I think the first time I noticed America’s political class divide when I was doing my first talk show, at KSTP, way back when. I made the, um, profound observation that while the American Left had always sought a “class war” in which they – or at least the garden variety of “they” – saw themselves as the little guy revolting against the Leviathan, in at least one contest, the gun control “debate”, they were in fact the patricians, trying to keep the plebs in line.

I was young and naive. Literally every cultural argument breaks down on those lines, down to the rhetoric Big Left uses.

And that class war’s biggest flashpoints in recent years were Brexit in Europe, and Donald Trump in the US. The Big Government response to Covid was an extension of that skirmish.

Which brings us to this weeks’ most interesting story, the argument over the case for or against Amnesty for the culture-war criminals.

Speaking to the case against “Covid Amnesty”, I present this piece from Unherd. Or rather, one part of a huge case for, not “amnesty”, but truth and reconciliation.

It was a salvo in the class war – America’s patrician class’s way of getting the plebs back for Brexit and Trump.

One of many “money” pullquotes:

Public faith in objectively shared political ground was already dissolving while my daughter gestated. If the Virtuals have a problem now, it’s that their counter-volley to Trump and Brexit consumed the last vestige of trust in that shared political ground: our faith in science. And the notion that such ground exists is the sine qua non of Virtual political legitimacy in its current technocratic form.

In this light, Oster’s call for amnesty can present itself as an effort to rebuild the neutral space of shared political endeavour after a period of conflict. But it reads as a continuation of now-familiar efforts to weaponise the appearance of such neutrality and common purpose, in the interests of one side of that conflict.

We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign [the “In This House…” mob – Ed.] priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.

The whole thing is worth a read.

…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.

Gotta tell you something that bugs the bejeebers out of me.

Governor Walz’s campaign motto in both elections has been “One Minnesota”.

Now, if you’ve studied History *and* German, that slogan sounds all too close to “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” – “One People, One Empire, One Leader”. It was the motto of…uh, a regime 80 years ago that left behind some apocalyptic historical, social and political baggage.

In 2018, the slogan was merely annoying – one of those things the kids today refer to as “Microagressions”, which is another way of saying “something that people normally suck it up and chalk up to the cognitive dissonance of human communication”.

But after four years featuring the most incredible peacetime seizure of government power in history, and a long spate of politicized violence, not to mention a campaign of “othering” dissenters from the current ruling party as “Fascists” – the same, morally and personally, as the Godwins Law convicts in the second paragraph up above – it’s not hard to wonder if “One Minnesota” is a warm, fuzzy inclusive thing, or a warning that you’re either *with* “One Minnesota” or you’re against it; an invitation, as Elvis Costello put it, “shut up or get cut up”.

The President’s speech in September, referring to half the country as “Facists”, is exactly what regimes do when they want to draw a wide, exclusive “with us or against us” line through society.

I thought about that while reading this blood-curdling story about the Russian war crimes in Bucha – where they “cleansed” the city of Ukrainians accused by their regime of being “Nazis” and “Fascists”.

Today it’s Ukraine – but it’s the same dynamic that happened in Iraq in the 2000s, and Rwanda in the ’90s, Northern Ireland in the ’70s, China in the ’60s, Greece in the ’40s and ’50s, Finland (ffs?) in the 1920’s, even Kansas before the CIvil War; if you were on the wrong side of the “Us vs. Them” line when “Them” came through town, you and your family…died. Horribly. Then and there, bodies dumped in the street as a warning that we’re now living in One Iraq/Rwanda/Ulster/Greece/Finland/Kansas.

Given the rhetoric we are seeing today – I’ll charitable and say “on both sides”, but my heart’s not really in it – a slogan like “One Minnesota” is just too…redolent. That’s a good word.

You indiscriminately refer to your opposition – political, social, whatever – as “Fascists”, “Nazis” or whatever mortal enemy, against whom your society fought a life or death battle in living memory, that your culture recognizes.

Something causes the gloves to come off. Angry tweets – aimed at people who’ve had that label from that mortal enemy piled onto them – turn to angry words, to angry actions…

…and eventually, to mass murder.

But after the rhetoric of the past few years, escalated over the past few months, it’s not hard to see it happening in a place like

Democrats, learning Twitter banned discussion on politically fraught topics at FBI request: “Hey, it’s a private company. They can do what they want!”

Democrats, being asked to pay $8 a month for their precious blue checks: “Musk is STIFLING FREE SPEECH ZOMG!!! REEEEEEEEE!!!”

Berg’s Seventh Law (“When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds“) was written long before I first read Saul Alinski’s “Rules for Radicals”, so I didn’t know that Alinski’s Rule 4, “”Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”, is more or less the same idea.

The most tiresome, and omnipresent, meme of this election is “a vote for Republicans is a vote against Democracy”, combined with labeling any call for scrutiny of election laws and processes on any level as “election denialism”.

It’s a way of “othering” people – for, in most cases (shaddap about Marjory Taylor Greene – for defending a system of self-government …

…that is under constant attack by the left themselves.

It’s time to start calling out:

• Electoral College Denialists
• Minoritarian Senate Denialists
• Enumerated Powers Denialists
• Checks and Balances Denialists…

…as the threats to self-government that they actually are.

A friend of the blog emails:

This woman has had 2 scary incidents. 

She tries to say in the op-ed that there are solutions. She doesn’t name any.

It doesn’t appear as though she called the police at all over either incident, so she is complicit, in my opinion, to allowing these criminals to terrorize others, maybe even kill someone next time. She doesn’t seem to care.

If she found herself visiting a small rural town, where several white rural stereotypes were shooting at each other and pointing their guns at her and her children, would she have the same beliefs? I don’t know.

But, in either case, she should be calling the police. Fine, believe in, advocate for early interventions. But, when someone is actively engaged in criminal activity, early intervention is too late. They are criminals. We have laws. Why is that so hard for people to understand? Does half the country have Stockholm Syndrome? 

I saw this morning that Peggy Noonan wrote that crime might elect a Republican in New York. And it is possible here in Minnesota, as well. I’m not going to win any friends by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway- I hope Republicans are truly prepared for that possibility.

Yeah, that’s kind of (pun incoming) elephant in the room: the GOP is going to need to deliver on a lot if they win significant enough majorities…well, anywhere.

Yesterday was a big day in polling for MN Republicans.

Top of the order – Real Clear Politics’s polling summary shows Scott Jensen behind, still – but the second most-improved of the GOP hopefuls:

That’s over the previous two weeks – and it was the best performance of a number of underdog Republican gubernatorial candidates. As Dan McLaughlin said:

In the gubernatorial races, the Wave Surfers are Christine Drazan, Kari Lake, Joe Lombardo, Stitt, Derek Schmidt, and Tim Michels. Maybe you could persuade me with one more poll to slide Scott Jensen into this bracket.

And its been 16 years since that’s been said out loud.

---

Later in the day? I suspect some interns were soundly thrashed when the news came out:

Wilson up five over Blaha, with plenty undecided, but Biden underwater in Minnesota and momentum apparently moving the other way? Fingernails will be chewed. But it could be worse.

And the big news:

GOP Attorney General candidate Jim Schultz up by nearly double the margin of error, with barely enough undecideds to swing the race to Ellison if they all joined him (ignoring the MOE for a moment).

As to the Governor’s race?

Survey USA, which had Jensen down 18 points two months ago, currently has him…

KSTP/SURVEYUSA: MN Gov. Tim Walz continues to lead his race against Republican Scott Jensen, 51% to 43% with just 4% undecided. pic.twitter.com/fYxhZYpRRF

— Tom Hauser (@thauserkstp) November 1, 2022

…down eight.

I’m not going to claim SUSA is biased in the same way I showed the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll was. Clearly the methodology differences between SUSA and the Trafalgar Poll a few weeks back are pretty immense, and it’ll be interesting, to say the least, to see how this shakes out over the next week.

Emily Oster at The Atlantic wonders if we mightn’t just bury the hatchet about all that Covid overreaction; call a social mulligan; just mooooooove on:

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

David Strom – now writing for Hot Air – meets Dr. Oster halfway:

[Dr. Oster] has generally been a voice of reason on COVID policy, and even when I disagree I respect her. She supported policies I considered and consider appalling, yet she always shared her reasoning and her doubts. Plus she vigorously opposed the COVID excuse to destroy education, and that deserves great respect…Dr. Oster’s premise is simple and easy to grasp. And, under normal circumstances, one with which I could be sympathetic: during the initial phases of COVID people were making decisions in an environment dominated by near total ignorance of the seriousness of COVID, so we should forgive each other for the mistakes made by people and policymakers

But…:

Once data started rolling in and the true scope of its danger was known, COVID became a political cause for the Left, not a public health issue. Public policy and social behavior was no longer grounded in any connection to reality and became a political signifier, and every single awful consequence that has come from the use of COVID as a political cudgel to attack those of us who demanded a rational, measured response is entirely blameworthy. The people who did this must pay a price.

COVID fanatics deserve every single bit of the consequences that are coming for them, and far far more than they will suffer.

I might be inclined to agree with David’s premise – in March and April, maybe May of 2020, when we really didn’t know what was going on, and we didn’t know that Covid wasn’t going to be a demographic scythe mowing down vast swathes of the population? Sure.

Once we got to about June or July – when it was very clear to anyone who could read a graph that Governor Klink’s prediction of 20,000 dead in Minnesota by mid-July, best case, was off by more than an order of magnitude, and he set about concealing the code for the model that led to the prediction because “someone might use it to get different results than we got” (which is the polar opposite of “science”?

For everything that came after – the schools closed, the tsunami of mental health issues, the endless emergency declarations, the boarded-over basketball hoops and bans on selling garden supplies – you want “Amnesty?”

After this?

I’m going to start the negotiation with “military tribunals”.

For the many millions who couldn’t get their cancer, heart disease and other chronic, sometimes life-threatening conditions seen, diagnosed or treated?

Drumhead court-martials are too good.

For the bans on funerals? For the loved ones that died alone in hospitals and LTCs?

https://twitter.com/benstanton77/status/1587123009663471619?s=46&t=MdTAU8OsNv76xs46QKVYmg

I’d be hard-pressed to deny those demanding a “purge night” their due, but this is a civil society.

For the huge advances in the power of the police and surveillance states? For the “emergency powers” seized, and held for well over a year, by tinpot piglets like Gretchen Whitmer and Tim “Klink” Walz?

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1587253046580776960?s=46&t=MdTAU8OsNv76xs46QKVYmg

Give me some heads on pikes – figuratively – and I I might, might, be persuaded to settle for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, as long as it has the power to imprison people for a long time.

My mother suffered from Alzheimers. She and her husband – also very ill – were in a long-term care in Minot. Her husband died in March 2020. The “emergency” rules in Minnesota – and the carnage caused by Governor Klink and the Department of Health’s policies – meant it took seven months to move her to Minnesota. Seven months during which, alone in a nursing home, my mother declined even more alarmingly than she had before.

Amnesty?

I’m more inclined toward demanding unconditional surrender.

But it’s likely my vote next Tuesday is my only recourse.

Rot in (figurative, electoral) hell, Tim Walz, Peggy Flanagan, and anyone who votes for you.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is out dropping literature for a candidate for the Minnesota state House of Representatives. As he walks toward a door, he encounters Avery LIBRELLE, carrying a shopping bag full of campaign literature.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, Chriiiiistchurch New Zealand is beautiful this time of year, hey, Avery, how…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. Paul Pelosi was attacked by a MAGAt terrorist who represents the inner id of all Republican scumbags, something that every voter needs to remember as we head towards a midterm election where some polls are showing democracy itself is a threat from slack-jawed, drooling yokels in red caps.

BERG: “Uh, there’s no evidence that DePape was a Republican or conservative in any…”

LIBRELLE: “He was an old man who was attacked, and all you can think is politics?”

BERG: (Glances into LIBRELLE’s shopping bag) Uh, Avery, that’s all Republican literature…

But LIBRELLE is already scampering down the road

And SCENE.

Since some prog will bleat “Why aren’t you condemning the attack on Paul Pelosi?” if I don’t say it – violence is bad. Don’t hit people with hammers, or anything else.

Speaking of people trying to exploit the episode…

The Star Tribune:

The violence was the latest jolt to an increasingly splintered political system that is riven with extremism.
Here's a look at what is known about the attack and the suspect: https://t.co/zf9AT14bED

— The Minnesota Star Tribune (@StarTribune) October 30, 2022

Rob Reiner, the intellectual thought leader of the modern Democrat party?

And look – here’s Ilhan Omar, on the attack on Paul Pelosi:

A far right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.

Here’s Angie Craig:

I was shocked to hear of the brutal attack that occurred last night against Speaker Pelosi’s husband, Paul. Political violence is never acceptable. I wish Paul a speedy recovery and am thinking of the Pelosi family at this time.

— Angie Craig (@RepAngieCraig) October 28, 2022

Here’s Amy Klobuchar:

On Meet the Press, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar rued how Pelosi “has been villainized for years, and big surprise, it’s gone viral, and it went violent.” She said we have “to make sure we’re not electing more election deniers who are following Donald Trump down this road,” and “we have to do something about this amplification of this election-denying hate speech that we see on the Internet.”

I don’t expect Dems to be familiar with Berg’s 18th Law – but there may be no better case of it in all of history. Indeed, there might be a corollary to the the law – if the Democrats can use the story for political gain, 48 hours is waaaaay too short.

The facts? Much more prosaic:

All of this requires imposing a coherence on David DePape’s mind that simply doesn’t exist, which would be obvious to anyone who paused for a minute to consider and absorb the evidence.

Listen to the person who perhaps knows him best — the mother of his two children, a woman named Oxane Taub (a.k.a. Gypsy), herself a whack-job serving jail time for trying to abduct a 14-year-old boy she was infatuated with.

(As a press release from the local DA’s office put it: “Over the course of 14 months, she sent him numerous obsessive emails, created blogs directed at him, used his friends to send him messages and eventually tried to abduct him a few blocks from his school in Berkeley. While the case was pending, Taub also tried to dissuade the victim from testifying.” And she was the rational half of the couple.)

In an interview from jail, conducted by a local TV station, Taub said, “He is mentally ill. He has been mentally ill for a long time.” She said he was missing for a year and then showed up again “in very bad shape.” According to Taub, “he thought he was Jesus.” She added, “He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him. And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.”

My theory? Democrats – especially Minnesota DFLers – are looking at next week’s election, and figure painting themselves as victims of MAGA, and the “wave of conservative/white supremacist terror” they’ve been promising for the past 15 years, can’t hurt.

The Vice President of the United States actively worked to bail out rioters, convicted rapists and scads of violent goons:

If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota. https://t.co/t8LXowKIbw

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 1, 2020

Not a single national Democrat or local DFLer denounced this erosion of our legal system. Some, including much of the metro and state “progressive” power elite, celebrated and participated in it.

This needs to be held against every last one of them in tomorrow’s elections.

UPDATE: Next Tuesday’s elections. Sometime banking posts for the future is a two-edge sword.