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.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is looking for a new heat gun at a hardware store when Kirk THUNT, used car salesman and chairman of The Arne Carlson Project, an anti-Trump organization based in Forest Lake, walks around the corner.
THUNT: Merg.
BERG: Er…hi ,Kirk…
THUNT: You routinely refuse to condemn Donald Trump for trying to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when he was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: I condemn, and condemned, the riot, the “storming” of the Capitol, and anyone who thought they could overtake the Constitutional process by force. All the talk about killing the Vice President is just baked wind; the Secret Service would have leveled anyone who tried. The electoral commission was alarmed – justifiably – but they finished their job. Democracy was never in danger, and everyone involved is in a world of legal hurt. The federal criminal justice system is doing what it does.
THUNT: The January 6 Commission just learned that Chief of Staff Meadows has text messages proving Trump was involved.
BERG: Maybe they do.
THUNT: Maybe? So you support the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: The commission is an investigation – of sorts. Findings are not a conclusion. I’m not going to pretend I know enough to draw a conclusion, even if my conclusion matters to anyone. Let the investigation run its course.
THUNT: Huh. Let it run its course? So you’re right there behind the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: Again, no. I am saying I believe the left has glommed onto it as a way of deflecting, eternally, away from their many very deliberate attempts to undercut out democracy, and the riots that they supported from 2015 to 2021.
THUNT: Deflection? So – you are a big fan of the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: I’m pretty sure I said exactly the opposite, several times. My “crime” with you seems to be the fact that I haven’t wet myself with outrage over Trump, with regard to this episode or any other during his administration. I was a Trump non-fan back when you were watching The Apprentice. I’m intellectually honest about the things he did right and wrong, but if you’re looking for…
…on cue from me, you’ve got the wrong guy .
THUNT: So you dismiss concerns about the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: For the fourth time in 90 seconds – no. I do think Big Left uses January 6 the same way a certain European socialist leader used this episode. But we’ve got a whole new set of problems to deal with, as a nation and, frankly, as a Republican.
THUNT: So you don’t think the GOP is forever rendered toxic by its association with Trump, meaning you support the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when he was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: Er, Kirk? I’ve just explained that every single point you make is bulls**t. And yet every time you take a breath, you tell me I support the…what is it you say?
THUNT: You are a hypocritical supporter of the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: And again, I am not.
THUNT: Denial means you are an enabler of the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: That’s false.
THUNT: Disagreement means you are a supporter the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: Once you got on the green, you only had to use your putter twice, right?
THUNT: Nonsensical responses mean you support the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: Look. The heat gun I’m looking for.
THUNT: Using heat guns means you support the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
…To remember when “insurrections against civil government” or a bad thing.
That’s “Anti”-Fa, projecting their emblem onto the wall of the Multnomah County courthouse in Portland.
It is literally no less objectionable than projecting a swastika, by the way. The emblem is directly descended from that of the German communist party’s version of the Brownshirts.
…Minneapolis’s PR firm is going be earning its pay over this next one-to-fifty years.
“Protesters” took to blocking off streets in the Uptown area over the weekend – leading to an incident where someone drove into the crowd, killing one woman.
Which led a crowd to block off Lake Street yet again. And it wasn’t an especially “peaceful” bunch of protesters.
One local news crew actually videotaping a woman wandering around, gun in hand, shooting at God only knows what or two:
Police arrest a suspects after we heard shots fired following a confrontation with a driver. pic.twitter.com/T1IOf5bkn9
Smith’s violent resistance to arrest may have been motivated by his belief that he was engaged in a “war” on cops.
For years leading up to his death, Smith made statements across social media platforms vowing to shoot police officers if he were ever to be apprehended, encouraging his followers to bring guns and bombs to protests and outlining tactics he believed would be most effective to kill members of law enforcement. He also frequently suggested that he was meeting with like-minded people and taking tangible steps towards these aims.
“Get ready for war,” Smith told his followers via Instagram in mid-April.
“Motherfuckers are finna move on these ‘ops,” he continued, using a slang term that means people would attack police.
“All the shooters, suit up,” he ordered. “Lace your boots up, it’s war fucking time. Bring your gun to the protest, bring them fucking bombs and rocket launchers and all that shit.”
We’ve heard a lot of legal expertise tossed around lately. Let’s see how easily our resident legal scholars handle a first-year law school exam question.:
Criminal Procedure quiz, essay portion:
A man is accused of committing a crime in Minneapolis. The prosecuting attorney spends a year tainting the jury pool with pretrial publicity. Defendant moves for a change of venue citing his Constitutional right to a fair trial but the judge concludes the State’s actions have been so widespread, so pervasive, so completely corrupting, that the Defendant cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the state.
The judge’s choices are:
A. Hold the trial in Minneapolis since that’s where the alleged crime occurred, even as the mob outside the courthouse threatens to burn the city if the man isn’t convicted;
B. Dismiss the charges on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct in violation of the Defendant’s Constitutional rights.
If the judge chooses A, he opens the door for the State to violate future defendants’ Constitutional rights in a similar manner. If the judge chooses B, the mob burns down the city. What should the judge do? Explain your answer in 100 words or less giving citations to relevant statutory, case-law, and rule authority.
You have one hour. Begin.
Joe Doakes
Er..Racism and White Privilege and the Patriarchy?
Those seem to be the answers for everyone question one can’t answer these days.
The Chauvin trial wrapped up yesterday. As this is written, the jury is deliberating.
But well into last week, Saint Paul was strapping in.
Holiday station, Hamline at Marshall. That’s some solid woodwork on those plywood window covers.
Saint Paul is smoking ’em if they got ’em.
Laundromat, University and Pascal. At least 2-3 other buildings east and west of here burned last May. The strip mall across the street was more or less looted out – allowing the property managers to sell to the owners of “Minnesota United”. The riots were indeed very good for Saint Paul’s plutocrats.
The Midway Menards hasn’t yet piled stacks of plywood in front of the store – which is the “smoke ’em if you got ’em” moment, from where I sit.
Some merchants are of the opinion that some kind of supplication to the crowd might buy them some grace.
I’m not going to say what the store is – and I’ll block anyone who tries, and it’ll be so permanent it’ll make “Dog Gone’s” exile look like Woody Kane’s sentence.. They’re a local, family-run business, and they were burned and looted, although not totaled out, last year. They’ve been warned to expect more of the same. Fingers crossed for all of them.
But most of the biggest victims last year were immigrants and merchants “of color”, and there’s no reason to expect the white left-wing college kids who did most of the burning last year are going to be any different this time around.
If some legislator wants to push a bill removing “duty to retreat” and allowing self-defense of felony-level destruction of property via lethal force, I’ll pound all the pavement they need.
Or, y’know, assert the rule of law:
DeSantis: “If you riot, you are going to jail, and you are going to have to spend time in jail. If you assault law enforcement in a violent assembly, you are definitely going to go to jail. You burn down somebody’s business. …”https://t.co/58PwCjPfxL
Assert it equally, regardless of class, race or all the rest? Absolutely – suggest otherwise (or suggest I suggest otherwise) and you are depraved and need to be shunned.
Yesterday, on the one hand, DFL rep Jennifer McEwen, sounding as if she were nearly in tearms, chided her GOP colleagues for attacking Maxine Waters, who spent her weekend telling Demcorats to riot if they didn’t get the verdict they wanted in the Chauvin trial…
WATCH: Democrat Senator defends Maxine Waters as "an icon" after she came to Minnesota and incited violence against law enforcement.
Right after that, the DFL moved a resolution condemning the National Guard – part-time soldiers who live among us all – for supporting the effort to keep “Anti”-Fa from burning down. more poor, immigrant and minority neighborhoods:
WATCH: Democrat Senator defends Maxine Waters as "an icon" after she came to Minnesota and incited violence against law enforcement.
And if you deflect to “January 6”, in the seeming belief that there was no pollitical violence in this country before that day, I will mock and taunt you for a month straight, and you will deserve it.
Telling (the right) people to go ahead and flout the curfew
I’m going to need to find all these examples of Ellison’s perfidy and collect ’em all in one place for 2022. This stuff needs to get dragged out of the memory hole…
Watching what’s going on now, I’ve had just about enough of two responses:
“It’s just property”
Let’s say you’ve worked hard, and spent $40,000 on a car. Since the average median income is about $40,000, that’s a year out of your life (your math may vary; If you make $100,000 a year, imagine you bought a Range Rover). You can spread that out over 4 to 7 years with a loan – but it’s still got to get paid, which means you are still going to spend a year of your life to pay for that car.
Somebody steals or destroys it. That means they have taken the work from a whole year of your life.
Without paying you.
And saying “it’s covered by insurance“ is a copout; instead of appropriating the life and labor of one person, you’re spreading it out across everyone. Insurance against accidents and the vicissitudes of life is one thing; assuming insurance is there to pay for someone’s looting or crime spree is the same as saying “this group of people is entitled to that group of people’s labor, without compensation.”
Stealing and destroying things, and saying “someone else will pay for it“, whether it’s one person or hundreds of thousands, is no different than making them work for you for free.
If someone openly talked about forcing a group of people to work for them for free, what would you do?
If someone were coming at you with the explicit purpose of forcing you to work for them for free, what would you call it?
Hint: we fought a Civil War over it at one point.
The other saying: “Complaining about destruction of property is privilege”
Your G___damn right it is. It’s a “Privilege“ you, and I, and every chump Of every race, religion, gender and orientation who pays taxes to any level of government, earn, in full expectation that government will carry out its absolute minimum legitimate role.
Which is not “building bike paths” or “running resiliency departments” or even “making life happy and equitable”.
It is “ upholding the rule of law“.
Which all sounds very square, like the John Lithgow character in “Footloose”…
…until you remember that without some minimum standard of order – for example, knowing that the home you work to pay for and the business you work to build, and the community that you work to create, aren’t going to be stolen and destroyed arbitrarily – prosperity [1] is impossible.
And without prosperity, “freedom“ is irrelevant. What difference does it make if you can vote, if you are working from sunup to sundown to stave off famine and don’t have time to keep up on the news?
It is the same level of “privilege“, by the way, that leads one to legitimately expect the justice system to which we lend some of our freedoms to work, fairly and impartially, no matter who the defendants are.
I’m done with taking either of these arguments as anything but the abominations they are. Our entire society needs to be done with them both.
Excusing looting, whatever its motivations, is an attack on everybody’s freedom. It’s time to treat it as such.
[1] and by “prosperity“, I don’t mean “Jay-Z driving around in a Bentley“. I mean “most of us aren’t out working in a field from the sunrise until sunset, to earn a famine prone subsistence living, so we have time to read books and raise our kids and think about things other than trying not to starve“. Which, throughout millions of years if human history, has been the rule, not the exception. That is mankind‘s natural state, not this relative utopia we are living in today.
