The weekend before last, I spent the better part of an hour on the NARN with Walter Hudson​, a longtime friend of the show (and someone who needs to be back on the air, one way or another).  It’s one of the the better hours I’ve had on the air recently (and I’ve been proud of a lot of my recent shows).  

Which isn’t to say it was an easy subject to talk about.   

What IF this society’s differences are irreconcilable?  

Dennis Prager points out – mostly correctly, I think, that Americans are more divided today than they were in 1861 [1].   How do we know this?  Because when the South split off, they formed a government that wasn’t a whole lot different than the one in DC.

But for four decades,  “the Great Sort” has been going on.   Americans have grouped themselves socially, economically and especially politically into at least two (I think actually three of four) major blocs, that not only have very little in common with each other (which isn’t all that new), but whose “rules” have made honest conversations about those issues impossible.

Part of America thinks – and is painstakingly training a new generation to think – that America, and Western Civilization itself –  the nation and civilization that have brought more well-being and humanity to this planet than any other in history, combined – are evil and rotten to their core, and needs to be completely rebooted, by means that are, depending on who you ask, more or less revolutionary and intolerant of dissent.   It’s not just “Anti”-Fa and the other militant revolutionary groups, either; some of our biggest, most respected institutions have been dragged on board.  The New York Times has gotten full force behind not only the perversions of the “1619 Project”, but the idea that journalism itself needs to abandon its traditional role of “putting out the facts and giving the consumer the info they need to make up their own minds”, but to use their outsized bully pulpit to directly affect current events.   That part of America believes that the Constitution – the contract that joins the several states together into a federation – is outdated at best, evil at worst, and needs to be radically overwritten, with the electoral college and the deliberative Senate and gun rights eliminated, and the majority disinhibited from absolute rule.   They  pay homage to the politics of Europe or the Pacific Rim nations, Japan at best, China at worst.  

Part of America, sorry to say, believes that America’s first priority is prevailing over that first America.   President Trump tapped in to that anger, and a lot more,  four years ago, and might just do it again.  We’ll see.  

And part of America believes that America, imperfect as it (like all creations of man) has had its problems, and (say some of us) has strayed from its best political instincts over the past 100 years, but on balance has still been far and away the greatest bringer of freedom, of human dignity and the prosperity that make freedom meaningful, in all of human history, and has been the primary driver in the fact that the 21st century, so far, is the best time in history so far to be a living human being.  

These divides aren’t “new”, per se.  But Blue America’s intolerance for the rest of the country started becoming a serious problem after the 2000 election.   And the other Americas started paying it back after 2010, when the establishments of both parties teamed up to slander the Tea Party – the most egalitarian, civil mass movement in recent history – back into the shadows.    (Wanna know where Trump came from?  Shut up about Racism, Putin, Xenophobia and Misogyny – millions of good-hearted Americans saw what coloring inside the lines and playing nice got you).  

So – how do 2-3 societies that neither trust nor care for each other get along?  

The *right* answer is “recommit this nation to Federalism – the system of checks and balances and shared but countervailing powers, from the federal down to the local levels, that made a “nation” of thirteen very diverse states possible in the first place.   Of course, that first America doesn’t want to share power – the idealistic among them say “it doesn’t move America forward”, which shows the complete failure of civics education in this country over the past forty years, from a conservative perspective.   The “revolutionary” part of that first America sees federalism as a bug, not a feature – if they know anything about it at all. 

The wrong answer?  Civil war – which would not be like 1861-65, with 2-5 groups of state withdrawing into their separate camps and starting over as nations.   Although we may wish it were that simple.  “Sorted” as America is, it’d much more likely look  like Bosnia or Kosovo or Rwanda than Gettysburg and Appomattox.

The “right-ish” but likely fantasy answer?  A civil divorce, with the 2-5 Americas staging an orderly breakup, each writing their own Constitution, each forming a new nation and rebooting the idea of (at best) self-government.   That’s not going to happen – between the masses of people who mindlessly chant “we settled that in 1865, you traitor” and people in Blue America eventually realizing that Paul Krugman was full of, er, privilege and that the prospect of having to import all the food and materials that they currently get for domestic prices?   And after that, when the “red” parts of “blue” states try to get out of the inevitable vassaldom (as, indeed, parts of California are already proposing)?    Elegant and easy as it seems – I’d love to see the US281 Corridor and the rural west turn into an energy and food superpower – it’s just not happening without a fight.  See the previous paragraph. 

The middle way?   As Walter puts it in the third segment up above, it’s time for Americans who care about freedom to start making it count, where they live. 

Stop acquiescing to your schools teaching your kids crap – by pulling them out, if need be, with whatever sacrifices that entails.  

When your local business defies Governor Klink’s hamfisted diktats, show up when Keith Ellison’s goons come out with their papers and show them what “defending freedom” really looks like.  

Start taking freedom seriously – vote for candidates, ESPECIALLY locally and the state legislature, who actually care about freedom, and are chomping at the bit to start rolling back the madness at city hall and in Saint Paul.    If you don’t know who I’m talking about, then ask.   State Senate candidates like Alexander Buster Deputie – an immigrant from a war-torn country – and Diane Napper, who being from Philadelphia is about the same – are two great places to start.   

Buy a gun (yes, I know – they’re scarce.  There’s ways to get around that.  And while all my guns fell in the lake, and they terrify me anyway, I do remember a thing or two).  Learn to shoot.   Join your local gun rights group.  Show up.  Be one of those numbers that terrify society’s ninnies.  Because this is one area of the culture war the good guys are winning, these days.  On all individual liberty issues, we can’t just “win” – we need crush it.  

If you’ve got a representative who’s already made their stand for freedom – a county commission that’s declared themselves a Second Amendment sanctuary, a libertarian/conservative City Councilperson who’s made a dent in a DFL cesspool, a sheriff who’s said they’re not going to enforce Governor Klink’s latest “bring me a shrubbery!” outburst, a state legislator who’s fought the fight and has the smear pieces in the media to show for it?  Don’t just vote for them.  Call them to thank them.  And then ask them how you can help. 

 Because it’s when good people see that there are other good people – other people who want that third America, above – that we start pushing the cultural needle back out of the red. 

The alternatives?   Ongoing collapse, or that First America taking power. 

But I repeat myself. 

…who has been paying attention: Violence in Portland is being orchestrated by a behind-the-scenes organization who, we are told, doesn’t exist:

We have overwhelming intelligence regarding the ideologies driving individuals towards violence and why the violence has continued,” Murphy wrote. “A core set of threat actors are organized, show up night after night, share common TTPs [tactics, techniques and procedures] and drawing on like minded individuals to their cause.”

But Minneapolis and Saint Paul?

It’s gotta be “white supremacists”.

There’ve been 27 people charged so far in connection with the rioting over Memorial Day week.

Just curious – look at the list.

Anyone appear to be a “white supremacist” to you?

Because on the one hand, white supremacists are a bunch of inbred losers. On the other, they evade capture like Mossad agents.

Weird.

Ryan Winkler, the House Majority Leader, isn’t thrilled with President Trump stealing Joe Biden’s thunder:

Then the Majority Leader has had a pretty sheltered life.

Know what’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard?

Other than the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Gulag, the Holodomor, the Rape of Nanking, the subjugation of Tibet, the history of Haitian slavery, or pretty much an garden-variety genocide?

Well, not this…

But it was pretty bad anyway. And if Bogdan Vechirko – who owned no “white supremacist” paraphernalia at all, and heroically avoided hitting anyone (who wasn’t trying to get hit) wants to sue for slander, I’ll host a fundraiser.

Have you people call my people.

On this, the anniversary of the last major catastrophic attack from without, it’s time to look at a potentially vastly more devastating attack from within.

Worse than 9/11?

Very likely, yes.

“Anti”-Fa – which, we are assured, doesn’t actually exist, except in the earnest hearts of a bunch idealistic kids – is worse than a “terrorist organization”. It is an invading army.

Read this account. While the website it’s on my whisper “sketchy”, the narrative presented should scare the living bejeebers out of you, if “defending freedom against “Progressivism’s” direct action arm” is your goal.

The final graf:

Bottom line: don’t go to an Antifa protest where you can put yourself in that situation. And if you find yourself in that situation, expect them to employ tactics that take away your situational awareness, and complicate the use of force continuum.”

But you should read the whole thing.

Worst part?

There are two, really.

First – the Normals, Real Americans, believe that because the good guys have most of the guns that Big Left – which they see as a bunch of aging hippies, Grievance Studies professors and shrieky, spoiled, over-schooled / undereducated millennials, and not without justification over 90% of the time – will lose if civil society ever does collapse and anarchy reigns.

But there are things more important than just having the guns. A plan. Some semblance of training, leading to some semblance of teamwork under stress. Infrastructure to support your operations.

Big Left has all these. And, now, guns.

The Second Amendment alone isn’t enough.

And, we’re told, either is the First Amendment – where Big Left’s information analogue is doing to “journalism” what their neo-Brownshirt arm is doing to opposition on the streets.

It’s high time Real America took this seriously. This isn’t “protest”. It’s not even “rioting”. This is an armed, trained, organized insurgency. It needs to be treated as such.

Remember when your “progressive” acquaintances would scoff and say “there’s no such thing as a ‘limosine liberal’, a ‘condo pink’, or any of that?”

I do.

And they’ll do it again.

But here – along with Lori Lightfoot’s haircut and the blowout that was apparently inflicted on Nancy Pelosi by GOP operatives – is Exhibit A.

Salem had “witches”.

The far right and far left in Europe from the middle ages through the 1940s (and beyond) had “Jews”.

Jordan, Minnesota had “satanists“.

And Governor Klink and Mayor McDreamy had “white supremacists”.

It seems like such a long time ago that Big Left started predicting an imminent wave of “right wing white supremacist terrorism“.

And, like OJ, they are still looking:

This notion – that Big Left has been getting ready to launch a violent war against dissent, while blaming mostly-phantom “right wingers” – is where Berg’s Seventh Law ceases to be funny.

On May 31, prosecutors learned Floyd died of an overdose. On August 25, they admitted it in court.

Charges against the officers still have not been dismissed. One remains in jail, in super-max prison, in Oak Park Heights. 

I seem to recall someone in the comments lecturing me on the ethical duties of a prosecutor as explanation why he was confident the state would win a conviction.  Yeah?  Not when your own medical examiner concedes it was an overdose. 

I’m ready for my apology.  I bet Chauvin is, too.  I wonder if the Lawyer’s Board of Professional Responsibility is taking complaints in person these days, or on-line only.  Because sitting on exculpatory evidence for three months, publicly branding a man you know to be innocent as a murder, encouraging people to riot to protest a crime that never occured . . . those acts seem to violate the Rules of Professional Conduct, particularly Rules 3.8 (a), (d) and (f).

Joe Doakes

Part of my enduring pessimism about politics in Minnesota is that, between the media, the irregularities in the election system, and the mass of brainwashed droogs that would vote DFL if Josef Mengele came back from the dead and got the DFL endorsement by standing on his head while chanting “Black Cadavers Matter” and give him 70% of the vote anyway, is that accountability – at least, the accountability not manifested by people voting with their feet – always evades them.

If it doesn’t happen soon – in some form other than “Minneapolis turning into a cold Flint” – I’m not sure that it’ll matter anymore.

“Prog” columnist looks at the statute and the evidence, concludes Kyle Rittenhouse will likely be acquitted.

I don’t disagree – and find that there’s ample grounds for caution for all the rest of us that take the Second Amendment seriously.

I homed in on these two passages:

When [the first “victim”, Joseph] Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, finally cornered Rittenhouse, he grabbed for the teenager’s gun. Multiple shots rang out, and Rosenbaum fell, mortally wounded.

Did Rittenhouse have a reasonable belief under the circumstances that if Rosenbaum got his gun he would suffer death or great bodily harm? Jurors in Wisconsin are instructed that “reasonable” means “what a person of ordinary intelligence and prudence would have believed … under the circumstances that existed at the time.”

And this bit here:

A third victim, Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, of West Allis, Wisconsin, who survived, first held up his hands in a gesture of surrender at a distance of a few feet. In one of his hands, he held a gun. But when he “moved toward” Rittenhouse, prosecutors said, Rittenhouse fired, striking him in the arm.

That final shooting “will be the most serious problem” for Rittenhouse at trial, Kling said. ”The guy did have a gun in his hand. But he wasn’t pointing it at or threatening Rittenhouse.”

My first carry permit instructor, the last Joel Rosenberg, used to put it this way: “You’ll be making a life-or-death decision in a split second, likely under incredible stress, in the dark, with incomplete information. The prosector will have weeks and months in a warm, well-lit building, protected by metal detectors and deputies, to decide whether you were right”.

Another of Joel’s sayings: “Shooting in self-defense is a choice between losing your life, and ruining it”.

Because while there’s a lot of rhetoric about deterring the madness, to say nothing of resisting it, it’s still incredibly risky, and under normal circumstances – and even some garden-variety extraordinary ones – best avoided:

Overwhelmingly I hear from the professionals that their plan for dealing with riots and mayhem is “Don’t be there.” Check the ego. Back away from the social media siren call to “be part of the solution.” Inserting yourself into a riot (AKA “war zone”) where we now know there are armed violent criminals (often felons) who are there with the expressed intent to do extreme violence to someone is, in my view, just foolish.

It’s said that good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. I sure have found that to be true a lot of times. In flying, we say you have a skill bucket and a luck bucket. You hope to fill your skill bucket before using up everything in the luck bucket.

For your consideration.

“So, Mitch – why are the Democrats and media (ptr) spending so much time saying that Trump wants to delegitimize the election?”

The answer, of course, is because they need to deflect away from the fact that they are trying, in advance, to delegitimize the election.

My jaw dropped to the floor when I saw the latest Biden ad, about the violence in our cities.

It’s not what’s in the ad, per se. It’s what’s missing.

Go ahead. What do you not see in this ad?

I’ll wait.

No identifiable “Anti”-Fa or BLM.

The only identifiable people in this ad are “right wing” protesters – in no case violent, not of of which burned or looted anything.

Biden – well, the people operating his animatronic controls, anyway – would have you believe the rioting, burning and looting, the coordinated and paid tantrum of the American Left (TM), was Trump’s fault.

This is what every spousal abuser says about their victims.

On August 31, 1939, groups of SS officers staged “attacks” on several German border outposts. Near a radio station near the village of Gleiwitz (modern day Gliwice, in Polish Silesia), a group of operators “captured” the station and broadcast militant Polish propaganda, and then dumped a group of recently-executed prisoners, dressed in Polish uniforms, around the station and other border outposts.

The bodies, and the attacks, were “false flag” photo ops designed to let the Germans claim to the world press that the invasion of Poland – which occurred hours later, and which started the European phase of the largest, bloodiest conflagration in human history – was provoked by Poland. It was patent balderdash, but within Nazi German is was pretty much gospel.

“Poland provoked us!”

It’s a situation familiar to anyone who’s dealt with domestic abuse; the abuser never believes it’s their fault.

So “Big Left” wanted violence. They welcomed it. They begged for it in as many words, over and over:

Until it started hitting them in the polls.

Then? They were “Trump’s riots”.

There have been so many ginned-up moral panics over the past four years that they simply dissipate into the ether. Reminder: The National Guard hysteria — “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun,” for example, warned Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times — happened right before the “fascists are snatching our mailboxes!” hysteria.

“As right-wing groups increasingly move to confront protesters in U.S. cities, demonstrators are assessing how to keep themselves safe,” says the same New York Times today. By the time this is all over, rioters will be remembered as the true victims.

Democrats thought they could somehow take advantage of radical protests to help them win 2020. It has backfired. Once distaste for the violence began showing up in polling, and once Republicans could circumvent media coverage during their convention and focus on David Dorn and other victims of leftist violence, the Democratic Party and their allies switched the narrative.

Today, the dangerously unserious House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff blames Trump and, who else, the Russians for “willfully fanning the flames of this violence.” Joy Reid, recently given a primetime show on one of the country’s major news networks, claimed that the riots were false flag operations perpetrated by “armed white nationalists” deployed as a nationwide strategy to help reelect Trump.

I’m pretty sure Schiff, Walz, Frey, and the rest of the gallery of “elites” don’t believe this.

I do believe they are counting on their voters not being smart enough to tell the difference.

Here in the Metro, I’m not sure they’re wrong.

It’s your fault, dirty <strike>polack</strike> deplorable.

Hopkins School Board Vice-Chair Chris LaTondresse – did he tell you he’s an “Obama administration alum” yet?

The Defund the Police movement hitches it’s wagons into the western suburbs.

In the apparently halcyon days of April 2018, students and school officials of the Hopkins School District gathered together in what was called “National Walkout Day” in memory of the horrific tragedy of the Columbine school shootings 19 years earlier.  Students spoke of issues of gun control and school safety.  And while none of the student speakers were even alive when Columbine occurred, a common theme of seeking safety at school echoed in the various speeches.

A time-traveler from that April day in 2018 would have a hard time reconciling the Hopkins School District of just two and-a-half years later as the School Board voted to keep guns out of their schools – guns in the form of local police protection:

The Hopkins school board on Tuesday night embraced a student-led call to remove police from Hopkins High School — with the action to come at year’s end.

The 6-1 vote brings a suburban voice to a national movement that has sought to end the use of school resource officers, or SROs.

The move to defund Hopkins School Resource Officers comes after several months of intense online lobbying by a group calling themselves “CopsOutHHH” and a poll of Hopkins students in favor of the movement – a poll in which only 183 of the District’s 1,600 students voted.  By the end of the year, Hopkins will sever it’s relationship with the Minnetonka Police Department (the Hopkins School District includes parts of Edina and Minnetonka) in a move that supporter and Board Vice Chair Chris LaTondresse bizarrely described as not actually “defunding” the police since the contract was due to expire anyway.

LaTondresse, a DFL endorsed candidate for Hennepin County Commissioner who touts his consulting work for USAID as making him an “Obama administration alum” in the same way that I apparently was a member of Congress because I visited Washington D.C. once, claims the move will allows for more mental health funding.  Considering the SRO budget is $113,142 out of a budget of $91,502,418, the idea that shifting 0.01% of the School Board’s resources away from security and towards mental health will address either issue is laughable at best and incredibly dangerous at worse.

It’s also a conclusion that files in the face of peer-tested research.  Carleton University conducted a two-year study of SRO programs and in their report, published by Routledge in 2019, they concluded that for every dollar invested in the program, a minimum of $11.13 of social and economic value was created.  While attention would likely focus on the role the SRO could or did play in the estimated 525 school shootings over the past decade (a number in partial dispute as it groups any gun-related incidents on a school campus together), left unreported are the number of incidents prevented by early SRO intervention.  The group Averted School Violence has begun to attempt to collect and analyze such data, a task made somewhat difficult by the very nature of the endeavor – incidents that don’t escalate into violence rarely make the news.

LaTondresse and the Hopkins School Board also want to cite that SROs make students of color fundamentally uncomfortable.  While data can’t contend with feelings, even a Brookings Institute report from 2018 which was less than fully supportive of SROs as agents of school safety didn’t see any correlation between SROs and race.  Brookings believed context for arrest records and racial backgrounds were lacking and thus a poor metric to judge whether or not SROs were more likely to discriminate or otherwise negatively impact minority students.

But no amount of data – or even common sense – was present on Tuesday night as the Hopkins School Board voted to eliminate basic security without even so much as a concept of what would replace their School Resource Officers.  Instead, a small but vocal minority has continued to push a partisan agenda that endangers students for the goal of striking symbolic blow against the police.

Been hearing yammering about the nation divided against itself, being
torn apart by culture war, end of life as we know it, civil war, yada yada.

Okay, sure, it happened once before.  But there was a fairly clear
geographical division – North against South.  What the division now? 
Suburb against Core?  City against Country?

In a war with clear issues, clear battle lines, colored uniforms and an
honor code to waging war, America lost 620,000 men (plus an unknown
number of non-combatants killed by accident or for lack of food and
medicine as society was disrupted).  That’d be more than 6 million
Americans today.

Without clear issues, battle lines, uniforms or codes of conduct, this
next conflict will be more like Kosovo or Somalia or Syria: everybody
against everybody.  The death toll won’t be anywhere near as low as 6
million.

Maybe society should be moving to establish better lines, set up a
buffer zone, before the actual shooting starts?  BLM in Minneapolis and
St. Paul proper, other Liberals inside the 694/494 loop, Conservatives
outside the ring.  Cross the Line of Death at your peril.  It couldn’t hurt.

Joe Doakes

Berg’s 21st Law is in full effect.

We’ll be talking about this subject with Walter Hudson on the show Saturday.

Why, it’s almost as if Biden knows something:

No, Mr. Vice President, I firmly believe that if you lose that part of this country will consider it a casus belli.

That’s what your party has wrought.

Stipulated in advance – we don’t know yet how the Rittenhouse case in Racine is going to end up.

Acknowledging up front that Berg’s 18th Law is in effect, it would appear that Rittenhouse’s first shooting might just be problematic, and that the second two appeared to be textbook legitimate self-defense.

Of course, earlier we noted the provenance of the two “victims”. The first person shot was a rather unsavory person whose behavior hash’t really been the subject of any public scrutiny:

The second person killed (and the ones wounded with him), either:

So – while it’s entirely possible the kid committed murder, it’d seem the idea that he’s a “white supremacist” might be just a tad bit of a stretch – and while all lives are precious to God, the path from the pedo and the thumper to “black” seems a little insurmountable.

With all of that exhaustively noted, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this tweet from Ayanna Pressley needs to not fall down the memory hole:

Heh.

UPDATE: Lin Wood and Rittenhouse’s defense team is on the ground swinging.

More later.

This may be the greatest lower-third super (aka “Chyron”, aaka the graphic at the bottom of the shot)) in the history of propaganda:

When life gives you rotten fruit, ferment it down until you can make a flaming sambuca:

Ryan Winkler, Minnesota’s House Majority Leader – let that thought rattle around in your head a bit – replies to Senate Majority Leader Gazelka yesterday:

“Trump’s America is deadly!”

But the Tim Walz and Peggy Flanagan’s Minnesota is the part that is rioting, burning, looting, shedding businesses and jobs, boarding up, moving to the burbs or Wisconsin or the Greater or Lesser Dakota, buggering off, hitting the dusty trail for freer and safer horizons.

Alondra Cano’s Minnesota is the part that can’t run itself even in good times without massive transfers of wealth from the parts of the state that work (for now), the Republican parts.

Lisa Bender’s Minnesota is the part that considers “law and order” a form of unsustainable “privilege” for all you plebs, but pays a lot of your money so that it has that privilege for itself.

Ryan Winkler’s Minnesota is the part where a Harvard graduate and machine politician from a lilywhite “progressive” suburb full of NIMBYs can call one of the most distinguished jurists of our time an “Uncle Tom”, and then turn around and yap about “white supremacy” when his opponent compliments the men and women who are taking time off from their real lives to clean up yet another DFL mess.

If Ryan Winkler didn’t exist, the GOP would have to invent him.

I get it.

If you’re a businessperson, a law-abiding citizen, a resident of a place like Minneapolis or Saint Paul or Kenosha, you might be getting a little tired of being siultaneousy treated like a villain, a sucker and a pop-sociology punching bag.

And seeing the entitled, upper-middle-cass, over-schooled, undereducated “progressive” thugs and the depredations they wreak, you might just be as mad as hell and not in a mood to take it anymore.

You might even take the Second Amendment of the Constitution seirously, with its implied empowerment to defend your life, your family, your property, your community and your freedom.

And truth be told, I feel it too. The Thursday night after Memorial Day, when the destruction came to Saint Paul, the temptation to strap up and sit out on the porch with a book and a couple of poieces of ugly black insurance would have been pretty dang tempting if all of my guns hadn’t fallen into Mille Lacs, and they didn’t terrify me besides.

It’s even ore overwhelming when you have a government that seems, at least in Minnneapolis, Saint Paul and Minnesota at large, to be on the wrong side.

It’s times like this the urge to get some friends and gun up and find some bit of real estate to protect from the mob – your own, someone else’s, it matters little – is palpable.

It’s a lousy idea for two reasons.

For starters – in most states, the odds are good that you’ll come off worse, legally, than the scumbags.

And the scumbags want a civil war.

Let’s look at both problems.

Self-Defense – As we’ve noted in this space before, the rules for claiming self-defense are (intentionally?) a little opaque in many states, including MInnesota and Wisconsin.

To sum up the confluence of a little statute and a lot of case law:

1. You must reasonably, immediately fear death or great bodily harm.  Reasonable means “it’ll convince a jury”.  Immediate means now; if someone says “I’m gonna kill you…tomorrow”, you can’t kill them first.
2. You must use appropriate force.  In other words, you can only use the force needed to end the threat.  No more.
3. You must make a reasonable effort to retreat.  Reasonable.  If you’re pushing your baby in a stroller, you don’t need to leave it behind.  If you’re a 70 year old man with a knee replacement attacked by four youths, you don’t need to try to out run them.  And in Minnesota, it doesn’t apply in your house.  In “Stand Your Ground” states, this provision is disregarded.  Minnesota is not a Stand Your Ground state.
4. You must not be a willing participant: you can’t start a brawl, and then shoot someone who breaks a bottle.Put another way, you must not be the aggressor.

Berg’s 18th Law is in full effect, here – but given what we might know about the crime, it would seem that Rittenhouse may have the same problem as Alan Scarsella, the man who shot at some “protesters” who were chasing him and his friends away from the Fourth Precinct in North MInneapolis a few years ago. Scarsella likely met three of the criteria for self defense – but the prosecution painted him, successfully, as the aggressor . He didn’t have to go to North Minneapolis, and he certainly didn’t have to post a stupid video bragging about it.

We’ll see what happens.

Say You Want A Revolution – In 1933 as German president Paul Hindenburg mulled giving emergency power to a cabinet led by Adolph Hiter, among the biggest supporters of the power giveaway were…

…the German Communist Party. The Nazi’s “enemies”. They figured extremism woulds benefit them – when the middle becomes untenable, the extremes become self-preservation. It’d worked for the Communists in Russia, and showed promise in other European countries; the Hard Left’s discipline and organization enabled it to win a batte of the extremes over right wings that weren’t anywhere near organized enough to prevail against Big Left’s discipline and regimentation.

They banked wrong on the batatle against Hiter – but got the formula down in North Korea, China, and a fair chunk of the Third World in the fifties through the seventies, and evena few since.

They are banking on the same thing today. Not without good reason.

If you run a business in the Twin Cities, this is what you are up against:

Lotus has been a tradition in the Twin Cities as long as I’ve been here, and considerably longer. Even as Vietnamese restaurants got taken over by Thai joints (Unjustifiably, in my book), the Lotus has carried on.

But will they come back downtown? Will Ruth’s Chris? Brit’s?

Especially given that the photo above described, exactly, the support they can expect from the city of Minneapolis?

Would you?

To: Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg – Former Rock and/or Cow, current Deplorable
Re: “Healing”

Governor,

Last night, as yet another round of looting began over a false rumor of another police shooting, you tweeted:

Heal?

You don’t “heal” from cancer while your tumors are still metastatizing.

Minneapolis’s disease is the long-standing tolerance of lawlessness toward political ends.

Every blocked freeway. Every “Anti”-fa outrage given a faint whisper of a slap on the wrist. Every child of the political class whose arson and looting and thuggery gets ignored. Every “progressive” city that declares itself above Federal immigraiton law. Every time you nudge and wink at progressive thugs – the spoiled, entitled, emotionally brittle, violence-prone, over-schooled / under-educated children of our political class (including, it might seem, the daughter of a certain sitting governor), every time you conflate “First Amendment” with “Room to Destroy”, every time you abandon parts of the city to the mob?

Every time you treat minority votes as your chattel?

Every time you and your party treat minority and immigrant neighborhoods as a place for people to take out their real or ginned-up frustrations with fire and baseball bats?

That’s the disease.

There is no healing until the disease is gone.

There will be no “healing” while cities like Minneapolis are nothing but Jimmy’s First Political Experiment Kit, for the political class to twirl the knobs and yank the levers and try to build a “progressive” utopia, rather than places where people live, work, and expect some level of fiscal and social return on the “investment” that is their taxes.

I’m not going to say “progressivism is the disease”.

But it’s the delivery system for everything Minneapolis needs to “heal” from.

That is all.

Among the left’s long list of abusive rhetorical techniques, and the one that has me in a particular state of pique, is the phrase “SAY HIS (or HER) NAME”.

It’s a pretty ghastly bit of emotional manipulation – basically a bit of on-the-spot brainwashing, and the crudest, most blunt-force kind of framing there is.

With that in mind, Governor Klink is clearly getting the message – the suburbs, which gave the DFL the majority that keeps his dictatorial power in place, are clearly not amused by last weekend’s shenanigans and malarkey in Hugo.

But he can’t quuuiiiiiite put it in words without getting his progressive puppetmasters to whack him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper:

Well, just a doggone minute, Governor.

What threatening behavior? What bloodthirsty rhetoric?

From whom?

Say his name.

And his party.

Hint: it’s the party – from the leadership on down – that is always the one actually attacking people and breaking things.

Go ahead, Governor Walz. Or, let’s be honest, Flanagan.

If you live outside the Jonestown cult that is the DFL in the Twin Cities, you need to make sure your neighbors seriously absorb this episode. It tells you everything there is to know about today’s DFL.

This is DFL-endorsed candidate for the MN House, Bob Thompson, this past Saturday in Hugo, outside the home of Lt. Bob Kroll.

It certainly didn’t end there:

Additional footage of Thompson’s speech showed him wondering why protesters “were so peaceful.” He then told a man holding a blue lives matter sign to “take that sign” and “stick it in [his] ass.”

“We coming for everything that you motherf–ers took from us,” he added. “This whole [vulgarity] state burned down for 20 [vulgarity] dollars. You think we give a f– about burning Hugo down?”

Huh.

The story has evaded the Mainstream Media, of course – they want the DFL to hold those suburban seats. You’ve got to go to the honest, conservative media to get the story.

By the way – when former state rep Matt Dean asked one of the area’s freshman DFL reps to comment, this was what Amy “Profile in Courage” Wazlawik had to say

Pretty sure Rep. Runbeck’s position on the demonstration is clear.

Unlike Wazlawik’s.

Or those of Ken Martin, Melissa Hortman or Ryan Winkler, for that matter.

Quick question for our DFL readers – do you disavow this?

Yes or no.

Oh, yeah – we know where Governor Klink stands:

This is the party that wants to rule Minnesota. Not govern – rule.

Rioting in Portland for 60 days now, most recently trying to burn down a police station. The Press says the riots are “mostly peaceful.” 

Puts me in mind of a certain movie. I can imagine our anti-fa hero coming up from the basement, dressed in black, telling Mom he’s going out with his friends. “That’s nice dear, have fun storming the courthouse.”

Joe Doakes

It’s all funny until self-government becomes impossible because nobody trusts our institutions…

Minneapolis businesses destroyed when the City failed – no, abnegated, competely – at its responsibility to deliver the public safety and order that taxpayers expect…

…have to pay in advance on their taxes to clear the rubble of the businesses that the City didn’t even bother protecting with last year’s taxes:

Light leaving “moral” today won’t reach Minneapolis’s city goverment until long after Mayor McDreamy’s great-grandchildren are collecting social security.