Over at True North and Anti-Strib, Tracy Eberly takes apart the “cute” anarkid video that’s been getting  yuks from the hear/see/speak no evil crowd.

Comments at Anti-Strib.

Last spring, when I appeared on MPR’s “In The Loop” on a panel discussion, Jeff Horwich asked me (and I’m paraphrasing closely) why conservatives aren’t out there on the street, protesting.

I stammered and yawped my way through the the answer, live on the air (it’s much easier being a host than a guest!).  As I noted later, I wished I’d said…:

“Jeff, I think the difference is that conservatism isn’t fundamentally about emotions, or their expression. 

Liberalism – or the left, anyway – is really a co-option (good or cynical, or a little of both, really) of a lot of things most of us are taught as kids; share with people, be nice, don’t fight, you’ll shoot your eye out with that gun.  That kind of thing.  Now, it adds some grownup things, like a legal imperative and, in extreme cases, a certain pseudo-religious ardor – but at the end of the day liberalism is  just an institutionalized version of things we all learned in kindergarten.

Conservatism is not about emotions, usually; it’s something that doesn’t come easily to a lot of people, since it’s something you have to think hard about, and in some ways on the surface it seems to fly in the face of things we’re brought up to believe.  You share, or be nice, or quit fighting, not because mommy or the government tell you to, but because it’s the right thing to do.  And you realize that there’s complexity to all these things; sharing in the form of charity is good, while welfare has and causes serious problems.  Fighting is bad, but sometimes it’s necessary to defend yourself, your family, and your country.  That kind of thing.

So if you consider that becoming a real conservative is largely a solitary, intellectual journey rather than an emotional wave one gets swept up in, it makes a lot more sense that we’re not out there waving signs and threatening to, say, bum-rush Erica’s convention, to pick a random example.

Now, I was oversimplifying, of course; emotion is a huge, and justifiable, part of the pro-life movement.  And the left’s war of bigotry against the law-abiding gun owner certainly left many a rigorously law-abiding citizen in a fit of pique or two. 

But either way, with few exceptions, conservative movements are generally not about standing about in the street and waving signs – and certainly not about standing around hoping to get “arrested” and slapped with what in the (liberal) protester-friendly Twin Cities generally involves the most token possible charge and released instantly. 

And I have no desire whatsoever to change that!

But if there’s one thing “protests” are good for, it’s getting outdoors, meeting people, and having a good time.

Now, on Saturday the 15th, the Anarkids are going to be throwing a “tune-up” march in downtown Saint Paul, in the environs of the Capitol and the X – basically the area that’s going to see most of the action next year.

And it’d be fun to get some of the Good Guys and Gals out there.  To “show the flag”, literally and figuratively.

Of course, being a group of conservatives, we have to have an operating philosophy; I suggest “WWPJOD” (“What would P.J. O’Rourke Do?”)

Over this next week, a group of us at True North will be organizing a counterprotest; a big, fun, loud, fun, raucus, fun, “tune-down” for the passersby. 

We’d love to see you there.

Details forthcoming.

It may be out of character – but it’ll be fun. 

Yesterday, along with their “prepared statement” – which their spokesbeing read word for word from the exact same handout that’d been given to all the “press” and any other onlookers that asked – the Anarkids handed out this statement about last week’s riot in Minneapolis, produced here word-for-word from the “release”.

While fisking it is probably not going to be as interesting as finding out who the writer’s English Teachers were over the years, it’s probably worth a look:

On Friday, August 31, nineteen people were arrested after police brutally attacked cyclists with Tasers, pepper spray, and excessive physical force.  The cyclists were part of the monthly Critical Mass bike ride.

This month’s Critical Mass was a kick-off for the pReNC, a weekend of organizing against the Republican National Convention to be held in St. Paul in 2008.

Interesting.  On some of the local discussion forums, lefties are claiming that there is no, was no, never has been any connection between the two. 

  The RNC Welcoming Committe (RNC-WC), a group hosting the pReNC, gave a public speech before the ride exhorting riders to avoid confrontation throughout the weekend. 

Well, bully for them! 

But of course, in the months before the ride, they were busy talking about all the mayhem they were going to carry out.  Wonder if that “speech” managed to counteract all of that braggadocio? 

While the police as a whole use excessive and brutal force in our communities on a daily basis, we feel that yesterday’s police response was highly inconsistent with their usual behavior.

Um – hello?  So which is it?  If they’re a bunch of jackbooted fascists “on a daily basis”, what’s “inconsistent”? 

The bikers did not provoke this incident, as they committed no violent or destructive acts. 

It’s perhaps not surprising that this contradicts the Strib’s account of the incident. 

 Unmarked cars filmed and targeted specific people.  A State Patrol helicopter accompanied the entire event. 

And is it any wonder?  Given all the threats that these jackbooted little wannabee fascists have been making, if I were a cop I’d make sure that there were plenty of cameras aimed at the scene, too. 

 Three police cars followed throughout the ride, attempting to intimidate the riders by sounding their sirens regularly and driving into the crowd, but issued no official dispersal orders.

Wow. Cops driving into a crowd of bicyclists? 

I’m a bicyclist.  I know if a cop ran into my bike, I’d have some damage to show for it.  Right away!

Two cruisers – #993 and #998 – drove into the back of the Mass at the corner of La Salle and Grand.  Witnesses report that at least one bicyclist was hit by a squad car.  At this point, the police began to arrest and pepper spray those who had gathered at the site of the accident.  They pointed Tasers at a nonviolent crowd, as if to create a sense of panic.

Again – and naturally, and not unexpectedly (“HONEST, officer, someone put that crack pipe IN my purse!  Really”), this contradicts everything I’ve seen in the media on the subject, which reported the cops tried to arrest someone who was playing “chicken” in traffic, and were in turn attacked by a crowd of anarkids. 

Now – take careful note of this next part (emphasis added):

  Nearly twenty squad cars arrived on the scene.  Over forty police created a line formation in which they advanced on bikers, arresting, and brutalizing those who fell behind.

Huh-whah?

Anarkids on bikes couldn’t escape a bunch of cops, loaded down with gear, advancing deliberately in a line (per normal riot training)?

Am I the only one who suspects that they must not have been trying to “get away” all that hard?

One cyclist was pepper sprayed when she attempted to obey dispersal orders.

“I swear to God, officer – I have no idea where that TV came from!  Stolen, you say?  Someone must have stuffed it into my backseat!” 

  She was then handcuffed and held to the ground as a third officer Tasered her in the neck.  Witnesses were also pepper sprayed and one bystander was among those arrested. 

I’ll be interested in seeing the video. 

 Most of the nineteen arrestees were held on “Probable Cause” for Riot charges and their bail was set at $3,000 each.

Let me take a step back here.

I know that it is entirely possible that the police might have overreacted.  Nothing about being a conservative involves blindly accepting government’s view of things – indeed, since every actual systemic government infringement of free speech in our society today attacks conservatives rather than liberals, we are right to be vigilant. 

But what do you suppose the odds are that the Minneapolis Police Department – one of the most intensely-politicized police departments in the business, which works for among the farthest-left-leaning city governments in the nation – being fully aware of both the Anarkids’ proclamations and intentions and the sympathies so many of their civilian bosses have for the “protesters“, would allow their officers to go all unhinged?  Indeed, I’m going to make a very fearless prediction here; the officers covering and responding to the “protest” knew that they were going to be on dozens of videocameras, both official eyes in the sky and a thousand points of cell-cam.  I’d be amazed, under those political and technological circumstances, if there were more than the thinnest film of police misconduct.  Just a hunch – but like most of my predictions, I’m pretty comfortable with it.

We believe that the police aggression experienced Friday night was a pre-meditated attempt to intimidate the anti-RNC organizers.  Although members of the RNC-WC were the intended recipients of police violence, the officers present exercised no discretion in their brutality.  All Critical Mass riders were subject to the police’s use of unrestrained force.  This was, with no question, a police practice run for next year’s RNC.

Well, they were half right.

I’ll bet anything that this was an intentional provocation, intended to inflame a sense of righteous victimhood on the part of the “protesters” – to create a sense of “we have nothing to lose, so anything goes.  Our ends now justify our means!”. 

Indeed, their next passage indicates almost exactly that (emphases added): 

  When the RNC-WC says that the State brings violence to the streets and leaves poeple, pacifist or otherwise, with no peaceful option for resistance, these acts of brutal force are what we speak of.  We do not expect the police to be held accoutnable by a system that necessitates their violence; however, we remain committed to confronting this repression wherever it exists and with whatever means available.

We will not be intimidated.

No, I don’t suspect “being intimidated” has ever been on the agenda. 

UPDATE: A commenter noted that, while I DO try to avoid using “nazi” references, I did let one slip through. 

I’ll cop to it.  The thought of these jagoffs polluting my city, my adopted hometown, with their puerile/violent little fantasies, is noxious to me.  So I slipped.

Good catch.

When you’re a Republican in Saint Paul, you get used to feeling like a Finn at Suomussalmi. 

It’s a rare thing indeed when the good guys outnumber the left at much of anything in this town.

Today was the last day I expected to be one of them.

The Anarkids – the various arrested adolescents who are planning on bringing violence to the Republican National Convention next year – had a “News Conference” at the Capitol at 11:30 today. 

Present were:

• Camera crews from two cable access outlets and WCCO TV.
• A reporter from Minnesota Public Radio (indeed, the same one I talked with on Friday).
• Lassie from Freedom Dogs
• Leo from Pscychmeister’s Ice Palace
• Jamie Delton, blogger and local GOP activist.
• Sandra Brown-Rivers, spokesperson for the RNC Welcoming Committee.
• Three or four anarkids.  One of them drove…(wait for it…wait for it…) a Prius – brand new and mighty expensive, for a bunch of kids who reject capitalism and money.  It was plastered with bumperstickers.
• Myself.

So – of the 15 (I counted ’em) people at the “news conference”, both the news media and the GOP presence were greater than the Anarkids!

Ms. Brown-Rivers – a short woman who looked either frumpily perky or perkily frumpy – did a lengthy soundcheck, looking hot and sticky and uncomfortable in her dark, dirty-looking standard-issue anarkid-wear duds, and sounding tentative behind the microphone, at the bottom of the capitol steps.  Then she cleared her throat, and as camera crews and the cute redhead reporter from WCCO tried to get her name for attribution, replied “We’re not taking questions…”

“No, we’d like to get your title”, replied one of the camera guys, who I suspect must have been wondering what he did to piss off his assignment editor.

Finally, after an extended buildup, Ms. Brown-Rivers read the following statement, word for word (barring a few flubs which I won’t bother to re-create):

Thank you, ladies, gentlemen, and otherly-gendered of the press, for joining us on this, most glorious of occasions.  This Labor day weekend, anarchists and anti-authoritarians from every city, every town, every hamlest, every last Hooverville of this great nation convened a grand congress.  Together, we have magicked into being a detailed plan, worthy of note, to receive the Republican National Convention. Like many a good plan, it is broad in scope, aimed an othering less than complete controll (!!) of this hallowed turf, our fair city.  Today, declare our first victory, having a chieved a complete shutdown of government services citywide.  This we have accomplished whilst wading in the dark tide of the State and their attempts to crush us on the first even of our festivities, when the gentle flesh of our comrades was met with hard metal and penetrating volts by members of the self-appointed police force – a foreshadowing glimpse.  Yet here we stand, and our chariots ride on.  Much as a phoenix rises from its own ashes, we admist that tomorrow the city will function anew.  But know this:  its hegemony, like all but the truest of loves, is fleeting, ephemeral.

I thought about fisking it – but this may be the most perfectly self-fisking statement in the history of public oratory (although other bloggers may feel free to go for it!).

Ms Brown-Rivers stalked off the steps, leaving the reporters looking mildly pissed. 

And so the season begins!

(more…)

BEFORE:  

Earlier this summer, the City Pages’ Peter “Snoopp Peete” Scholtes wrote about the Critical Mass bike rally:

What always strikes me about this parade is its quiet, a gap in rush-hour racket that absorbs even the clink of chains, the shouts to passersby. The effect might explain why participants prefer to joke with–rather than preach at–people they pass. On a previous ride, when the cyclists glided past a man looking under the hood of his overheated sedan, one rider couldn’t resist yelling: “Time to get a bike!”

That’s about as didactic as this roving protest gets. Though against automobile traffic in both the physical and philosophical sense, Critical Mass is a ride first and foremost, an exercise in guerrilla leisure conceived ten years ago in San Francisco and duplicated across the planet, from Tel Aviv to Sydney. The name was lifted from Ted White’s 1992 documentary Return of the Scorcher, in which one interviewee described the bike buildup and spontaneous group forays across the busy intersections of Beijing as “critical mass.”

Sounds peaceful.

Almost bucolic. 

Almost something I can get into. 

Indeed, an old friend turns up:

“It’s an exhilarating feeling to ride on some of the streets where we’re most vulnerable and feel absolutely safe,” says Jason Goray, a Web developer who joined the Mass in April. “I never realized how much tension I carry around when I ride; the feeling that a car could take you out at any point.”

This exorcism inevitably backs up traffic and irritates weary motorists, but Goray doesn’t like the word protest. Like many riders, he believes the movement’s civilly disobedient slogan–“We are not blocking traffic. We are traffic”–is an assertion, not a dare.

After a summer of biking to work – which, with a 17 year gap, followed a decade of serious biking, albeit most of it in the country – I can agree.

What could be wrong with that?

AFTER:

From WCCO on Friday:

Minneapolis Police arrested 17 adults and 2 juveniles during a monthly bicycle protest Friday night…The trouble started Friday night with one bicyclist.

“Somebody was driving straight at cars,” said Deputy Chief Allen.

Police tried to arrest that bicyclist on Hennepin Avenue, but were unsuccessful. In a videotape of the incident provided by a friend of one of the bicyclists, the crowd grew vocal and restless as officers tried to make the arrest. “What’s the charge? What’s the charge?” the group chanted.

According to Police, the bicyclist escaped back into the mass of riders. Officers made another attempt at an arrest on LaSalle Street, not far from Loring Park, at 7:15 p.m. Friday.

“There were individuals physically trying to pull officers off the individual under arrest,” said Deputy Chief Allen. That’s when the officers called for backup, and at least 50 squad cars responded to the scene.

On the videotape provided to WCCO-TV, an officer is seen spraying pepper spray at some of the bicyclists. According to Allen, that was warranted, because the bicyclists were being aggressive and refusing to back away from the arrest scene.

“They were set upon by a large group who started fighting with the officers,” he said.

The Strib article on the incident goes into more detail:

When officers tried to arrest a rider they felt had been trying to provoke them, a scuffle broke out, said Minneapolis Police Lt. Marie Przynski.

“When the officer went to arrest him, his buddy came up, and they started to struggle with the officer,” Przynski said.

A group surrounded the officers, and begin to chant “Let them go!”Then several people tried to prevent the officers from arresting these individuals,” she said, and a skirmish ensued.

Soon, the two officers were surrounded by about 30 people, and they issued the call “officer needs help.”

That brought 48 officers from six different law enforcement agencies racing to the scene, where the situation escalated and the officers used chemical Mace in an attempt to control the crowd, Przynski said.

And the Strib noted, almost as an afterthought:

The ride was also linked with weekend protests of next year’s Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities.

Hmm.

So what could have possible taken a peaceful (if typically, Minnesotan-ily passive-aggressive) protest and turned it into a riot?

A hysterical lefty site gives us a hint (and photos):

Police attack Minneapolis Critical Mass @ pReNC and arrest around 20 cyclists

The first day of the pReNC gathering in Minneapolis/St. Paul (in preparation for next year’s Republican National Convention) saw an utterly unprovoked attack by police on a non-confrontational Critical Mass ride. Around 20 people have been arrested, several from out of state.

A strong critical mass of around 400 or more cyclists were attacked by the police at the corners of LaSalle and Grand as the tail end of the Mass went under the bridge.

The site also asks, plaintively:

If you know these people and know that they were part of Critical Mass or the pReNC, let us know immediately so that jail support can work to help them. Many out-of-state Anarchists journeyed to the pReNC alone and it is our fear that they may not have written down the jail support number and now be languishing in jail without our knowledge. 

Huh.

According to this site, all but three of those arrested have been released:

Gus Ganley  (Henco jail record)
Paul Krisopovich  [Actually Kristapovich, of Prospect Park – and he’s been released]
David Renz [Henco jail record]
Alan Palazello   [Henco jail record]
Dohovan Lessard   [Henco jail record]
Joshua Nichols   [Henco jail record]
Alice Battey [posted bail]  [Henco jail record]
Julia Bates   [Henco jail record]
Isaac Peter (a minor)  
Alia Trindle   [Henco jail record]
Magdelena Kaluza (a minor)  
Luce Guillen-Givins  (She’s popped up before)  [Henco jail record]
Jeff Pemberton   [Henco jail record]
Joel Leders     [no Henco jail record on the website]
Daniel Barnett   [no Henco jail record on the website]
Mike Kirk [Henco jail record]
Jeff Fick  [Henco jail record]
Hunter Gsoell [Henco jail record]

…Those not listed are being charged with felonies and kept till at least Wednesday, bail set at $3,000.

So: heretofore peaceful local protest plus [possible] out-of-town anarchists (some of the names were just too common to Google) and thugs equals riot.

It’s going to be an interesting year.

Local anarkids plan to “tune up” for the convention:

Marie Braun, a local antiwar leader, said protesters will get a tuneup on Sept. 15 when they will stage an antiwar march from the Cathedral of St. Paul to the Xcel Center and then to the State Capitol, a route protesters hope to use again on the opening day of the convention.

Hm.

If I can make it to the meeting, I’ll tune up by skipping my shower for three or four days, and eating lots of bean burritos and cheap beer.

That will tune me up.