Category Archives: The Second Civil War

“Semi-Fascists” Vs. Not-Semi-At-All Authoritarian, Part III

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So what would you do if you met an SS stormtrooper, in mid-depredation? One of the people who conquered Europe and ran the concentration camps? An actual “fascist”?

We’ll come back to that.

Boogie Man

So what defines an authoritarian, whatever label (“fascist”, “Nazi”, “Communist”, “Banana Republic”, and on and on?).

Here’s one trait.

Remember when this scene, from 1984, seemed fictional?

Authoritarians, from the Pharoahs to Kim Jong Un, knew that total authority rested on having a boogeyman – simultaneously the nadir of depravity and an existential threat – to divert the attention and energy of the people.

(Funny bit of trivia – at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Democrats tried to capture the magic of the scene from the movie. Didn’t work.)

Staring At The Social Ceiling

Remember that old trick from junior high, where you’d stare up at ceiling until other people started staring up with you to see what you were looking at?

“White Supremacist” groups have been shedding members at the rate of an order of magnitude per generation: they had millions of members in the 1920s (they the KKK drew 50,000 to a rally in Rocherster Minnesota in the ’20s), to hundreds of thousands in the ’60s, to tens of thousands in the early 80s (which saw the last great spasm of militant violence from those groups – the Posse Comitatus, the Alan Berg murders, and of course Oklahoma City).

Notwithstanding that, about the time Barack Obama got elected, Big Left started chanting “there’s going to be a wave of white supremacist/ultra-right terror that’ll dwarf 9/11. Any day now”.

And they’ve done their darnedest to tell that story – from portraying 100 doughy losers parading with tiki torches while outnumbered 10 to 1 in Charlottesville a “White Supremacist Uprising”, to shaking and baking more “right wing attacks” from the ether…

…almost as if they’re trying to goad someone into doing something as stupid and destructive…

…as the stuff “Anti”-Fa and BLM have been doing nationwide for the past couple of years.

But it’s not just about deflection.

It’s about making your side think the other side is just a little less noble, worthy and human than the people on your side.

All You Others

Which is what we’re getting from Democrat politicians. Last week, New York governor Kathy Hochul told all 5.4 million Republicans in her state to leave (she later clarified that to say she only wanted to expel the leaders and politicians that oppose her).

Charlie Crist, taking the next step on his road toward being the Harold Stassen of the deep south, told Republican voters to take their votes elsewhere, for their “hateful” act of (checks notes) supporting Ron DeSantis. .

Which is mostly par for the course, these days.

What, Are You Gonna Cry? Huh?

The propensity for bullies to try to goad their opponents to strike first, so they can appear to be defending themselves, is pretty much bully human nature. Extremists benefit from extreme responses; among the biggest supporters of German president Von HIndenburg’s “Hitler Cabinet” were the Communists, who bet long (and, while ultimately mistakenly, not without good reason) that promoting extremism in their opposition would benefit them.

But as we wait for the “President”‘s speech on “the soul of the nation” tomorrow, the chanting point has been deafening.

If brains were gasoline, Eric Swalwell couldn’t drive a Vespa around the inside of a Cheerio. But that’s the nice thing about being a “useful idiot” – being an idiot won’t count you out of the job:

Doesn’t he sound like that red-faced bully in sixth grade?

Speaking of sixth grade: don’t some of them sound like they learned “debate” from the mean girls in junior high?

Just some schmuck lefty who’s not the definitive opinion of the whole left?

OK – how about the President’s press secretary?

And this, er, person:

Berg’s Seventh Law alert; who said anything about a civil war?

And this next bit, from Brandon – is it yet another senile rant, or does he actually think that “right wing Americans” are killing cops?

Or does he just want his dumber, less critical supporters to think it?

Well, clearly Big Left wants people to think someone’s itchin’ to do some killin’:

(Note: not gonna say “this didn’t happen” I am going to say it happens all the time, and like Ilhan Omar’s “death threats” just in time for the state fair last year, calling them out, especially on the part of an intentional incendiarist like Swalwell, is more a matter of political optics than actual law-enforcement. I’m going out on a short little limb to suggest this is but one of many threats people on all sides of the aisle get – but this one happens to fit a narrative. Prove me wrong)

Now, it may well be that “bloodshed is coming”. We’ve already had a couple of examples – although neither this nor this are the examples Swalwell is thinking of.

But the larger point is, Big Left is trying to make half the nation into “boogiemen”.

“But the right does it too! What about Willie Horton? What about Reagan’s ‘welfare queens'”?

Say what you will about both of them; nobody ascribed their traits to half of the entire electorate.

Big Left is “othering” half the population; social media is a “90 Seconds Hate” that never ends.

Why?

You Travel Back In Time And Meet Teenage Hitler…

To answer the question from the first paragraph – what do you do if you meet an actual SS Stormtrooper?

Because the “fascist” of cultural lore was an enemy of humanity. There is no “semi”-concentration camp guard, is there?

You do what our grandparents did at Normandy or Bastogne or Saint Lo? You attack and destroy them. Right?

They are making about half the population into boogiemen so the other half doesn’t see them as human beings with political differences, but rather as villains to be feared, hated, subjugated, destroyed metaphorically or literally.

Let’s see if that’s part of Biden’s speech about “the nation’s soul” later today.

“Semi-Fascists” Vs. Not-Semi-At-All Authoritarian, Part II

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President Brandon and a cavalcade of lesser flaks have been referring to about half the population as “Fascists“, and people who want to destroy democracy.

Remember this?

In 2020, a group of activists tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the Capitol mall in Saint Paul.

Although the entire episode was carried live in TV, only one person was arrested; that person was “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the evils of Columbus, which is a little like sentencing drunk driver to teaching mixology to high school kids.

This happened, even as the person in charge of the Capitol Architecture Commission, Peggy Flanagan (have you heard she’s Native American?), had the power in her hands to remove the statue via due process – which is slow and boring, compared to having your activist buddies do it for you.

And lefty social media was clogged with addlepated lefties nodding and going “rules, schmules; at least it’s gone”.

One needn’t imagine what’d happen if some non-DFL group decided to tear down a statute of their bete noir; I’ve thought about how fun it’d be to rip down the statue of noted authoritarian socalist Floyd Olson. I don’t suspect I’d get “sentenced” to teaching high school kids about the evils of socialism.

This episode highlights three facets of the sort of authoritarian government that is, in fact, the sort of “fascism” that Big Left is trying to paint the right with:

  • The Rule of Law is for Other People: Don’t want to go through the Capitol Architecture Committee – or get your Student Loan Redistribution passed by Congress, or have to convince the American people and their state legislatures of the rightness of your cause, or convince Republicans of their wrongness? Just have your buddies tear it down, or declare $10K null and void with no statutory authority, or pack the Supreme Court, or send your “Anti”-Fa crowd in to bust some heads. Rules are for peasants.
  • Different Versions of Justice For the Political “Haves” and “Have Nots”: Lois Lerner will never go to jail for gang-raping the First Amendment. Not only did the Ramsey County Attorney’s office not actually punish Woody Kane for leading a planned, coordinated assault of Republicans, they may as well have sent him off with a voucher for a hooker and dinner at the Saint Paul Grill.
  • The Ends Justify The Means: If your idea of government, like the people approving of the tearing down of the statue, is “to get the things I want done, done”, or the shorter but more cynical “move things forward” – whether good, evil or indifferent – then you don’t really get self-government, and likely don’t want to.

“But Trump did all those things!”

Are you sure you want to make “our leadership is doing the same thing the person we call ‘literaly Hitler’ did” your lede?

Just A Note Before We Go

We’ve talked about four attributes of authoritarian government – defining boogeymen, circumventing the rule of law, and making one’s ends justify one’s means.

There’s one more; wrapping ones side in some larger cause, be it “history” or nationalism or, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess, “the soul of the nation” – about which President Brandon will be talking today.

So that’ll be the next part.

“Semi-Fascists” Vs. Not-Semi-At-All Authoritarian, Part I

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Last week, President Brandon accused Republicans of being “Semi-Fascists”.

To be fair, it sort of sounded like one of his “is he senile, or just not very bright” moments:

I could go either way, to be honest.

But it got me thinking about a couple of things.

What’s In A Word

The left has been devaluing the term “fascist” since I was in high school, and long before, if I recall.

If you want to be pedantic about it, in the 1910s Benito Mussolini – at the time a prominent Italian socialist – figured that while a command economy, a welfare state and state ownership of the mean of production might go over just fine, Internationalism – the concept near and dear to socialism that eventually all borders will be rendered moot by the unification of workers around the world – was not going to fly with Italy, which was had been a nation for about fifty years, and had a lot of nationalist energy about it.

And, presto change-o, Mussolini did some tinkering; in founding the Italian “Fascist” Party, he chucked the “internationalism”, and replaced it with a heaping helping of nationalism. The command economy, nationalization of assets and welfare state, of course, he kept – to Italy’s chagrin in World War 2, as the command economy lagged the rest of Europe so badly that the Italian war machine was positively handicapped.

Most “Fascist” movements – the Nazis, Franco’s Falange and so on – repeat that pattern, keeping the small-l socialism, substituting nationalist dogma for internationalist chanting.

Of course, the left’s version of “fascism” is more nearly described as “saying or doing anything I don’t agree with”.

These days, references to “fascism” almost invariably seek to “other” those your crowd wants to erase from the public square;

And we’ve been seeing an awful lot of that, lately.

How much?

More tomorrow.

Drop The F

So as we close in on President Brandon’s “speech about America’s Soul” on Friday near the Liberty Bell, let’s talk about some of the attributes of…

…well, not ‘fascism’, per se. Or at least not only fascism.

Let’s talk, instead, about authoritarianism, by whatever name you want to call it.

About government that:

  • Ignores, subverts and/or perverts the rule of law in favor of the rule of men
  • legitimizes itself in comparison to some boogeyman, without or within – a boogieman that personifies all evil in the eyes of the state, and who must be subjugated for “good” to prevail.
  • Sublimates everything to a more or less utopian vision of what the world could be, if they had the means

More tomorrow.

Never Forget

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Since it’s state fair time Dash the time when at least some people in Minnesota start paying attention to the upcoming elections – let’s make sure we remember: when minutes counted, Governor Klink took days to respond to the collapse of law and order in Minneapolis.

The media is going to focus on cheery stories about food on sticks, and a blijf The Administration in deflecting to happy talk about abortion.

To protect a progressive administration, the rioting is going to get memoryholed.

Let’s not let it get memory holed.

The Thing About “Progressives” is…

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If you lelt them babble on long enough, they always prove you right:

By the way – newspaper editorial cartoonists take a test when they’re interviewing, measuring their knowledge of current events, history, and their understanding of the ins and outs of American society.

If they score over 50%, they get a job in the warehouse.

Under? Cartooning.

Steve Sack is gone – but stupid is eternal .

Recruitment

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:l

Best possible news for our nation: Lesko Brandon kicks out 60,000 unvaxx military members. All those trained professional warriors just became part of The Resistance. It’s not only us Wolverines anymore. Excellent.

Meanwhile, the military is reducing standards again, desperate to find bodies to replace the trained professional warriors they just let go.

Civilian gun sales continue unabated, the better to face off against Lesko Brandon’s Wokesters in Uniform. The next Insurrection should be a real doozy.

Joe Doakes

I’m going to break with Joe on this one for a bit. I’m going to suggest that if we ever have a real insurrection, the military will be the least of the problems, as they are overwhelmingly not drawn from the “blue“ elites.

As Robert Kaplan noted in his excellent (albeit a generation old) imperial Grunts, an 18-year-old from East Texas is 32 times as likely to serve in the military as one from New York City (and that New Yorker is much more likely a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx, or a blue-collar Irish kid from Staten Island, as opposed to a WASP trust fund baby from Manhattan).

Call me naive, but that’s where I put my faith.

Look At Meeeeeeeeeeeee

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Joel Doakes from Como Park emails:

Protesters outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Barrett.

First, it’s illegal to protest outside the home of a federal judge and rightly so. There are limits to free speech: fighting words, fire in a theater, perjury on the witness stand, and threatening/intimidating a judge are off limits. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, these gals can take their protests to their state legislatures. They have no place here.

Second, the sign makes clear this protest is not about saving Roe v. Wade’s “first trimester” limitation; it’s not about saving Casey’s “undue burden” limitation; it’s about Kermit Gosnell-style partial birth abortion butchery and Planned Parenthood’s baby-parts-to-order sales. They might be the only seven women in the nation who demand that. The rest of the nation recoils in horror.

Third, their costumes are meant to emphasize their plight. The bloody pants mean that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, women will have to seek back-alley abortions from unqualified practitioners who will leave them hemorrhaging from botched abortions. The tied hands holding the baby mean the women will be prisoners/slaves forced to carry the baby they conceived until it is born and can be given up for adoption. Dire predictions, considering that many states have already moved to guarantee abortions and some employers have even offered to pay for interstate travel if required to obtain one. This is not 1950. Alleys are for drug sales and commercial sex acts, not abortions.

The fact that seven women can get national media coverage for their little stunt instead of a quick trip to the local jail followed by prosecution in federal court indicates the effort likely is coordinated from the very top of the Lesko Brandon administration, probably the same people who sent the FBI after parents who complained to school boards about pedophile grooming curricula and covering up transgender rapes. I hope Democrats run this photo in every campaign ad from now until the election. It’s too much to hope that Republicans would be smart enough to do it.

Joe Doakes

Of course it’s too much to hope the Republicans do it.

But I’m going to help them.

Terrorism

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I’ve probably noted this elsewhere, but I don’t’ think it can be overstated: the reason that the first Obama Administration spent so much time and effort barbering about “white supremacist terror” was to start projecting fault on the phantom menace to draw attention away from the mass of leftist thugs that Big Left was in the process of unleashing on society.

Events this week show I’m onto something.

Pro-infanticide terrorists in Buffalo firebomb a crisis pregnancy center – one of several such incidents nationwide lately:

The arsonists left graffiti on a wall that read, “Jane Was Here.” The organization has committed multiple such incidents in the last few months, including one in which it firebombed the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA), a pro-life group in Madison, Wis. last month. There, the terrorists left the message, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”

…

Jane’s Revenge also admitted that it threw red paint on the the front door of a crisis pregnancy center in Washington, D.C. last week, spray painting “Jane Says Revenge” on the side of the building.

Here, locally? “Anti”-Fa torches the truck of a contractor who helped the city evict a homeless camp, takes credit:

It’s culminated – for now (?) – with the Democrat hit man who, incited by Chuck Schumer’s rhetoric (specifically calling out Justice Kavanaugh for the attention of extremists) and the partisan leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision and the likely outcome of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association case, rangered up and went cross-country with the stated intent to kill the justice and intimidate the court.

The punk will get virtually no sentence; his crime, little media attention outside the conservative media. Big Left will blather on about “imminent waves of right wing / “white supremacist” terror”, while waves of leftists burn more cities, and eventually just through weight of numbers kill more conservatives.

And Big Left and its media toadies will befrenzy themselves over episodes like Charlottestown and January 6, while ignoring events like this – which are themselves every bit as great a threat to democrach.

If people don’t get law and order – and, more importantly, equality before the law – in exchange for all of the taxes and civil liberties we give up – or, perhaps worse, realistically believe that there are two separate, unequal justice systems – they are going to get it for themselves.

And it will be incredibly ugly.

Lost

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

As I was putting out the cat this morning, the little girl from upstairs walked by. She was crying. I asked her what was wrong. “Someone stole my bike, I’m looking for it.” I told her I’d keep an eye out and wished her luck.

Yes, I could have lectured her on the evils of society, how she should have assumed everyone is a thief and locked it up, how we have new neighbors so no doubt they stole it just to wreck it because that’s how Those People are. I could have offered to buy her a different bike, a even better bike. But she’s a 2nd Grader. She doesn’t care about any of that. She doesn’t want a different bike, she wants her own bike back.

I know how she feels. I feel the same about America. The Left keeps trying to take it away so they can wreck it. They claim they will replace it with a different America, an even better America, but I don’t want a different America. I want my own America back. The fear it may be lost forever makes me feel like crying, too.

Joe Doakes

In my book “Trulbert“, the question on the surface was “what if society had to stay over“.

Implicit in that, sometimes, was “what if we could start society over“.

Because these days I’m feeling…

… not so much like that second grade girl.

More like the 18-year-old who got his bike stolen, and spent the summer roaming the city, looking for an excuse to pound the thief flat with a hammer.

Just Remember…

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The real wave of terror is going to be all those white right-wingers.

Someday.

One of these days.

Any time, now.

Honest.

In the meantime, though, we’ve just got the regular left-wing terrorists in the Twin Cities:

May be an image of text that says 'FFICIAL NOTICE TO ALL POLICE UBLIC WORKS, AND OTHER EVICTION COLLABORATORS: YOU WE SWEEP? STRIKE ENCAMPMENT EVICTIONS ARE POLICE BRUTALITY. ESESWEES DISPLACE THE MOST VULNERABLE IN OUR CITY FROM THEIR SHELTERS OF LAST RESORT, DESTROYING WHAT LITTLE BELONGINGS THEY HAVE LEFT. F#&K AROUND AND FIND OUT: PUBLIC WORKS FACILITIES AND EQUIPMENT USED IN EVICTIONS ARE OFTEN LEFT UNGUARDED AND VULNERABLE @emliaa Na EVICTIONS EVICTION-ENABLING BUREAUCRATS INCLUDE: STOUENLAND PETER EBNET (POLICY ADVISOR TO MAYOR FREY) ANDREA BRENNAN (CPED) SARAY GARNETT-HOCHULI (REGULATORY SERVICES) & MANY OTHERS WITH NAMES AND ADDRESSES'

Or at least some Macalester poli-sci majors apprenticing with Big Left. By the way – the guy with the Molotov Cocktail in the pic is black – but I’ll wager a shiny new quarter that everyone behind this leaflet is whiter than me, and comes from a family with an income well into six figures.

Remember – if the people to whom we pay taxes don’t provide law and order, people will provide it for themselves.

And it ain’t gonna be pretty.

F#&*k around and find out, indeed.

Just Remember…

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The real danger to our society is “right wing terror”.

As the gone-but-not-forgotten, perma-blocked Dog Gone used to say, the danger is a wave or conservative violence that will “dwarf 9/11”.

While we wait,and wait, and wait, we saw this from a “journalist” for “Rewire News Group” re the firebombing in Madison we talked about earlier this week:

Image

I’ve heard people on both sides of this issue say that abortion would be the spark for the next hot civil war in this country.

I disagree. The left’s response to being forced to share power, via shared powers, checks and balances and due process, with those they hate is going to be what the civil war is about.

Abortion will be one of the issues that will exercise the shared powers, checks, balances and process against which Big Left will revolt.

One Evening, Somewhere In A Blue City

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SCENE: Long after dark, in a ratty but not necessarily malevolent commercial and office district, in an unnamed “blue” city. A Hyundai crossover pulls up to the curb, in front of a relatively pristine, whitewashed brick wall on the side of a church.

Stacey HINTON, Executive Director of “Keep All Racists Eternally Nonplussed”, a white progressive support group, steps out of the vehicle. She furtively looks around, pulls a can of spray paint out of a bag, and starts to spray paint something on the white wall.

Gradually, it resolves into:

“If abortion isn’t safe, either are you”.

HINTON hurriedly climbs back into the Hyundai, and drives away.

Minutes pass.

Another car – a 1990 Dodge Ram – pulls up to the same spot. After a moment, Mitch BERG climbs out, and reads the graffiti. He shakes his head, mildly disgusted.

He looks around and, improbably and incredibly, notes a “Planned Parenthood” clinic which, oddly enough, is right across the parking lot from the now-vandalized church. It has a pristine, if dingy, yellow wall facing the parking lot. BERG saunters across the lot, checks his six, and pulls a can of spray paint from his cargo pocket. Slowly and vaguely legibly, he sprays the wall.

“If you threaten me and mine with political violence, finding an abortion is going to be the least of your problems”.

BERG walks back to his truck, and drives away.

And SCENE.

Mostly Peaceful

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Pro-“choice” activists firebomb pro-life office:

Madison police and fire departments were called to the office of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA) around 6 a.m. on Sunday after a passer-by reported smoke coming from the building. The flames were extinguished and thankfully, no one was injured. Investigators found a smashed window and at least one molotov cocktail that had failed to ignite. A fire inside the office burned books and damaged furnishings. Additionally, the building exterior was covered with spray-painted graffiti, including the anarchy symbol (an A inside a circle, also used by Antifa), the anti-police tag “1312” (which stands for ACAB — All Cops Are Bastards), and the threatening phrase, “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.”

As I noted earlier, it seemed that the most likely likely of the (likely) expungement of Roe v. Wade would be that they’d have to start trying to convince voters, one at a time, of the rightness of their cause.

As we saw in Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the George Floyd riots, violence is certainly one of the ways Big Left “convinces” people.

The Drawing Board

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An anonymous lawyer friend (who is not Joe Doakes) writes:

I’d get in so much trouble if I posted this, but when I see people say that 70% opposethe overtruning of Roe v. Wade, my first thought is that no more than 2% even know what it says, much less what overturning it would mean.

And they also have no idea what the Mississippi law, challenged in the current case, says.

In terms of what it means?

I’m looking forward to explainingi this to pro-choicers: it means you’re going to have to do what we Second Amendment people have been doing for about the past fifty years; convincing people, one at a time, nationwide, of the rightness of your cause and case.

35 years ago, the same polls of uninformed and largely disinterested people said that 85% supported gun control, including a majority that supported banning handguns completely. That number is under 50% for the first time in a couple of generations.

And that’s because 2-3 generations of people have spent a lot of time, treasure and shoe leather convincing their fellow Americans that a constitutional right of the people is, in fact, a constitutional right of the people.

The terror the pro-choicers seem to feel about that concept tells us that while 70% of the people may respond to “Do you support women’s ‘reproductive rfights'” with “yes”, when you change it to “how are you with the thought of killing a gestating human?” it’s going to drop way off.

Democracy Dies In Democracy

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Americans want change, dammit!

I suspect modern Americans, if asked “should we install a single executive, with unlimited power over government, to get things done and solve the current crisis?“, it’d show something like 52% positive.

Apples And Chainsaws

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If you listen to the pro-infanticide crowd, you might think the Unted States “lagged” behind the heathens on the Continent when it came to “reproductive rights”.

Which is why listening to the pro-infanticide crowd is such a terrible idea:

May be an image of map and text

Most of Europe is more restrictive than Mississippi or Texas.

Hold that thought.

Two Americas

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During World War 2 in the Pacific, American GIs famously used verbal call-and-answer passwords with the letter “L” – “Calla Lillies” was a famous one – because the Japanese language has no such sound in it; it’s hard for Japanese-born speakers, even those relatively fluent in English, to make that sound.

Likewise, an easy way to tell if someone is from Western Europe is to see how they pronounce a phrase like “Think Through The Thoughts Thurman Thought Thirty-Three Times”. A German will work hard not to say “Tink Tru Da Tots Turman Tot Turty-Three Times”; a French native, “Zink Zru Ze Zots Surman Sot Zurty-sree times”. Neither language has the “th” sound like American English does.

But if America comes, heaven forbid, to blows over our social and cultural differences, the social and cultural divides don’t really break along linguistic lines.

So as a substitute, perhaps we’d have to try this; tell someone a bit of news like this, and see if they regard it as good news or terrible news.

That should tell you what you need.

Pondering The Decline

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Joel Doakes from Como Park emails:

If:

A sane man instinctively recoils in horror from harming another, and later suffers PTSD from the guilt;

A sociopath cares about his own group but not other groups and therefore has no problem harming them; and

A psychopath actively enjoys harming people and seeks out the opportunity to do so; then,

judging from behavior observed on freeways, grocery stores, Twitter and social media, ordinary Americans seem to be sliding from sanity to sociopathy, becoming less empathetic and more emphatic, less generous minded and more generally pissed at the world in general. And judging from crime reports and YouTube videos, young African-Americans seem to be sliding from sociopathy toward psychopathy.

If true, this change will make it easier for all Americans to resort to violence, murder, rebellion, revolution, which is what certain Liberal/Progressive/Leftists seem to desire: an end to the United States as it now exists.

Why has this happened?

Did we fall or were we pushed?

Joe Doakes

Well I’m not going to answer directly, I will remind you that the extremes like it when people feel the need to abandon the center.

Destructive Destruction

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The CVS store that has served for the past few decades as one of the anchors of the MIdway’s “main street”, at Snelling and University (but for seven months after the George Floyd riots, of course, where it stood boarded up, a monument to the perfidy of the metro DFL) is closing in a couple of weeks.

A friend of the blog emails:

CVS is keeping the store in a residential neighborhood on Fairview open, but not the one on a busy urban corner next to transit and a “world class” soccer stadium? Why would they ever not want to do business there? We’ve been told over and over again how precious that real estate is, how the train and the stadium were going to be a boon.
http://www.twincities.com/2022/03/09/longstanding-st-paul-cvs-at-snelling-and-university-to-close-at-the-end-of-the-month/

Perhaps boon is in the eye of the beholder- it certainly has been a boon for vagrancy, crime, and vacant lots. I shouldn’t assume that that wasn’t the goal.

Expect apologists for the Carter, Walz and Biden administrations to claim “It’s not our fault! Look at this:”.

In mid-November, the Rhode Island-based pharmacy chain announced a major realignment of its national retail footprint, with a heavy focus on consolidating retail locations operating in close proximity to each other. The closures amount to 300 stores per year for the next three years.

Of course, the fact that that location is in an increasingly crime-ridden area, and has a record of being looted from wall to wall, couldn’t have possibly.affected the decision to close this store, rather than the one in Mac-Groveland, Crocus Hill, the Target on Uni, or the two at the University of Minnesota, nosirreebob.

Scratch A “Progressive”, Find A Totalitarian

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“So, Mitch – why do you say that the democratic party in United States is the party of authoritarianism? “

Because they tell us they are. Strong majority of Democrats approve of Justin Trudeaucescu‘s treatment of civil disobedience:treatment of civil civil disobedience:

35 percent overall approved of Trudeau’s crackdown, while 10 percent said they were unaware of what’s happening to the US’ northern neighbor.

Looking at Democrat likely voters alone, 65 percent said they favored Trudeau’s crackdown on the protestors, and 17 percent said they disapproved.

I mean, even the rhetoric is becoming too obvious to avoid; Orwell’s villains declared that freedom was slavery; today, democrat thinkers closer and closer to the main stream say freedom is “white supremacist“.

Tomato, tomahto.

Calling All “Journalists”

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More on the Ilhan Omar response tweet – itself just a big fascination – later.

Now – let’s take a look at this tweet, from someone justifying the hacking of crowd-funding data for people supporting the Trucker Convoy, included this photo and blurb:

Stay with me on this: it zigs, and it zags.

We’ve got “neo nazis”…

…at a libertarian, anti-masker rally of mostly rural, western, and libertarian-sympathetic Canadians, themselves likely to be not especially mask-y, especially if they take that whole Gadsden Flag “Don’t Tread On Me” thing seirouslly…

…all masked up as tightly as the most constipated Karen?

Does anyone ask actual questions anymore?

“Captain Obvious? Your Promotion To Admiral Came Through”

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Study shows that “racial justice” protests that include “Anti”-Fa are at least 18 times more likely to end up in violence than protests where they didn’t show up.

And no, the same does not hold true for “right wing“ groups:

They continued on to question whether the right-wing groups were the real source of the violence given that Antifa tens to show up to counter their presence.

“That’s not what our research found. We sawno difference between events in which antifa was facing off with a group such as the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters and when they were protesting unopposed,” they wrote.

The use of violence as a tool of political “persuasion“ appears to be almost purely a leftist phenomenon.

Our Bully-Girl Social Superiors

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Nekima Levy-Armstrong, at the demonstration over the weekend outside what may have been the Minneapolis interim chief’s house:

My – she’s kind of a bully, isn’t she?

She’s well on her way to being Al Sharpton.

For It, Before Against It

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I don’t as a rule care about artists politics, anymore than I care about a politician’s taste in music.

But the flip-flop of so many “counterculture” artists to “cultural enforcer” would be jarring, to anyone who thought about it critically.

It made headlines last week: Neil Young, who’s spent the last couple weeks trying to shut down Joe Rogan, was participating in “Free Speech rallies” in 2006.

Now, you could call them anti-George W Bush rallies that had little to do with free speech; I certainly called them that at the time.

But the language Young used is interesting:

“Just getting up in front of a lot of people makes you nervous. But when you know that some of them are really going to be angry at you, and you’re in a crowd, and it’s a volatile situation, people have been drinking, whatever — you know, it makes you nervous.”

“It was just that critical time in history where things were turning. Things were changing,” he added. “Those who feel the way we do had some hope and those who don’t feel the way we do were angry that the change happened. And those people have got a voice, and they have a reason for feeling the way they do. They strongly believe in the convictions. They believe in the military.” 

“They believe that we’re doing the right thing for the world, and they have every reason to be respected for their beliefs,” he said. 

Does it look like he’s describing Rogan listeners to anyone else?

Did Neil Young become The Man? Did “Rage Against the Machine” become “Rage Enforcing The Machine?”

Maybe – but I suspect the Tea Party, and its slandering back into the shadows, from whence it emerged mean and without manners as the Trump Populist movment, had a lot to do with it. The counterculture of 50 years ago is now the dominant culture.

Maybe He’ll Give Up Umbrella Man!

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10 year sentence – a downward departure from sentencing guidelines by nearly half – in the burning of a Minneapolis pawn shop during the George Floyd riots:

Black Lives Matter rioter Montez Terriel Lee Jr., of Rochester, New York, was sentenced Friday to 120 months in federal prison for his role in burning down a Minneapolis pawn shop during the destructive George Floyd riots in May 2020.

Lee had previously pleaded guilty in July 2021 to a single count of arson in connection with a fire that destroyed the Max It Pawn Shop on Lake St. at 2726 E. Lake St. He admitted to starting the fire on May 28, 2020, which is now considered one of many arson incidentsthat happened during the summer riots.

Oddly, the article doesn’t list which white supremacist group he was part of