On Monday, third district Congressman Dean Phillips claimed complete ownership of Labor Day:
Don’t tweet about #LaborDay unless you support the right to organize and collectively bargain. Unless you’re working to lower the cost of healthcare and childcare, and fighting for paid family leave, pre-k, and the child tax credit. America’s heroes need support, not bbq’s.🇺🇸
Seems a little presumptuous – foreclosing all communication that is ambivalent to opposed re unions – unless Phillips is a real champion of labor.
But a quick search doesn’t indicate that the Phillips distillery in Princeton Minnesota is unionized; a look through a court document related to a workmen’s compensation case mentions no union involvement on behalf of an injured warehouse worker, so I don’t think it’s a reasonable stretch to assume the plant is not, or not fully, unionized.
I will be putting in a call to representative Phillips‘s office on this today.
In the first 150 odd years of the Minnesota State Fair, law abiding citizens were discouraged, and perhaps even told in as many words not to bring guns to the Minnesota state fair.
And yet they did. From statehood until 1974, law-abiding Minnesotans didn’t need a permit to carry a firearm, so it’s completely preposterous just say not a single law abiding citizen brought their firearm to the fair.
And we know that in the “shall issue” era, people might have brought a gun or two. In fact, I know of at least one radio station where every single staffer at the fairgrounds may have had a legal firearm, and a clean criminal record to go with it.
 And in that 150-odd years, there were countless fights…
… and exactly one incident with a gun, an armed robbery probably five or six years ago – an incident that happened about the time the fair stepped up the “gun free zone“ signs and rhetoric. If you guessed that the perpetrators were legal gun owners, actually entitled to hold, much less own, a firearm or carrier in public legally, you would have guessed wrong.
So that’s the first 160 years of Fair history..
Then, last year (before the Covid-addled 2021 Fair), the Minnesota State Fair announced that they were going to put some teeth behind the “gun free zone“ designation, putting up metal detectors and searching fairgoers. They took that policy to court, and prevailed (so far).
The official policy of the Minnesota State Fair is that law abiding citizens should be defenseless against whatever miscreancy any ne’er-do-well wants to carry out.
After about 160 relatively tranquil years, it took exactly 10 days for some party pooper to settle his argument – probably over a fish story or a bet on a Gophers game, I bet – with a gun that just couldn’t possibly have been there, because it’s a gun free zone.
There is a lesson here that we can, and should, apply to the sort of spectacular violence that has the white middle-class part of our society so exercised, the mass shootings in places like schools and government offices and schools and grocery stores and schools.
If you want to deter violence, nobody actually needs to carry a gun. All that’s needed is the knowledge that nothing prevents good people from protecting themselves.
Criminals aren’t as a rule the brightest people – but they have a sense of self preservation.  in the months after Minnesota past its “shall issue“ carry permit statute in 2003/2005, something weird happened: an alarming number of bars that posted themselves as “gun free“ wound up getting robbed. Most of those signs – especially in the less than posh neighborhoods – disappeared from bars by about 2006.
There are two lessons in last nights story:
1) The Minnesota State Fair board values the anxieties and aesthetics of its white, upper middle class governing board and political circle more than your safety.
2) an ounce of prevention is worth all the self righteous politically correct hubris in the world.
160+ years of law abiding citizens carrying firearms on the fairgrounds: zero shootings.
Two years (one of them after Covid) of security Cedar and at law abiding citizens: the first ever shooting on the fairgrounds (an increase in violence around the fairgrounds).
Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation. But in this case, I’m pretty sure it does.
The line of people looking to find out more about Scott Jensen at the State Fair yesterday:
The crowd outside the Tim Walz booth:
I’m not saying crowds at the fair translates necessarily to results at the ballot box; the state fair is sort of like red Minnesota’s daycamp in the city, and Republican booths pretty routinely draw better crowds.
But I’ve never seen it quite this unbalanced, before.
There are two ways of looking at last nights exercise of the will to power masquerading as a speech by a senile old man:
The Ultimate Exercise of Berg‘s Seventh Law: Brandon, leader of a party whose acolytes have been dismantleing the rule of law nationwide, using administrative power to stifle opposition,and sending bands of thugs out to keep people in line,speaking from an SS-issue black and red stage flanked by Marines, painted half of America – his political opponents – as threats to democracy and domestic terrorists.
A Masterful Diversion: instead of talking about inflation, energy prices, a failing education system, unaffordable health care and education, catastrophic crime rates, the border crisis, national debt, the collapse of America’s foreign-policy, a nationwide mental health crisis, we are all now talking about Donald Trump.
And given how much extremism benefits from extremism, I don’t doubt for a moment that the Branden ministration is hoping last nights “Build back with Triumph of the Will“ address goads some less stable Trumpkin into doing something stupid, accompanied by lavish media coverage, to further deflect the nations attention.
Something else I recently watched on Disney Plus is Hamilton. It was long. I wasn’t enthusiastic about watching the entire show in one sitting -might be better live.
But, I started listening to the soundtrack. Some of those songs are pretty good. I think they are uplifting in a “I’m proud of my country and it’s history” way. It’s good to hear modern day pride in our country and our founders.
But, one song sticks with me in particular. “You’ll be Back.”
https://youtu.be/JF23buZH4WU
It makes a mockery of the King of England. But, I can’t help think some of these lyrics apply to many present day Democrats.
There are times that honestly wonder how many would repudiate the terms of the Declaration of Independence, in a double blind test…
So what would you do if you met an SS stormtrooper, in mid-depredation? One of the people who conquered Europe and ran the concentration camps? An actual “fascist”?
We’ll come back to that.
Boogie Man
So what defines an authoritarian, whatever label (“fascist”, “Nazi”, “Communist”, “Banana Republic”, and on and on?).
Here’s one trait.
Remember when this scene, from 1984, seemed fictional?
Authoritarians, from the Pharoahs to Kim Jong Un, knew that total authority rested on having a boogeyman – simultaneously the nadir of depravity and an existential threat – to divert the attention and energy of the people.
Remember that old trick from junior high, where you’d stare up at ceiling until other people started staring up with you to see what you were looking at?
“White Supremacist” groups have been shedding members at the rate of an order of magnitude per generation: they had millions of members in the 1920s (they the KKK drew 50,000 to a rally in Rocherster Minnesota in the ’20s), to hundreds of thousands in the ’60s, to tens of thousands in the early 80s (which saw the last great spasm of militant violence from those groups – the Posse Comitatus, the Alan Berg murders, and of course Oklahoma City).
Notwithstanding that, about the time Barack Obama got elected, Big Left started chanting “there’s going to be a wave of white supremacist/ultra-right terror that’ll dwarf 9/11. Any day now”.
And they’ve done their darnedest to tell that story – from portraying 100 doughy losers parading with tiki torches while outnumbered 10 to 1 in Charlottesville a “White Supremacist Uprising”, to shaking and baking more “right wing attacks” from the ether…
…almost as if they’re trying to goad someone into doing something as stupid and destructive…
…as the stuff “Anti”-Fa and BLM have been doing nationwide for the past couple of years.
But it’s not just about deflection.
It’s about making your side think the other side is just a little less noble, worthy and human than the people on your side.
Charlie Crist, taking the next step on his road toward being the Harold Stassen of the deep south, told Republican voters to take their votes elsewhere, for their “hateful” act of (checks notes) supporting Ron DeSantis. .
Which is mostly par for the course, these days.
What, Are You Gonna Cry? Huh?
The propensity for bullies to try to goad their opponents to strike first, so they can appear to be defending themselves, is pretty much bully human nature. Extremists benefit from extreme responses; among the biggest supporters of German president Von HIndenburg’s “Hitler Cabinet” were the Communists, who bet long (and, while ultimately mistakenly, not without good reason) that promoting extremism in their opposition would benefit them.
But as we wait for the “President”‘s speech on “the soul of the nation” tomorrow, the chanting point has been deafening.
If brains were gasoline, Eric Swalwell couldn’t drive a Vespa around the inside of a Cheerio. But that’s the nice thing about being a “useful idiot” – being an idiot won’t count you out of the job:
Boy these guys don’t like being called fascists. Maybe they should stop trying to overthrow their government and forcing raped women to have babies.
Berg’s Seventh Law alert; who said anything about a civil war?
And this next bit, from Brandon – is it yet another senile rant, or does he actually think that “right wing Americans” are killing cops?
Or does he just want his dumber, less critical supporters to think it?
Biden repeats the lie that "you can't go out and buy a cannon" and then claims "brave right-wing Americans" are "shooting at these guys behind me." pic.twitter.com/Pt9jKwDoWg
Well, clearly Big Left wants people to think someone’s itchin’ to do some killin’:
A staffer of mine—who’s 1 month into her job—received a call from a man saying he’s coming to our office w/ an assault rifle to kill me. I hesitate to share this but how else do I tell you we are in violent times, & the architects are Trump & McCarthy. Bloodshed is coming.
(Note: not gonna say “this didn’t happen” I am going to say it happens all the time, and like Ilhan Omar’s “death threats” just in time for the state fair last year, calling them out, especially on the part of an intentional incendiarist like Swalwell, is more a matter of political optics than actual law-enforcement. I’m going out on a short little limb to suggest this is but one of many threats people on all sides of the aisle get – but this one happens to fit a narrative. Prove me wrong)
Now, it may well be that “bloodshed is coming”. We’ve already had a couple of examples – although neither this nor this are the examples Swalwell is thinking of.
But the larger point is, Big Left is trying to make half the nation into “boogiemen”.
“But the right does it too! What about Willie Horton? What about Reagan’s ‘welfare queens'”?
Say what you will about both of them; nobody ascribed their traits to half of the entire electorate.
Big Left is “othering” half the population; social media is a “90 Seconds Hate” that never ends.
Why?
You Travel Back In Time And Meet Teenage Hitler…
To answer the question from the first paragraph – what do you do if you meet an actual SS Stormtrooper?
Because the “fascist” of cultural lore was an enemy of humanity. There is no “semi”-concentration camp guard, is there?
You do what our grandparents did at Normandy or Bastogne or Saint Lo? You attack and destroy them. Right?
They are making about half the population into boogiemen so the other half doesn’t see them as human beings with political differences, but rather as villains to be feared, hated, subjugated, destroyed metaphorically or literally.
Let’s see if that’s part of Biden’s speech about “the nation’s soul” later today.
In 2020, a group of activists tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the Capitol mall in Saint Paul.
Although the entire episode was carried live in TV, only one person was arrested; that person was “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the evils of Columbus, which is a little like sentencing drunk driver to teaching mixology to high school kids.
This happened, even as the person in charge of the Capitol Architecture Commission, Peggy Flanagan (have you heard she’s Native American?), had the power in her hands to remove the statue via due process – which is slow and boring, compared to having your activist buddies do it for you.
And lefty social media was clogged with addlepated lefties nodding and going “rules, schmules; at least it’s gone”.
One needn’t imagine what’d happen if some non-DFL group decided to tear down a statute of their bete noir; I’ve thought about how fun it’d be to rip down the statue of noted authoritarian socalist Floyd Olson. I don’t suspect I’d get “sentenced” to teaching high school kids about the evils of socialism.
This episode highlights three facets of the sort of authoritarian government that is, in fact, the sort of “fascism” that Big Left is trying to paint the right with:
The Rule of Law is for Other People: Don’t want to go through the Capitol Architecture Committee – or get your Student Loan Redistribution passed by Congress, or have to convince the American people and their state legislatures of the rightness of your cause, or convince Republicans of their wrongness? Just have your buddies tear it down, or declare $10K null and void with no statutory authority, or pack the Supreme Court, or send your “Anti”-Fa crowd in to bust some heads. Rules are for peasants.
Different Versions of Justice For the Political “Haves” and “Have Nots”: Lois Lerner will never go to jail for gang-raping the First Amendment. Not only did the Ramsey County Attorney’s office not actually punish Woody Kane for leading a planned, coordinated assault of Republicans, they may as well have sent him off with a voucher for a hooker and dinner at the Saint Paul Grill.
The Ends Justify The Means: If your idea of government, like the people approving of the tearing down of the statue, is “to get the things I want done, done”, or the shorter but more cynical “move things forward” – whether good, evil or indifferent – then you don’t really get self-government, and likely don’t want to.
“But Trump did all those things!”
Are you sure you want to make “our leadership is doing the same thing the person we call ‘literaly Hitler’ did” your lede?
Just A Note Before We Go
We’ve talked about four attributes of authoritarian government – defining boogeymen, circumventing the rule of law, and making one’s ends justify one’s means.
There’s one more; wrapping ones side in some larger cause, be it “history” or nationalism or, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess, “the soul of the nation” – about which President Brandon will be talking today.
