Yesterday, I started telling the story of Dr. Massoud Amin – a man who came to the US as a teenager with his parents after the Iranian Revolution, became a citizen, and rose to the highest levels not only of academia, but of national security, as one of the nation’s foremost experts in cybersecurity.

And then, in the middle of a rancorous divorce with more than a whiff of academic backstabbing mixed in, an overzealous prosecutor turned a paperwork discrepancy in a civil divorce filing into, literally, a criminal case.

Pursuant to that case, the prosecutor and the police searched Dr. Amin’s house, and confiscated Dr. Amin’s firearm collection,  planting the story of “The Iranian professor who collected a bunch of guns and swindled his soon-to-be-ex” – simultaneously defaming him to the left (“Serves the gun nut right!”) and the less-bright parts of the right (“Probably a terrorist!”).

The trial?  It was a comedy of errors – but not remotely funny.   All exculpatory evidence was suppressed, and that was just the beginning.   The ending?   A conviction – aided  by bizarre courtroom antics and some sketchy lawyering on both sides.

The prosecution is asking for a ten year prison sentence for a conviction that normally carries a years’ suspended sentence and probation for a first-time offender – which Dr. Amin, who held a top-secret security clearance until the conviction, most assuredly was.

Why so much irregularity in what started as a typical ugly American divorce?

We’ll be talking with Dr. Massoud about that this Saturday on my show.   Tune in, and call in if you havre questions.

I’ve long held, correctly, that Red America understands Blue America – its culture, society, ways, mores and the like – better than vice versa.   Red America gets New York and LA in a way that neither of them gets, and I’d suggest don’t believe they need or care to get, the rest of the country.

And it seems it’s not merely geographic:

In his remarkable book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt recalls a telling experiment. He and his colleagues Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (ie: progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse. Rather, they seemed to put moral ideas into the mouths of conservatives that they don’t hold.

That would explain why liberals are so very prone to arguing the straw man; it’s the only way they perceive conservatives.

To put it bluntly, Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives. This he calls the ‘conservative advantage,’ and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.

It’s been my observation that liberals, at large, can not effectively debate conservatives, because at no point in their education have they ever had to see conservatism and conservatism as anything other than cartoons.

I’ll urge you to read the whole thing.

I’ve become convinced that the greatest ever in rotation of Berg’s 7th law has been this past two decades’ drum beat of promises that there is “an avalanche of right wing terrorism” just around the corner.

Any day now.

Honest.

Actor James Cromwell predicts – I would say it’s more like “calls for” – “revolution” if the Republicans win the midterms:

Speaking to Variety at the event, he warned of the turn that he sees America taking and cautioned there will be “blood in the streets” if Republicans remain in control.

“This is nascent fascism. We always had a turnkey, totalitarian state — all we needed was an excuse, and all the institutions were in place to turn this into pure fascism,” Cromwell said. “If we don’t stop [President Trump] now, then we will have a revolution for real. Then there will be blood in the streets.”

The star, who previously played George H.W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s “W,” echoed these sentiments during his acceptance speech, where he warned that he believes the country is headed toward the possibility of a violent revolution.

“We’re living in very curious times, and something is coming up which is desperately important to this country and to this planet, and that is an election, in which hopefully in some measure we are going to take back our democracy,” he said. “We will have a government that represents us and not the donor class. We will cut through the corruption, [and] we won’t have to do what comes next, which is either a non-violent revolution or a violent one, because this has got to end.”

I don’t think members of the “elite” Realize how many Americans are ready to take him up on that. I don’t think it’s going to go nearly as well as they – Cromwell – think it will.

Last year, a story broke that had a little something for everyone – where by “everyone” you’re referring to “incurious, uncritical consumers of shabby information”.

It involved a professor from the University of MInnesota, Dr. Massoud Amin.   Amin was convicted of “Theft by Swindle” for, it was alleged, concealing funds from his soon-to-be ex wife during a nasty divorce.

We’ll come back to that.

The story got liberals exercised because Amin was a gun collector (with, dare I say, a penchant for finding bargains).   That is a classic dog whistle for the left.

And for the, shall we say, less bright on the right?   A middle-eastern sounding name like Amin’s is enough to get the “WATCH FOR TEH SHARIA” crowd into a froth.

And the media coverage of his divorce proceedings – including the swindle allegations – were decidedly unsympathetic.

Sentencing in his trial is scheduled for November 9.

The client is obviously guilty – right?

Not so fast.  And according to sources with close knowledge of the case, the charges and conviction are well beyond a miscarriage of justice; they were the tip of an iceberg of shenanigans – borne of malice up against incompetence at best, cynical ambition at worst, all  slathered with a layer of legalism.

And when you peel back the onion, you still have something for everyone – among critical thinkers, this time:

• A divorce from hell
• City bureaucrats hamfistedly persecuting a law-abiding gun owner
• A legal process that reads like something between Michael Crichton and Franz Kafka, tainted by racism and amoral careerism
• And, at the end of the day, an American who has done decades of groundbreaking work defending this country from cyberterrorism, facing ten years in prison for something that, even if it were a legitimate conviction.
• Which, given the evidence I’ve encountered, it was not.

More tomorrow.

A good dad with a gun ends a potential mass shooting at a McDonald’s:

The unidentified father was leaving the restaurant around 10:45 p.m. on Sunday when the suspect walked into the Birmingham, Alabama fast-food restaurant and started shooting.

The father then opened fire on the gunman, fatally wounding him. The dad and one of his children were also struck and suffered non-life threatening injuries.

Authorities do not know if the gunman was intending to rob the store or targeting a particular person. The father will not be facing charges, WBRC reports.

The motive – robbery, or a gang execution – isn’t clear at the moment to investigators…

And, thanks to one good guy with a gun, it doesn’t have to be.

Some Jews are learning the right, prudent lesson from the PIttsburgh Pogrom.

Indianapolis talk radio host Tony Katz describes his epiphany:

What happened in Pittsburgh is my nightmare scenario. For a few years now, on my radio shows in Indianapolis, I have said as loud and as clear as I can that any Jew who attends religious services without a firearm is risking their life and the lives of the ones they love.

But, in truth, I’ve never said it so kindly. I’ve said that nothing in America is more of a soft target than a synagogue on a Friday night or a Saturday morning. I discuss all houses of worship; synagogues, churches, mosques – they are all soft targets. I have argued that laws that prevent carrying a firearm in a house of worship where there is also a school are wrong, and should be changed (and, if necessary, ignored.)

The purpose of being trained and carrying a firearm is to protect yourself AND the ones your love. That means children: your children. Why would you ever put yourself in a position not to protect them? Why, as a society, would we ask this of any parent or guardian?

Read the whole thing.

The logical disconnect among the anti-gun crowd in view of episodes like the massacre in Pittsburgh – “helplessness is strength” – is frankly bizarre.

Via Gary Gross at LFR – two unions have broken from the DFL borg and endorsed Jason Lewis:

The carpenters’ union and International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49, both of whichendorsed Hillary Clinton, will support the first-term congressman in the midterm elections in his rematch against former health care executive Angie Craig. Labor leaders praised Lewis’s record in Congress, highlighting his support for domestic energy development as well as his willingness to buck his political party. Lewis has supported Davis-Bacon, which favors union wage levels in federal projects despite the push in the conservative movement to abolish wage mandates.

“In Jason’s time in Congress he has cast repeated votes in support of Davis-Bacon prevailing wage and has led on the issue of changing school curriculum to encourage more people to look at careers in the construction industry,” carpenters’ spokesman Adam Duininck said in a release.

Both unions also praised Lewis for focusing on local issues and maintaining a relationship with labor leaders. Local 49 business manager Jason George said that Lewis and the union were not in lockstep on every political issue, but the congressman had supported the issues that help support the building trades and traditional blue-collar workers.

There has been a slow, fitful trickle of private-sector unions coming over to the GOP – accelerated by the Trump Effect, it needs to be said.

And it only makes sense; the public sector unions that control the Democrat party have interests that are largely inimical to those of private-sector labor – indeed, the public ones, left with their own way, will eventually strangle the private ones.

Here’s hoping that the private unions still pack enough clout in places like Newport and Sourth Saint Paul, where Angie Craig will likely run strongest, to make a difference.

The welfare state – in the US, the state that was put in place by Lyndon B Johnson’s “Great Society” – isn’t so much about “solving poverty” as it is about “making poverty a permanently sustainable state that can be exploited for political gain”.

We can argue the specifics, and maybe even the conclusion.

But let’s say that was not the case; if the Democrats weren’t trying to build a permanent underclass beholden to them with the welfare state, how would you better design such a thing as one would with the Great Society?

Because that’s how it worked.   Poverty in the US was in free fall until the nation “declared war” on it.:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The recent synagogue shooting has Jews thinking about buying a gun.  Fine with me; but a gun is not a rabbit’s foot.  Simply having one in your possession doesn’t avert bad luck.  You need to know how to use it.

I’ve been shooting for more than 40 years.  I am a member of a gun club that lets me bring guests, for free.  I offer to teach any new gun owner the basics: how to load your new firearm, how to shoot it, how to clean it, how to store it so it’s quickly available if you need it but not accessible to those who shouldn’t have it.

No politics, no religion, no lectures, and no charge.  Safety and accuracy.  Leave your contact information in the comments.

Joe Doakes

And I’ll do the same.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting in a cafe, doing his taxes on his laptop.   Avery LIBRELLE walks in, and notices BERG before he can look away. 

LIBRELLE:   Merg!

BERG:   Oh…hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE.   Words have meanings! Less stable followers will take those words and use them to justify violence!

BERG: So you people call yourself “the Resistance” – appropriating the name of a movement that violently assassinated members of an occupying military, blew up their trains and trucks, sank their ships, gunned them down and hand-grenaded them in cafes and on public transit, set bombs in their offices and factories, threw molotov cocktails into their trucks, and murdered those they saw as “collaborators” to ensure nobody would collaborate.

LIBRELLE: No, no no, Merg. YOUR side’s words have meanings. OURS don’t.

And SCENE

Flying cars? Nope.

A cure for cancer or ALS? Slow your roll, buddy.

Food replicators? Ha ha. Not quite.

But we do have bricks. Made from urine.

Try not to get whiplash from all that progress.

Followers of the party that has undercut Israel for 40 years, many of whom cuddle up to Louis Farrakhan, and where Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar are leading emergent figures…

…says Donald Trump’s rhetoric promoted an anti-semitic attack.

Here’s Doug Wardlow’s website.  He can beat Keith Ellison – the polls are looking good – but we can not get complacent.   Help out.

Check out the Legislative Evaluation Assembly’s 2018 Report Card.

Finally, Myron Wilson is running for the HD15B House seat against Shane Mekeland, the GOP-endorsed candidate.

Join me from 1-3PM today on the NARN!

Today on the show:

• Doug Wardlow, GOP candidate for attorney general, on the latest polls, Keith Ellison’s performance, and how you can help him score the upset of the century.  .
• John Augustine of the Legislative Evaluation Assembly on the LEA’s 2018 Legislative Scorecard.
• Myron Wilson, independent candidate for the MN House.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• FM107.5 in the West Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narnshow)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sen. Grassley’s referral of Julie Swetnick and her “teenage rape gang” story to the FBI:

Was this an intentional attempt to mislead our reporters? Evidence points that way… https://t.co/MOxE8WiGK4

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) October 26, 2018

Mr. Todd: Isn’t it your job to figure that out?

Perhaps – radical thought, here – before you run the story?

At the “Battleground Talkers” event last night, Larry Elder reminded us just how racist Trump voters are.

In 2016, Abilene, Texas racked up the highest percentage of Trump voters of any metro area in the US – close to 80%.

And then, last year…:

In 2017, just months after voting so overwhelmingly for Trump, they elected a black mayor for the first time in the town’s 136 year history. And did so by a wide margin.

Those same white people who voted for President Trump helped propel Anthony Williams to victory in a town with a black population hovering at 10 percent.

Abilene Mayor Anthony Williams (R).

“People were so eager to vote, there was actually a higher turnout at the runoff than the general election,” the Texas Standard reported. “It’s been at least two decades since that has happened in Taylor County.”

“Just like other Texans, I’m proud to be a Texan,” Williams told local reporters and residents in town after the big win. “As an African-American, I’m proud of my heritage, but I really want to focus more broadly on our community.”

One of the left’s favorite slanders of the right over the past decade or so is “the only reason you didn’t vote for Obama was because he’s black” (and its companion slur, not voting for Hillary Clinton because she’s female-ish).

Which is baked wind, of course; I wouldn’t have voted for a Scandinavian Male Presbyterian who espoused either of their policies.  And I’d vote for a black Muslim lesbian, if she were a Hayek/Friedman disciple who owned a couple of AR15s and agreed that we should too.

Everything the coastal media tells you about the rest of the country is pretty much BS.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You know the pipe bombs are fake when celebrities and politicians start MeToo-ing them.

Obama, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros – sure, they are Conservative hobgoblins.  It’s believable some Conservative might send them bombs.  But Robert DeNiro?  He gets a bomb?  And now New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants in on the action (NYPD denies he got one).

Receiving a fake pipe bomb is the latest status symbol.  How come I didn’t get a bomb?  Did you get a bomb?

“Getting a bomb” is the new “once dated Taylor Swift”.

But only the convenient ones.

Andrew McCarthy  on the media’s treatment of the “pipe bomb” story:

There is plenty of media commentary at the moment about incivility, in the form of incendiary rhetoric and actions. This is entirely appropriate. But I’m at a loss to understand how the climate is improved by spicing up reports with thinly veiled suggestions that President Trump may have triggered a series of potentially murderous attacks on political opponents. When Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson opened fire on the Republicans he targeted and nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise, I don’t recall much Times speculation about whether he could have been set him off by Democrats urging their supporters to get aggressive — “get in their face”; “if they bring a knife, we bring a gun” — when dealing with political adversaries.

Every one of these episodes is like a mini Reichstag fire, a Gliwice incident;  every Democrat from Maxine Waters to Kathy Griffin to the New York Times can openly fantasize about killing the President and attacking Republicans – but let Trump talk smack about reporters and suddenly we’re on civility patrol.

As we often observe after terrorist attacks, everyone needs to take a deep breath until facts begin to emerge. The investigators are doing their jobs. Chances are we will know soon enough who is actually responsible for the pipe bombs. Then we probably won’t need speculation about motive and incitement . . . though there will be no shortage of it, anyway.

As Andrew McCarthy points out, there  is no evidence yet as to who did it – which doesn’t excuse the media’s double standard in covering the story.  At any rate, my speculation is of no more (or less) value than what you’re seeing on the news right now.

So I’ll speculate:

• – The bombs were amateur productions: https://twitchy.com/…/former-bomb-disposal-officer-weighs-…/
• – They targeted obvious Democrat figures – the Clintons, CNN, Obama, and George Soros – but only in a way that was practically guaranteed to get discovered long before they reached their ostensible targets (at least some were apparently packed in padded envelopes).
• – They came out two weeks before the election.

Seeing that, what would YOU think?

Jim Geraghty writes in NRO about how the blue Tsunami might in fact be a leaky diaper.

The whole piece is worth a read – but this bit in particular caught my attention, vis-a-vis polling and dire-sounding media coverage:

Folks on the right get used to hearing that they’re going to lose, how the Democrats have all the advantages, and they develop the ability to just keep plugging away in a tough environment. GOP grassroots activists are used to bad news, critical coverage, and ominous poll results. They’ve seen their candidates give amazing debate performances and then watch the coverage declare the Democrat the big winner. They’re used to having their attack ads denounced as vicious and unfair while the Democratic candidate’s ads are merely “hard-hitting” or “tough.” They’re used to seeing unflattering photos of candidates on the front page, comments taken out of context, fact-checkers that get the facts wrong, headlines that leave the wrong impression, and glowing editorial-page endorsements of the opposition. They’re used to having their yard signs stolen.

And they get up every morning and knock on doors and make the calls and participate in get-out-the-vote efforts anyway.

Of course, this rings true for Minnesota Republicans; if you didn’t get used to ignoring Dave Schultz and mocking the Minnesota Poll, you’d never get out of bed…

An Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren bio for, apparently, kids:

The lesson?  That any girl born into immense wealth, prestige and class privilege can still find a way to grow up to be an identity pimp.

Over the past two years, there’s been an epidemic of violence perpetrated by people on the left against Republicans, conservatives, Trump supporters, and anyone else the left considers untermensch.  

Some liberals, to be fair, decry the violence – but not only do you have many high-profile liberals calling for it, and calling for more, but many more quibble that it actually happens, or that it’s really as bad as the victims say it is.

But now we come to hear that both prog plutocrat financier George Soros, Barack Obama and the Clintons have received some form of explosive device or another.

Right before the election.

Simply amazing, isn’t it?

If someone on the right is behind this, then they need to be arrested and prosecuted until their ears bleed.

But it does seem waaaaaaaaaaaaay too convenient, doesn’t it?

… that thousands of people are theatrically attempting to bum rush the borders to get here to the country he’s, er, destroying.

Perhaps they thought they were marching to Venezuela?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I now know as much as I need to know, to cast an informed vote in the governor’s race.

Joe doakes

The missive relates to this mailer:

Leaving aside the Orwellian use of “Health” to refer to dismembering fetuses, I just want to smack Democrats for making up “rights” as they go.

There is no “right” to health. There is a responsibility to take care of yourself.

No more!

When I started going my show in 2004, I accepted a couple of things as truisms:

• The Eighth Congressional District would be rock-solid Democrat territory forever.
• Mike Hatch, Mike Hatch’s progeny, or Mike Hatch’s brain in a jar would hold the Attorney General’s office though my great-grandchildren’s time
• Metro DFL voters would be arrogant, entitled, and generally awful.

The first really fell apart two years ago, with Trump capturing the district by two digits, and Pete Stauber looking to do the same.

And the second?   Look out, but there’s a hurricane coming:

Republican Doug Wardlow has pulled ahead of Democrat U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison in the race for Minnesota attorney general, a Star Tribune/MPR News Minnesota Poll found.

Wardlow now leads by 7 percentage points, at 43 percent to 36 percent for Ellison, just a month after the Democrat held a 5-point edge in a September Minnesota Poll. The switch follows a turbulent period for the Ellison campaign, as he has navigated the political fallout of his former girlfriend’s allegation that he abused her in 2016, a claim he denies.

About one in six poll participants said they had not made up their minds about who to support.

And this has got to be bad news for Ellison:

Republicans appear to be falling in line behind Wardlow, but an increasing number of Democrats were undecided about who to back compared to September.

When you’re losing the sales on your own side (assuming the poll is accurate, and I never have and never will, but let’s run with it for now), you’ve got issues.

By the way – the crosstabs:

The self-identified party affiliation of the respondents is 38 percent Democrats, 33 percent Republicans and 29 percent independents or other.

Seems…high to me.

But onward.

Oh, the third bullet?  Utterly unchanged.  What, you thought it might?