The New Lubyanka

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Been reading claims that the US holds political prisoners to punish Trump supporters.  Here’s a list of everybody arrested in the Four Hour Insurrection with their charges and detention status.

A lot of them are out, either on bail or personal recognizance.  A few  haven’t had their bail set yet, which strikes me as being a ridiculously long time to get around to it.   Only a few have been denied bail and remain in jail: those are mostly people who allegedly attacked cops or were engaged in Assaultive / Violent Behavior. 

Attacking a cop is still not enough reason to deny bail in any ordinary criminal case.  The courts have consistently held that bail is a constitutional right.  It’s being delayed/denied.  The charges against the January 6th accused aren’t serious enough to support the denial of bail.  And denial of bail for trespass-type offenses while holding the accused in solitary confinement, is inconsistent treatment considering that we’re emptying the jails everywhere else so people don’t catch Covid.
The hype could simply be complaints from defense lawyers looking for a better deal for their clients, or from political grifters who will seize any stick to beat the administration.  But the fact the DOJ’s own list confirms the claims makes this smell political. The fact the government refuses to turn over video evidence makes it smell political.  The fact the judge made histrionic claims to justify the sentence for a non-violent protester makes it smell political.   It smells like an attempt to punish these Trump supporters and intimidate the rest.  It smells like federal law enforcement is holding political prisoners.  That’s Third World banana republic stuff, like stuffing ballot boxes or imposing martial law on the capital city or calling for ‘reeducation camps’ or telling the media which news stories to take down.   That stuff could never happen in America, right? 

Right?

Joe Doakes

Democracy can not survive if people don’t trust its institutions to be even-handed.

We’ve got a big problem, then.

As Predicted Here

Last year, when the FBI triiumphantly claimed that they’d busted a plot to kidnap MIchigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, I said, in as many words, “I bet a shiny new quarter this was a setup by the feds”.

My quarter is looking safer and safer:

The explosives expert was the undercover FBI agent. He was the one who figured out where to plant the explosive and offered to obtain as much as the group wanted. Would there even have been a plan to blow up the bridge without him? The Iraq War veteran is heard barking at the other members about not hanging around unless they were “down with the thought of kidnapping.” It almost sounds as if he had to talk some of them into it. A government informant from Wisconsin was the person who traveled around the country and introduced various militia members to each other, sometimes paying their travel costs. Many of the eventual members had never met each other before this. There were fully a dozen informants and undercover agents involved every step of the way.

When you put all of that together, you are forced to consider the question that Buzzfeed is asking. Without all of those agents and government informants holding people’s hands and guiding their steps, would there even have been a conspiracy without them? The defendants are saying no. They claim that the whole idea of kidnapping Whitmer never rose above the level of fantasy, though they freely admit going to paramilitary training sessions together and engaging in anti-government conversations and online chats.

My two cents: the establisment wants to deliver on that “wave of white supremacist terror” they’ve been promising since 2009, they’re willing to create it from scratch.

What’s Swedish For Omertá?

When people can’t trust the “Justice” system, they create their own.

From Irish cops to legends of The Godfather and Goodfellas and The Sopranos to the various warlords and cartels of Central America (and what is a cartel but a warlord with a product people want to buy?), the long legacy of people, even in a place that’s prided itself on this justice system, who find themselves needing to turn to their own communities (read: the elements of their communities with the fewest scruples about applying force to gain power) to get, if not “justice”, at least a order they as a group can live with, albeit at a cost.

The trick? Get the locals to fear you, and the erstwhile authorities at least to give you some room out of mutual convenience, if not outright getting on your payroll. And/or both.

So – can we, the people, trust our institutions?

  • Our “elite” media is a joke. They are nothing but propaganda shills, and they only pay lip service to the contrary to gull the gullible.
  • The FBI and the Justice Department are thoroughly politicized.
  • So are academia and education and the bureaucracy.
  • While lefist groups get the run of major cities without even the formality of a slap on the wrist, those perceived as “right of center” come in for, let’s not mince words, oppression.

And when the Normals color inside the lines, as we did during the Tea Party, we get both sides sliming us; when they learn the lesson and elect a candidate who doesn’t play by the K Street rules, they get slandered as a group. Oh, yeah – and told they’re defectives who are wired to hate from birth, and are just waiting to blow up.

It seems like Big Left is a bully kicking sand in the Normals’ faces, trying to provoke a fight.

Am I the only one who can’t possibly think it’s a coincidence?

Two Rules, One Narrative

If government tells you something, distrust but verify. And then, usually, distrust some more.

If the media tells you something – at least, anything about an event that is especially socially fractious – distrust, and verify even harder. And, as always, usually wind up distrusting even more.

If any of Big Left’s social hangers on declares some thing with immense servitude? Distrust, verify, and, well, you know the drill.

Last week was the fifth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting.

“Perish the thought, it couldn’t possibly have been a deranged man tied to and eliminationist sect of Islamism“, Big Media media assured us. “It was an anti-LGBTQ hate crime, nothing more, nothing less“.

Which is how the media and Biden administration have been treating it, over this past weekend

Distrust. Verify.

Continue distrusting.

I Think I Figured It Out

An allegory in three acts:

Act 1

SCENE: An elementary school classroom.BULLY is sitting at the desk next to KID. A half dozen pencils lie strewn about the floor around KID’s desk.

BULLY: Throws a pencil at KID. KID looks annoyed, but shakes it off.

BULLY: (Sotto Voce) Hey, kid! (KID looks over as BULLY whips another pencil at him. KID, more annoyed, shakes it off)

BULLY: (Sotto Voce again). Hey, kid!

KID: Tries to ignore BULLY.

BULLY: (Flings pencil, hard . The pencil catches KID in the corner of the eye, and it hurts.

KID: (Jumps up). What’s your problem?

BULLY: Ms. Walburn! Ms. Walburn! The Kid is trying to pick a fight with me!

MS. WALBURN: Kid, you have detention tonight!

BULLY: Ms. Walburn, have I not been warning you about Kid’s propensity to bullying for days, now ?

KID: What the…?

And SCENE

Act Two

SCENE: In the kitchen of a single-wide trailer. WIFE Is sitting on the floor sobbing. HUSBAND is looking around, apparently making sure nobody saw what just happened.

HUSBAND: Look, you provoked me.

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, OK, hitting was wrong, but you have to admit, the way you badger me about things is emotional abuse. And you know what they way – emotional abuse is worse than physical abuse.

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: And you were badgering me. I mean, criminy, we both have big problems, here.

WIFE (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, since emotional abuse is worse, and you do a lot of it, we’re really still not even even-up, here…

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, you’re lucky I’m willing to call it even. It’s a gift.

WIFE (Sobs)

Act Three

SCENE: The United States, today.

BIG LEFT: “Whiteness” is a mental disorder that goes along with merely being white. Whiteness and systemic racism are inseparable.

NORMALS: That’s bulls#it.

BIG LEFT: That’s your privilege, racism, misogyny, transphobia and ethnocentrism talking.

NORMALS: That’s just word salad at best. “Inclusion language” – an arcane code designed to show you’re one of the “good ones” – at worst.

BIG LEFT: What if your employer were to find out about your retrograde thinking? They might not appreciated it.

NORMALS: So you’re going to try to cancel me, now?

BIG LEFT: Pffft. There is no such thing as “cancel culture”.

NORMALS: Sure there is. If we’re mainstream conservatives, and haven’t gone as undercover as a Mossad operative in Tehran, we can’t get jobs in Academia, public education, much of private education, Hollywood, many public employee unions, the news media, a whooole lot of BIg Tech, an increasing number of smaller companies. And if we break cover – or any “evidence” of mainstream conservatism is found, we can get hounded out of our jobs, our hobbies, our volunteer work, deplatformed, and have our personal lives upended as well.

BIG LEFT: Republicans do it too!

NORMALS: So let me get this straight – it doesn’t exist, but Republicans do it too?

BIG LEFT: Evangelical groups picketed LGBTQ bookstores! Gays were oppressed!

NORMALS: OK, so that’s a “yes”. And let’s be clear on this – you go back almost forty years, to very localized episodes, to find behavior that pretty much every significant conservative repudiates today. As opposed to people being barred or drummed out of whole swathes of academia, business and culture. No cancel culture? Please.

BIG LEFT: Nope. There is only “accountability culture”.

NORMALS: “Accountability” for what? Having, much less voicing, utterly mainstream Republican views?

BIG LEFT: For the results of your Privilege and Whiteness!

NORMALS: Privilege – an Orwellian deflection of classist and cultural privilege shared by the left’s “elites” over to race? “Whiteness” – a bit of made-up pseudo-social-science designed entirely to denigrate and invalidate people without needing to engage in any facts?

BIG LEFT: Sounds like “white fragility” talking…

NORMALS: More word salad, with a siding of making facts up as you go along.

BIG LEFT: Here’s the only “fact” you need: January 6! The worst act of terrorism in American history!

NORMALS: Leaving aside the fact that it’s far from the only partisan violence at the seat of American democracy, January 6 was something that every significant conservative repudiated. But you keep on trying to apply it to everyone you disagree with, as if it gives The Left a permanent intellectual get out of jail free card.

BIG LEFT: Bet you wouldn’t be talking so big if you had a bunch of protesters in front of your house, would you? It’d be a shame if something…broke.

NORMALS: Go ahead. Make my day.

BIG LEFT: It’s a threat! It’s a threat! Behold the wave of white supremacist terror we’ve been warning you about for the past fifteen years!

And SCENE.

From The BlueAnon Archives: The Phantom Menace

To: Jon Collins, Minnesota Public Radio News
From: Mitch Berg, Irasible Peasant, critic of BlueAnon
Re: It’s Been A Year

Mr. Collins,

Last year – literally, a year ago last Wednesday – you sent out a message to MPR’s mailing lists asking if anyone had seen “white supremacists” during the civil unrest of the previous weeks.

I know this sounds crazy. But it’s 2020. And I’m working on story now about white supremacists coming to Minneapolis to foment race war under cover of the protests. I need your help, and your friends help. Please refer anyone with real, credible info (not rumor or speculation) or sources to me at (I’m gonna redact that)

As we go on a year after that request, and a week after President Biden reiterated the nearly two decade old claim that “white supremacist terror” is the greatest danger facing this country, it’s. probably not unreasonable to ask if you found anything.

A not-entirely-casual search of MPR News’s archives indicates “no”.

Any chance we could get an update?

That is all.

(I sent Collins an email. Since have it on absolutely reliable sources the management at MPR News has told their staff not to engage with peasants, I’d be amazed if I got a response).

None Dare Call It Slander

I mean, when even Bill Maher gets uncomfortable…

Former North Dakota Senator and current useless mouth Heidi Heitkamp calls Gina Carano a “Nazi”. Plain and simple, full stop.

I’ll chalk this up to the (utterly true) idea that any Democrat can parrot any narrative twaddle, no matter how moronic, without fear, knowing that their audience hasn’t the critical thinking skills to call them on it. Or anything.

But I won’t get mad. I’ll just get on the air. I sent this to her Facebook page.

Senator,

I’m Mitch Berg. I grew up in Jamestown. My mother, Jan Berg/Brooks, was a volunteer for any number of your campaigns at the state and federal level.

I fell a bit farther from the tree, politically, of course.

I’d like to make a media request – I’d love to interview y ou on my show (WWTC AM1280) in the Twin Cities regarding your assertion that Gina Carano is a “Nazi”.

I can either do it live on Saturday at 2PM, or record an interview at any time convenient to you.

Hope we can discuss this.

Thanks.

Why, sure – I expect a response! Why wouldn’t I?

Among The Biggest Advantages…

…that DFL politicians have is that they can say anything, no matter how illogical, preposterous and risible, anything at all , knowing that not only will the media never call them out on it, but that “their” voters, of all races, classes and education levels, having as they do zero critical thinking skills, will gobble it up.

Councilman Philippe Cunningham, in a “Neighborhood Safety Manual”, repeats the assertion from last year that “Klansmen”, complete with robes and pointy hoods, were roaming North Minneapolis during the riots.

Note to non-MSP residents: Klansmen in robes will occur in the Twin Cities about the same time I go on a hot third date with Anna Kendrick.

Learning To Punch

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds has a recipe for fighting back against the woke cancel mob: “Never apologize, rally your friends, punch back harder“.

And it’s a good one:

This is what’s going on with the University of San Diego Law School, whose dean shamefully capitulated to an absurd student campaign against a professor who did nothing wrong. In a post on his personal blog, Professor Thomas Smith said that those who dismiss the possibility that the Wuhan coronavirus escaped from a lab there were “swallowing whole a set of Chinese” — and here he used an scatological phrase meaning, in effect, “balderdash.”

He was, of course, referring to the Chinese regime’s denials, which are facing growing scientific skepticism.

Asian students complained — preposterously — that this was somehow a racist slur against Chinese people, rather than a criticism of the brutal Communist regime. Rather than telling them that, as law students, they needed to work on their reading skills, Dean Robert Schapiro issued a craven response, suggesting that there was some basis to the complaints. In an e-mail to the law-school community, he charged Smith with “bias” and with using “offensive” language and announced an investigation.

But here’s where the story changes. Some of the most eminent faculty members at the law school — including such big names as Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild, Steve Smith, Chris Wonnell and Gail Heriot — fired back at Schapiro. They wrote: “We are concerned that treating these complaints the way you are doing validates student reactions and strained interpretations that are misguided, that reflect a lack of critical thinking and that will chill faculty members’ teaching and scholarship.”

The one problem – it depends on having friends to rally.

Oddly enough, in academia – which has become a “woke” gulag in the past few decades – conservatives may be better placed to fight back. As lopsided as things are in academia, there is at least a tradition of academic freedom to uphold, and groups like FIRE, with money and lawyers, to help do it.

But if you’re at a company that’s become infested with Wokies? Getting pressure to just shut up? Seeing dissenting thought shouted down around the water cooler? Seeing management starting to buckle?

Normals need to start organizing in the real world.

More on this tomorrow.

The New McCarthyites

I really can’t boycott “Hollywood”. because given the fact that Tinseltown can’t seem to get its heart into doing much of anything but comic book movies, and I just can not bring myself to go to a comic book movie, I mean, why bother?

So I’ve never seen any of Disney’s various Star Wars spinoff productions. The last, “first” three chapters of the Star Wars saga soured me on the whole franchise to the point where I just don’t care much. I’m told The Mandalorian is worth watching – but I honestly wouldn’t know.

So when I heard Gina Carano had been jettisoned from Mandalorian, after talk of her getting her own spinoff series was making the rounds, it took me a moment to dig and find out why it mattered.

It’s alleged by some media that she was tubed for being just a little too irascibly un-woke:

Carano was the subject of much criticism recently when, in a now-deleted Instagram post, she compared being a modern-day Republican to being Jewish during the Holocaust. The hashtag #FireGinaCarano has trended on social media in recent months after other incendiary comments by the television and film star.

And what were those “incendiary comments?” Especially as to “comparing” modern GOPers to German Jews in the ’30s?

Details are very, very thin. But I’ll defer to that not-remotely right-wing outlet, Variety, for the closest we have to core facts:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children,” Carano wrote Instagram. “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.” The post originated on a different Instagram account.

In other words, totalitarians turn societies against themselves?

If the Woke Mob things that’s politically incorrect, we’re gonna have a real difference of opinion in our society sooner than later.

In another post, Carano shared a photo of a person wearing multiple cloth masks with the caption, “Meanwhile in California…

If riffing on California is politically incorrect, I don’t wanna be PC.

Gaslighting

A new article in New Yorker chronicles the “Cultural Revolution” – the Chinese Communist Party’s revolving round of purges that wracked China in the decade before Mao’s death in 1976.

Tell me – what does this scene look like?

Red Guards—a pseudo-military designation adopted by secondary-school and university students who saw themselves as the Chairman’s sentinels—soon appeared all over China, charging people with manifestly ridiculous crimes and physically assaulting them before jeering crowds. Much murderous insanity erupted after 1966, but the Cultural Revolution’s most iconic images remain those of the struggle sessions: victims with bowed heads in dunce caps, the outlandish accusations against them scrawled on heavy signboards hanging from their necks. Such pictures, and others, in “Forbidden Memory” (Potomac), by the Tibetan activist and poet Tsering Woeser, show that even Tibet, the far-flung region that China had occupied since 1950, did not escape the turmoil. Woeser describes the devastation wrought on Tibet’s Buddhist traditions by a campaign to humiliate the elderly and to obliterate what were known as the Four Olds—“old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes.” The photographs in Woeser’s book were taken by her father, a soldier in the Chinese military, and found by her after he died. There are vandalized monasteries and bonfires of books and manuscripts—a rare pictorial record of a tragedy in which ideological delirium turned ordinary people into monsters who devoured their own. (Notably, almost all the persecutors in the photographs are Tibetan, not Han Chinese.) In one revealing photo, Tibet’s most famous female lama, once hailed as a true patriot for spurning the Dalai Lama, cowers before a young Tibetan woman who has her fists raised.

Does it remind you of…:

  • A “Struggle Session” at in the humanities department of an exquisitely expensive private university – like Hamline or Saint Thomas?
  • A Pacific Consulting Group workshop on cis-privilege
  • An “Anti”-Fa coffee shop after hours?

Hah, silliy peasants. It reminds the New Yorker of…

Trumpism!

Why did a rich and powerful society suddenly start destroying itself?

The Trumpian assault on the West’s “olds” has long been in the making, and it is, at least partly, a consequence of political decay and intellectual ossification—akin to what Mao diagnosed in his own party. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, a consensus about the virtues of deregulation, financialization, privatization, and international trade bound Democrats to Republicans (and Tories to New Labour in Britain). Political parties steadily lost their old and distinctive identities as representatives of particular classes and groups; they were no longer political antagonists working to leverage their basic principles—social welfare for the liberal left, stability and continuity for the conservative right—into policies. Instead, they became bureaucratic machines, working primarily to advance the interests of a few politicians and their sponsors.

In 2010, Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through “mass movements, communities organized around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties”—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.” Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred ruling class and its cherished monuments.

I suppose in the interest of intellectual self-review, I need to ask – is it gaslighting? Or is it just the sort of stupendous self-unawareness that seems to be a condition for joining today’s “elites”?

Point toward the “lack of self-awareness” thesis – they don’t seem to realize this sort of cultural slander is how we got Donald Trump in the first place.

(Hat tip to regular commenter Max Overlord)

Oversight…

Henco attorney Mike Freeman isn’t happy about the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” repeatedly bailing out violent offenders who can be linked, however tenuously, to political protest.

Which is fine, as far as it goes.

But have you noticed, in the wake of all the collective slander about “white supremacists” being “the real culprits” behind last spring’s riots, that not a single media report or government objection notes that the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” is financed by progressive plutocrats and aristocrats,

And why would they be bailing out “white supremacists?”

I keep asking Twin Cities media figured “reporting” on the story, to the extent anyone ever does.

There’s never an answer.

#Unexpected.

Bigotry Of Bizarre Expectations

Kind of a good news, bad news situation here. But maybe not in the way you think.

A teachers union president in Washington State refers to reopening schools as a “white supremacist” initiative.

The good – or “good” – news: this is an example of the type of rhetorical, social and policy overreach one can expect when “progressives” – in this case invariably white, middle-class, and visibly “progressive” – find themselves in power. This statement – literally, “wanting your kids back in schools, and wanting some sense of stability and normalcy for their mental health, at a time when teenage suicide is exploding all over the country, is racist” is the very definition of “2+2=5” – mental health is mental illness, concern for kids is a pathology, truth is lies. (And the ability to say it without having ones own peers pelt one with rocks and garbage is Urban Progressive Privilege).

ut another way, evil – no scare quotes. Inverting moral truth and moral falsehood is as textbook a definition of venial evil as exists.

That’s the “good” news.

The bad news? About half the country, as this is written, doesn’t know any better, or just doesn’t want to think about it that hard.

Playbook

Big Left has been openly salivating about a “wave of ‘white supremacist terror’ that’ll dwarf 9/11″ for years, now.

No – seriously. Years.

Does it seem like they’re wishing it to be so?

You’re not alone:

Need an Orwell reference? Authoritarians always need a boogieman. And like Orwell’s Eurasia and Eastasia, or Hitler’s “Reichstag arsonists” or the “Polish soldiers who attacked the Gleiwitz radio station” or “Jews”, or generations of Soviet “wreckers” and “counter-revolutionaries”, having a conspiracy to flog can certainly take peoples’ minds off of the bread lines or endless mask mandates, wouldn’t it?

Of course, the Democrats chose half the country for their boogieman.

Seems…self-limiting?

If so, the good guys have two years to prove it.

Planet Of The Humans, Part 0

I spent a lot of time thinking about this scene last week:

I first started paying serious attention to politics in about 1980. Like a lot of high school kids, then and now, I was somewhere out on what would be called “the left”; I wrote a platform for North Dakota Boys State (a statewide mock government program put on by the decidedly conservative American Legion) that called for systematic redistribution of wealth, abolishing nuclear energy and nuclear disarmament, and a whole bunch of stuff that would be pretty mainstream among the Bernie Bros today.

Three years later, due to the good graces of my English professor, Dr. Jim Blake, I had re-evaluated most of my assumptions. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and never really looked back.

And I had no reason to. None of us did. Although the history books, all being written from the perspective of the Left, will never admit it, the two decades from 1980 to 2000 were, objectively, the last American Golden Age. I’ll squeak out an optimistic coda and add “so far”, but I’ll be honest – I haven’t been feeling it, but I’m a firm believer in acting like you want to feel, and so there is is. “So far”.

I’ll come back to that.

There’s no denying it was one of the high points of American history. We led an economic surge that brought more wealth to more people than any in history. We, as a nation, led a political surge that led to the collapse of one of the most evil regimes in history (although not the other one – so far).

Maybe it’s just the perspective of one guy’s lifetime – but I suspect you’d have to look long and hard to find a place and time when it was generally better to be a human.

Not just in material terms, but in terms of the tension between freedom and order, one of the hardest things about running a self-governing society, being in relative balance – and, more importantly, the general commitment to the system and process that kept all those moving parts in balance.

And it’s been downhill from there.

The arc from Morning in America in 1980 to last week’s skirmish at the Capitol – which, loathe as I am to come even close to Democrat chanting points, was a form of coup, not against President-Elect Biden, but against the states’ constitutional power to select electors – peaked…somewhere in the late ’90s – when one of the glories of the American system, gridlocked government, combined with a Peace Dividend brought about by the end of the Cold War (thanks, President Reagan), led to an outburst of technological, entrepreneurial and market power that brought so much wealth, and security, and general well-being, to so many people that it may have been as close to a uptopia, in some ways, as humanity can get. Because of the gridlock in government.

Somewhere between 1998 and 2005, things started to turn back south again. It’d be easy to point to the polarization of American politics, starting with the various Clinton scandals, through the fiasco of the 2000 election, the near-decade of squabbling over the War on Terror and the 2008 government-caused financial meltdown, as the cause – but it went in parallel with a lot of other changes in our nation’s political, moral and social lives that have led to their…

…I was going to say “culmination” last week at the Capitol. But of course, that’s not true. Last week’s sorry episode was, like last summer’s riots, and the social back and forth that gave us Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trump himself, and the movements that supported them all in a way that was increasingly “un-American” (I’m still claiming a meaning for that term), and if you think that was the peak, or trough, or any sort of ending to the story, you just haven’t paid attention to 20,000 years of human nature.

So let’s not call it a culmination. Let’s call it a checkpoint, on a path that may be going up, or down, but control over which We The People need to take before the phrase “We The People” is forever relegated to the museum.

How have we gotten from the peak of Western Civilization to…this, in my adult lifetime?

Let’s talk about it.

We’ll start with President Trump, next.

But we’re damn sure not going to finish with him.

National Slander

I’m particularly proud of the interview I had last weekend with Peter Wood, author of 1620 – A Criticial Review of the 1629 Project. Wood and his book take a hammer to the historical fraud that the NYTimes sicced on the nation…

…and, worse, the miseducation of an entire generation about the history of our country.

It starts at 33 minutes into the hour:

Prager U has a similar message:

Can You Feel The #Unity, Here In #OneMinnesota?

Ilhan Omar thinks we’re the “Klan”:

Omar’s not stupid. She knows that’s not true.

She just knows that CD5 Democrats pretty much believe anything they’re told.

Pride

Forget, for a moment, the fact that not only has President Trump denounced ‘white supremacist” groups frequently and unequivocally, but he’s done it roughly 100% more than Joe Biden has denounced “Anti”-Fa.

What if the ‘group’ that the press is mau-mauing on command…

isn’t “white supremacist” at all?

But there’s a small problem with this narrative about the Proud Boys besides the fact that Trump didn’t even know who they were and has no connection with them.

First, Proud Boys have brawled with Antifa because they regard anarcho-Communism as a danger to Western society. They’re not the ones rioting in the streets attacking the police and other people, that’s BLM/Antifa who have been the leftists’ shock troops to push radical reform. The only group that seems to be connected to a political party and political agenda is BLM/Antifa. The Biden campaign specifically endorsed the BLM during their convention and has yet to denounce BLM/Antifa violence by name. Joe Biden even denied the existence of Antifa, completely ignoring their involvement in hundreds of BLM connected riots in the last few months.

Second, there’s another problem with the accusation. Proud Boys have members of all races and have black, Hispanic and Asian leaders. They may be many things but white supremacists they aren’t, they’re multi-racial.

They didn’t like Joe Biden calling them white supremacists and following that came out in Salt Lake City, Utah to publicly say they were not in any way white supremacists.

I can’t speak for the “Proud Boys” – of whom I’ve heard very little, notwithstanding the fact that I’m, well, not tuned out of that scene.

But I do recall the local media and DFL (ptr) riffing on the “Boogaloo Boys” during the “Anti”-fa tantrum last May, as if they were a “white supremacist” group…

…when, in fact, they tend to be radical libertarians. And the closest person I’ve ever know to a Boog was in an interracial marriage.

#shrug.

If you get it from the media or Democrats, it’s probably wrong, likely intentionally so.

Make Nick Sandman Rich Again

A whole bunch of general counsels for a whoooole bunch of media outlets are changing their drawers right about now:

I’m smelling panicky settlements in the air.

Some Good News In 2020

Quick tangent before I cut to the chase: is anyone out there as sick as me about people whining about how awful 2020 is? Yes, epidemic and riots and collateral damage, this generation’s 9/11, yadda yadda, I get it, it’s the worst thing people under thirty have ever seen. Gotcha.

Comparing it to 1962, or 1942, or 1933-1936, or 1915, or 1861, or pretty much any year the bubonic plague was active, seems pretty…trivial.

But never mind – the year, bad or overrated as it may be, just got a little better:

Much as I’d love to see one of the media outlets go to court, and lose big, this is a great start.

We’re All In This Together, In One Minnesota

If you think fighting disaster with economic devastation is a bad strategery, this is what Channel 11’s weather talking head thinks of you:

And Sven? When you go on to talk about the “sacrifices we are making”, don’t tell it to social media. Go to the small businesses who are arbitrarily shuttered and tell the owners whose lives’ work is being destroyed while competing business are chugging right along, exactly how “in it together” you are with them.

I”ll wait.

A Bit Of Advice

Back in 2010, when the Tea Party was at high tide, there was a wave of sightings of some disturbingly racist and violent signs at Tea Party rallies. These signs got all kinds of media attention.

Thing is, when people were able to crowd-source the people carrying the signs, a huge portion of them turned out to be ringers – people from leftist groups who just happened to wind up in front of the news media with their objectionable signs. Not just a few, eitheri – there was a very high correlation.

Of course, some of the less curious members of the media just ran with it – killing the Tea Party and other obstreporous bitter clinging deplorables was just fine by them.

But before I MCed the 2010 Tax Day Tea Party rally, I made sure the organizers got the word out as publicly as possible – anyone with an off-color sign would be photographed, and publicized, and “outed” either way – but especially if they were lefty ringers bent on slandering the Tea Party.

Sounds like certain conservative groups need to re-learn this lesson.

How likely is the woman’s sign a hoax?

Is there a number over 100%?

Crystal Dodged A Bullet

Former Crystal Mayor ReNae Bowman took one of the dumbest swipes I’ve ever seen at Andy Richter, founder of “Community Solutions” and one of the driving forces behind Crystal’s libertarian/conservative insurgency – an insurgency that’s undone a lot of ex-mayor Bowman’s toxic legacy.

But never let it be said the woman doesn’t ooze class.

Emphasis on “ooze”:

Bowman’s lunacy, and borderline slander, gets worse – including a swipe at Richter’s wife that’s straight out of some trailer park reality show.

I’m going to presume Bowman is angry with Andy for two reasons: he clobbered her in a city that was supposed to be a DFL sinecure, and Andy helped lead the way doing the most unforgivable sin in the “prog” religion; peeled back “progressive” power.

Richter’s response was as classy as Bowman’s was toxically “progressive”:

The truth is Ms. Bowman you don’t scare me. You’re nothing more than a classless coward. While I go out and work hard with my blog and my podcast and on campaigns, you sit around on social media and spread 24/7 hate. it’s a pathetic existence. If you’d like to be as successful as my group I have a suggestion; why don’t you come up with a positive agenda and persuade people to support it?
I know I’ve helped defeat you and all your friends in Crystal and that has to be eating at you. I can understand that. Losing that much has to drive someone crazy. She probably dreams about defeating our group in just one election. And why not? Dreams are important. I won’t knock them.

And since Bowman still harbors political ambitions, I’m gonna post this for my friends in Crystal:

Having said all this, I will support Ms. Bowman’s right to free speech. If I try and shut her up then I’m no better than she is. Her first amendment rights will be supported by this group even it attacks me and my family. What I will not do, under any circumstances, is stop exposing her vulgar and despicable words. These are her words, published in their entirety. Voters of Crystal will know what she says and who she supports. No amount of attacking me will intimidate me into silence. One thing Bowman won’t do is shut up, so you can rest assure that her conduct will continue to be exposed here.

Your choice is clear – achievement, competence and success, or “Honey Boo Boo Moves To City Hall”.