The NYTimes is trying to disappear some of their own paper’s history in re the “1619 Project”, which claimed that, based on the premise that America was founded primarily to exalt slavery, the nation was really founded when the first slave arrived.

Or…so they said. For a while:

Editors recently removed (without explanation or acknowledgment) the provocative statement that the project “aim[s] to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” from the article series’ online introduction. Lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones has repeatedly claimed it is a myth that the project proposes 1619 rather than 1776 as the country’s birth year: She blamed bad-faith critics on the right for tricking the media into believing otherwise.

“One thing in which the right has been tremendously successful is getting media to frame stories in their language and through their lens,” wrote Hannah-Jones in a subsequently deleted tweet. “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”

Forget for a moment that Hannah-Jones’ Twitter banner is a picture of 1776 crossed out and replaced with 1619. Forget that multiple progressive media outlets that were sympathetic to the project’s aims used the 1619-as-true-founding summary in order to explain it. Forget that a year ago, after the articles were published, both Hannah-Jones and New York Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein described the project in exactly these terms: “We sort of proposed the idea in a variety of ways that if you consider 1619 as the foundational date of the country, rather than 1776, it just changes your understanding and we call that a reframing of American history.” Just consider one last piece of evidence that Hannah-Jones is being deceptive about who invented the 1619-not-1776 framing.

My guess – she’s not being “deceptive”. She, and the Times, are backfilling and memory-holing because Identity Politics stands to cost the Democrats.

Again.

Am I the only one watching the various prosecutions underway from the riots a couple weeks ago, and wondering which ones are the “white supremacists?”

Any guesses?

I’m sure stumped.

During the Bush years, as many as a third of Democrats had some level of belief that 9/11 was an inside job.

Today, a significant number – on social media, it looks like a supermajority – believe that Trump colluded with Russia, that Kavanaugh raped someone, that “white supremacists” started the riots, that “Anti”-fa is anti-fascist, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s purported “dying wish” should have some legal merit and that the Electoral College disenfranchises them.

Which is why we’re seeing this sort of “journalism”, doubtlessly placed by a Democrat attack-PR firm, about a movement whose adherence among the GOP is likely in low single digits.

Yep – it’s Berg’s 7th Law, and Urban Progressive Privilege – a gaslighting twofer!

Fleet Farm, Labor Day Weekend. No .22, .223, .357, .38, .40, . 45, 5.56mm, or 9mm. Cabellas, the same. None expected. 

People who have confidence in their civic institutions do not panic about defending their families. 

Democrats have much to answer for.

Joe Doakes

As we noted the other day – people seek order.  If government doesn’t provide it, they’ll do it for themselves.  That’s not always a pleasant thing. 

Oddly enough, when you work for a boss that actively disparages, nay, defames the work you do, loudly, constantly and in public, employees are going to react.

The numbers for the Minneapolis Police Department are well-nigh catastrophic:

Nearly 40% attrition in four months. And I suspect the recruit stream has not only dwindled to a trickle, but is heavily made up of people you don’t want wearing badges and carrying guns.

Historically? Minneapolis went through similar (albeit not nearly so drastic) problems in the nineties, and before that in the seventies – and the city paid the price in terms of officer quality both times.

This could well make both of those troughs look like the good times.

Dennis Prager puts it well – the Left (today’s extreme left, not the center-left American liberalism of Hubert Humphrey or John F. Kennedy) destroys everything it touches.

The American Civil Liberties Union of the sixties and seventies, the ACLU of Nat Hentoff and other principled center-left civil libertarians was an organization with a political point of view, but that realized civil liberties were for everyone; that if the Manhattan crowd infringed rural Missouri’s civil liberties, they’d eventually regret it.

I’ve been joking – and then “joking” (see Berg’s 21st Law) – since the nineties that the ACLU should obey truth in advertising laws and change its name to the San Francisco, Hollywood and Upper East Side CIvil Liberties Union (SFHaUESCLU), since that’s really all they represent.

So I’m not sure if I should be happy or concerned that the ACLU has dropped all pretense to the contrary.

Ryan Winkler, the House Majority Leader, isn’t thrilled with President Trump stealing Joe Biden’s thunder:

Then the Majority Leader has had a pretty sheltered life.

Know what’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard?

Other than the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Gulag, the Holodomor, the Rape of Nanking, the subjugation of Tibet, the history of Haitian slavery, or pretty much an garden-variety genocide?

Well, not this…

But it was pretty bad anyway. And if Bogdan Vechirko – who owned no “white supremacist” paraphernalia at all, and heroically avoided hitting anyone (who wasn’t trying to get hit) wants to sue for slander, I’ll host a fundraiser.

Have you people call my people.

The bail fund promoted by Kamala Harris kicks another sex offender loose.

This is the same basic bunch that bailed an “Anti”-Fa thug who beat the snot out a Twin Cities’ bar owner for…

…well, we’re not sure yet. But it was a mostly peaceful protest.

Remember when your “progressive” acquaintances would scoff and say “there’s no such thing as a ‘limosine liberal’, a ‘condo pink’, or any of that?”

I do.

And they’ll do it again.

But here – along with Lori Lightfoot’s haircut and the blowout that was apparently inflicted on Nancy Pelosi by GOP operatives – is Exhibit A.

This was posted on one of those insidious neighborhood Facebook pages around which America’s newest plague, “Karen”, congeals:

So, let me get this straight: people, mostly college students, being in an age bracket that has suffered precisely zero COVID-19 deaths in the state of Minnesota, are going to a bar staffed mostly by people in their 20s and 30s (who have also experienced zero COVID-19 deaths so far), To celebrate going back to school after six months of absurd, ineffective, potentially counterproductive and onerous quarantine that has left them, like the rest of society, aching for some kind, any kind, of social contact at a time in their life when that is what they’re supposed to be doing?

What did I get wrong?

I’ll tell you what the paragraph above got wrong: They haven’t gotten into the bar yet.

Plums (a reliable, responsible-drinking source tells me) observes standard sociall distancing inside, as well as on the patio out back, notwithstanding the fact that they are nearly no confirmed cases of outdoor spread of the virus, no matter what your distance, no matter whether you’re wearing a mask or not.

I’m not saying the Karen involved is a totalitarian.

I am saying actual totalitarians need lots of people like her in society to have a chance of taking over.

On August 31, 1939, groups of SS officers staged “attacks” on several German border outposts. Near a radio station near the village of Gleiwitz (modern day Gliwice, in Polish Silesia), a group of operators “captured” the station and broadcast militant Polish propaganda, and then dumped a group of recently-executed prisoners, dressed in Polish uniforms, around the station and other border outposts.

The bodies, and the attacks, were “false flag” photo ops designed to let the Germans claim to the world press that the invasion of Poland – which occurred hours later, and which started the European phase of the largest, bloodiest conflagration in human history – was provoked by Poland. It was patent balderdash, but within Nazi German is was pretty much gospel.

“Poland provoked us!”

It’s a situation familiar to anyone who’s dealt with domestic abuse; the abuser never believes it’s their fault.

So “Big Left” wanted violence. They welcomed it. They begged for it in as many words, over and over:

Until it started hitting them in the polls.

Then? They were “Trump’s riots”.

There have been so many ginned-up moral panics over the past four years that they simply dissipate into the ether. Reminder: The National Guard hysteria — “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun,” for example, warned Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times — happened right before the “fascists are snatching our mailboxes!” hysteria.

“As right-wing groups increasingly move to confront protesters in U.S. cities, demonstrators are assessing how to keep themselves safe,” says the same New York Times today. By the time this is all over, rioters will be remembered as the true victims.

Democrats thought they could somehow take advantage of radical protests to help them win 2020. It has backfired. Once distaste for the violence began showing up in polling, and once Republicans could circumvent media coverage during their convention and focus on David Dorn and other victims of leftist violence, the Democratic Party and their allies switched the narrative.

Today, the dangerously unserious House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff blames Trump and, who else, the Russians for “willfully fanning the flames of this violence.” Joy Reid, recently given a primetime show on one of the country’s major news networks, claimed that the riots were false flag operations perpetrated by “armed white nationalists” deployed as a nationwide strategy to help reelect Trump.

I’m pretty sure Schiff, Walz, Frey, and the rest of the gallery of “elites” don’t believe this.

I do believe they are counting on their voters not being smart enough to tell the difference.

Here in the Metro, I’m not sure they’re wrong.

It’s your fault, dirty <strike>polack</strike> deplorable.

I listen to NPR so you don’t have to.

And there are some reasons it’s worth it. I mean, that’s where you get Live From Here with Chris Thile.

Well, for now, anyway.

Otherwise, there’s…

…well, a lot of racial virtue-signaling. I suspect the most lilywhite of America’s organizations is fearing a lot of backlash when the Bolsheviks come for the Mensheviks.

Speaking of which, it’s always a bit of a chuckle when the “progressives” that are NPR’s staff, social circle and pool of sources try to explain things like economics to the pool of “progressives” that are NPR’s audience.

Case in point – a piece from yesterday’s All Things Considered, an interview with one Eula Biss, about her new book about Capitalism.

Biss – a “non-fiction writing” major who has lived within the academic echo chamber her entire career, is the author of “Having and Being Had” – a primer on…

…wait for it…

…Capitalism.

Or, rather, a coddled, over-schooled/undereducated resident of the academic echo chamber’s perversion of the cartoon term “capitalism”, itself a hijacked representation of “the free market”…

…not that either term isn’t completely lost on Professor Biss.

Let’s start with this passage, which the NPR crowd will no doubt take for an emanation of wisdom, but merely proves that Biss’s son and babysitter are smarter than she is:

PFEIFFER: At one point, you’re talking about your son paying for a Pokemon card, although someone else thought he overpaid for the Pokemon card. What was it like for you to watch your son try to figure out what something was worth and why and maybe not figuring it out correctly?

BISS: Oh, it was amazing. In watching him learn how to play Pokemon the way it was being played in first and second grade at his school, I felt like I was seeing an economy be invented. But it was also somewhat excruciating to me because I saw the ways in which other children and his babysitter and I were training the values of capitalism into him. So, yes, at one point, he gave away a valuable Pokemon card because he just didn’t like it very much.

And then I heard his babysitter saying to him, were you a smart negotiator? And I thought, oh, no. What are we doing? This kid is only 6, and we’re already training him not to be generous and to get as much out of an exchange as he can possibly get out of it even if he doesn’t care about the thing he’s giving away.

PFEIFFER: Oh, that’s so interesting. I mean, diamonds are objectively very expensive and valuable, but if I don’t care about them and I just want to give them away, is that fine, or is that flawed financial thinking?

BISS: Under the logic of capitalism, it’s insane, right? But by some other logic, it makes perfect sense, especially since diamonds aren’t incredibly useful. You can’t eat them, and you can’t live inside them.

The interview – and one suspects the book – is a cavalcade of white progressive guilt, the sort of consequence-free wailing that afflicts our current layer of pseudointellectual societal overburden:

BISS: One of the things that I didn’t want to have happen to me as I entered this new life and lifestyle [i.e. – bought a house in a tony neighborhood near Northwestern Universitiy] was I didn’t want to begin to think that I had what I had because I’d worked hard, which is one of the patterns of thought very common to upper middle class. I don’t believe that I got what I got because I worked hard. I believe that I got what I got because the system favors me in a number of different ways – one, because I’m white, but also because I started out middle-class.

Notice she doesn’t mention “…because I’m part of an academic-industrial complex to which being a recipient of Urban Progressive Privilege gives me a priority ticket”.

Ms. Biss: If you’re that concerned about the things your “work” didn’t “earn” you, give up your teaching gig at Northwestern and become one of the people you describe later in the interview:

I think one of the possibilities that I could perceive, especially once the pandemic arrived, was the possibility of – what if we compensated the people we speak of as essential workers? So what if everyone who is essential to the daily workings of our lives was paid well and had health insurance and had basic security? That’s entirely possible. It’s even possible within capitalism, but that involves us making a series of changes in policy and, to some extent, in what we collectively value.

It’s entirely possible – say, within the context of a real epidemic, a modern-day Plague with a two-digit mortality rate, something that legitimately shuts down society for the duration of a disease serious enough to impinge even Nancy Pelosi or Lori Lightfoot’s lifestyles – for the skills and presence of “supply chain” workers, from the farm to the Walmart, to become very, very valuable. Vastly moreso than, say, writing professors at Northwestern.

But I don’t think that’s the “policy change” she’s referring to.

The bad news: these are the people teaching the “next generation of leaders”

The not-so-bad news: nobody she teaches will amount to anything outside the academic-industrial complex.

A family watches their grandmother die, through a window – if they’re lucky.

More often, they are barred from the hospital where their loved one spends their last hours.

Thousands – possibly as many as 30,000 – cancer patients die because their needed care has been, and is being, deferred due to absurd coronavirus restrictions. Nobody has even estimated the toll for other diseases.

A father is barred from his pregnant wife’s ultrasound. This isn’t just missing a cute gender-reveal or a heart-warming first-encounter; the wife has had several miscarriages; a lot of mental health is riding on this test. No dice, Dad. Wait in your car until summoned. Put a mask on, while you’re at it.

Nancy Pelosi gets a blow out.

You have just discovered the meaning of socialism.

This is DFL-endorsed candidate for the MN House, Bob Thompson, this past Saturday in Hugo, outside the home of Lt. Bob Kroll.

It certainly didn’t end there:

Additional footage of Thompson’s speech showed him wondering why protesters “were so peaceful.” He then told a man holding a blue lives matter sign to “take that sign” and “stick it in [his] ass.”

“We coming for everything that you motherf–ers took from us,” he added. “This whole [vulgarity] state burned down for 20 [vulgarity] dollars. You think we give a f– about burning Hugo down?”

Huh.

The story has evaded the Mainstream Media, of course – they want the DFL to hold those suburban seats. You’ve got to go to the honest, conservative media to get the story.

By the way – when former state rep Matt Dean asked one of the area’s freshman DFL reps to comment, this was what Amy “Profile in Courage” Wazlawik had to say

Pretty sure Rep. Runbeck’s position on the demonstration is clear.

Unlike Wazlawik’s.

Or those of Ken Martin, Melissa Hortman or Ryan Winkler, for that matter.

Quick question for our DFL readers – do you disavow this?

Yes or no.

Oh, yeah – we know where Governor Klink stands:

This is the party that wants to rule Minnesota. Not govern – rule.

Dissent will not be tolerated:

The Attorney General has leapt into action, suing the organizers.

In the meantime, the group of over-schooled, under-educated children of the political class who destroyed state property as the cameras rolled…

…and the State Patrol looked on are still “under investigation”.

“Some animals are more equal than others”

Found on Twitter. Verdict: Absolutely true – but it doesn’t go far enough.

30 Days from Now: “Expecting protests to be ‘peaceful’ is a sign of white privilege.”

60 Days from Now: “Any ‘violence’ inflicted on you at a peaceful protest is deserved – expecting not to have violence committed on you at a protest is a sign of privilege”

90 Days from Now: “Violence is Peace”

Remember – Berg’s 21st Law is a law for a reason.

Liberals keep haranguing us about Covid numbers, comparing New York to Florida, Minnesota to Wisconsin. They want us to believe open states fare worse than closed states. I don’t believe the numbers Liberals use are apt comparisons.

Covid kills old people. It’s reasonable that places with more old people would experience more Covid deaths. Raw number of deaths, and deaths-per-million-of-total-population, don’t take into account how many of the population are old enough to be at-risk (leaving aside the fact nobody believes the reported death numbers). You have to look at the at-risk populations to see how various states are doing.

There are 5,800,000 people in Wisconsin, 16.5% of them over-65, for a pool of 957,000 at-risk seniors, of which 906 have died of Covid.  That gives Wisconsin an at-risk death rate of 0.094%

There are 21,500,000 people in Florida, 21% of them over-65, for a pool of 4,515,000 at-risk seniors, of which 6,100 have died of Covid. That gives Florida an at-risk death rate of 0.135%.

There are 5,600,000 people in Minnesota, 16.3% of them over-65, for a pool of 912,800 at-risk seniors, of which 1,600 have died of Covid.  That gives Minnesota an at-risk death rate of 0.175%.

There are 19,500,000 people in New York, 17% of them over-65, for a pool of 3,315,000 at-risk seniors, of which 32,700 have died of Covid. That gives New York an at-risk death rate of 0.986%.

Minnesota’s results are twice as bad as Wisconsin’s (17 to 9).

New York’s results are SEVEN TIMES as bad as Florida’s (98 to 13).

Among the at-risk population, open states have decisively better results.

That’s a story that needs better telling.

Joe Doakes

That’s been the case since the beginning of this plague: “Blue State” pundits, pols and Karens have been predicting perdition for uppity square-staters with the fervor of Pentecostal ministers.

The comparison is less and less inapt every day.

As this is written, the general trend in research indicates that children – under 10-ish – suffer exceptionally mild symptoms of Covid, frequently none at all, and may not even transmit it when infected (which may or may not be related to the observation that asymptomatic people may not spread it, either).

At the same time, the nation’s teachers’ unions are demanding a near-complete lockdown, including another stretch of “distance learning” – which for many children is the worst possible way to learn, amplifying the stultifying effects of sitting in a desk with the boredom of never leaving home at all – even if the home isn’t an unpleasant or cramped place to be, as indeed it is for many, largely inner-urban children. And that’s for kids where learning at home is even an option.

We’ve all heard the stories – children rendered paranoid about germs and masks, terrified about dying hooked up to a ventilator or being left orphaned, kept sometimes literally sequestered away from the world, including the in-person socializing that’s such a vital part of childhood, often by the same parents that are the most obnoxious, hectoring helicopter elders stereotype can muster (I have to figure that yesterday’s “helicopter parent” is todays’ Karen, while we’re on the subject).

So what’s that going to do to kids?

Probably nothing good.

And, given the shadiness and opacity of Governor Klink’s response, I have to wonder – what if, along with a “mail-in” election that could put the DFL’s mass of fraudulent registrations into play, “raising a generation of kids so insecure, damaged and anxious they make millennials seem like John Wayne in comparison” is the actual goal?

Anxious, insecure people who’ve had any notion of self-determination strained out of them are “progressivism’s” farm team.

Psychologically speaking, this quarantine may well be the biggest “grooming” exercise ever attempted.

Via Facebook friend (and, I think, occasional reader John Doiron)

…Big Left is looking for the real racists.

But they have met the enemy, and it is them.

And you? The citizen of Minneapolis? Presuming you’re not part of the political class?

You’re a loser.

“You should be voting in your ‘best interests'”

You mean, the “best interests” that gave voters Camden?

Stockton?

Detroit?

Newark?

New Orleans?

Baltimore?

Saint Louis?

DC?

North Minneapolis?

The destruction on Lake Street and University Avenue?

The carnage every summer in south Chicago?

Those “best interests?”

Just wanna be clear, here.

Keith Ellison says cops shouldn’t be the ones responding to rapes.

Emphasis added:

“If you’re a woman who’s been a victim of a sexual assault and the assailant has ran away, wouldn’t you rather talk to somebody who is trained in helping you deal with what you’re dealing with as opposed to somebody whose main training is that they know how to use a firearm, right?” he asked.

Ellison posed this question during a broadcast featuring himself, Democrat Congresswoman Karen Bass and Yamiche Alcindor, PBS’s White House Correspondent on July 17. As he spoke, both the congresswoman and reporter looked downward and did not interrupt.

The Republican National Committee research team discovered the clip and posted it across social media.

Side note – “…the assailant has ran away?”

He went to law school, for chrissake.

But yes – he think social workers, not investigators, should be the first to respond to rapes.

“Keith Ellison clearly is not even aware of the MN Post Board standards for police training. Licensed police officers receive a variety of training in multiple subjects including how to interview a rape victim. As a state leader he should be more familiar with state standards before he makes assumptions,” says the officer. This is the same officer who has delivered verifiably factual information to Alpha News previously.

The fact that Ellison apparently doesn’t believe there’s an investigative component to responding to sexual assault should make everyone in Minnesota with a female in their life really, really angry.

“If You’re Not Part Of The Solution, You’re Part Of The Problem”

People who use this statement always use it incompletely. I’ll do it again, filling in and emphasiing the words that are unstated but that actually define the statement.

“If you’re not part of the solution I’m demanding, you’re part of the problem that’s in my way“.

It’s incumbent on you to convince me – everyone – that your solution isn’t worse than the problem. If you are a socialist, if your “solution” can be shown via a rational argument based in fact to be worse than the problem you see, then you’re going to have a tough time of it.

And if you use statements like “If you’re not part of the solution…”, it’s going to be even tougher, because if you knew all that rational, factual, “convincing people” stuff, you wouldn’t have to resort to such twaddle.

“Silence is Violence”.

No. It’s not.

Silence – if you catch me silent at all – is me keeping my mouth shut while I figure out what I think, to say nothing of what I’m going to say. Your freedom of speech doesn’t give you the right to tell me what I’m going to say.

If your response to that is “there is only one thing to say”, and that’s to agree with your point of view – then most likely you’re trying to logroll and shame people into knocking off all that pesky thinking, and just acquiescing.^[1] If your position is worthy, I may eventually agree with you. Not doing so, in and of itself, doesn’t make me the immoral one.

Logically, it’s Orwellian – silence is the opposite of violence. Morally, it’s worse than Orwellian.

If your response is “that’s how Germans reacted when Jews were getting hauled off” – well, there’s your opportunity to convince me that the issue we face is, actually, that clear-cut.

If it’s not? If there are some facets to the issue at hand over which reasonable people may debate?

If you were to tell a spouse or a significant other “if you’re not verbally acquiescing with my point of view, you are party to evil”, a therapist would call you an emotional abuser.

And they’d be right.

Logrolling is no substitute for a convincing argument.

Unfortunately, people using this form of logrolling, gaslighting chanting point aren’t trying to “convince”, and they’re not trying to provoke thought.