One of the things about having one’s party in the minority is that, free from the possibility of having to try to craft compromises to pass legislation, they can submit legislation that reflects their core principles to a T.
When the GOP is in the minority – as it is in the MN House and Senate? Then you see bills that make you wonder “where was that kind of thinking when the Republicans controlled the gavel?” Of course, it’s easy to stand on pure principle as the minority – it’s all for the campaign lit in the next election.
Parties in the minority submit legislation that reflects their inner id.
WIth the GOP in the minority, you get solid conservative, even daringly libertarian proposals.
WIth Democrats in the minority? You get attacks on core liberties.
Adam Schiff and his fellow Dems dream of gutting the First Amendment. He and his cronies are proposing to reverse Citizens United – which ended speech rationing for non-union corporations – and re-regulate political spending, which is political speech.
Of course, they’re in the minority, for now:
It’s just a political stunt, of course, as Schiff doesn’t have the votes. But it does reflect the authoritarian outlook of the contemporary left on free expression. From the day the decision came down, 13 years ago this week, Citizens Unitedwas a rallying cry for those threatened by unregulated discourse. President Barack Obama infamously, and inaccurately, rebuked the justices during his State of the Union for upholding the First Amendment. Since then, Democrats have regularly blamed the decision for the alleged corrosion of “democracy.”
“Democracy”, in Democrat usage, is losing meaning almost as fast as “White Supremacy”.
A. send your goons after businesses, trying to survive your administrations unconstitutional lockdown. Openly sided with rioters against law abiding people.
Or
B. Yap about “upholding the dignity of every Minnesotan”.
Congratulations to the MN House of Representatives for passing Drivers Licenses for All.
This long, overdue legislation honors the dignity of every Minnesotan family, makes our streets safer, and helps more of our fellow Minnesotans afford their lives. pic.twitter.com/hZEo8R98se
Lieutenant, governor Flanigan – who is known to wear an Anishanabe costume when it suits her, politically – was crowing about Minnesota being on the brink of adopting, the most radical abortion law in the country., and one of the worst in the world:
When @GovTimWalz signs the PRO Act into law, we will be keeping our promise to Minnesotans that we would codify the right to an abortion and protect reproductive freedom for all.
Abortion was on the ballot last fall, and Minnesotans were clear. We won’t go backwards.
But Representative Donna Bergstrom – also an Ojibwe – had the burn that we’ve been looking for:
There is no Ojibwe word for “abortion” because the concept of killing a gift from the creator does not exist to us @LtGovFlanagan Know this. Gaawiin nishimis. https://t.co/HoMUGdOoFK
The goal of the Soros-funded district attorney is to make people distrust the system – by punishing the law-abiding and coddling the depraved – to the point where they demand a dictator to keep them safe.
We warned Hennepin County that that was Mary Moriarty’s goal.
The Good News: The tl:DR version of the story found in Alpha News’s tweet isn’t a great summary of the case.
Her campaign was opposed by 32 senior Hennepin County prosecutors, including Catherine McEnroe, who is now under investigation by the Minnesota Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility, according to the Star Tribune.
McEnroe was leading the prosecution of 35-year-old Marco Tulio Rivera Enamorado, who was charged with one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. He allegedly raped his 14-year-old cousin when he was invited from Honduras to come live with her family in the summer of 2019.
McEnroe is accused of fabricating the contents of a note that was passed to her by a victim advocate during Enamorado’s trial Jan. 6.
So – so far, what we have is a prosecutor who went on record opposing Moriarty (bad career move) lying to a judge (bad legal move). Hard to tell, to a layman, if this is incompetence, revenge, or both.
But it gets worse; rather than take the hit and go forward with a different prosecutor in this rape case, Moriarty dismissed the chargfes:
A source with knowledge of the situation said there was no reason for the case to be dismissed, especially since two other prosecutors offered to take over the case.
“The conduct of the county attorney trying the case had nothing to do with the substance of the actual trial,” the source said. “That attorney absolutely could have continued on with the case. If there was concern about her candor to the court, then a supervisor could have acted as co-counsel to ensure the court that there would be truthfulness.”
Moriarty said her priority from the beginning was “trying to see if we could continue to prosecute this case, whether now or later after a mistrial might be declared.”
So Enamorado is free, can never be tried for the case again, and Mike Freeman is looking better and better.
SCENE: It’s MSNBC. A commentator is bellowing at the camera.
COMMENTATOR: Long Island Republican Congressman-elect George Santos is lying! Which means he’s no different than all Republicans!
SCENE: In a South African jail cell, three inmates are watching MSNBC
JOE BIDEN: The commentator is right. Republicans all lie.
CORN POP: Word up.
NELSON MANDELA: I”m so glad you left the leadership of the Delaware Civil RIghts movmement to come to jail, here in South Africa.
SCENE: In a classroom in Boulder, CO, watching MSNBC
RACHEL DOLEZAL: That’s right! Can I get an amen!
CLASROOM: (A few half-hearted or sarcastic “amens” ensue)
SCENE: A Hill somewhere in the Mekong Delta. Two men in jungle fatigues, M-16s smoking, stand amid a pile of slain Viet Cong and piles of cartridge cases, watching MSNBC on a black and white console TV set.
JOHN KERRY: Let me be clear. I agree with this perspective. All Republicans lie through their teeth.
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: (Spitting a plug of tobacco into the foxhole, wiping blood off his K-Bar knife on his pants leg). Yup. All of ’em.
SCENE:At a steak house in Newark, New Jersey. MSNBC is playing on a TV over the bar.
T-BONE: Wotchuthinkabout dat?
COREY BOOKER: He’s right. All Republicans lie, all the time.
SCENE: A runway in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina. A group of American officials, Secret Service, and a blondish woman huddle behind a brick wall as sniper five spatters the ground around them. A racket of gunfire as Bosnian troops return fire, trying to clear the airfield for the woman to get on her plane. On a TV behind the wall, MSNBC blares.
HILLARY CLINTON: Damn straight they’re all liars!
SCENE: At a Native American observance, with drums and dancers, on the quad at Harvard University, as a TV blares MSNBC in the distance.
ELIZABETH WARREN: The great spirit that is the true law professor of the universe agrees. Republicans are liars. As the first woman of color at this law school, I agree.
The drums continue to beat, as crowds of pasty white liberals shuffle past.
SCENE: At a spa in Hollywood, a man and woman lie on their backs, cucumber slices over their eyes, listening to MSNBC on a TV in the background.
HILARIA BALDWIN: Repobelicans are de woorst liahrs.
ALEC BALDWIN: I oughtta kill them all.
SCENE: At the Saint Paul Grill. Editors and Executive Producers from the Star-Tribune, KARE, WCCO-TV and the Pioneer Press are having cocktailswith Ken Martinas MSNBC plays above the bar.
EDITORS AND PRODUCER AND MARTIN: Heh.
SCENE: in the back of a limousine, driving through the District of Columbia. Ilhan OMAR is sitting in the back with husband Tim MYNETT, watching MSNBC on a mobile device.
OMAR: I was never married to my brother.
MYNETT: Literally nobody in the world believes you were, darling.
…when dissenting from forced civil rituals was considered the height of Patriotism.
Why, it was only Kaepernick years ago.
How things have changed:
I couldn’t imagine looking at myself in the mirror if i was @mattgaetz or @laurenboebert. Smugly sat on their hands while history was made and a real hero addressed us. Imagine caring more about performance art than actual human lives.
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@AdamKinzinger) December 22, 2022
There are so many reasons I’d go on strike if I were one of Kinzinger’s mirrors…
Michael Beschloss is to historians what Taylor Swift is to guitarists. Only without the integrity.
Look – as someone who supported Ukrainian independence back when Democrats universally said the USSR was here to stay, I have one request: Show the share of the money that actually goes to weapons, logistics and training.
Because I’ve seen estimates that 2/3 of the money we “send to Ukraine” ends up in the pockets of consultants and special interests in the US that don’t include building weapons (or replacing them in US units and inventories), shipping them, or training Ukrainians to use them.
And what better way to avoid that accounting than to hold yet another ongoing witchhunt against “badthink?”
And if you expect something that the Babylon Bee might have passed on as too implausible, you’re half right. The Bee makes better satire. But if you work in modern corporate culture, it’s all too plausible.
The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) is a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford. EHLI is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group in December 2020.
The list has gotten a raft of derisive coverage – all of it justified.
Pick a favorite.
Mine (so far):
Seminal: Replace with “Leading, Groundbreaking”. Term reinforces male-dominated langauge.
Well, no – Seminal (and “Semen”) are derived from the Latin term for “Seed”. A “seminal” thing is something from which something bigger grows. It’s not “male-dominated”, it’s Latin-dominated.
But :
Transgendered: replace with “Transgender”. This term avoids connections that being transgender is something that is done to a person and/or that some kind of transition is required.
Grammatically? That’s just bizarre. Adding “ed” is a common way to turn a noun into an adjective.
Biologically? That’s even more bizarre. The word “Trans” itself means some sort of, uh, transition is required.
Oh, go ahead. Pick out your favorite and leave it in the comment section. I can’t fight the language war by myself.
Big Left’s latest atrocity against the language – a perversion that looms large in the “Twitter Files” story – is the debasement of the terms “Attack” and “Safety”.
One example:
Elon Musk publicly attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, over the weekend. His jabs may resonate with far-right audiences, but are likely to deter wary advertisers. https://t.co/mVsRh6CR5g
The “attack” was more commonly or germanely known as “showing evidence of wrongdoing on Fauci and Roth’s parts”, of course. And the fact that Roth was Twitter’s “Safety” czar, with “safety” in this case meaning “insulation from conservative dissent”, closes the circle on my lede.
But the larger point is, Big Left is actively debasing terms that used to have fairly vivid meanings.
“Attack”: Leaving out actual physical assaults, it meant a malicious verbal or written aggression – not “building a case for someone’s malfeasance”.
“Safety”: The state of being protected from or preventing harm – once upon a time. Now: the existence of an informational echo chamber.
The list goes on: Fascist, Holocaust, Nazi, Hitler, Man, Woman, Family, and on and on.
It’s not accidental, of course – controlling language is a key part of controlling society, and removing the redolence in language that harkens to the lessons of the past ensures that any future tyrant can dispense with any foreknowledge of what they are up to.
Anyone remember Mika McFeely? He’s sort of the Filene’s Basement version of Ed Schultz, another guy who got his start talking about grown men chasing balls around fields, and decided to go into being a political, talking head. He’s the Heitkamp family’s token liberal on KFGO in Fargo, and proof that the talent bench for progressive talk hosts in Fargo is even shallower than in the Twin Cities.
Anyway – he came to Minneapolis over the weekend. Ironically, it was to see Les Mis, a play featuring an out of touch patrician class that attacks a plebaian class whose travails they neither share nor understand.
Oh, yeah – he had a great time!
We were so terrified of downtown Minneapolis after seeing “Les Miserables” with hundreds of other people that we stopped at the Red Rabbit for some pasta. Place was full. Must be other terrified people like us. pic.twitter.com/O33ltukJxt
In other words, he went to a show, with hundreds of other people, and then went to a tony restaurant on the south end of the gentrified North Loop. Back to the hotel – or on the road back to Fargo? – by 11!
And look – no crime!
Guess all those people talking about crime in Minneapolis are wrong!
Speaking of crime – tourist McFeely has an interesting perspective on recent Twin Cities history:
Not sure it’s “Anti”-Fa that’s shooting up crowds after bar closing on First Avenue.
But he’s getting a little warmer: “Anti”-Fa are the children of the Twin Cities bon vivant class. But they didn’t burn the Ordway, or Kenwood or Linden Hills. They burned East Lake and University – the places where immigrants and lots of entrepreneurs and workers try to earn a living.
But he didn’t go to a show on Lake, or Uni, or up at Plymouth and Sheridan, now, did he?
I’m going to guess most of you didn’t know that Sunday was “World Toilet Day“ (I personally celebrate the Eastern Orthodox Toilet Day, which is December 3)
Something I didn’t know about the humble toilet; to at least one part of Big Left and, to at least one part of Big Left, it’s a social justice issue:
Unsafe toilets are robbing girls of their futures.
“We’re not going to let the political philosophy of the DFL be dictated from the Kremlin,” Humphrey said. “You can be a liberal without being a Communist, and you can be a progressive without being a communist sympathizer, and we’re a liberal progressive party out here. We’re not going to let this left-wing communist ideology be the prevailing force because the people of this state won’t accept it, and what’s more, it’s wrong.” His Republican opponent in Minnesota’s 1948 senate race had voted against the Marshall Plan for European aid, and Humphrey charged that “if American policy had been decided by the vote of the senior Senator from Minnesota, we might be negotiating with the Russians now in London instead of Berlin.”
Especially regarding the behavior of the left’s vanguard elite (emphasis added):
Whatever the motivation, Humphrey was now in the front line of an increasingly bitter civil war in the Democratic Party. Many young activists, drawn into politics and the party by the struggle for civil rights, were bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war. Known as the New Left, as distinct from the old left of Rauh’s coalition, their opposition escalated along with the war. Wherever Humphrey went, he was met with abuse from anti-war protestors. At Stanford in March 1967, for example, demonstrators mobbed his car screaming, “War criminal!” “Murderer!” and “Burn, Baby, Burn!” Several tried to break through the police cordon, and a can of urine was thrown over one of Humphrey’s Secret Service men. Humphrey had little affinity for the student radicals. Recalling his time as a student at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s, he said, “I didn’t have much time to join a protest movement, I was concerned about being able to earn enough to eat.” He compared the protestors’ “foul language and physical violence” to “Hitler youth breaking up meetings in Germany.” In 1966, referring to his battle with the DFL Communists, he told reporters “I fought those bastards then and I’m going to fight them now.”
Of course, that was at a time when “the greatest generation“ were still in their prime working years, and the degenerate radical left was a relatively new abscess. Today’s “new, new left“ is the children, grandchildren and indoctrinees of the hippies Humphrey was talking about.
Not sure how to word it, but it’s got to be a Berg’s Law in some way, shape or form:
“Democrats, knowing their key demographics are driven by emotion and don’t think critically, can say pretty much anything they want; given the media’s bovine kowtowing, they know there will be no consequences for the lie”.
Case in point:
Neither were in any danger. But given the bovine emotionalism of the typical DFL voter, Walz could have warned of Martian landings or floods of snipes, and gotten the same crowd to not onyl turn out, but angrily lash out at people who didn’t openly worry about Martians or snipes.
Neo Marxist iconography? Specious reference to “democracy“ from a party that has been actively fighting the things that make American democracy good and useful?
SCENE: Mitch BERG is out dropping literature for a candidate for the Minnesota state House of Representatives. As he walks toward a door, he encounters Avery LIBRELLE, carrying a shopping bag full of campaign literature.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh, Chriiiiistchurch New Zealand is beautiful this time of year, hey, Avery, how…
LIBRELLE: Shut up. Paul Pelosi was attacked by a MAGAt terrorist who represents the inner id of all Republican scumbags, something that every voter needs to remember as we head towards a midterm election where some polls are showing democracy itself is a threat from slack-jawed, drooling yokels in red caps.
BERG: “Uh, there’s no evidence that DePape was a Republican or conservative in any…”
LIBRELLE: “He was an old man who was attacked, and all you can think is politics?”
BERG: (Glances into LIBRELLE’s shopping bag) Uh, Avery, that’s all Republican literature…
Since some prog will bleat “Why aren’t you condemning the attack on Paul Pelosi?” if I don’t say it – violence is bad. Don’t hit people with hammers, or anything else.
Speaking of people trying to exploit the episode…
The Star Tribune:
The violence was the latest jolt to an increasingly splintered political system that is riven with extremism. Here's a look at what is known about the attack and the suspect: https://t.co/zf9AT14bED
A far right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.
Here’s Angie Craig:
I was shocked to hear of the brutal attack that occurred last night against Speaker Pelosi’s husband, Paul. Political violence is never acceptable. I wish Paul a speedy recovery and am thinking of the Pelosi family at this time.
On Meet the Press, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar rued how Pelosi “has been villainized for years, and big surprise, it’s gone viral, and it went violent.” She said we have “to make sure we’re not electing more election deniers who are following Donald Trump down this road,” and “we have to do something about this amplification of this election-denying hate speech that we see on the Internet.”
I don’t expect Dems to be familiar with Berg’s 18th Law – but there may be no better case of it in all of history. Indeed, there might be a corollary to the the law – if the Democrats can use the story for political gain, 48 hours is waaaaay too short.
The facts? Much more prosaic:
All of this requires imposing a coherence on David DePape’s mind that simply doesn’t exist, which would be obvious to anyone who paused for a minute to consider and absorb the evidence.
Listen to the person who perhaps knows him best — the mother of his two children, a woman named Oxane Taub (a.k.a. Gypsy), herself a whack-job serving jail time for trying to abduct a 14-year-old boy she was infatuated with.
(As a press release from the local DA’s office put it: “Over the course of 14 months, she sent him numerous obsessive emails, created blogs directed at him, used his friends to send him messages and eventually tried to abduct him a few blocks from his school in Berkeley. While the case was pending, Taub also tried to dissuade the victim from testifying.” And she was the rational half of the couple.)
In an interview from jail, conducted by a local TV station, Taub said, “He is mentally ill. He has been mentally ill for a long time.” She said he was missing for a year and then showed up again “in very bad shape.” According to Taub, “he thought he was Jesus.” She added, “He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him. And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.”
My theory? Democrats – especially Minnesota DFLers – are looking at next week’s election, and figure painting themselves as victims of MAGA, and the “wave of conservative/white supremacist terror” they’ve been promising for the past 15 years, can’t hurt.
It was probably 4-5 years after I read Saul Alinski’s Rules for Radicals that I noticed one of his rules – essentially, “accuse your opponent of doing what you’re doiing” – basically is the actor’s side of Berg’s 7th Law.
UPDATE: Whoops. I’m informed that Ms. Sarandon may have become, if (certainly) not a Republican, at least a skeptic of the Democrat Party, and that my lede may be wrong, and she may actually be referring to the Democrats.
It’s about six weeks until the election. And with polls showing Governor Klink seven points up on Scott Jensen, it’s time to remind minnesotans, with their famously short attention span‘s, about what this last couple of years have been like.
The Twin Cities media desperately wants to memoryhole this episode:
Your periodic reminder that @GovTimWalz attended the packed funeral of a stranger (who I'll argue he had a hand in killing) along with an unmasked @SenAmyKlobuchar – while you were not permitted to have a gathering of any size to mourn your dead child, parent, sibling or spouse. pic.twitter.com/PavvNt3jh4
“Essential“ workers – people whose stores and businesses had to be kept open at all costs; grocery stores, gas stations, pretty much any big box store, and the worlds largest candy store, in Jordan, which just happens to be owned by a big DFL campaign donor.
“Nonessential“ workers – people who worked at frivolous hustles like oncology clinics, cardiologists, and all manner of surgeons.
“The Laptop Class“ – everyone who could work at home, including most government union employees. and pretty much any big box store
But then, his administration added injury to insult. while you couldn’t visit your family in hospitals or nursing homes, or whole funerals if they passed, somehow the Klink administration made a “scientific“ exception for demonstrations and riots – which, according to the “party of science“, were actually good for health, since science.
The Twin Cities media is going to go out of its way not to remind you of any of this, or of the prosecutions of business that, desperate to stay solvent, defied the ham fisted and unscientific emergency orders.
Seeing the hair pulling response of upper middle class leftist to actually have to pay the freight for their own policies on the border is, to put it frankly, utterly glorious:
Wow! This Martha’s Vineyard Democrat doesn’t seem very welcoming or progressive.
“We don’t have housing for 50 immigrants.”
Uh, don’t the Obamas have a 10 bedroom mansion there? That will fit half of them.
On Monday, third district Congressman Dean Phillips claimed complete ownership of Labor Day:
Don’t tweet about #LaborDay unless you support the right to organize and collectively bargain. Unless you’re working to lower the cost of healthcare and childcare, and fighting for paid family leave, pre-k, and the child tax credit. America’s heroes need support, not bbq’s.🇺🇸
Seems a little presumptuous – foreclosing all communication that is ambivalent to opposed re unions – unless Phillips is a real champion of labor.
But a quick search doesn’t indicate that the Phillips distillery in Princeton Minnesota is unionized; a look through a court document related to a workmen’s compensation case mentions no union involvement on behalf of an injured warehouse worker, so I don’t think it’s a reasonable stretch to assume the plant is not, or not fully, unionized.
I will be putting in a call to representative Phillips‘s office on this today.
There are two ways of looking at last nights exercise of the will to power masquerading as a speech by a senile old man:
The Ultimate Exercise of Berg‘s Seventh Law: Brandon, leader of a party whose acolytes have been dismantleing the rule of law nationwide, using administrative power to stifle opposition,and sending bands of thugs out to keep people in line,speaking from an SS-issue black and red stage flanked by Marines, painted half of America – his political opponents – as threats to democracy and domestic terrorists.
A Masterful Diversion: instead of talking about inflation, energy prices, a failing education system, unaffordable health care and education, catastrophic crime rates, the border crisis, national debt, the collapse of America’s foreign-policy, a nationwide mental health crisis, we are all now talking about Donald Trump.
And given how much extremism benefits from extremism, I don’t doubt for a moment that the Branden ministration is hoping last nights “Build back with Triumph of the Will“ address goads some less stable Trumpkin into doing something stupid, accompanied by lavish media coverage, to further deflect the nations attention.
So what would you do if you met an SS stormtrooper, in mid-depredation? One of the people who conquered Europe and ran the concentration camps? An actual “fascist”?
We’ll come back to that.
Boogie Man
So what defines an authoritarian, whatever label (“fascist”, “Nazi”, “Communist”, “Banana Republic”, and on and on?).
Here’s one trait.
Remember when this scene, from 1984, seemed fictional?
Authoritarians, from the Pharoahs to Kim Jong Un, knew that total authority rested on having a boogeyman – simultaneously the nadir of depravity and an existential threat – to divert the attention and energy of the people.
Remember that old trick from junior high, where you’d stare up at ceiling until other people started staring up with you to see what you were looking at?
“White Supremacist” groups have been shedding members at the rate of an order of magnitude per generation: they had millions of members in the 1920s (they the KKK drew 50,000 to a rally in Rocherster Minnesota in the ’20s), to hundreds of thousands in the ’60s, to tens of thousands in the early 80s (which saw the last great spasm of militant violence from those groups – the Posse Comitatus, the Alan Berg murders, and of course Oklahoma City).
Notwithstanding that, about the time Barack Obama got elected, Big Left started chanting “there’s going to be a wave of white supremacist/ultra-right terror that’ll dwarf 9/11. Any day now”.
And they’ve done their darnedest to tell that story – from portraying 100 doughy losers parading with tiki torches while outnumbered 10 to 1 in Charlottesville a “White Supremacist Uprising”, to shaking and baking more “right wing attacks” from the ether…
…almost as if they’re trying to goad someone into doing something as stupid and destructive…
…as the stuff “Anti”-Fa and BLM have been doing nationwide for the past couple of years.
But it’s not just about deflection.
It’s about making your side think the other side is just a little less noble, worthy and human than the people on your side.
Charlie Crist, taking the next step on his road toward being the Harold Stassen of the deep south, told Republican voters to take their votes elsewhere, for their “hateful” act of (checks notes) supporting Ron DeSantis. .
Which is mostly par for the course, these days.
What, Are You Gonna Cry? Huh?
The propensity for bullies to try to goad their opponents to strike first, so they can appear to be defending themselves, is pretty much bully human nature. Extremists benefit from extreme responses; among the biggest supporters of German president Von HIndenburg’s “Hitler Cabinet” were the Communists, who bet long (and, while ultimately mistakenly, not without good reason) that promoting extremism in their opposition would benefit them.
But as we wait for the “President”‘s speech on “the soul of the nation” tomorrow, the chanting point has been deafening.
If brains were gasoline, Eric Swalwell couldn’t drive a Vespa around the inside of a Cheerio. But that’s the nice thing about being a “useful idiot” – being an idiot won’t count you out of the job:
Boy these guys don’t like being called fascists. Maybe they should stop trying to overthrow their government and forcing raped women to have babies.
Berg’s Seventh Law alert; who said anything about a civil war?
And this next bit, from Brandon – is it yet another senile rant, or does he actually think that “right wing Americans” are killing cops?
Or does he just want his dumber, less critical supporters to think it?
Biden repeats the lie that "you can't go out and buy a cannon" and then claims "brave right-wing Americans" are "shooting at these guys behind me." pic.twitter.com/Pt9jKwDoWg
Well, clearly Big Left wants people to think someone’s itchin’ to do some killin’:
A staffer of mine—who’s 1 month into her job—received a call from a man saying he’s coming to our office w/ an assault rifle to kill me. I hesitate to share this but how else do I tell you we are in violent times, & the architects are Trump & McCarthy. Bloodshed is coming.
(Note: not gonna say “this didn’t happen” I am going to say it happens all the time, and like Ilhan Omar’s “death threats” just in time for the state fair last year, calling them out, especially on the part of an intentional incendiarist like Swalwell, is more a matter of political optics than actual law-enforcement. I’m going out on a short little limb to suggest this is but one of many threats people on all sides of the aisle get – but this one happens to fit a narrative. Prove me wrong)
Now, it may well be that “bloodshed is coming”. We’ve already had a couple of examples – although neither this nor this are the examples Swalwell is thinking of.
But the larger point is, Big Left is trying to make half the nation into “boogiemen”.
“But the right does it too! What about Willie Horton? What about Reagan’s ‘welfare queens'”?
Say what you will about both of them; nobody ascribed their traits to half of the entire electorate.
Big Left is “othering” half the population; social media is a “90 Seconds Hate” that never ends.
Why?
You Travel Back In Time And Meet Teenage Hitler…
To answer the question from the first paragraph – what do you do if you meet an actual SS Stormtrooper?
Because the “fascist” of cultural lore was an enemy of humanity. There is no “semi”-concentration camp guard, is there?
You do what our grandparents did at Normandy or Bastogne or Saint Lo? You attack and destroy them. Right?
They are making about half the population into boogiemen so the other half doesn’t see them as human beings with political differences, but rather as villains to be feared, hated, subjugated, destroyed metaphorically or literally.
Let’s see if that’s part of Biden’s speech about “the nation’s soul” later today.
In 2020, a group of activists tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the Capitol mall in Saint Paul.
Although the entire episode was carried live in TV, only one person was arrested; that person was “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the evils of Columbus, which is a little like sentencing drunk driver to teaching mixology to high school kids.
This happened, even as the person in charge of the Capitol Architecture Commission, Peggy Flanagan (have you heard she’s Native American?), had the power in her hands to remove the statue via due process – which is slow and boring, compared to having your activist buddies do it for you.
And lefty social media was clogged with addlepated lefties nodding and going “rules, schmules; at least it’s gone”.
One needn’t imagine what’d happen if some non-DFL group decided to tear down a statute of their bete noir; I’ve thought about how fun it’d be to rip down the statue of noted authoritarian socalist Floyd Olson. I don’t suspect I’d get “sentenced” to teaching high school kids about the evils of socialism.
This episode highlights three facets of the sort of authoritarian government that is, in fact, the sort of “fascism” that Big Left is trying to paint the right with:
The Rule of Law is for Other People: Don’t want to go through the Capitol Architecture Committee – or get your Student Loan Redistribution passed by Congress, or have to convince the American people and their state legislatures of the rightness of your cause, or convince Republicans of their wrongness? Just have your buddies tear it down, or declare $10K null and void with no statutory authority, or pack the Supreme Court, or send your “Anti”-Fa crowd in to bust some heads. Rules are for peasants.
Different Versions of Justice For the Political “Haves” and “Have Nots”: Lois Lerner will never go to jail for gang-raping the First Amendment. Not only did the Ramsey County Attorney’s office not actually punish Woody Kane for leading a planned, coordinated assault of Republicans, they may as well have sent him off with a voucher for a hooker and dinner at the Saint Paul Grill.
The Ends Justify The Means: If your idea of government, like the people approving of the tearing down of the statue, is “to get the things I want done, done”, or the shorter but more cynical “move things forward” – whether good, evil or indifferent – then you don’t really get self-government, and likely don’t want to.
“But Trump did all those things!”
Are you sure you want to make “our leadership is doing the same thing the person we call ‘literaly Hitler’ did” your lede?
Just A Note Before We Go
We’ve talked about four attributes of authoritarian government – defining boogeymen, circumventing the rule of law, and making one’s ends justify one’s means.
There’s one more; wrapping ones side in some larger cause, be it “history” or nationalism or, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess, “the soul of the nation” – about which President Brandon will be talking today.
Last week, President Brandon accused Republicans of being “Semi-Fascists”.
To be fair, it sort of sounded like one of his “is he senile, or just not very bright” moments:
I could go either way, to be honest.
But it got me thinking about a couple of things.
What’s In A Word
The left has been devaluing the term “fascist” since I was in high school, and long before, if I recall.
If you want to be pedantic about it, in the 1910s Benito Mussolini – at the time a prominent Italian socialist – figured that while a command economy, a welfare state and state ownership of the mean of production might go over just fine, Internationalism – the concept near and dear to socialism that eventually all borders will be rendered moot by the unification of workers around the world – was not going to fly with Italy, which was had been a nation for about fifty years, and had a lot of nationalist energy about it.
And, presto change-o, Mussolini did some tinkering; in founding the Italian “Fascist” Party, he chucked the “internationalism”, and replaced it with a heaping helping of nationalism. The command economy, nationalization of assets and welfare state, of course, he kept – to Italy’s chagrin in World War 2, as the command economy lagged the rest of Europe so badly that the Italian war machine was positively handicapped.
Most “Fascist” movements – the Nazis, Franco’s Falange and so on – repeat that pattern, keeping the small-l socialism, substituting nationalist dogma for internationalist chanting.
Of course, the left’s version of “fascism” is more nearly described as “saying or doing anything I don’t agree with”.
These days, references to “fascism” almost invariably seek to “other” those your crowd wants to erase from the public square;
And we’ve been seeing an awful lot of that, lately.
How much?
More tomorrow.
Drop The F
So as we close in on President Brandon’s “speech about America’s Soul” on Friday near the Liberty Bell, let’s talk about some of the attributes of…
…well, not ‘fascism’, per se. Or at least not only fascism.
Let’s talk, instead, about authoritarianism, by whatever name you want to call it.
About government that:
Ignores, subverts and/or perverts the rule of law in favor of the rule of men
legitimizes itself in comparison to some boogeyman, without or within – a boogieman that personifies all evil in the eyes of the state, and who must be subjugated for “good” to prevail.
Sublimates everything to a more or less utopian vision of what the world could be, if they had the means
