If there are two bright spots in this current legislative session, it is the emergence of Harry Niska and Walter Hudson, as two of the best state legislators in the United States.
Here, Walter finishes the job Harry started, giving the single best explanation of why the DFL, and the StarTribune, are lying about the removal of language, regarding pedophilia from state statute.
Pass this around, like it’s hot.
Dems: Public broadcasting is NOT state media! 1% of their funding comes from government!
Normies: Then defunding won’t hurt anythi…
Dems: NOOO! You’ll KILL ELMO! Why do you hate Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers?
Dems: Trans women are women!
Normies: Except in athletic competition, where their innate masculine physical traits are a huge advantage, not to mention in prison where they tend to rape bio-women…
Dems: Genocide!
DFL: Let’s fully fund education!
Normies: Could you define that term? Because we already pay an awful lot of money, and the results keep getting worse…
DFL: You hate children! Why do you hate children?
Dems: Blue America *carries* Red America. Without us, Red America would starve.
Normies: OK. Let’s talk national divorce, since you don’t need…
Dems: Why are you talking treason!?!? NEVER!
To: Rep. Samantha Vang
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Gaslighting
Rep. Vang,
You wrote the “Social Credit” bill (you call it ‘Stop Hate’, but my title is more accurate) that I talked about on my show over the weekend.
You got a storm of criticism – almost all of it justified.
This was your response:
Well,no. That’s not what it does.
Y’see, the market for hate crime far, far outstrips the supply, notwithstanding the DFL’s “Reichstag Firing”. For example:
The mosque fires were set, not just by one guy, the the one criminal in Minneapolis dumb enough to actually commit a crime that Minneapolis’s city government still gives a sh*t about.
No – Rep. Vang’s bill will essentially collect statemens about “microagressions” reported by protected classes.
Bumper sticker they don’t like?
Something overheard in a cafe?
A Trump sign?
Nobody knows. The bill allows no scrutiny, no Data Practices requests, no accountability or transparency of any kind.
It is, in every respect, a “social credit” bill.
Which is a key part of the Communist system, Rep. Vang, that your parents and her people fled.
That is all.
DFL: Walz runs the most transparent administration in history.
Normies: His administration us utterly opaque, hides information, and communicates only in giggly selfies.
DFL: Our HR office will be in touch.
DFL: The surplus is immense, and a monument to DFL wisdom.
Normies: It’s mostly one-time money. You turned it into permanent spending. It’ll be a deficit next session.
DFL: We ALWAYS said it was one-time money!
DFL: the police are in occupying force of oppressors, and must be defunded!
Normies: we oppose defunding the police.
DFL: hey, we never said anything about defunding the police!
DFL: we will make Minnesota a safe place for children to get gender affirming care
Normies: we oppose allowing children who can’t rent a car or consent to getting a tattoo to opt for life changing gender altering surgery.
DFL: hey, who said anything about altering gender!
DFL: it’s good for children younger than 13 to attend a highly sexualized drag shows.
Normies: we oppose children attending highly sexualized drag shows
DFL: don’t you DARE call us groomers!
DFL: it’s time to ban magazines larger than seven rounds, as well as “assault weapons”
Normies: so, do you want to confiscate firearms?
DFL: how dare you say anybody’s coming for your guns! You’re paranoid!
We talked last week about Peggy Flanagan’s absurd take on parenting.
Here it is again:
She followed up with this photo.
Check out that righteous Bowie knife.
There are only three interpretations for this symbology:
Not sure which it is. I’m open to suggestions.
Speaking of which – I have four friends that one could classify as transgender. Two of them are from the “Armed Trans Don’t Get Shot” faction of the Second Amendment movement, whom I could see donning one of these:
Of course it’s a photoshop. Theatrical posturing about stabbing bigots is OK; taking a gun to them, probably not.
Which is a shame, since the gun might actually work.
Speaking of which, here’s the MN Gun Owners Caucus’s version:
It goes without saying that if a Republican threw a knife or gun reference into a t-shirt on a social issue, it’d be front page news, with thought-free “think” pieces clogging op-ed pages nationwide.
So I won’t say it.
Badthink is the new…badthink.
Or to put this in terms any Second Amendment activist can relate to, “Don’t be paranoid. Nobody’s coming for the language itself”.
Pathologizing freedom of conscience by speciously linking it to objective evil?
Demonizing dissent?
Oh, yeah – and just flat out lying…
…to gull the gullible – a population the Democrats count on growing to supermajority levels.
I hope you all had a happy, blessed, gratitude-heavy Thanksgiving.
I hope you did not spend the day alone in a New York apartment, sitting on your toilet, hunched over your smartphone, obsessively typing bilge out onto social media.
Like this guy seemed to:
Only to be reminded that graywashing American history is how authoritarianism thrives.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.
I have so much for which I should be grateful – and I’ll be going through the list, as far as I can, tomorrow.
But I’m going to jump the (if you’ll pardon the expression) gun, and say I’m thankful I’m not that this grift.
Whoah – did I say grift? I meant, “dinner party“:
Jackson and Rao are the founders of an organization called Race2Dinner. For $5,000 the two women will attend your eight-person dinner party and bring along “Lisa Bond, our Resident White Woman.” For that price, they will berate you about your racism. They will share their own experiences with racism, which sometimes don’t sound like actual racism. But if you object or even if you agree, they will tell you that’s what white women do and you’re part of the problem. The two have a lot of observations about “what white women do.” White women are mean to each other, for instance. When they are accused of racism white women accuse black women of being “angry” or “crazy.” White women also say they’re not racist. White women like dinner parties. And they like to say they’ve donated money to the ACLU. If you suggest that black women may be mean to each other or that they may like dinner parties, you’re also a white supremacist. Because how would you know? Don’t say you have black friends because that too would be a sign of white supremacy.
Questioning whether spending $5,000 to have people call you names is also “white supremacy,” and the authors explain, “we are tired of it.” The fact that you are complaining about the price is evidence that you “see this work as charity. You doing us a favor. … White supremacy culture has you believing that you are doing us a favor by even caring about racism or antiracism. This results in your incessant demands that we educate you—on your own racism, on a system you created to harm us for your benefit. For free.
On the one hand, it sounds as hellish as the left tells us Thanksgiving with one’s family ostensibly is.
On the other hand, if I had a lot more money than bills – or friends who’d be willing to pitch in – I think it’d be fun to pony up, invite the ladies, and watch the sparks fly.
If I were on the Nobel Committee, this simple meme would be my nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature this year:
It’s simple, and it sums up the modern culture war to a “T”.
We warned you that if marriage got redefined to something other than “a guy and a gal” to “two people getting together to enjoy the legal benefits of a contractual status”, there was literally no logical or moral reason that couldn’t be extended to two or more people – or not necessarily people at all”.
“That’s never gonna happen, and you’re paranoid and weird”, they said.
Of course we were right:
But remember – nobody’s coming for your guns, there’s no such thing as election fraud, there’s no way January 6 was a shake and bake…
Deep thoughts from Chris Cillizza, circa 2015:
Joe Biden’s unique trait as a politician is — and always has been — his honesty. Sometimes that honesty gets him into varying degrees of trouble. Sometimes it makes it seem as though he’s the closest thing to a real person you could possibly hope for in politics.
This didn’t age too well, now did it? I can’t prove Cillizza’s childhood nickname wasn’t Corn Pop, or that he wasn’t at some point a classmate of Biden’s at the Naval Academy, but it’s a useful reminder that our betters have been carrying water for Ol’ Joe for a very long time now. There was more:
The Joe Biden on display with Colbert is the person who has inspired remarkable loyalty — over decades — from a tightknit group of staffers who would form the core of his presidential brain trust if he decided to run in 2016. It’s the guy who, for a time in 1987, was one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s who Barack Obama saw when he decided to pick Biden as his vice president in 2008.
1987. Do you remember why Biden fell from grace all those years ago? I suppose you could ask Neil Kinnock, whose speech Biden plagiarized. You could ask Barack Obama:
One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
After the last 18 months, no one seriously doubts The Leader of the Free World’s ability in that realm.
Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – has been getting a workout lately.
But this next bit – an LATimes response to last week’s Bruen decision at the Supreme Court – may be heading to the Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame. [1]
I’ll let the Times own words do the talking:
Is “California” “ready”? Well, the state’s government clearly isn’t:
California Democrats are scrambling to craft and enact new legislation this week that would somehow salvage the requirement — assuming local law enforcement continues to enforce it — that residents get a permit before carrying a concealed weapon. Current law forces gun owners to show “good cause” for needing such a permit, and that is now unconstitutional.
And they can’t talk about the issue without a certain amount of gaslighting:
Nathan W. Jones leads the Bay Area chapter of the Black Gun Owners Assn. But until a few years ago, he wasn’t even into guns…on Thursday, while many were apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the rights of gun owners to carry a loaded weapon in public — throwing gun control laws in California and New York into limbo at a time when shootings are increasing — Jones was thoughtful.
On the one hand, he wants it to be easy for law-abiding citizens to be able to defend themselves “if and when the time arises.” But on the other hand, he’s a 50-year-old realist who knows that fear and hatred of Black people run deep in the United States, especially when we’re armed.
And this is based on…?
“There’s no overt racism when we go to the gun range, but we know how people are looking at us,” Jones said of the dozens of Black members who meet up to go shooting. “We know the things that people think.”
So, gaslighting it is. “We know what you’re really thinking?” Every signficant pro-2nd-Amendment group, at the national and federal levels, have welcomed the surge in black gun owners – whatever their reasons for joining the tribe.
The writer, Erika D. Smith, is certainly impressively ignorant on the substance of the issue:
And the other, truly weird thing is that race is now actually being used as an argument in support of loosening gun laws
Justice Clarence Thomas, in his opinion for the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen case, waxed philosophical about how the right to bear arms was crucial for the self-protection of Black people in the South during Reconstruction.
And how in 1868, Congress “reaffirmed that freedmen were entitled to the ‘full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty [and] personal security … including the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.’”
Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive organizations, including the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, filed an amicus brief in the case, urging the Supreme Court to rule exactly as it did.
Their argument? That gun control laws in New York, like California, disproportionately harm Black and Latino people who carry guns for self-defense. They complained of clients who have been “stopped, questioned, and frisked,” and deprived of their livelihoods because they “exercised a constitutional right.”
“We represent hundreds of indigent people whom New York criminally charges for exercising their right to keep and bear arms,” they wrote. “For our clients, New York’s licensing requirement renders the Second Amendment a legal fiction.”
Smith – and the white LA progressives who edit and publish the LATimes who greenlit Smith’s piece – seem almost amazed to notice the one real thing that the gaslighting just can not deflect from:
But the governor and lawmakers could fail in their efforts, and the Supreme Court’s ruling could stand. And then, California could be forced to confront a reality that has long made many self-proclaimed liberals uncomfortable: Black people — potentially a lot of us — legally carrying guns in public.
Dig beneath the ongoing, lazy slander of all white America, and the McCarthyistic “white supremacists under every rock” rhetoric that’s become background noise in most “progressive’ writing; that’s the real fear. The only thing a white progressive fears, and needs to control, more than a black person is an armed black person.
And when they become armed, and realize that the honky at the range isn’t the problem…
[1] Note to Self: Create a Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame.
To: Democrats
From: Mitch Berg, whose common “irascible peasant” self-appelation has never seemed more on-target.
Re: You
Dear all Democrats,
Every once in a while, in front of a friendly audience, you slip and let the truth out.
In front of the NPR simps in 2016, for example, you said in as many words it was time for the media to put its finger – or arm, or butt – on the scale to tip the public against Donald Trump.
And now, from the (if you’ll pardon the expression) Colbert sixty minutes hate:
You can put most of what this woman says into the mouth of a spousal abuser – which really is a great metaphor for the modern Democrat party.
That is all.
Some restaurants – including one Twin Cities favorite – are instituting “equity charges“.
They would appear to be doing it, at least in part, because they believe their customers are idiots:
On its website, Broders’ has a notice to customers notifying them of a new 15 percent “benefits and equity” charge they’ve instituted. They justify the charge, first, by explaining that “many states have allowed reduced minimum wages for service staff in the form of a tip credit.” (More on this in a minute.)
But Minnesota (the restaurant being referred to is in southwest Minneapolis) is not one of them.
Oh, also they think you’re a bigot…
“Studies have also shown that there is inequity and built-in bias in the way consumers give tips,” the statement reads. “In general, Black or Brown servers receive less tips than Caucasian servers. There is gender bias as well.”
Has anyone noticed how the phrase “studies show…” may as well be a shorthand signal for “weasel words will follow”?
I used to like to ask “what studies? Where?“, But that would get us into a Bergs 16th Maw situation, almost immediately, almost every time..
SCENE: A suburban family room. MOTHER and FATHER are anxiously looking at their SON, who’s watching…TV.
MOTHER: It’s all he’s watching lately. .
FATHER: What is it?
MOTHER: He’s binging Band of Brothers
FATHER: Again? This is like the third time.
MOTHER: And before that, it was 13 Hours. And then Taken.
FATHER: I caught him watching Die Hard the other day.
MOTHER: He has the scene of him rescuing his wife from being pulled out the window with Hans Gruber as his social media avatar.
FATHER: God. I wonder what’s going on with him?
So I started binge watching “The Flight Attendant” last night.
Pros: it’s really well written. That’s nothing to sneeze at. I’ve been terribly disappointed by the writing in a lot of things I’ve seen lately (I’m looking at you, Love Life, whose laziness completely wasted Anna Kendrick).
The writers toss out a completely un-subtle “Crime and Punishment“ reference in the first couple minutes, and then go on to deliver on it throughout everything I’ve seen so far (#StuffEnglishMajorsLike). And Kaley Cuoco makes a completely believable protagonist.
Bonus pro: it’s got Rosie Perez, who may be the most underrated actress of her generation (although she’s just a tad underutilized in the first couple episodes).
It’s not Dial M for Murder, much less Gaslight, but it ain’t bad.
Speaking of that Ingrid Bergman / Charles Boyer classic…
Cons: These aren’t all in re Flight Attendant alone – far from it.
Hollywood writers seemed to have gotten together and signed a weird, junior high quality pact amongst themselves: “For decades, we wrote women as one dimensional caricatures; madonnas, whores, bimbos and housewives. Let’s pack a century of retribution into a couple of years worth of television and movies.“
Apparently, women can be protagonists, or nuanced, complex characters, or turbocharged badasses, for good or evil – or at least not incompetent caricatures.  That’s a good thing.
On the other hand, rules for men of these days seem to be boiled down to:
Patronizing? I think so.
Virtue signaling? Sure.
 Lazy? Completely.
Gaslighting?
FATHER: Junior? Why are you watching all these…
MOTHER: …movies and TV shows?
SON: Because it’s fun, for a change, for the first time in my life, to see people like I am, or plan to become, not portrayed as idiots, buffoons, fools, blackguards and expendable simps?
MOTHER: (sotto voce, to FATHER). Do. you think we should call a therapist?
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.
Please tune in to AM1280 this afternoon from 4-6PM for a special broadcast about Critical Race Theory in Minnesota, and what you and I can do about it.
It’ll feature:
We’ll be having the actual conversation that the CRT crowd plays lip service to.
I’ll be moderating the discussion.
Hope you can listen in!
A lot of people are yukking it up over this story – yep, including me the other day. You recall it – Italian “artist” selling an “invisible sculpture” / block of air / “vacuum full of energy” for $18,000.
“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a weight,” Garau said of the statue according to as.com. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”
Italy 24 News reported that per Garau’s instructions, the sculpture must be displayed in a private home free from any obstruction, in an area that is about 5 ft. long by 5 ft. wide. Because the piece does not exist, there are no special lighting or climate requirements.
The story was, to say the least, thinly sourced, to the point where the BS meter is howling.
On the other hand? This, along with the “dumpster fire” last week in Uptown Minneapolis, is the ultimate metaphor for society today.
It’s a cube of nothing – that means whatever the viewer can conjure from it.
It’s no different than “woke”-ism. Or “Critical Race Theory” . Or “Whiteness” theory. All of them are conclusions that are left to the viewer to fill in any way they want.
Signore Garau may be a garbage artist, and a con man extraordinare – even if you assume the story isn’t a hoax (and I’m abou 50-50 – mixing wealthy Frenchmen and dubious “art” is never completely implausible.
But the metaphor he is alleged to have constructed may be the best bit of literature, or at least the best bit of (unintentional?) literary symbolism of the year.
Whether it happened or not.