A friend of the blog who fled Saint Paul just in time writes:

this msg is making the rounds of the S.MPLS progressive/arts set

Per Jon Collins at MPR News- “South Minneapolis: I know this sounds crazy. But it’s 2020. And I’m working on story now about white supremacists coming to Minneapolis to foment race war under cover of the protests. I need your help, and your friends help. Please refer anyone with real, credible info (not rumor or speculation) or sources to me at (I’m gonna redact that)

What the heck – let’s give this a shot:

 Mr. Collins,

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m  a talk show host at WWTC-AM in Eagan, and I write the blog “Shotinthedark.info”.  

Last week you put out a call to your listener mailing lists, looking for confirmed sightings of “white supremacists”.  

I’m genuinely curious – did you find anything?

While I am a very overt conservative (I went from Bob Collins’ Christmas Card list to…well, not on it over the past few years), I also spent time covering radical groups of all stripes back when I was in the mainstream media.  

And while I realize this is very unlikely, I’d like to invite you on my show (Saturday, 1-3PM) to talk about your findings.   Because it’s everyone’s city. 

Thanks, and stay safe

Mitch Berg
Host, WWTC-AM

Given that I saw a lot of “AmeriKKKa” and “Destroy the 1%” graffiti, but not a single swastika or “14 words” reference, I’m thinking the Twin Cities either got the most inept “white supremacists” in the history of bigotry, or they were the most ingenious – fiendishly tricking a whole city full of leftists into doing the job for them.  

In which Mike Freeman drops a banana peel in front of Keith Ellison while saying “Hey, join the team,” and chuckles as Ellison eagerly rushes in.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/05/31/keith-ellison-prosecutions-george-floyd

Freeman is a jerk but he’s also an experienced prosecutor.  Remember the Somali cop who shot the little White woman in the alley?  He got convicted of 3rd degree and got 12 years, nothing close to what the mob wanted. Freeman survived that fiasco and he intends to survive this one.  
He’s read the autopsy report.  He knows Floyd didn’t die from lack of air (obviously not, or he couldn’t have been talking).  Freeman knows the victim was stoned and had other medical issues that may have been exacerbated by the arrest, which might possibly make the officer careless or negligent, but Freeman knows there’s no way to make Murder 1 stick and that’s the only thing that will satisfy the mob.
So how’s he get the mob off his back?  He asks Keith Ellison for help.  Ellison – who has no prosecution experience – will now “take the lead.”  Which means whatever goes wrong with the case from here on out, Freeman points at Ellison and says “Don’t ask me, he’s in charge.”
Early in my career, I spent a few years as a prosecutor.  A criminal case isn’t won by clever speeches or Twitter comments, it’s a s***load of hard work.  Ellison has no idea.  He’s being set up to take the fall when the cop walks.  Freeman will shrug and carry on.  Walz will remind us what a great job he’s done on Covid.  Charlie Foxtrot all around.
Joe Doakes

More on this later today.

Thursday evening, I decided to walk down to Snelling Avenue to check out the situation.

I saw broken glass at Lloyd’s Pharmacy, at the corner of Snelling and Minnehaha. I decided to check out the situation.

The situation nearly came to me. I saw a vibrant group of youths carrying bags of merchandise out of the Speedway station across the street, chased by the immigrant family who run the place. The other gas station up the block was in the process of being looted as well.

A small group of twenty-somethings jumped out of a car in rudimentary riot-wear, and ran past me, headed toward the Speedway. They took no interest in me – which was good for all concerned. Take that as you wish.

I beat a hasty retreat home, and rode out the rest of the evening.

The next morning, it looked like this:

Lloyd’s, which had been in this building for 102 years, as one of the last of Saint Paul’s small independent pharmacies, was gone. They’d remodeled last year, adding more lab space and some offices for a medical office – a vote of confidence in the neighborhood.

Here’s what confidence in Saint Paul gets you:

That’s 102 years worth of rubble.

Some wag commented with a sign:

Lloyd’s, and the looted gas stations , were the only visibly damaged bulidings north of Thomas – although it was hard to tell if the stores were boarded up as a preventive measure…

Or repairing damage.

I don’t know.

All I know is that my neighborhood, the Midway – my tough, scrappy, blighted little underdog of a neighborhood – feels gutted today.

Did I say tough and scrappy? Hell yeah. The staff from one restaiurant, immigrants all, climbed up on their roof on Thursday night, vislbly armed, entirely to deter the looters that’d gone over so miuch of the street the night before. I won’t name them here – I don’t want the neighborhood’s many Soy Boys and Karens to try to cancel them for their impudence.

During the day on Friday, University was crawling with people with dustpans and brooms, descending on University to clean up the mess.

They clearned out later in the afternoon, though, as sporadic incidents of looting and violence started to speckle the map. Recovery? Just ending the nightmare seemed a long, hard slog away, given Mayor Frey and Governor Walz’s performance.

Anway – to those of you who’ve been burning down my neighborhood, looting my neighbors’ shops, trying to wreck our lives – the neighborhood where I raised my kids, started a business or two, and have lived for what seems like an entire lifetime?

You want to talk about police brutality? Cultures of entitlement? Systemic racism?

Want to talk anger?

Let’s talk.

Want to make some changes, over what happened to George Floyd? Hey, guess what – I’ve got huge problems with excessive police power, too. Let’s get things done!

But talking isn’t’ fast or dramatic enough for you? Want to browbeat dissent into submission? Want to vent your inchoate rage on innocent third parties? Want to burn things that don’t belong to you?

Racism, inequality and brutality is oppression. But so is rioting.

And if you want to fight opporession with more oppression?

This is for you .

Go back to taking your rage out on your family, or your professors, or on yourself. Jam your adolescent entitlement someplace nature never intended things to be jammed.

Screw your “revolution” – I brought my own.

I’ll be here long after you move on to other tantrums. I will listen, if listening and discussion is what you want. But I’m not running anywhere.

This is my town, sparky.

This is our town. All the good people, black and white, Korean and H’mong, Turkish and Ethiopian, and every other flavor of humanity God put here. The ones who built this place, and the ones who’ll rebuild it after you’ve had your excellent weekend of fun.

We deserve better elected “leaders”, it’s true. But we were here first, and we’ll be here last.

One’s outrage over George Floyd’s death varies depending on one’s definition of normal.
If you’re just going about your business, acting in an ordinary and normal way, the cops shouldn’t hassle you and certainly shouldn’t kill you. So what is “normal?”
Philandro Castillo was driving and carrying a pistol while high on marijuana. The Black community considered that normal. His death was an outrage… to them.  The rest of us could understand why the officer panicked and shot him. Driving and carrying while stoned is not normal…for us.
I don’t know how hard it is to restrain a 6 ft 6 in tall, 250 lb former NBA player, who is drunk and passing counterfeit money. Does that take a polite request? Or three cops kneeling on his neck? I have no idea. But to me, getting arrested for committing a crime would be normal, and you sort it out later in court. For the Black community, passing funny money while stoned is normal and the cops should have left him alone.
The autopsy report shows George Floyd did not die of asphyxiation. He had an underlying medical condition. His arrest may have contributed to it, but the cops didn’t murder him. His death was merely incident to the arrest which makes us question whether the arrest itself was justified, which brings us back to whether his behavior was so unusual and abnormal as to justify an arrest.
This difference in perception – what is normal and acceptable behavior – is the heart of the dispute, not just for this one fellow, but for Black lives matter, antifa, achievement gap, racial reparations, affirmative action …
Joe Doakes 

And the perception gaps among so many different, parts of society are so radically different, it’s hard to see how any of it squares up, ever.   Especially since arriving at some sort of consensus is both absolutely vital…

…and utterly impossible given not only our current political, social and media state, but the opposite of what most of Minneapolis’ ruling class wants.  

My theory: America is protesting – angrily, but generally peacefully – over the death of George Floyd and all of the history in, about and around it.

America is rioting, on the other hand, because America is bored stiff after ten weeks of being cooped up inside with each other, unemployed or underemployed, being told they are “nonessential“, stricken with stage IV cabin fever, with no place to go but the online world that, hey, lookie here, told them about a huge get together!

No, not joking.

The Minneapolis police killing George Floyd was the spark.

A nation of Karens, on the other hand, had been piling up tinder for months.

For those who might be curious, I’m safe.

The neighborhood that has been my home for most of the last 33 years? Not so much. More on that later.

The cities that have been my home, and the place that I raised my family, for the last 35 years?

We are in the worst possible hands.

Yesterday afternoon, I almost wrote that Mayor Frey’s press conference was the worst train wreck I have ever seen in public.

I would’ve spoken too soon.

The mayors 1:30 AM press conference last night…

… Well, words fail me. I come up with words for a living, and a hobby, and I’ve got nothing.

There is literally not the faintest shred of leadership under that perfectly coiffed hairdo of his.

Asked why he ordered the third precinct evacuated, he prattled something about the building being just a symbol – human lives are the important part. Why no reporter thought to follow up by asking “what about the lives that are being put in direct jeopardy by the complete turnover of the streets to the mob? What about the symbol you’re sending – that the police protection that is one of the few legitimate reasons to have a government, is being pulled out at the height of the crisis? Do you want to talk symbols, let’s talk symbols!”

Naturally, nobody asked that.

But a reporter actually DID ask an incisive question, something the mayor clearly isn’t used to ever getting. “What’s the plan?“. The mayor responded, initially, with five seconds of deer in the headlights silence, before asking the reporter “plan for what?” like a junior high kid who’d forgotten this week was midterms, before starting “there’s a lot of pain out there…“ and another couple minutes of gibberish that didn’t even address, much less answer, the question.

Forget about the facts on the ground – if you are a resident of Minneapolis, that press conference should have you howling with anger. The feelings of the mob – not people demonstrating against police brutality, but the roving mass of thieves and provocateurs – are more important than your livelihoods, your lives.

Call it the tyranny of low expectations, but when I saw St. Paul police chief Todd Axtel‘s press conference I found myself almost happy to see a police chief saying “we’re not abandoning our city“. In normal times, I would say, dumbfounded, “what, do you want a cookie? That’s your job!“ We’ve seen today that you can’t take that for granted.

Part of me wants to apologize for former New Orleans Ray Nagin for calling him the worst mayor in the history of America in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

Anyway – curfew in effect.

“One Minnesota“ my ass.

———-

If you think this would be an opportune time to slip some virtue signaling about the justification for the rioters into the comments, think again.

It’s juuuuuust possible some journos are seeing what some of us have been saying forever: the media’s power to euphemize can be a evil thing:

Ms. Hockert; there’s a long way to go. But it’s a start.

Yesterday, along East Lake.

This is life in a one party town.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Court Administrator sent a message at 3:00 warning all court employees in St. Paul to evacuate because a mob was coming. My wife and I have the grand-kids for a sleep-over. I was concerned the kids’ mother might say “Riots? Get my kids out of there!”

She’s a Southren girl, married my boy while he was in the Navy. She asked two questions: “Are the riots near y’all?” Well, no. “Grandpa Joe’s got a gun, doesn’t he?” Well, yeah. “Well, alright then.”

I LOVE THAT GIRL.

Joe Doakes

You should, Joe.

A friend of the blog writes:

What, did they just come to town, Google for chain stores that might be open and close to the freeway? Apparently they did.

I don’t know a single local protester who would have thought SunRay would be the place to March/riot.

I have lived in the Twin Cities for decades, and I can’t remember a single time when it was the perfect place to…shop.

According to a very reliable source, a Minneapolis police officer reports that all Minneapolis police have been moved out of the Third Precinct to the Fourth, and told to “sit tight, do nothing”.

And the police are – according to my source’s source – “pissed”.