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.
Dissenters are the first target. Especially the ones whose dissents actually work:
If I were him I’d run background checks on every customer coming through the door.
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.
The good news: After hearing Ben Shapiro roasting Rupar last week on his radio show, I have to say it’s been amazing seeing that more people nationwide are learning what we in the Twin Cities have known for most of a decade: that City Pages alum and Vox “writer” Aaron Rupar is a really terrible “journalist” and not an especially bright man (read the whole thread):
The bad news: these days, competence and discernment are less important than ideological purity and loyalty.
And, Rupar being simultaneously a definer and beneficiary of Urban Progressive Privilege, he’ll never be held to account for it any more than Jim Acosta or Esme Murphy.
…of constant violence that he encouraged not only with as many words but with as many actions, Portland, Oregon mayor Ted Wheeler says people are “sick of” the constant sturm und drang that has made parts of the city unlivable:
Portland became a hotbed of civil unrest last summer during demonstrations protesting the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. Similar demonstrations in cities across the country were largely peaceful. But in Portland, some of the demonstrations have deteriorated into widespread arson, looting and assaults. ADVERTISEMENT
Rioters in the city, who have called for the defunding of the local police department along with other measures, have on several occasions targeted a federal courthouse, spraying it with graffiti, setting fires and destroying nearby storefronts and other property.
“The people who work here support the voices of racial and social justice and will not be intimidated from doing our jobs by the ugly graffiti or broken windows,” Scott Erik Asphaug, a U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, said during the press conference, the AP reported. “We do not confuse the voices of the many with the shouts of the few who hope to hold our city hostage by petty crime and violence.”
The first two things that jumped to my mind?
After a year of hysteria, of gaslighting, of “Karen” nagging you from behind four masks, of plush-bottom public union employees telling unemployed waitresses “we’re all in this together” via Zoom from their ranch houses in Apple Valley, suddenly, after one barely coherent speech in the wake of the signing of an immense power grab disguised as a pork barrel bill…
…everything is OK?
So let’s get this straight – after a year of dictatorial control, now Minnesota is “ready?
And “we” are “ready” after a near majority have re-opened, without their governors publicly rolling around in the glory and majesty of their own omnipotence like Scrooge McDuck cavorting about in a vault full of quarters?
Yes. Yes, they are. Suddenly, “hope” is acceptable. Quadruple-masking? Scary new variants?
Pish-tush! The only thing to fear is fear itself! Happy Days Are Here Again!
The House majority leader, as if on cue:
And finally, Ryan Winkler tells (the second cousin of) the truth. While the pandemic was and remains real, the Minnesota government’s response has been entirely contrived to sway the election, and to give the political class a “big win” (they’ll let the media handle that for them) to use to evangelize transforming society into Big Left’s vision.
Minneapolis pushing ahead to eliminate cops. Look at the photo to see who’s pushing the issue.
Do any of those people look like they live in Hawthorne or Phillips? Any of them look like they’ll be affected when cops stop patrolling dangerous neighborhoods?
Looks more like White people from affluent neighborhoods telling the city council what’s good for Black people living in desperate neighborhoods. “Pull the cops out of those bad neighborhoods, leave the Black people to die.”
In the olden days, instead of wearing backpacks and carrying signs, they’d have been wearing sheets and carrying torches.
Joe Doakes
Big Left always sells class conflict as cultural conflict. Today’s cultural conflict is racial. But behind it, always, is affluent honkeys with (at best) white liberal guilt and, otherwise, the kind of cynicism that is dripping from every pore of the American ruling class.
Urban Progressive Privilege includes being reasonably certain that none of the policies you promote for other people will ever really affect you.
Joe Soucheray on the Chauvin Trial and Minneapolis:
Yes, the trial, and the attendant protests, could be the end of Minneapolis. There is no political strength in place to save it. The council even exudes a vibe that suggests they are more concerned about the safety and convenience of protesters than their own citizenry.
The council cannot open an intersection because of their apparent fealty to those who occupy it. What are they going to do if rioters decide that they are going to take over six or seven square blocks of downtown, maybe the Nicollet Mall? This city let a police station burn. This is a city that called for help too late back in May 2020.
Minneapolis city council president Lisa Bender famously said that expecting public safety is a “privilege” – to which every taxpayer in that city should be saying “Yes. It Is. A ‘privilege’ I, whatever my race, creed or belief, pay through the nose for. Now provide it, stat, or get out of office and quite wasting our time”.
But they don’t ,and they won’t, and when Lisa Bender leaves the Council she, like Frey and even Alondra Cano, will be replaced by someone worse. That’s cynicism talking – well, not just cynicism. It’s the way Minneapolis politics is set up. It’s the way politics go wherever a small minority, committed to getting power at whatever cost, get their way. It’s the apotheosis of Urban Progressive Privilege.
Not even a complete apocalypse is going to change that.
Conservative calls for boycotts are a little frustrating. Partly because boycotts rarely do much good. And largely because conservative calls for boycotts usually involve companies I’ve never patrionized, goods I’ve never bought, services that have never served me at all.
Recent example: last month’s call to boycott Disney Plus and The Mandalorian over the politically-motivated and largely counterfactual firing of Gina Carano. But I’ve never subscribed to Disney, I’ve never watched Mandalorian (the last, “first” Lucas episodes of Star Wars put me off the entire franchise – I’ve literally watched not one second of Star Wars since…er, the one where Anakin became Darth, whatever that was called), and I can’t be bothered.
With that in mind?
I’ve never really been a big fan of online shopping.
No, it’s not because I’m a technology-averse middle-aged guy. I work in tech. I not only use technology, I design it (and, avocationally, spend a lot of time critiquing bad design). It’s hard to stay near the absolute bleeding edge…
…but then, shopping on line is not the bleeding edge of technology. It’s pretty much a commonplace these days.
I’ve just never liked buying things sight-unseen.
Oh, I’ve adapted a bit – I’ll buy USB cables and printer ink off of Amazon, once in a while – convenience is truly seductive.
But perhaps not seductive enough, anymore.
No pullquote. The whole thing is worth a read.
The news is full of stories about the preparations for Monday’s opening of the Derek Chauvin trial.
Signally, all those preparations seem to involve fortifying government buildings.
That includes Minneapolis City Hall, where taxpayers are paying a lot of money to fortify a building wherein most of the City Council members believe the expectation of public safety is a privilege.
As to protecting the small businesspeople? Residents?
Additionally, Sasha Cotton, the director for the city’s new Office of Violence Prevention, said her department is working with the city’s Neighborhood and Community Relations Department on a preparedness toolkit—which includes safety tips and best practices, among other information—to help neighborhoods and residents.
A “preparedness kit”.
In other words, smoke ’em if you got ’em. You’re on your own.
Again. Government has its priorities. Government is government’s priority.
But it’s OK – because city officials are pointing out the precedent they’re concerned about.
January 6.
Not May 25.
“Never Waste a Crisis!”
A city’s agony is just another excuse to feed into the blood libel that there is a massive wave of “white supremacist right wing violence that’ll dwarf 9/11” waiting out there, any day now.
Guy Benson notes the same thing about some of the reaction to Texas governor Abbott’s removal of all state enforced Covid restrictions in Texas the same way I did:
My theory: there is a sizeable population for whom Covid is their claim to relevance and authority, even authority of even the most venal and petty variety.
Not just officials like the once-obscure Andy Slavitt, who owes his re-found prominence to Covid’s role in deposing Trump.
I’m talking about every mask-shaming, disinfectant-wipe-hoarding Karen who has found this past year to be an endless cafeteria of options for imposing their need for internal drama on those around them.
When Covid fades, then like the high school football hero the day after graduation, they are just another bunch of annoying non-entities.
I can’t imagine they will confront that with any more grace than the high school football hero.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is at a local roastery, picking out some bourgeois coffee. Avery LIBRELLE walks in. BERG can’t quite react fast enough.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh, f…for crying out loud, it’s been a long time, Avery. What’s…
LIBRELLE: (Interrupting) You say Democrats have trouble with critical thinking…
BERG: (picking a medium roast, ordering a half pound ground for french press) Yup.
LIBRELLE: …and that conservatism takes more mental energy…
BERG: …and it absolutely does, for people in modern society…
LIBRELLE: and that the modern left is hopelessly reductionistic.
BERG: You bet.
LIBRELLE: That is so wrong.
BERG: Nah. Here’s one of the modern left’s intellectual thought leaders at work:
BERG: Boiling a complex argument with lots of real world context down into an evil cover of a nursery rhyme is…
(BERG looks at LIBRELLE – who is happily clapping along and whispering the words)
(BERG silently pays for his order, leaves)
(And SCENE)
(
Emery keeps bringing up the fact that Trump’s lawyers quit as proof there was no election fraud.
Trumps lawyers quit because they were personally threatened with violence by the mob.
Evidentally, Emery supports mob violence as a tactic to prevent proof of election fraud from seeing the light of day.Why doesn’t he want it seen? What is he afraid would be revealed?
And if mob violence against some people is okay, is it okay against everybody? Or is this another “rules for thee but not for me” situation that seems so common in the Biden Administration?
Joe Doakes
Part of me wants to start updating my “Climate of Hate” page – the ongoing of attacks, shootings, beatings and attempted mass murder by lefties against normals.
But it’s to the point where it’d be a whole blog in its own right.
I’m going to modify Mahatma Gandhi’s classic aphorism on the course of dissident politics.
First they ignore you.
Then they mock you.
Then they pathologize you.
Then they attack you.
Then you win.
The term “whiteness” has become a key term in the word salad of modern progressive duckspeak.
It it feels like the terms is a narrative “MacGuffin”, designed to be a little bit of everything as well as just nothing enough to be flexible?
To anyone not predisposed to conversion, the gospel of whiteness obfuscates more than it reveals about the American experience. To begin with, we never really know exactly what whiteness is. This promiscuous concept sometimes appears as just another word for racist ideas, while other times it connotes power, material benefit, social opportunity, or just about anything else its adherents desire. In his book’s introduction alone, Roediger defines whiteness as a “racial identity,” an “ethnicity,” “status and privileges conferred by race,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of work discipline.” This grab bag of meanings suggests that whiteness is little more than a deus ex machina lowered onto the historical stage to wondrously resolve a tangle of problems. Too wondrously.
Moreover, we seldom see how whiteness actually works in the real world. This reified concept hovers above lived experience, mysteriously bending the arc of history. The underlying problem is a paucity, or distortion, of supporting facts, which leaves Saxton and Roediger pounding many evidentiary square pegs into explanatory round holes. For example, Saxton excoriates the Whig Party in the 1830s and 1840s for its combination of capitalist bias and elitist racism, but cites as his main example John Quincy Adams, one of America’s staunchest opponents of slavery. Roediger misleads similarly with his jaundiced analysis of “freeman.” This term and its partner, “free labor,” indeed took on a racialized meaning in antebellum America that contrasted with the bound labor of African-American slaves. But it also became the central feature of the anti-slavery movement as it fueled growing denunciations of slave labor, prompted opposition to its expansion into the western territories, and inspired the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in the 1850s.
Both historians suffer the same blind spot. They portray a 19th-century America in which citizens either embraced black freedom and equality without reservation or embraced whiteness. This produces not a gathering of information and fair-minded analysis that leads to a measured judgment, the historian’s task, but a process where evidence is cherry-picked or twisted to buttress a predetermined conclusion. It oversimplifies the messy, tangled, multifaceted development of the American republic, replete with ambiguous motivations and unintended consequences, and replaces it with a simplistic morality play where all whites are racists outright, or racist dupes. The monocausal steamroller of whiteness history, lumbering about amid historical complexity, simply flattens the American past.
Last week, one of Ben Shapiro’s podcasts pointed out that among the modern left’s greatest sins is its reductionism – the need it has to try, not to boil down and condense this complicated world, but to just oversimplify it, to turn all problems, causes and solutions into absurdly oversimplified bromides – suitable more for sorting the world into believers and heretics than actually addressing anything.
Beyond that? “Whiteness” is to today’s woke mob what “Counterrevolutionary” was to the NKVD: a malleable, one-charge-fits-all that could mean whatever the inquisitor wanted it to mean to justify a verdict that had been decided in advance.
When everything is about “whiteness” (or any misbegotten “-ness”) and “privilege”, then nothing really is.
And it’s because the progressive movement has it’s knee on the city’s neck.
Kevin Williamson explains, in a piece that’s too perfect to pullquote.
Liberals insist their beliefs are the only acceptable beliefs and anybody who thinks differently is insane, their children should be taken away and sent to Re-education Camps, and the parents should be ‘cleansed’ from America.
Assume Liberals are not lying this time and actually go through with it. If you knew that today was your last day of freedom before the authorities broke down your door to put you on the train heading Way Up North where you’ll spend a life sentence in a gulag counting the birches as a political prisoner, how would you spend your day?
I sat at my computer updating work instructions and form templates for the person who will replace me. The work won’t go away, only I will go away. But I’m leaving good notes and a clean desk instead of taking the day to goof off and leaving a mess for the new person.
In the Bad Old Days, that’s what was known as ‘being a White Man about it.’ You made your bed. You picked up your stuff. You chopped wood for the next camper. You returned the borrowed car full of gas, the lawn mower washed. You told the grocery clerk when she undercharged you and paid the difference so her till would balance. You did things that nobody else noticed and you wouldn’t have been punished for failing to do because . . . it was the right thing to do.
Nowadays, of course, it’s hateful and racist and sexist to expect people to act like responsible adults, so they don’t; they burn police stations and occupy hotels and form communes called Autonomous Zones. I’m not convinced the new way is better which is why I’ll be on the train, soon. Best of luck to you all. Spend your last days wisely.
Joe Doakes
The conventions that made Western Civilization – which is dependent not on skin color, but on a set of ideals commonly observed – is the enemy these days, and they don’t care what they have to do or who they have to step over to destroy them.
Whatever you do, don’t you dare suggest public schools have become leftist indoctrination factories:
According to whistleblower documents and a source within the school, a fifth-grade teacher at the inner-city William D. Kelley School designed a social studies curriculum to celebrate Davis, praising the “black communist” for her fight against “injustice and inequality.” As part of the lesson, the teacher asked students to “describe Davis’ early life,” reflect on her vision of social change, and “define communist”—presumably in favorable terms.
At the conclusion of the unit, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-old students into the school auditorium to “simulate” a Black Power rally to “free Angela Davis” from prison, where she had once been held while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. The students marched on the stage, holding signs that read “Black Power,” “Jail Trump,” “Free Angela,” and “Black Power Matters.” They chanted about Africa and ancestral power, then shouted “Free Angela! Free Angela!” as they stood at the front of the stage.
Apologists may respond “this is an anomaly! Not all public schools try to get away with this kind of thing!”
No. Just the ones in districts so blue that there will be no consequences – serving both to socialize (heh heh) the concept with other teachers, and to lower the bar of what’s “acceptable” elsewhere; “Oh, fer gosh sakes, Edina doesn’t have them chant “Free Angela” and talk about black “ancestral power”. No, perish the thought. We just study why Angela Davis is a hero (omitting all context about her crimes and communism itself, naturally), and why “whiteness” is a social cancer. Totally different things!”
Remember – Berg’s 21st Law is pretty clear on this: “When it comes to “progressive” policy, yesterday’s absurd joke is today’s serious proposal and tomorrow’s potential law”
Don’t be surprised.
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.
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.
It’s gotten to the point where hearing about any emotionally charged claim of abuse gets me thinking “deep breath, wait – the odds it’ll be a hoax are just about even, if not better”.
I mean, there’s a reason it’s not called “Berg’s 20th Suggestion“.
Keep it in mind, and you’re disappointed…well, pretty rarely, to be honest.
(Not gonna pullquote it – the whole thing is worth a read).
As the bad night that was the 2018 Mid-terms ground along, I pointed out something I believe to be a truism: that “progressive” overreach might be its own best limiting mechanism.
The downside (well, not the downside – one of many, indeed) is that we’re going to have to hope that’s the case, or that the opposition gets its act together, or some combination of the two. Because absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Big Left is seeking both:
People need limits in their lives. Anyone who has ever seen a spoiled child knows that these children are deeply unhappy, miserably vicious, and extreme in their rages and demands. Now imagine taking that child and subjecting it to a lifetime of having its every want, need, or desire granted. You will quickly see that you’ve created a dangerous monster. Go through any list of worst rulers (this one for example), and you’ll see how damaging it is when people’s desires are always unopposed.
That’s where leftists are right now. In 2020, thanks to the Wuhan virus and BLM, they manipulated themselves into complete power and, having gained that power, they have lost their grip on sanity. Unless reality intervenes in a way leftists must address, nothing will stop their mad dash into a lunatic world, one in which “science means whatever I say it means,” the economy is no longer constrained by inexorable rules of supply and demand, race becomes the only metric by which to judge people (and whites and Jews are inherently evil), borders serve no purpose, etc.
Nations do not fare well when madmen are at the helm. And as a reminder, while Trump may have had an eccentric personal style, everything he did was within the rule of law, and the mainstream of American, Western, and human history. It was those who opposed him who had abandoned norms. Like the narcissist, who says that anyone who opposes his abuse is at fault for the resulting fights, the left used its media control to announce that anyone who challenged its anti-science, racist, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian dictates was evil.
The whole thing is worth a read.
Every spousal abuser in history: “Yeah, sure, I hit you. But you provoked me – again. So you’re at least partly to blame. Maybe mostly. I mean, actions have consequences, baby…”
Big Left’s latest line – through one of its local mouthpieces, former Reprentative and Lt. Gov. Candidate and Urban Progressive Privilege poster child, Erin Maye Quade:
This statement ticks off nearly half of the traits one associates with someone with a serious personality disorder.
And before anyone stars a’yappin’ – I’m not saying Ms. Maye Quade suffers from any psychological illness.
Merely the movement she’s part of.
[1] Not to mention a culture of abuse, and a serious collective group personality disorder.
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.
This site is an endless – so far – catalog of people, frequently but far from always in academia – catalog of “cancelees”.
And reading the blurbs is a little like reading log entries from a ship that is slowly sinking, but the captain just doesn’t know it yet.
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