To: Rep. Liz Cheney
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: It’s Not Me, It’s You

Rep Cheney,

I’m not the biggest fan of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

For that matters, I’m not the most passionate of your detractors.

But on this issue?

So let me make sure I’m clear on this; if our government is violating the Constitution you’re wrapping yourself in, how long are we supposed to go along with it?

“Our country is governed by the Constitution”

One might hope. But when the government turns the executive branch institutions – the FBI, IRS, BATFE, CDC – against the peoples freedom? When the government trashes the separation of powers and undercuts federalism, and proposes violating the contract under which small states agreed to share some of their sovereignty with big states by eliminating the Electoral College and making the Senate reflect popular rather than state votes…

…how long before dismissing those usurpations with an ofay “Well, the Constitution” isn’t by itself an answer?

“Secession is unconstitutional“

So?

So was the American Revolution.

Saying “secession is illegal” is like trying to end a moral argument with “…because the Bible said so”. It’s vapid and cowardly. Is it illegal even if the Constitution has been rendered moot? Because saying that is like saying the preservation of government is the point, not the system the Constitution establishes and the eternal rights it enshrines.

Which do you think it is, Rep. Cheney?

That is all.

Staffer for conservative GOP Latina congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna discusses how loving and accepting the left is:

Berg’s Eighth Law has no exceptions.

…when those 87,000 new IRS agents were “only going to go after rich tax cheats“.

The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service today issued Notice 2023-13, which contains a proposed revenue procedure that would establish the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program, a voluntary tip reporting program between the IRS and employers in various service industries. The IRS is issuing this guidance in proposed form to provide an opportunity for public comment.

The proposed SITCA program is designed to take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance. The proposed program would also decrease taxpayer and IRS administrative burdens and provide more transparency and certainty to taxpayers. The proposed program includes several features:

Politicians lie. It’s a fact that was building careers for editorialists, humorists and satirists since long before it made WIll Rogers a well-known man.

But today’s Democrats seem to be counting on, not just gullibility, but active willful ignorance, on a titanic scale.

Secretary of State Simon wants to throw away whatever a little relevance Minnesota has in presidential elections.

No, really. He said it in as many words on Monday:

Let’s be clear about this: the Electoral College exists because smaller states realized that a national popular vote for President would essentially leave the Executive branch of government to be elected by the voters of the most populous states. All the decisions the President and his branch make – the enforcement of all laws, the spending of all budgets – would be determined by the residents of the most populous parts of the country, and those parts would be who the President answered to.

The Electoral College was part of a contract – our Constitution – by which smaller states avoided getting logrolled, and thus consented to join the union.

If they abolish the Electoral College, there is literally no reason for any states other than California, New York, California, Texas, Florida, Illinois and maybe Pennsylvania, and the de facto mono-state of New Jersey/Connecticut/Massachusetts/Rhode Island, to remain in the union, since everyone else will be vassals.

Simon is calling for Minnesota to become irrelevant to Presidential politics. .

Let’s be clear: abolishing the Electoral College is, i’ll be charitable, at least as great a threat to American democracy as January 6. And that’s being charitable and meeting the Sixers halfway.

And before anyone responds in the comments with “Hahaha that was settled in 1865” – no. It was settled in 1776.

…and the enemy was nothing but a bunch of snot-nosed eighth graders…

…with firebombs and deep political connections?

You learn a lot about people…

…by what they publicly fantasize about.

Democrats in Minnesota and nationwide are switching into enforcement mode.

The legal persecution of Jack Phillips continues…

Phillips’s public expression of his faith had placed a target on his back, and the narrow Supreme Court ruling in his favor had the two-pronged effect of further inflaming activists while simultaneously depriving the baker of decisive, precedent-setting protections against their agitations. In 2017, “the very day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’s case, Autumn Scardina, a transgender activist in Denver, called Masterpiece Cakeshop and requested a custom cake with a blue exterior and a pink interior to symbolize a gender transition,” David Harsanyi wrote. Scardina was allegedly a member of the Church of Satan, and court documents alleged the activist had also sought Phillips’s services for charming depictions such as a cake celebrating Satan’s birthday, which would feature “a large figure of Satan, licking a 9″ black Dildo,” with the requirement that the dildo must necessarily be “an actual working model that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.”

Phillips, of course, politely declined Scardina’s requests. Scardina, of course, proceeded to file a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The commission, of course, ruled against Phillips. In August 2018, two months after his initial Masterpiece Cakeshop victory, Phillips was back in court.

Last week, a panel for the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld an earlier court decision requiring Phillips to bake Scardina’s transgender cake. No surprise there — the same court had also upheld the state’s original injunction demanding that Phillips bake the same-sex wedding cake. What should be abundantly clear at this point is that “civil rights,” in this context, are more about power — wielded against disfavored groups, and in favor of privileged ones — than any neutral conception of legal protection. Even as it ruled against Phillips, the Commission upheld the right of bakers to refuse to make a Bible-shaped cake inscribed with the message: “Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:2.” This double standard is a feature, not a bug, of how these bureaucracies function. As NR’s editors noted today, the practical effect of the Left’s weaponization of anti-discrimination laws “is to demand that the faithful kneel before favored identity groups.”

…and is so hamfistedly symbolic that a sophomore-year English prof would send it back for rewrite if it were fiction.

The process is the punishment.

Of course, the MNDFL does its darnedest to make it difficult, even impossible, to run as a Republican. I’ve heard more than one GOP legislator who’d been pondering running for higher office without having spent their teens and twenties as cloistered monks say they were going to demur on running , because the DFL’s opposition research crowd would make not only their lives, but their family’s, a living hell.

WIth that in mind?

Keith Ellison is going to show Scott Jenson that running against the DFL has consequences. Via David Strom:

…the Attorney General of the State of Minnesota has taken it upon himself to step up the harassment of Dr. Jensen based upon already adjudicated charges that should never have been brought in the first place. It is disgraceful and can be explained by nothing other than politics.

It is a political hit job–punishment not for what he has done, or even said, but for who he is. A well-respected Republican who dared to challenge Tim Walz in the last election. They are sending a message that taking on the Democrat establishment will ruin your life.

I said above that the process is the punishment. At some point, the determination that he may continue to conduct medicine will not exonerate him, nor return the time, effort, and money that he has to spend to defend himself. They have turned him into a doctor who has faced 5 investigations. How many potential patients will avoid him for that alone? Countless.

No matter how bogus the charges are, the punishment has taken place simply by making the charges and forcing him to defend himself.

Politics ain’t beanbag, and it is usual for people in the midst of campaigns to hurl charges at each other. But this goes way beyond that. They are mobilizing all the power of the state to destroy Jensen.

This is what tyranny looks like in America.

When all your oppoonent cares about is gaining and consolidating power, “democracy” is just a decorative verbal sprig of parsley on top of whatever horrors our new Leninists are hoiking up.

One of the things about having one’s party in the minority is that, free from the possibility of having to try to craft compromises to pass legislation, they can submit legislation that reflects their core principles to a T.

When the GOP is in the minority – as it is in the MN House and Senate? Then you see bills that make you wonder “where was that kind of thinking when the Republicans controlled the gavel?” Of course, it’s easy to stand on pure principle as the minority – it’s all for the campaign lit in the next election.

Parties in the minority submit legislation that reflects their inner id.

WIth the GOP in the minority, you get solid conservative, even daringly libertarian proposals.

WIth Democrats in the minority? You get attacks on core liberties.

Adam Schiff and his fellow Dems dream of gutting the First Amendment. He and his cronies are proposing to reverse Citizens United – which ended speech rationing for non-union corporations – and re-regulate political spending, which is political speech.

Of course, they’re in the minority, for now:

It’s just a political stunt, of course, as Schiff doesn’t have the votes. But it does reflect the authoritarian outlook of the contemporary left on free expression. From the day the decision came down, 13 years ago this week, Citizens Unitedwas a rallying cry for those threatened by unregulated discourse. President Barack Obama infamously, and inaccurately, rebuked the justices during his State of the Union for upholding the First Amendment. Since then, Democrats have regularly blamed the decision for the alleged corrosion of “democracy.”

“Democracy”, in Democrat usage, is losing meaning almost as fast as “White Supremacy”.

In my 20s, I had a section of my bookshelf that I called my “Know Thy Enemy” section.

It had an assortment of books that, broadly, are antithetical to Western Civliization: Marx, Mein Kampf (in German and translation), even a copy of “The Turner Diaries” at one point (although that last one got tossed along the way).

Point being, while I don’t still literally have that bookshelf, I find it useful to know our enemies.

So I listen to NPR. Not all the time. Mostly when I’m stuck on a long drive. I seek out the blinkered, the entitled and the depraved.

The New Yorker Radio Hour rarely disappoints on any of those counts. Like it’s fellow WNYC production, NYRH is a reliable stenographer for the inner id of eastern transatlantic progressive reflexes.

This past weekend? The etymology of word “woke”…

…which, we are reminded, doesn’t really exist:

Lately, conservatives have blamed “wokeness” for everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Still, few have a ready definition for what the word means. 

The episode then goes on to provide its etymology (I’m a linguistics geek, I live for that stuff) and several working definitions and its history of use on the “progressive” left…

…on the way toward telling us the whole thing is a conservative messaging scam.

This is, of course, the leftist pattern:

1. Coin a term – “Politically Correct”, “CRT” “Woke”, “Mostly Peaceful” – to describe one of the left’s activities or goals
2. Use it.
3. Turn it into a social cliche.
4. When conservatives turn the cliche against them, declare it never existed and that that it’s all right-wing messaging (leaving behind a residue of people who didn’t get the memo, and continue to use the term in its original form with dogged, entitled obstinacy).
5. Move on to the next term, lather, rinse, repeat.

My project for the coming year: do my little bit to push “white supremacy” down into Step 4.

Over the weekend, “Anti”-Fa rioted in Atlanta.

First: Governor Klink and Mayor Mompants McDreamy could learn a thing or two from Brian Kemp about how to handle communist guerrilla uprisings. But of course, if either of them did the “progressive” wing of the DFL would get upset: Peggy Flanagan would yank the leash on Governor Walz’s dog collar so hard he’d fly out of his shoes.

Among the arrested – the daughter of House Majority Whip Katherine Clark:

Yep. Daughter. One of those “menstruation is a state of mind”-kind of daughters:

Because of course, and what did. you expect?

My first thought, by the way, was that the arrest of the child of a high-profile progressive would work out about the same as the handling of Woody Kaine, the son of Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary’s Veep candidate and “Anti”-Fa member who was arrested for attacking a Republican gathering in the MN State Capitol in March 2017.

But the arrest may have been state jurisdiction. Which may just mean “no woke Soros prosecutor”.

SCENE: Mitch BERG Is shopping for a new stove at the appliance store. Focusing on spec sheets, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE, who makes a beeline for BERG.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, whyyyyyhi, there, Avery. What’s…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. The paranoia of you wingnuts is hilarious. Now you’re saying “big bad gummint” is coming for your gas stoves.

BERG: Yeah – I hard NPR saying that, last week.

It’s the latest tempest in a teapot on the internet and in Washington politics – what some have dubbed StoveGate. That is the idea of banning natural gas cooking stoves. The controversy started with a remark from Richard Trumka, a commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, last month before a consumer advocacy group. He cited health studies about gas stoves.

LIBRELLE: Exactly. Nobody’s coming for your gas stove.

BERG: But they’ve been talking about wanting to ban them for years.

LIBRELLE: (Theatrical sigh). OK, Merg. Are they coming for your gas stove right now?

BERG: You people do this with everything. With CRT in schools…

LIBRELLE: Are they literally teaching your kids a law-school level sociology class, right this second?

BERG: …and bespoke gender…

LIBRELLE: Are they booking your kid for gender reassignment surgery right this second as we speak?

BERG: …or socialism…

LIBRELLE? Are they nationalizing your busienss right now?

BERG: Or gun control.

LIBRELLE: Is there a SWAT team beating down your door, not your neighbor’s door but your front door, looking for your guns right this second?

BERG: …then you call us hysterical.

LIBRELLE: Heeeyyyyy! Hysterical is anti-feminist, and implies that insanity is a feminine trait.

BERG: (Seeing a golden opportunity) Am I telling a woman she’s hysterical right this second?

LIBRELLE: Why, as a matter of fact…

(Gas oven lights off with an exaggerated roar. LIBRELLE walks away by the time the sound dies down).

BERG (to clerk). Did you catch that?

CLERK: I was wondering myself.

BERG: Guess we’ll never know.

And SCENE.

The Bad News: The DFL ran on abortion last fall, and won,.

The Worse News: They’re making hay with that “Mandate”, working to remove protections in Minnesota law for infants actually born alive:

The “Born Alive Infants Protection Act” was passed by the Minnesota Legislature in 2015. It states that abortion survivors should be fully recognized as human persons and provided with medical care to preserve their lives.

Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, wants to repeal these protections because they are an “insult” to doctors, she said during a House Health Committee meeting Thursday.

Her bill would also repeal restrictions on the use of public funds for abortion and a requirement that aborted babies be “disposed” of in a “dignified and sanitary” manner.

So not only can DFL doctors murder babies on their way out of the birth canal, they can dump the bodies wherever they want to. Hey, that’s progress.

The Good News, Maybe: After this session, there won’t be a whole lot more abortion for the DFL to run on.

The Worse News: I expect the DFL to run on legalizing murder of children up to age 13. Unless they’re transgender.

A: What, are you new here? Berg’s Seventh Law is universal and unyielding.

They do it to draw attention from their own support for terrorism.

Glad I could settle that.

I swear, it’s not the Babylon Bee:

I’ll spell it out for DFLers:

California might arguably be freer when it comes to some social behaviors, but in most areas—starting and operating a business, pursuing work, building housing, educating our kids free from government control—it is unquestionably among the nation’s least-free states.

Our tax rates are so high that Californians mainly are free to work longer hours to pay for a modicum of mostly shoddy services. Keeping the money one earns is in some ways the ultimate freedom issue. Is Newsom unaware that our population is declining—as people flee our sunny clime and magnificent scenery for Godforsaken places such as Nevada and Oklahoma?

Newsom demonstrates what PJ O’Rourke said: to Republicans, freedom means freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, keeping and bearing arms; to Democrats, it’s the right to wave your private parts around in public.

Of course, if the actual goal is to debase the language – to make “freedom” a synonym for “the stifling reassurance of government control” – then Newsom probably is on the right track.

And Tim Walz is doing a fine job of emulating him.

A friend of the blog emails:

With this most recent snowstorm, there has been lots of discussion about snow removal. Reasonable people look at the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and say no wonder people are moving to suburbs-the cities are just incompetent.

Leftist urbanists look at the state of the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and giggle saying ha ha car drivers. We hate you and get out of our city so we can drive it all ourselves.

The really clueless look at the condition of the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and say, hey! Let’s charge people even more so we can mess up sidewalks (alleys in the case of Saint Paul) the same way we mess up the streets. You people don’t really need to be anywhere for the winter anyway, right? Just let us take good care of you.

Everything from cradle to grave is an opportunity to transfer money and power from people to the institutions of big left.

Once you internalize that, you understand the goals of the DFL.

Among the welter of new laws going into effect at every level of government this past week are two one must suspect the MN DFL “trifecta” will trot out sooner than later; gun insurance.

San Jose passed a municipal ordinance requiring gun owners carry liability insurance.

Notably, the kinds of coverage mandated by the ordinance would not cover the overwhelming majority of firearms incidents that tend to be the subject of public concern. To start, homeowners and renters policies only extend coverage for injuries to third parties. Generally, this would mean guests, contract workers, or other visitors to the insured’s property, or in some cases, to third parties who were injured by the insured off-premises. Injuries to other members of the household would not be insured. Thus, the paradigmatic example of a tragic firearms accident—a child gets hold of an unsecured firearm and injures his or her sibling—would not be covered.

Naturally, this depends on the integrity of the state’s insurance regulators. After New York’s attack on the NRA’s carry insurance program, it’d seem that trust is misplaced, at least in all “Blue” states.

Depending on one’s point of view, the new law in New Jersey would appear to be even more insidious, or comically incompetent; it doesn’t specifically rule out insuring illegal activities with guns:

As to whether it would violate New Jersey insurance law to extend coverage to criminal acts, the question is—as it is in many states—somewhat complicated. But ultimately, the state Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld exclusions for “expected or intended” injury as barring coverage, including in Voorhees v. Preferred Mutual Insurance Co. (1992), SL Industries v. American Motorists Insurance Co. (1992), and Harleysville Insurance Cos. v. Garitta (2001). Moreover, in 1990’s Figueroa v. Hartford Insurance Co., the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey held that an injured party could be collaterally estopped from suing a third-party’s insurer to relitigate questions of intent where that intent had been settled in a previous criminal action, such as by a guilty judgment or plea.

At a minimum, it can therefore be said that New Jersey insurance law broadly permits exclusions for intentional acts in personal liability policies and that state courts have shown deference to criminal proceedings as dispositive in settling questions of intent (which isn’t necessarily true in all states.) Given that backdrop, a broad reading of A. 4769’s text would appear to require the state’s firearms owners to obtain coverage that does not actually exist, particularly in the wake of regulatory actions to shut down the NRA’s Carry Guard program. That would amount to a de facto ban on firearms ownership, directly contravening the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, even before applying the Court’s more recent Bruen test.

I can see the MNDFL majority copying and pasting either law.

Last week, this blog received something of a challenge: A debate on “who the fascists actually are in modern American society”. \

But one of the key tenets of a meaningful debate is to make sure you agree on your terms.

What is…

…well, let’s start with the state that each side in American politics accuses one another of – “Fascism”, “Communism”, “Naziism”, “Socialism” – all of which have much in common, all of which are subtly different in some contexts and utterly indistinct in others.

The left’s self-indulgent rhetoric has denuded terms like “Fascist”, “Nazi”, “Racist” and “White Supremacy” of much of their meanings, and usefulness as debate yardsticks. The right did the same with “Socialist” (although the left has played its part in sapping that term of its zing as well).

So I’m going to try to settle on one of two terms to use as yardsticks; “Authoritarian” and “Totalitarian”. They are more pedestrian and academic than the list above – no mortal enemy of our nation has rallied behind either of them, so (let’s be charitable) neither side has seen fit to devalue them yet.

And yet, America – or parts of America – seems to be turning into an authoritarian society.

To wit:

• Authoritarian: one who seeks to have their government control society
• Totalitarian: One who seems to have one’s rule become indistinct from society

So – how do we define either of ’em?

John Miltimore has a decent start in this blog post; he defines “totalitarianism” with fourteen criteria. It works as a matter of . I borrow and adapt them below:

Once we have the definitions nailed down, we’ll debate each point. Then, victors, losers and maybe even draws will be declared.

So I started with Miltimore’s list, added and rewrote a few things, and reorganized them:

Co-option of Institutions

Society’s formal institution are convinced to support the goals of the regime, or gotten out of the way, willingly or not.

• Media is controlled, directly or indirectly, by the state
• State police (and the laws and processes that guide its actions) protect the regime, not the people
• Power is concentrated in inner ring of elite institutions and people

Co-option of Society

An authoritarian society co-ops the institutions, not only of government, but of society itself. Government deploys carrots and sticks to create a society that complies – willingly or not. .

• Dissent is actively demonized (e.g., equated to violence)
• Mass conformity of beliefs and behaviors is demanded
• The ruling caste leverages divisions in society to multiply their power

Eroding Rule of Law, Uplifting Rule of Men

Free peoples laws observe a process over a goal. Authoritarians laws have goals – not always stated clearly in the text.

• The legal system is co-opted by the state
• State exerts power to quash dissent
• Rights—financial, legal, and civil—are contingent on compliance

Perverting Society’s Norms

While the institutions squash dissent, the co-option of society gradually makes dissent not only too costly, but unthinkable.

• Private and public levers of power are used to enforce adherence to state dogmas

Creating Official Boogeymen And Enemies

A state of war hysteria keeps peoples minds from what they’ve lost to the regime – it even makes them happy to sacrifice wealth, freedom and autonomy. Authoritarians need enemies.

• Entire classes singled out for persecution
• Harsh legal enforcement against unfavored classes
• Extra-legal actions are condoned against internal regime opponents
• Semi-organized violence is permitted (in some cases

So what needs to be added or removed?

I was listening to MPR last week (so you don’t have to), and almost had to pull the car over when I heard this interview – with Beverly Gage, historian and author of “G-Man – J Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century”.

And I almost pulled off the road because the generic female NPR host got sooooo close to realizing “giving big governent unlimited, unaccountable power can have bad unintended consequences”…

,,,but just couldn’t quite say it.

To: Minnesota Peasants. Er, Citize…Subjects. Let’s go with Subjects.
From: Minnesota State Government
Re: Take Comfort

Your paycheck is worth 8% less than it was last year.

The price of food and gas is waaaay up.

Your rent is going up. Lots.

The cost of borrowing has more than doubled.

The schools are failing – and your government blames you for it, and for everything else.

But don’t trouble your hearts, simple peasants. Because while you may suffer, your government is doing just fine.

Because while peasants like you come and go, State Government is forever.

And in that, you should take comfort.

Signed
Minnesota State Government

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking around Uptown Minneapolis trying to decide which pop-up brunch joint to go to. Absorbed in thought, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has approached

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh,Go…olldarnit, Avery, how have you…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. Why aren’t Republicans condemning Donald Trump’s latest attack on Demoracy?

BERG: Republicans and conservatives are, in droves.

LIBRELLE: But when are they going to condemn it?

BERG: Uh…they re?

LIBRELLE: But when are they going to condemn it?

BERG: While you ponder that, here’s another question: when are Democrats going to condemn their party’s constant erosions of the Constitution and the rule of law? Their efforts to erode Federalism, abolish the electoral college, add states to tack on Democrat Senators, weaponizing the IRS, FBI and DOJ, squat on the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 10th and 14th Amendments, circumvent the FIrst Amendment via “public/private partnership” between Big Tech and the Democrat Party, weaponize “Emergency Orders”, pack the SCOTUS?

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

BERG: (Backs slowly away)

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

BERG: (Leaves building)

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

(And SCENE)

Remember Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?

Government and the expert class all but brought them to your house and forced you to change out incandescent bulbs at gunpoint. Government tried to jam them down with by force of law, notwithstanding their cost (to purchase, and to dispose of), and their many other drawbacks.

And then, just about the time the jamdown was complete, the free market came up with the LED bulb: cheaper, better light, easier to dispose of (and they last longer, so there’s less need to dispose of them) and they use even less energy.

Point, free market!

That same expert class is saying we need to switch to electric vehicles to “save the planet”.

Steven Hayward at Breitbart spells out how there’s no rational way to look at this as anything but returning the world to feudalism.

We’re already getting there, under “unusual” (for the moment) circumstances.

Of course, yet again, the free market may well have a better answer – more sustainable (especially if society kicks its unscientific superstition about nuclear power), more affordable, and capable of keeping the world, not just the top 10% of it, mobile. More on this in the future.

Watch to see how the would-be ruling class tries to gundeck hydrogen power.

One of the key goals of any authoritarian or totalitarian system is to dehumanize its opponents. Because without an opponent to mobilize against, people start looking seriously at the shortcomings the system’s autocrats bring to their lives.

And a good enemy isn’t really very human at all.

Whether it’s a drill sergeant during bayonet practice, or a Stormtrooper yakking about üntermensch, or a kommissar denoucing a kulak or a “wrecker”, the key in getting regular people in any authoritarian or totalitarian system to feel that rage with “the enemy” is to reinforce how really subhuman they actually are.

“President” Biden took the moral arc of American civilization a little further toward tyranny and barbarism over the summer, when he referred to half of Americans as fascists.

Former President Obama got curiously specific in referring to Republicans as “The Revolutionary Guard”.

But it was far from just national figures. Locally, reverse-McCarthyites were finding “fascists” behind hedges as well:

And of course, shut down all dissent:

I’m less surprised than most that it came to this, this quickly, in the run-up to the mid-terms:

And, suspecting as I do that the “red wave” we didn’t get this month may still be lurking out there somewhere, Big Left isn’t letting off the gas.

Biden and Trudeau, prancing about Beijing…

…in Mao jackets:

I’d say “call the metaphor police”, but I guess it’s “Metaphor Red Guards” in this case…

I mean, I’m not wrong…

…of Berg’s Twentieth Law of Social Justice Warmongering (“All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise”), it’s hard not to look at this story – “Klan literature” being handed out in a swing-y part of northeastern Minnesota long controlled by a DFL that’s not happy about losing ground in the are, four days before an election where the DFL is poised to lose, maybe big – and not presume it’s a hoax.