To: Jason Chavez, Minneapolis DSA/DFL councilbeing
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Punching

Councilbeing Chavez,

You tweeted this on Wednesday:

Let’s talk about the term “uprising”.

It usually connotes a group of subjugated, beaten-down people, “rising up” against their oppressors.

Good examples of uprisings that fit some variant of that definition:

• The Boston Tea Party – indigenous people rose up against colonialism
• The Sobibor Uprising – people escaped from colonizers who had started the job Hamas is trying to finish.
• The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – actual genocide victims attacked actual practitioners of genocide.
• The Storming of the Bastille – Musical theatre fans attack critics

Each of these uprisings have a few things in common: the people doing the uprising were being actively oppressed by those up against whom they rose; the targets of their attacks were the actual oppressors; tax authorities, the SS, the monarchy.

In May of 2020, people who considered themselves oppressed (we’ll accept that for sake of argument) “rose up” and destroyed…

…hundreds of businesses, extremely disproportionately owned by immigrants, people of color, people in the neighborhood. Oh, the Third Precinct got destroyed – after a couple of days of generalized looting and arson, seemingly almost as an afterthought, to give the “uprising” some window-dressing sense of political virtue other than “looting and burning cafes owned by first-generation Americans”.

I may be just an obstreporous peasant, but I think “downrising” might be a better term.

That is all.

Block a freeway? Burn down a neighborhood? Jack a car, rob a store, shoot up on a train, b**w a john on a bus, attack someone on a train platform?

Mary Moriarty’s got your back.

Exercise your first amendent right to demonstrate for Mary Moriarty’s enemies, whoever they are, wherever you are?

You’re a threat to democracy:

Mary Moriarty is the real authoritarian – or “fascist”, as the kids are calling ’em these days.

UPDATE: Here’s Londregan’s attorney, Chris Madel’s response.

And let me tell you…

…it may be the best press conference I’ve seen since Norman Schwartzkopf’s wartime pressers. More drop-mic moments than a “Freddie Mercury” night at a karaoke bar.

Wish we could get this guy to run for Senator or Governor, if he’s GOP.

To: Alvin Bragg,
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: You Did It!

I’ve never been coy about the fact that I’ve never cared about Donald Trump – or at least his dominant public persona. I don’t care for what his erratic and impulsive nature cost the GOP in 2018 and 2020.

Something I like far less than Trump? Debasing the justice system to harass poltiical opponents and try to rig elections.

Alvin Bragg’s goal may not have been to create someone who’s going to do whatever he can to push Trump over the top this fall.

If it were, I’m not sure what he’d have done differently.

January 6 was a riot – and the foundations of our representative republic were never in danger, any more than during Watergate or the Civil War.

The Trump trial – activities that according to the judge related to no crime, over charges that the FEC said weren’t crimes back when they were within the statute of limitations – is a direct assault on one of the things that tenuously separates America from the barbarians.

So far.

Congrats, Dems. You did it. You dragged me, kicking and screaming, into supporting Trump .

Let’s make America a constitutional republic with the rule of laws, not men, again.

To: DFL Parents
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Your Kids

DFL comms guy Ryan Faircloth [1] had himself a chuckle in the lobby of the GOP convention last Friday:

The sign, naturally, is a just a tad tongue-in-cheek.

But the MNDFL – the party of “comedians” who aren’t funny and people with no sense of humor, to sa nothing of the party of Judd Hoff and Nicole Mitchell – forgot about Judd Hoff, Nicole Mitchell and “Anti”-Fa long enough to post this:

Now, let’s focus on the sign.

DFLer parents: how about teaching your kids that hitting people with skateboards and shooting golf balls and frozen water bottles from slingshots isn’t actually political speech?

That is all.

[1] CORRECTION: Ryan Faircloth appears to be a reporter for the Strib, not a DFL comms guy.

We regret the error.

Answer: Show them you exist and aren’t going away:

The comments on this tweet are the tip of the rhetorical iceberg, and bespeak a crowd who treat violations of their ‘Urban Progressive Privilege’ like getting jabbed in the yarbles with a knitting needle.

It’s high time we stopped calling Ivy Leaguers like this Columbia spokesbeing:

…as “our best and brightest”.

By the way – at “Mitch Berg University”, students who infringe other students rights – Jewish, conservative, liberal, communist, I don’t care – by depriving them of the use of the campus they pay to attend will be blockaded into their “autonomous zones”; no water or food go in, no sewage comes out.

Only way out is through a checkpoint where they either make a videotaped apology and commit to pay restitution to the students they’ve adversely affected, or sign the acknowledgement on their expulsion paperwork.

In California, fast-food restaurants must now pay $20/hour. Newsom has celebrated this as a major achievement.

But Newsom’s restaurant group can, and does, hire people for much, much less.

PlumpJack Cafe in Olympic Valley – which is among a group of eateries owned by a company Newsom founded in 1992 – is hiring a part-time busser who “will aim to assist the food server … to ensure guest satisfaction during all aspects of the dining experience,” according to a ZipRecruiter posting.

The job listing states the salary for the busser is $16 an hour plus tips.

But a food service worker would make more working at a McDonald’s than at the high-end restaurant and bar thanks to the new $20 fast food minimum wage that went into effect Monday.

Fast food restaurants under Newsom’s law includes any place without table-side service that has more than 60 locations around the country – which seems pretty oddly specific, targeting McDonalds and skipping Chilis…

…or the PlumpJack group, where you can get a steak for $90 with tax and tip.

Some animals are more equal than others…

To: DOJ/DHS/FBI/Deep State
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: McCarthy Called, He Wants His Scare Back

Feds,

Just a quick detour into music history:

OK – with that out of the way:

I mean, I‘ve been predicting this since 2009 – not that it was a huge reach.

Anyway, Ms. Federal Agent, it’s b-E-r-G. Not “U”. I’ve never actually met a Burg. And yes, that dress makes your ass look fat.

That is all.

History doesn’t repeat – but it rhymes.

The world’s major powers are rattling their sabers as they spar in secondary theaters.

The economies are in the hands of people who love to tinker with the levers and buttons of the Big State.

And young intellectually over-stimulated but underendowed bobbleheads are romping and playing:

Everything old is new again.

What’s the term all the urbanist fanboys are using these days?

Oh, yeah – “vibrant”.

Here’s another example of blue city “vibrancy”, this time from San Francisco:

Any bets as to whether the Minneapolis City Council will consider “desolation” a bug, or a counter-capitalist feature?

The Minneapolis City Council’s vote on minimum wages for independent contractor drivers has driven Lyft out of Minneapolis, and Uber out of both cities.

A friend of the blog emails with an initial reaction very close to my own:

The Minneapolis City Council doesn’t actually understand a lot. They want affordable options, but they want people to be paid high wages. It doesn’t always work that way.http://apnews.com/article/minneapolis-uber-lyft-ridehailing-minimum-wage-d60db6a2e2580dc1d93c438a8cffa5ee

That being said, Uber and Lyft were never affordable here in the Twin Cities like they are elsewhere. That is likely because the market here doesn’t support it like it might in cities with higher density populations. 

This article mentions that “Seattle and New York City have passed similar policies in recent years that increase wages for ride-hailing drivers, and Uber and Lyft still operate in those cities.”

Yes, well, the cost to use those services was lower to start with because they actually could make money there. So, they are likely still making money even if passengers are paying more to ride. I would bet those services were barely making it here as it was. It’s not hard to drive most places, it’s not even particularly expensive. The downtowns of MSP are mostly dead anyway, so who is using Lyft and Uber at this stage anymore? As far as I can tell, the council’s stupid ordinance just gave them the excuse to pull out. 

That was pretty much what I thought; it was yet another case of a prog city council demanding the world violate the laws of economics to give them what they want.

But wait. There’s more.

It’s the current DFL – so one must always check to see if there’s an ulterior motive involving transferring wealth from taxpayers to the DFL’s non-profit/government complex.

And of course there is:

There you go – Soviet-style ride sharing.

Because the DSA needs to make sure they get a cut of all that ride-share money.

If you’re a working or middle-class taxpayer in Minnesota, the DFL wants to show you:

They took $17 billion dollars extra from you, and gave you $260 back, maybe. But they want to give illegals a Universal Basic Income.

This is a complete inversion of anything plausibly close to “Justice”.

SCENE: A conference room in Zürich, Switzerland. An international team of historians is gathered in a conference hall. Behind the panel tabel, a large “Powerpoint 2170” holographic slide displays the title for the session: “Origins of the Second American Civil War”.

PROFESSOR A: Welcome, one and all, to this discussion on the origins of the Second American Civil War. We’d like to start with this presentation from PROFESSOR B.

PROFESSOR B: Thank you. As you know, the origins of the Second American Civil War, 150 years ago, are shrouded in mystery. But we found this exchange on “X”, a “social medium” popular around 2024, that sheds some light on the subject.

(B swooshes his hand in the air, and the holograph advances to show a “Twitter thread”i)

ProgressiveDuke1332: ReTHUGlicons have no policies to fix Minneapolis’s problems.

Mitchpberg: Of course we do. Arrest, prosecute and incarcerate actual dangerous criminals. Make life better for law-abiding citizens. Get rid of impediments to affordable life, like rent control, the Met Council’s idiot zoning policies and city policies about “driving density”. Have a a sales tax holiday. Cut spending, and cut taxes, especially some of the more niggling, punitive taxes like parking meter rates and hospitality taxes, to simulate traffic and business.

ProgressiveDuke1332: Hahaha, mitchpberg think you can eliminate crime by lowering parking fees!

PROFESSOR B: This, I hold, was the beginning of a pattern where nobody in society could communicate about anything.

PROFESSOR C: So, part of America lashed out at the other part as a matter of…

PROFESSOR D: Intellectual self-defense?

PROFESSOR B: Precisely.

(Brow-furrowing and beard-scratching follows)

PROFESSOR E: I mean, it doesn’t not make sense…

(General assent breaks out).

And SCENE

Did you hear that crash last week?

That was the sound of the DFL trying to demolish the First Amendment.

We touched on it briefly last Friday. But here’s a handy 20 minute digest of what exactly happened:

And yes, it’s systematic.

From the “it could be comedy, if it weren’t for what they actually mean” files: Minneapolis representative Brion Curran took some time off from driving hammered through Central Minnesota while thinking she was in the Twin Cities to tell us what’s what:

It’s tempting to respond “we know you exist, Rep. Curran. It’s just irrelevant to our actual lives, and don’t bother forcing us to see this your way”.

But about that last bit:

Under the DFL proposal that reps FInke and Curran are talking about..

…and talking, and talking…

…churches can be sued into obedience.

This is like those lawsuits against the bakers and florists and photographers, but in statute, and everywhere.

If this isn’t enough to get you to hold your nose and support even an imperfect Republican for the legislature, I’m really not sure what to tell you anymore.

Christians are the same as slaveholders.

No, that’s what Rep. Luke Frederick of Mankato says:

He’s responding to an amendment that would protect churches and their members freedom of conscience about transgender issues.

The MNDFL is at war with the Constitution.

UPDATE: Harry Niska sums up the, er, debate:

I’ll be talking with Rep. Niska on the NARN tomorrow.

Joe Doakes, formerly from Como Park, emails:

The most common rejoinder to my concern the 2020 election was stolen is: “It’s not possible.  The conspiracy would have to be too large.  Someone would talk.”  What if it’s not a conspiracy? What if it’s a shift in attitude?  What a significant portion of the public believes crime is no longer wrong?

Have you noticed the way people drive?  Stores closing because of rampant shoplifting?  Carjacking rates through the roof?  Why now?  Why are all the rules being ignored?  What changed? I posit a general attitude shift.  The rules don’t apply to me.  I can speed, shoplift, rob people at gunpoint, and you know why? Because F-U, that’s why.

It’s even more pronounced in the “legal” system.  The New York judge with his bullshit $350 million fine.  The defamation jury with its $83 million verdict.  The Hawaiian judge who decided the Aloha spirit is superior to the Second Amendment.  These are examples of the same attitude that makes ordinary people think it’s okay to commit crimes.  I suggest that same attitude made election workers think it was okay to help steal the election. They didn’t need a centralized bureaucracy giving orders to minions.  Everybody just did a little extra by themselves, ran a few ballots through twice, disqualified a few Trump ballots or shifted them to Biden.  Why not?  Who’s going to stop them?  Keep counting until we have enough – it’s the Al Franken model (and the basis for the recent joke that the 49er’s found 3 mail-in touchdowns so they actually won).

The lawless attitude is getting worse and more focused.  Donald Trump is the new Emmanuel Goldstein from the book “1984.”  He’s the designated enemy.  He’s the one person it’s okay to hate. There is no punishment, no insult, no disgrace too vile for him and it’s okay for anybody and everybody to play the game, even using taxpayer money to hire your lover to bring baseless charges against him.

RINOs say “you better not change the rules, you won’t like living under the new rules” but that’s a bluff and Liberals know it. Trump didn’t prosecute Hillary because our side is ‘better than that,’ we don’t ‘stoop to their level.’  Yeah, but that also means there’s no penalty for cheating, lying, stealing, rigging, perjuring . . . so why not do whatever it takes to win?

That judge who imposed the $350 million fine and banned Trump from owning any business for three years, feels safe.  He knows he won’t get overturned and even if he does, he’s still the hero of the courthouse back corridor and the bar association luncheon. He’s not afraid of being impeached, his house won’t get burned down, he won’t lose his pension, he’s safe, same as the cheating election officials and crooked businesses paying off Hunter. Hillary and Biden won’t even be charged, must less railroaded, the way Trump has been.  And they know it.  And we know it too, which may be part of the reason people feel like the rules don’t apply anymore.  Certainly they don’t apply to the big-shots.  Why should they apply to me?

There is no remedy for a pervasive lawless attitude within the Constitutional system.  The Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, the Judicial Branch, they’re all in on it.  The Administrative Deep State, they are, too.  The Fourth Estate – the legacy media – up to their eyeballs.  Running for school board, voting harder, boycotting Budweiser – none of that can overcome the pervasive bias in the system.

The only way to shift the attitude back is to go outside the Constitutional framework of government to restore respect for law and order.  That’s the destination too many Conservatives are afraid to reach.  Because once we conclude the system is broken and cannot be fixed from within, the only conclusion is we must throw out the system and replace it.  That’s insurrection.  That’s a revolution.  That’s a civil war.  It’s the end of the nation as we know it and it would throw the entire world into an economic depression if not a literal Dark Age.

I’m terrified there’s no other way to stop the slow-motion train wreck, because I can safely predict I’ll be one of the first people rounded up and shot for my opinions.   The only questions are which of my “conservative” friends will rat me out, and which of my liberal friends will be helping load me into the cattle car?

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

The US – especially the rural US, but even the bigger cities – used to be a relatively high trust society. It’s not anymore. I’d say “the consequences will be dire”, but they pretty much already are.

Minnesota “needs” 381 “cannabis dispensaries”, according to the same people who claimed that the state would have 20,000 Covid deaths, “best case”, by July of 2020.

And if you think that’s a curious number to arrive at, you’re right:

Now that recreational marijuana is legal, Minnesota will need nearly 400 dispensaries to comply with state law, a new study reveals.

The law requires one dispensary for every 12,500 Minnesotans. That totals to a minimum of 381 cannabis dispensaries across the state.

Why that exact ratio – a ratio higher than the ratio of McDonalds restaurants to Minnesotans?

Well, y’see, there was a study:

Participants in the study included Minnesotans who have consumed marijuana within the past year. Of those participants, 83% reported cannabis consumption at least once a month. Forty percent reported consuming cannabis “daily or almost daily.”

Still doesn’t make sense?

Just remember – the whole thing is a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the political class that employs the bureaucrats that’ll administer this inevitable soon-to-be boondoggle.

Now it makes sense, right?

A fire at a west end building housing three conservative groups is being investigated as arson:

My firend, former co-host and CAE chair John Hinderaker commented:

John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment (CAE), said based on the location of the fires in the building, it appears that someone targeted conservative groups.

“The fires were obviously set by someone. They targeted conservative organizations. They didn’t firebomb the chiropractors or psychologists or Manufacturers Alliance. We are working with authorities to try to identify the perpetrators,” Hinderaker said.

The Golden Valley Fire Department responded to a fire at 8421 Wayzata Blvd. shortly after 2 a.m. Sunday morning, according to the fire department.

Among those cheering on domestic terror was “Represenative” Andy Smith (Chucklhead Jagoff, Rochester):

Apparently having one of his (dumber) representatives giggling like a schoolgirl about domestic terrorism was enough to get even Ken Martin and the DFL Mystery Meat Machine to spring into PR action:

Nothing could shut that little twerp up until, apparently, giggling like a middle-school mean girl about domestic terror.

PS: I hope “Protect” Minnesota can provide good information to the FBI/BATFE to find and arrest those responsible for this apparent attack.

…while it’s always the Democrats who fantasize [1] about turning the military loose on Americans…:

…it’s the Republicans who are really the “Fascists”.

Representative Wu went on to bleat…:

That’s right – a guy who openly fantasizes about shooting missiles at Americans is concerned about “dangers to his community”.

Gene Wu may be the modern Democrat party’s intellectual thought leader.

[1] One suspects “arousal” to the level of, uh, showing physical symptoms, at least in Mr. Wu’s case.

“Art” as humanity used to know it is pretty much dead, at least in any community of people who call themselves “artists” anymore.

This was from a, for lack of a better term, “art event” in Powderhorn Park over the weekend:

Ignore the stupid sled.

Look, rather, at the audience. What do you see?

Inevitably, they are smug, corn-fed, entitled, white progressive members of the laptop class and the non-profit/industrial complex – no doubt from “Urban Life” theme parks like Marcy Holmes or Merriam Park, larping it up as “art fans” in Powderhorn, the part of Minneapolis that smug progressives go to when they want to be “down with the neighborhood” (before they scamper back home to where all the barristas and short order brunch technicians have to commute to from Fridley and Brooklyn Center).

The MPD has condemned the display – which, I’m sure, is causing all sorts of nasal snorking over lattes this morning.

And why not? It’s not their stores being cleaned out (none of them as any concept of the free market more involved than a coffee shop), not their cars being jacked (does anyone actually steal electric cars?), not them waking up to bullet holes in their siding.

Here’s hoping every last one of these cretins needs a cop sometime soon.

Who knows? Sometimes even Progressives can learn something.

OK, so something useful, non-toxic and non-authoritarian happened at Davos.

Javier Milei loads his carronades with rhetorical grapeshot and aims them at the decks:

We need one of him here.

All is not well in China.

This video shows a Miao village (Miao are ethnic cousins of the H’mong) smacking down a group of local Communist Party thugs sent to enforce the party’s burial racket; locals are forced to bury the ashes of the dead in official, party-approved cemeteries, at immense expense.

The locals were having none of it.

This is part of a growing wave of unrest inside Red China, as the gap between “Have Nots” and “Have Lots” grows gapingly wide.

As to the locals beating the crap out of party thugs? It’s the kind of thing one hopes we see in Greater Minnesota the next time Keith Ellison sends his goons to enforce and unconstitutional lockdown…

I saw “The Fall of Minneapolis” again last week.

Now, when I first mentioned seeing it a few months back, a few smart people whose opinions I never discount asked “is there anything new that the courts didn’t settle?”

That brings up a couple of questions.

In our society, we usually think that if a court – an impartial jury of our peers, a couple of adversarial attorneys patiently digging out the facts, a fair and impartial judge facilitating it all via “due proces” – decides something, that’s that. The truth has been found.

There’s problems with that.

The was this guy, James Fleming, a Facebook friend, shooter and criminal defense attorney. He used to snap at people who referred to “due process” by itself as a reason to trust something. Paraphrasing: due process isn’t a guarantee of fairness, much less justice. It means the proceedings all check the same checkboxes and standards. The fairness and justice is all in the details.

So – how can that go wrong?

Years ago, I was *very* tangentially involved in the case of a man who’d been accused of a fairly grisly rape and murder in 1982. He had been kind of a lowlife, a petty criminal and drug addict, the kind of guy you’ve seen on a thousand episodes of “Cops” insisting to the officer “I have NO IDEA whose gun and cocaine that is!” He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

The courts settled the matter.

A decade and change later, a group of people did enough digging and agitating on his behalf to get the attention of “The Innocence Project”, a group of pro-bono lawyers that works on what they believe to be unjust convictions.

The lawyers found that the original conviction had been secured via:
– A jailhouse snitch with a history of perjury whose testimony nonetheless was allowed
– A District Attorney hiding exculpatory evidence.
– An incompetent public defender.

The exculpatory evidence included forensic evidence that, with modern DNA testing, could have shed some light on who the attacker was. But it vanished as completely as whispering “due process” in the wind.

After years of legal wrangling, the lawyers found the evidence – and with more modern DNA testing, determined that the man, who’d been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” after “due process”, couldn’t have possibly been the murderer. In 2003 he was released, after 21 years on Death Row.

And he’s not alone. In the past 50 years, *185* inmates have been released from Death Row. Not granted new trials. Not commuted to lesser sentences. *Released* from Death Row to the world – because their “convictions beyond a reasonble doubt” were in error, due to perjury, official misconduct, incompetence, and even some honest but terrible mistakes.

So – do I think the answer to “is it true?” is “the courts have spoken?”

Let’s just say I believe in (grudging, conditional) trust but verification. Throw in a heaping dollop of skepticism about the integrity of public officials and systems.

More later this wee4

Don’t get me wrong. Jason DeRusha – former Channel 4 reporter and morning anchor, turned afternoon drive guy at the once-great WCCO – isn’t a bad guy. I’ve met him, engaged with him a time or two, and by Twin Cities media standards he’s OK. He’s no Bob Collins, anyway [1]

But if I were a DFL Comms person who wanted to come up with a nice, low-impact media appearance to side-slip the impression that your Governor’s only media contact was an endless stream of selfies and cheesecake (and donut, and pizza and corn dog) photos, without sweating the Governor too hard, DeRusha – or, really, anyone at ‘CCO – would be at the top of the list.

But somehow he managed to choke:

“Minnesota is a diverse state, it continues to grow. This flag was crafted in the 1890s,” said Gov. Walz regarding Minnesota’s current flag. “It’s highly offensive to a large number of people, and there’s very little debate about that.”

“…there’s very little debate” because the DFL steamrolled it through without a whole lot of debate allowed.

But here’s the clinker:

When asked about this topic, Gov. Walz compared these Republican efforts to “somehow saving the Confederate battle flag.” The governor added, “These are the arguments that happened with Jefferson Davis statues in Alabama.”

That’s right. The “old” flag was the one the 21st Virginia carried at Gettysburg.

Remember – he’s the governor of “#OneMinnesota”.

[1] Of course, either was Bob Collins, ’til he retired.