SCENE: A group of parents are gathered at a school board meeting in “Anytown, USA” – a medium-sized city in a swing-ish state. The city voted for Trump in 2016, elected a Democrat cityi council in 2018, and was nearly statistically tied in 2020.

While these meetings are normally somnolent affairs dealing with abstruse board policies and contracts, this is the exception. The district’s contract with a curriculum consultant who’s been training the staff on “inclusive teaching” is under discussion.

The audience is orderly, but the tension is palpable as school board president, Doctor Karen Gossleiten-Prigg, addresses the audience.

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Questions? OK – you, over at the microphone to my left.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Why is the district teaching Critical Race Theory?

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: We’re not teaching “Critical Race Theory”. Indeed, the entire term “CRT” is a creation of (clears throat) conservative media.

You, over on my left…

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: But Ms. Gossleitein-Prigg…

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: …That’s Doctor Gossleiten-Prigg.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: (Over snickers in the audience) …Doctor Gossleiten-Prigg, I brought a series of CRT press clippings to show the audience:

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG:

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: You’re telling me there isn’t a certrain…tone to the discourse when it comes to this subject?

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Right, but that’s not Critical Race theory. You ,over on my left…

(Audience members 2,4,6 and 8, standing at the mic on GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG’s right, start to rustle a bit. )

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: So you’re saying that the district doesn’t teach critical race theory?

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: That’s correct. You on my left…

(Audience members 2,4,6 and 8, start to audibly complain )

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: So if you’re’ not teaching Critical Race Theory, what are you teaching them?

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Glad you asked. What we are proposing is a set of standards, a framework if you will , for teaching the history of this country. You, on the left…

AUDIENCE MEMBERS 2,4,6 and 8 (Agitated) Hey! What about us?

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: You’re on the right. You on the left…

AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: So you’re not teaching Criticial Race Theory?

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Of course not. CRT doesn’t exist. Again – we’re creating a framework for teaching history.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: So where are kids being taught that “whiteness” is a deterministic unavoidable state that makes one uncontrollably racist, and that every group of “white’ people is in and of themselves a “structure” that just can’t avoid hating other races?

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Oh. That’s not CRT.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: So where does it come from?

GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: History!

And SCENE

Cubans, actually suffering the oppression that a few million “progressive” snowflakes fantasized they were suffering during the Trump term, are thinking, again, about risking it all to come to America:

And our administration will have none of that:

 Note to Cubans:   it’s a rookie flub.  As long as Biden Harris is in office, you need to come via the southern border.

Problem solved. 

Question:  Mayorkas didn’t put this out via a mean tweet.  So why am I feeling ashamed to be an American, right about now? 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Trigger warning – clear thinking ahead.

If you’ve never thought “perhaps it’s time to just re-boot the whole thing”, you might start.

This video’s been making the rounds. I’ve had at least a half dozen people refer it to me. It’s Brad Taylor, speaking last week at the Rosemount School Board, on how his education has already been given over to indoctrination:

I give speaker points: the kid is excellent.

All you folks moving to the third-tier burbs looking to escape the lunacy? The lunacy is following you. Running away ain’t gonna work. You’re going to have to stand and fight.

And a few thousand more like Mr. Taylor and his like (I’m looking at you, Kyle Kashuv, wherever yo88u are) it may be a fair fight.

As re getting him on the NARN? My people are already calling his people.

. . . right up 38th Street:

For the second time in less than a week, Minneapolis city crews worked to reopen the area around 38th Street and Chicago Avenue to traffic and activists have returned makeshift barriers to the area.

Minneapolis city crews, at around 4:50 a.m. Tuesday, were removing items from George Floyd Square in an attempt to reopen the intersection to traffic.

Once crews were done removing items, they left the area.

Later Tuesday, a 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew reported activists had returned makeshift barriers to the streets near the intersection.

Our friends in Minneapolis have turned fecklessness into an art form.

Seriously, what’s the point? Either you clear the intersection and ensure it doesn’t get blocked again, or you admit you are too weak to run your city and let the local warlords run the show. This is a stupid game. 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Richard Fernandez asks the right question.  Nobody in the Garden Administration seems to be listening. The Vegetable can’t figure out what flavor pudding to have today and The Hoe, well, she’s a ho and that’s about it.  Maybe the problem is the people running things behind the scenes are just plain evil so it isn’t that they aren’t listening, it’s that they don’t care.

Joe Doakes

Don’t care?

Or “it serves their interests?”

For someone who we were told was a “compromise” candidate that was “too far to the center” for our left, it sure seems “progressives” have warmed up to Biden, doesn’t it?

Weird.

The law? Berg’s Seventh, of course. This is a Twitter tag “responding” to Senator Tim Scott’s response to Biden’s prattling-on last night.

The aphorism? “Being a Democrat means never being accountable for anything. Ever”.

UPDATE:  It’s been pointed out that his is also an example of Berg’s Eighth Law. 

The justification for Dictator-for-Life Walz’ continued use of Emergency Powers, and his endless fondling of the dials to raise or lower limits on normal behavior, rests on the notion that if he failed to act, Covid patients would overwhelm the hospital system leaving sufferers to die on gurneys in hallways and parking lots, up to 70,000 of them in Minnesota alone.

This chart from Kevin Roche at Healthy Skeptic illustrates how stupid that lie was and continues to be.  Time to end the lockdowns. 

Joe Doakes 

In Minneapolis, the Democrat Party tells the peasants who to thank for their bread and circuses:

No, no no no no – this is totally not the act of a party that knows its voter base is a lumpen gray mass of people with no critical thinking skills.

And don’t you dare call the one-party governments of the Twin Cities mechanisms for transferring taxpayer money to the favored political classes:

Springboard for the Arts said its member artists will receive the first $500 payments in the pilot program in April. The payments will support 25 artists in the Frogtown and Rondo neighborhoods for 18 months.

In a release, Mayor Melvin Carter called Springboard for the Arts a “vital partner” and said guaranteed income will “benefit our entire community.”

The $500 payments are deposited directly to individuals and have no strings attached or work requirements. The recipients will be chosen at random, but Springboard for the Arts says 75 percent of the individuals will be “Black, Native and/or people of color…The city of St. Paul used its CARES Act funding, philanthropy and the Mayors for Guaranteed Income national network to come up with the $1.5 million needed to fulfill the pilot.”

So – not wanting your catalytic converter stolen is “privilege”…

…but being an “artist” entitles you to tax money, not paying which will put me in jail.

That boot-like thing you feel on your neck? It’s a boot.

They’re not even bothering to couch it in academic abstractions anymore:

If the people have any kind of memory or moral sense at all, 2022 is going to be a bloodbath.

But I’m worried about the whole memory and moral sense thing.

Lauren Boebert, 34 year old business owner and freshman Congresswoman from Colorado, is to the 2020s what Michele Bachmann was to the 2000s – further proof of Berg’s Eighth Law.

Boebert actually is what Big Left has been trying to teach the world AOC is; a young woman who actually accomplished something.

Even at the peaks of their evil power, Mussolini was never able to get authors to drop off boxes of books at their bonfire parties. The Nazis weren’t able to get the Brownshirt leadership to beat themselves to death. Stalin never got the Kulaks and Wreckers and “KRs” to check themselves into the Lyubyanka.

Say what you will about modern “woke” culture – they’ve been able to develop the self-canceling apparatchik.

A few regular-ish Democratic commenters have taken umbrage at my occasional statments along the lines of “Democrat voters have no critical thinking skills”.

Let me explain.

I say it because…’

…well, it’s true. Universally. Without exception.

Case in point:

“Shots in arms” – thanks to Trump.

Billions for schools – that, with the DFL calling the shots, are still squabbling about reopening.

And every dollar in the pocket paid for by five dollars taken from someone else – including your own grandchildren.

But no – don’t you dare assume the party that would write tripe like this can’t safely assume their voters are a lumpen, bovine mass.

Just in time for Black History Month, Amazon scrubs references to one of the most accomplished black men in America today. Clarence Thomas’s bio-doc has been disappeared:

Amazon appeared to drop the PBS title, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” while still promoting a wide array of feature films under the category of Black History Month such as “All In: The Fight For Democracy,” with Stacey Abrams and two movies on Anita Hill, Thomas’ accuser of sexual misconduct who attempted to derail his confirmation. All come free to stream with a Prime membership.

The Thomas documentary released in January last year remains available to purchase on DVD. A simple search for “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” comes up short for the title however. To find it, users must include “DVD” in the search box, and the documentary will come up as the 10th result. A search for “RBG” on the other hand, will bring three documentaries on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s documentary to the top after promoting a sponsored post of her biography, “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

You can probably fill in the kicker I usually write after the pullquote yourself – our monthly observance of all things Afro-American should be retitled “Month With History Of The Correct Black Americans”.

Truth is a trigger, apparently.

A far-left progressive representative relates the “emotional toll” of having black female politicians’ “violent” rhetoric (if we’re using Trump’s rhetoric on January as the standard) in Trump’s defense:

“The defense council put a lot of videos out in their defense, playing clip after clip of Black women talking about fighting for a cause or an issue or a policy. It was not lost on me as so many of them were people of color, and women, Black women. Black women like myself who are sick and tired of being sick and tired for our children. Your children,” Plaskett said.

Earlier in the day on Friday, Trump’s defense attorneys spent a great deal of their closing arguments accusing Democrats of hypocrisy over their support of last summer’s protests for racial justice. In doing so, his team played video footage from the summer protests, zeroing in on the relatively rare instances of violence and looting that occurred during the demonstrations.

TL:dr – Orange Man Bad, for the children.

So either using the term “fight” is aggressive rhetoric, or it’s “incitement”. End of story.

Pick one.

Keep your triggers off my – our, Western Civilization’s – logic, laws and reasoning.

This is interesting

Another stunning example of the ‘rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me’ attitude
which is fast becoming a Biden administration hallmark.

My question is: who paid the 10% to The Big Guy, for allowing this claim
to go forward instead of having the FBI arrest them for sedition? 
Haven’t tracked that down, yet.

Joe Doakes

I think we’re talking a four year freeze on all accountability for, well, most things.

My first thought in reading this story, I kid you not, is that I’m a little amazed a city government or law enforcement establishment actually did anything about an offense like this:

After a hearing last Friday and conversations with the city attorney, the employment of part-time Library Specialist Cameron Dequintez Williams was terminated on Wednesday.

He was charged with burning books from the library written by conservative authors.

Library officials said, “The city of Chattanooga Human Resources Department completed its investigation of an allegation that books were removed from the Chattanooga Public Library’s Main Branch on Dec.https://w.chattanoogan.com/photo.aspx?a=8&t=11, 2020. 

“The investigation determined that part-time Library Specialist Cameron Williams violated city and Library policies by improperly removing items from the Library’s collections.”

As one wag remarked:

Now, it remains to be seen if the real reason was that the library board wants to do all of that themselves.

Bonus observation: Am I the only one thinking Lt. Governor Flanagan feels pretty good, having not only gotten away with having ideological mercenaries do her cultural cleansing for her, but having them in effect rewarded for their efforts?

I see a posh consulting job for Flanagan, if she ever leaves office.

“Protect” Minnesota has a new executive director.

We’ll come back to that.

Modern American “progressivism”, like all its many forebears in the past 200 years, has been all about rallying people against boogeymen. From “monarchists” in the French Revolution, to “Wreckers” in Stalin’s USSR to the Wobbly’s “Bosses”, up through “the patriarchy” and “the man” and “counterrevolutionaries” in Red China and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, and if you have a hard time distinguishing between ’em, join the club.

Today, the boogeymen…er, boogiepeople on the left are pretty much all the things that people who are included are told to be “anti”. “Anti-Racism” “Anti-Misogyny” (not just sexism, anymore – it’s the more active, more malevolent noun these days), “Anti-Fascism”, “Anti-Transphobia”, and on and on – all of which sounds like good things to be “anti”…

…and, unsurprisingly, when you dig into the “Root Causes” of all those nouns, all things trace back to “Western Civilization” in all its particulars: the Judeo-Christian value on the individual and their worth, value, rights and responsibilities and potential of each and every person, as a person with a mind, a point of view, and at the end of the day an indivisible soul of personal, societal, political, intellectual and metaphysical worth.

Those aspects of humanity are anathema to progressivism in all its flavors. The focus is on the group – the Marxists “classes”, the Nazi’s irreducible focus on race, the modern academic Left’s obsession with a byzantine network of intersectional identity groups. The individual is nothing but a vote (for now), an appetite, a widget to be moved through the production line of life (like Obamacare’s awful caricature of Progressive humanity, “Julia”). Progressivism is “Materialist”. Souls, individual intellects and thoughts and reams, all are ephemeral; humans are widgets that consume and produce, and whose worth and value (to those in power) is expressed via their membership in the collective.

Those widgets have a term. “Bodies”. Not people. Not brains. Not souls.

Bodies.

Anyway – “P”M has a new director. And unlike the dotty, dizzy neverending font of comedy that was Heather Martens, or the serial fabulist The “Reverend” Nancy Nord Bence, the new director presents us with a few surprises.

She’s “a gun owner herself” – which might be seen in several ways. Is “P”M moderating? Are they realizing that the culture war has slipped far enough away from them, especially over this past year, that they have to start speaking to people who need to be convinced?

And she’s apparently incredibly famous, since she apparently just goes by “Rashmi”. I’ve turned “Protect” Minnesota’s website, Facebook feed and other social media upside down, and not been able to find any reference to a last name, which is Seneviratne, by the way.

But even during the reign of the serial fabulist the Reverend Nord Bence, “Protect” MN wasn’t nearly extreme enough in its hatred of guns and (law-abiding) gun owners, enough for some people.

“P”M spawned a breakway group, “Survivors Lead” – basically a woman, Rachel Joseph, with a long history of progressive activism and a story; an aunt who was murdered, according to Ms. Joseph’s story, by a gun.

Quick aside: I don’t minimize anyone’s trauma over having a loved one murdered. But in the many times I’ve heard Ms. Joseph’s story, she’s never once mentioned a perpetrator, someone actually holding and using the gun that killed her aunt; that persons evil motivation, the legal fallout from the murder, whether that person was sentenced or not. It’d be wrong to crack wise – “what, did the gun animate itself?” – but omitting a perpetrator, his/her motives and the like from the conversation is incredibly intellectually dishonest.

Anyway – “Rashmi” and her apparent moderation are not going over well with “Survivors Lead”:

The extreme heckling the not-as-extreme about getting less extreme. That qualifies as “dog bites man”, at the very most.

Rather less so? There followed some more, er, ethnically pointed traffic on one social media feed (from which I’ve long been blocked) or another.

After which “P”M – operating through its usual social media persona, the omniscient third person that used to be Martens and Nord Bence – responded:

On the one hand, watching the agents of Big Left eating each other is one of my favorite spectator sports.

And if the biggest semi-organic anti-gun group in MInnesota (shaddap about Moms Want Action already) is pivoting from pushing Linda Slocum’s gun grab bill to highlighting the inequity of gun control (“Race, class and geography all play into who gets to have a gun and who doesn’t” – which is something every Second Amendment activist has known for 50 years) and speaking in the first “person” to the prudence of victims of violence to arm up, then in culture war terms that’s the sound of the first tank crossing the pontoon bridge at Remagen.

But…”white bodied privilege?”

What the flaming hootie hoo?

I thought for a moment – is this a shot back at the Rachel Dolezals and Elizabeth Warrens of the world, with their flip-flopping identities, by “actual” “people of color”, reinforcing the idea that while you might “identify” with one degree melanin or another, your apparent appearance still wins out in the great privilege lottery (which will, I suspect, get pilloried hard by the Trans crowd, for whom perceived identity is everything? I’ll let the fight that one out).

But no. It’s much less hilarious than that.

It’s “inclusion language” – slang or argot that one class of people use to track who is in, and who is “out” – to be sure. That’s part of it, and people are noticing:

Referring to people as bodies is a reminder, writer Elizabeth Barnes says in an interview, that “racism isn’t just about the ideas that you have in your head.” Barnes is the author of “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, The Girl Behind the Wall.” In intellectual discussions, theories about social oppression sound almost disembodied; “we talk about prejudice,” Barnes says, “like it’s just a matter of ideas.” The point is to emphasize the physical violence done to black people through slavery, lynching, and police brutality. In the case of women, the term “bodies” highlights “what happens to women’s bodies in health care contexts, in sexual contexts, in reproductive contexts.”

But behond that?

It’s a nod to the materialism of the left – that the mind, the thoughts, the indivisible soul of the indivisual human being is not merely irrelevant, but inconvenient to the obsession with identity.

Your melanin defines you.

In some ways its a cheap ad hominem – “of course you’d think that, you are (add a reference to your target’s melanin, or lack thereof)”. But pointing logical fallacies out to the foot soldiers of Big Left is a little like arguing salinity with sharks; it’s just part of the water they swim in.

So – gun groups eating each other? Good.

The debate contributing to the ongoing hijacking of the language? Bad.

The whole thing participating, in its own little way, in the further erosion of one of the ideals that’s made Western Civilization the most successful, and humane , civilization in human history?

Worse.

Kind of a good news, bad news situation here. But maybe not in the way you think.

A teachers union president in Washington State refers to reopening schools as a “white supremacist” initiative.

The good – or “good” – news: this is an example of the type of rhetorical, social and policy overreach one can expect when “progressives” – in this case invariably white, middle-class, and visibly “progressive” – find themselves in power. This statement – literally, “wanting your kids back in schools, and wanting some sense of stability and normalcy for their mental health, at a time when teenage suicide is exploding all over the country, is racist” is the very definition of “2+2=5” – mental health is mental illness, concern for kids is a pathology, truth is lies. (And the ability to say it without having ones own peers pelt one with rocks and garbage is Urban Progressive Privilege).

ut another way, evil – no scare quotes. Inverting moral truth and moral falsehood is as textbook a definition of venial evil as exists.

That’s the “good” news.

The bad news? About half the country, as this is written, doesn’t know any better, or just doesn’t want to think about it that hard.

… more horrifyingly Orwellian than the title of this proposed cabinet post…

… is the actual proposal itself.

Big Left has been openly salivating about a “wave of ‘white supremacist terror’ that’ll dwarf 9/11″ for years, now.

No – seriously. Years.

Does it seem like they’re wishing it to be so?

You’re not alone:

Need an Orwell reference? Authoritarians always need a boogieman. And like Orwell’s Eurasia and Eastasia, or Hitler’s “Reichstag arsonists” or the “Polish soldiers who attacked the Gleiwitz radio station” or “Jews”, or generations of Soviet “wreckers” and “counter-revolutionaries”, having a conspiracy to flog can certainly take peoples’ minds off of the bread lines or endless mask mandates, wouldn’t it?

Of course, the Democrats chose half the country for their boogieman.

Seems…self-limiting?

If so, the good guys have two years to prove it.

Democrats. after an election when media both mainstream and social worked overtime to install them in office, propose to “rein in the media”:

During a lengthy Instagram Live on Tuesday evening where she revealed that she feared for her life during the siege, the “Squad” member accused the mainstream media of “spewing disinformation” ahead of the deadly riot in which five people died.

“There’s absolutely a commission that’s being discussed but it seems to be more investigating in style rather than truth and reconciliation,” she said.

“I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy because that is part of what happened here,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went on.

“We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” she said.

So – yet again, while calling all Republicans “Nazis” by implication and association, Democrats act like…

…well, Democrats.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A couple of days ago, I urged application of Berg’s 18th Law of Media Latency to the events at the Capitol. I was right. The FBI has charged a Leftist for the Capitol riot. He was running a false flag operation, dressing as a Trump supporters to infiltrate the crowd to commit violence.

Still, I’m seeing bloggers and columnists on the Right saying that even though President Trump did not urge his supporters to commit violence; and even though Leftist infiltrators did commit it; it’s still President Trump’s fault.

Look, I expect the Left to blame the victim of its false flag operation – that’s the point of running a false flag operation. I expect Never-Trumpers to do it too, because they hate Donald Trump and want him gone by any means.

I wasn’t expecting it from people nominally on our side. It’s disappointing. There’s a flavor of Saint Peter’s Denial about it, of throwing the man under the bus to avoid denunciation by the Liberal mob, of saving one’s own skin at the expense of one’s own principles.

In terms of fighting the system, I think Donald Trump may have been the greatest American President since Andrew Jackson. I think his reelection victory was stolen from him. I think he has received shabby treatment from his friends and allies, people I thought were my friends and allies.

Monday is a federal holiday to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., another man who fought the system and lost. I’m taking a few days off to think about things. Take care, everyone.

Joe Doakes

There’s a lot to think about this month.

The left’s urge to control thought has gotten to none other than George Orwell himself – a push that is positively…

…well, you know where I’m going.

The piece is an object lesson on how American education has failed society in completely abrogating the teaching of critical thinking. How can we tell?

The gaping irony of this bit, for starters, responding to people who “reduce” Orwell to “tyranny bad, liberty good”:

But Orwell’s book is much more sophisticated. Orwell was interested not just in communicating the badness of totalitarian regimes but also dissecting how they succeed through the manipulation of language.

And in comparing the fascists Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War (on the side of the doomed communists) with Trump supporters, the writer and USAToday participate in the reduction of the language to a tool of political coercion.