Old and Busted: “The rising tide raises all boats”

New Flava: “Decline and stagnation is not just good – it’s courageous“

I’m no expert, but it looks to me that keeping the southern border open is more important to the Biden administration than either Ukraine or Israel.

Again – no expert. But those seem like strange priorities for the American executive branch.

My friend, advice columnist and author Amy Alkon, has been chronicling the orgy of antisemitism bursting out in the Los Angeles area.

She filmed this encounter over the weekend:

Let’s take Judaism, Antisemitism and the Middle East out of this incident. Let’s say this was a domestic altercation. A man Two men use their physical bulk and subtly aggressive invasion of personal space to force a woman out of the way? That’d be considered abuse in court, and justification for a restraining order and, likely, loss of child custody if the woman really wanted to put her back into it, legally .

When I was working in bars, if I saw a man behaving like this around a woman, I’d have called the bouncers in. And there’s nothing those bouncers liked more than having a pretext to pummel guys who were threatening the ladies.

Big Left – maybe 5% of the population – is trying to intimidate the 55% that passively or actively disagree with them into submission.

And the subtle threat of violence implicit is there, in this “man’s” delivery and in Big Left’s approach to every issue today – be careful, or you’ll get Swatted/a visit from “Anti”-Fa/doxxed – is waiting out there for everyone – especially if you try to rally in response.

I’ll be interviewing Amy on my show this coming Saturday.

The GOP controlled US House did its job – passing aid to Israel along with a proposal to slash the funding bounty the IRS picked up during the pandemic.

Ryan Winkler did his job – pimping for Mother Government:

When it was pointed out that hampering the IRS and supporting the IDF were both blows for freedom against tyranny, and that criticizing government is a constitutional right and obligation, while stifling that right is the actual “extreme” view, Winkler…

….well, he Wilnkered:

Where to start?

Once you reject the straw man (no, not “All” laws. Just the stupid an tyrannical ones, by your indulgent leave), just because a law was “validly (sic) enacted” doesn’t make it good.

Jim Crow laws were “valid” – enacted by due process by an elected government. So,, in a sense, were the Nuremberg Laws – the Nazi Party took power until the color of German law.

And I’d ask WInkler if he’d be so sanguine if the IRS was sandbagging the Democrat Socialists of America rather than the Tea Party, but that – either that bit of oppression, or WInkler giving a straight answer to a question, both – are about as likely as Ray Charles getting a called third strike on Kirby Puckett.

Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you.

Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”.

Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum.

Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle for a traumatic brain injury?”

It’s the middle way, after all. The guy with the bat might even say “sure, I just wanna hit you, hard!“

You might respond “No – in fact, I don’t want anyone hurting me in any way. At all”

And the buttinski responds “Why won’t yiou compromise?”

Who’s right?

You?

The guy with the bat?

Or the person striving to find the middle ground between the two of you?

If your response is “I’m putting my foot down; nobody is hitting me with a bat for any reason at all“, and the other to ask “why do you hate the guy with the bat?“, does that change anybody’s mind?

Point being, sometimes the middle path, the compromise, is not the most moral path forward.

Berg’s 8th Law is pretty clear on situations like this. Especially about situations like this:

American progressivism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder.

Two women in politics were involved in “sexual indiscretions” last week.

Naturally, the difference in the media and commentariat’s reaction to Lauren Boebert’s (whose indiscretions were really more social) and Susanna Gibson (a Democrat legislative candidate) couldn’t reinforce Berg’s 8th Law more:

Gibson started an OnlyFans page, for which she is being praised as “Courageous” and “Empowered” – two more words the feminist left has completely neutered.

In the meantime, Lauren Boebert got into a drunken make-out at a play (while being staked out by media with night vision cameras, and can I just say there’s nothing weird at all about that, nosireebob).

And the answer is giggle, Victorian misogyny:

And Katie Hill has built a prosperous career out of being a Democrat woman with a sex scandal.

Now, two things can be true; Boebert is a sitting Congresswoman who won re-election by under 1,000 votes. There’s literally no sense in giving anyone a reason not to vote for you under those circumstances.

Because two things can be true: it really wasn’t behavior becoming an elected Rep…:

…and a little hilarious that the Democrats are deflecting away from Genderqueer in elementary school libraries, R-rated drag shows at schools, guys in assless chaps simulating fellation at Pride parades and Hunter Biden shorting blow off of hookers buttocks (“Grow up! Adults have sex“) with Boebert’s pratfall.

Minnesota is getting its thoughtcrime registry.

First, some credit where it’s due. I actually found a relatively fair, well-balanced story on the subject.

Of course, I had to go to Grand Forks to do it.

The piece covers the registry’s background – including some of the fairly inspired quesistoning by Republicans Harry Niska and Walter Hudson:

The key moment that caught the most attention? An exchange during a floor debate when Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, asked House bill sponsor Rep. Samantha Vang, DFL-Brooklyn Center, if publishing an article on the theory that COVID-19 was a bioweapon that had originated in a Chinese laboratory could count as a bias incident under the new legislation.

Vang said it would be possible.

“With the rhetoric we have seen since the pandemic regarding accusing Asians of bringing in the coronavirus, that is bias-motivated,” the first-term representative said. “So that can be considered a bias incident.”

Now, the bad news.

Wags in some conservative circles floated the idea of flooding the agency with reports of progressive hate speech, of the type that run of the mill DFLers are constantly dribbling out.

No such luck. The lsw’s DFL sponsors saw the potential for the registry to be buried in “progressive” hate, and tightened it down. (Emphasis added).

In its final form as a law, language calls for the department to “analyze civil rights trends … including information compiled from community organizations that work directly with historically marginalized communities.”…

In other words, they did for it what they did for “Feeding Our Future” money: made sure only the DFL Non-Profit/Industrial Complex could participate.

But what about safeguards?

Why, after spending a decade and a half obliterating all rational grounds for the “high trust society” that democracy needs to survive, we’re supposed to just trust ’em!

What officials do know right now is community organizations such as Jewish Community Action, the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, will provide reports of bias incidents to the state…Putz said it would have been more of a problem if the human rights department were to take direct reports of discrimination from individuals. With nonprofits and other groups with a track record of documenting discrimination being the source of information, that won’t be a concern, he said.

Nothing says “trustworthy” like a (partial) list of non-profits that are also DFL farm clubs.

Senator Zaynab Mohammed – a “devout Muslim” who voted for chemical neutering and abortion after birth – should put your mind at rest (although hopefully not “at rest” enough to vote DFL) (emphasis added again):

Asked by Forum News Service whether spreading a lab theory on COVID would count as a bias incident, Sen. Mohamed said she trusted the judgment of Human Rights Department officials.

“Could that happen? Sure, maybe,” she said, but added: “They know exactly what they’re doing. They understand the goal of what this legislation is supposed to do.”

That whole idea of breaking CD1, 6, 7 and 8 away into a separate state is sounding better every day.

The rule changes in baseball this season got a lot of press.

But a rule change in basketball seems to have gotten less press.

Apparently, two field goals inside the three point line is now worth five points.

In related news, the Wooves/Linx “community” group has decared its “Inspirinig Women” winner for 2023:

The DFL did so much damage this past session, it’s hard to track all of it.

Rep. Hudson did a pretty good job of cataloging it – and why it matters (expand the tweet to see it all).

I’ll be talking about this extensively on the show this Saturday.

Humans: “My God, this is horrible. Those poor girls…“

DFL/Media (pardon the redundancy): “OK, who leaked the video?“

Well, no – I’m actually not exaggerating (thread):

The problem, Ms. Moriarty, is that nobody trust you or your office. Not even a fair chunk of people who would never consider not voting for the DFL.

This piece – about “Allies” who joined forces to make money off of DEI by capitalizinging on someone else’s jape, and went on to eat each other – is almost too perfect to be parody.

You and your significant other each earn $60,000 a year. That’s a total household income of $120,000.

Your bills – housing, transportation, loan payments, food, everything you do – come to $10,000 a month. Your family budget is balanced.

You go out to the casino one night, and get the luckiest break ever; you walk out $80,000 ahead. 

You buy a bigger house, a newer car (and a bridge loan to finish paying off your old one), do some remodeling, put a couple of vacations and cruises and a whole lot of happy hours, on your capital one card. 

With the new mortgage, car loan, revolving credit and loans to pay for all the other goodies, your monthly expenses go up to $16,000 a month – requiring a $200,000 a year income between you and your significant other – who, remember, are still earning $120,000 a year between you. So when you’ve burned through that $80 windfall, you’ll be coming up $80,000 a year in the red.

Your options to avoid insolvency, foreclosure, and repossession are:

a. Downsize, quick – go back to a smaller house, cheaper car, etc.

b. Keep going back to the casino and hope for another big score, and hope your significant other isn’t too stupid to know what a longshot that is.

c. Browbeat your significant other into earning more money so you don’t go bankrupt, and hope he or she doesn’t leave you. As the significant other why they hate children if they don’t ratchet their income up, but fast.

That’s exactly what the state legislature and Governor Klink have done; the pandemic left the state with a one time windfall that they have spent, and much more. 

And you and I, the taxpayers of Minnesota, are the significant other. 

So what are they going to do about it?

Well, they’re going to hope that you’re a dumb spouse that thinks you can bank on casino winnings. But they are just going to hold out for option C, and demand you pony up more.

That’s exactly what just happened.

If this were a marriage, you would call the big spender an abusive spouse. 

So when you are the victim, what do you call the perpetrator? 

January 6 was, at worst, a bunch of goons and wannabes playing “Three Percenter” games. Maybe they were provoked by a Fed, maybe not.

Watergate? That was a President and his committee doing something that they knew was wrong enough that they felt the explicit need to cover it up. amind

The Durham report describes something much worse: the active co-option of the institutions of American law enforcement to political ends.

David Strom on the choice this nation, as individuals and as a collective (or collectives) faces:

But right here, right now anybody who had faith in those liars has a choice: declare your alliance to the truth, or to the lies. Do you care more about America or hate Donald Trump so much that you are willing to give up America? Because defending the abuses of power is a rejection of America itself.

The choice is stark, but the stakes really are that high. Not because Donald Trump is the only man who can “save America,” because if that were true America would already be lost. Donald Trump is not immortal, nor has he proven capable of fighting the “deep state.” This is not about Trump, but about who rules America–the people or the Elite.

No, the choice is between upholding the rule of law, limits on power, ensuring accountability in government, and preservation of our constitutional order, or just handing raw power to the Left, the Administrative State, and an MSM dedicated to lying to you all the time.

A smaller but equally corrosive scandal is out there in plain sight; as I’ve been tirelessly pointing out for six and a half years, we don’t have to infer that the media is not just biased, but actively working for the same people the FBI has been busted working for; representatives of our media “elites” said it, proudly, in front of a friendly crowd, just after the ’16 election.

Trump’s greatest failure was his inability to drain the swamp. He made a start – but in the context of this week’s news, “getting a start” is a little like “getting halfway across Omaha Beach before calling it a ‘L'”.

This is going to have to be the next great national crusade.

More on this to come.

Last week, I did one of my periodic cites of Jeff Snyder’s epochal “A Nation of Cowards“.

It was partly in reference to the Penny case.

Daniel Penny was the good samaritan who put a sleeper (not choke) hold on a mentally-ill man who was actively threatening people in the NYC subway. He was assisted by a black man and a latino fellow – all good samaritans, all men doing the right thing, all examples of what masculinity is supposed to be in the face of danger.

But Penny is being charged by Manhattan DA Lavrentii Beria. Oops – I mean Alvin Bragg.

He’s got a legal defense fund:

Penny (amd the other men) were the opposite of the “cowards” Snyder assailed. Naturally Beria..er, Bragg can’t tolerate that.

This has the potential to wedge NYC the way the Bernard Goetz case did.

In a just world, anyway.

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.

In a tweet related to this morning’s post, Rep. Koslowski wrote:

Rep. Koswlowski: You are an elected official, part of the non-profit/political/industrial complex who will likely spend the rest of your life earning a comfortable living at least, at taxpayer and donor expense.

OK, that’s the system.

However, logic gives you a choice:

• Call Republicans “fascists”
• Vote for the DFL’s social credit bill.

You get to pick one, and only one.

There’s sure been a lot of aggressive rhetoric from the DFL, especially its “LGBTQ” caucus, for the past (checks watch) 24 hours or so.

Here’s Alicia Kozlowski, elected representative from Duluth and, as such, person witih a lifetime sinecure of living on the public dime ahead of her:

Wow. That sounds serious.

It’s certainly got Rep Kozlowski’s dudgeon up:

And then there was Rep Leigh Finke with, curioiusly, the exact same type of rhetoric:

Wow. Two marquee members of the LGBTQ caucus making “defiant” noises.

I wonder what’s up with that?

Oh:

A Republican lawmaker was verbally accosted by a Democratic colleague on the House floor Wednesday because she shared a tweet from the organization Gays Against Groomers, she told Alpha News.

Rep. Dawn Gillman, R-Dassel, retweeted a post regarding legislation that would have removed existing language in Minnesota law stipulating that pedophilia is not a protected sexual orientation.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Leigh Finke, DFL-St. Paul, who confronted Gillman about the retweet. Gillman said she was “yelled at and intimidated” by Finke, who apparently shouted “no!” when a colleague suggested moving the conversation off the floor.

“My interaction on Wednesday evening with Rep. Finke left me shaken and fearing for my personal safety. Instead of coming to talk to me, I was yelled at and intimidated on the House Floor,” Gillman told Alpha News. She said that this type of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated in other workplaces.

The incident was corroborated by multiple representatives who were there. Gillman asked to be escorted to her car after session.

Finke reportedly upbraided [1] Gillman over circulating this article.

Several questions, here:

1. Is House HR going to get involved, or are they still chasing after Peter Callaghan?
2. Is House HR going to come after me for writing this?
3. If this story is accurate, it’d appear that the House Cisgender Caucus is the one that needs a mutual defense agreement.
4. I wonder if writing this is going to put me afoul of the DFL’s new Social Credit policy?

Speaking of Social Credit policy, I’ll be talking about that, the Giillman/Finke incident, and much. more on the show tomorrow. Tune on in.

Earlier this week, we pointed out something that, after thirty years of the worthless Steve Sack, I thought I’d never need to: A Strib “editorial cartoonist” actually causing consternation on both sides of the aisle.

Mike Thompson seemed to me to be a huge improvement over Sack’s flaccid, entitled, completely predictable drivel:

I ended the piece earlier this week by predicting there would be consequences.

Of course I was right. Publisher Steve Grove – a man who has never many pretense of being independent of the DFL – issued the first of what I suspect will be many mea culpas:

The least sinister interpretation: after 30 years of publishing, Steve Sack’s thud-witted, one-sided, uncreative drivel, of course The Strib becomes “accountable to the community“ after publishing one cartoon that roils their publisher’s cocktail buddies.

Most sinister? The DFL directly controls what the state’s most powerful news outlet presents, and how.

They’re already trying to avoid getting a ding on their Minnesota social credit scores.

More on that tomorrow and, most likey, on the show Saturday.

To: Steve Van Zandt
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant and Longtime Fan
Re: I’ll Meet You Halfway

Steve,

Earlier this week, you got into a bit of a flap over this:

You removed the tweet, but followed up saying that you meant “exterminate at the ballot box”, although you delivered it with all the subtle grace of Sean Penn on a three day bender.

But hey, I’ll meet you halfway. Ask Sarah Palin what it’s like, having something that was meant one way passed off as something completely different. That’s politics.

And given the number of unstable, armed people on your side of the political aisle, perhaps you should moderate your tone a bit.

But while others focus on your original rhetoric, I’m going to roast you for this:

It’s one of an endless series of tweets in your feed where you refer to Republicans as some variant of stupid.

Some of us sure are.

But none of us ever put “Princess of Little Italy” on an otherwise perfect record.

Humility is in order.

That is all.

(CLOSED CIRCUIT: Comments to the effect of “Why do you listen to music from people who hate you” will be mocked and taunted. We’ve been through this).

… is what fascism looks like; [1] San Francisco State University, thanks the student to Ryan, head against Riley Gaines (a bio woman, speaking out against having to compete against transgender athletes), hit several times (by a bio male), and forced to take shelter in the back room, protected by campus police until the riot cops showed up to escort her and the group she was with out of the building.

“I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. These issues do not go away, and these values are very much at our core. ”

She even offered them counseling – for the fact that Riley Gaines exists, apparently:

[1] actual fascism. Not the meaningless, wiffleball college students and other leftists today keep referring to.

SCENE. Mitch BERG is in his muddy driveway, replacing a taillight on his truck. Avery LIBRELLE, happily inspecting the contents of peoples recycling bins for violations, sees him, and saunters over before BERG notices.

LIBRELLE: :Merg!

BERG: Uh…hey…

LIBRELLE: I read your bit on Watler Hudson’s hateful speech calling for genocide against trans children.

BERG: If you’re down to nothing but lies, I don’t think we’ve got anything to talk about…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. You are motivated by pure hate.

BERG: Saying those who disagree with you on *policy* issues act out of “hate” is the mark of a dolt.

Don’t flatter yourself. I won’t risk corroding my soul wasting hate on those who disagree with me. I love those who differ from me – including transgender people – as my savior said to love my fellow imperfect human.

Hate? Get over yourself. If you thought it before, you were delusoional. If you believe it now, you’re manipulative, gaslighting human garbage.

LIBRELLE: Oooh. You’re melting down.

BERG: Maybe if I splashed water on you, you would.

And SCENE

All last week: the DFL telling the peasantry that 2+2=5.

The weekend:

Endless gauzy-focused, staged cheesecake (literally, this weekend) photo-ops, breathlesslyt lapped up by a tame, generally almost worthless media.

Remind anyone of any utterly depressing and ever-more-timely literary masterpieces?

Senator Smith took to Twitter to shill for “ESG“ – rules that require businesses to make decisions based on “Environment, Social Credit, [woke corporate] Governance l”practices.in other words, replacing fiduciary responsibility with “woke“ “social justice“ (read: Marxist) values.

there are really only two possibilities:

• Smith really is this ignorant.
• She knows she can count on a majority of her voters being this ignorant.

Given the last few elections in Minnesota, #2 isn’t the dumbest strategery .

Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true.

But if there’s one thing the American media does well, it’s come together to deflect attention away from its collective misdeeds. (emphasis added): .

Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.

In other words, “the truth may change, but it is always what we say it is”.

And nothing changes the definition of truth more than you-know-who:

In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.

Because to the – there is no better term – clique that sees itself as running America’s media and messaging, it’s not even the medium that’s the message. It’s the messenger:

In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”

It’s hard to do anything but taunt big media anymore.

…when those 87,000 new IRS agents were “only going to go after rich tax cheats“.

The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service today issued Notice 2023-13, which contains a proposed revenue procedure that would establish the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program, a voluntary tip reporting program between the IRS and employers in various service industries. The IRS is issuing this guidance in proposed form to provide an opportunity for public comment.

The proposed SITCA program is designed to take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance. The proposed program would also decrease taxpayer and IRS administrative burdens and provide more transparency and certainty to taxpayers. The proposed program includes several features:

Politicians lie. It’s a fact that was building careers for editorialists, humorists and satirists since long before it made WIll Rogers a well-known man.

But today’s Democrats seem to be counting on, not just gullibility, but active willful ignorance, on a titanic scale.