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

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

What is…

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

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

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

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

To wit:

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

So – how do we define either of ’em?

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

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

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

Co-option of Institutions

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

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

Co-option of Society

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

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

Eroding Rule of Law, Uplifting Rule of Men

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

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

Perverting Society’s Norms

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

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

Creating Official Boogeymen And Enemies

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

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

So what needs to be added or removed?

The headlines tell a heart-rending story: new Florida congressman, heralded as the first “Gen-Z” member of Congress, can’t afford an apartment in DC.

If an intellectual titan like Reich is yakking about it, it must be worth a look. And, sure enough…:

When he’s sworn into office next month, Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost will become the first member of Generation Z to become a member of Congress in U.S. history; an auspicious milestone for the 25-year-old and the House of Representatives at large. For now, though, the onetime progressive activist-turned-legislator has more immediate concerns on his mind — one shared by millions of his generational peers, as well: finding an affordable place to live amidst skyrocketing house and rental prices.

And I couldn’t help but think – the story seems familiar.

Sure enough – four years ago, Tide Pod Evita had the same exact sob story:

One year ago, you could find Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez working behind the bar at Flats Fix, a small taqueria near Union Square. Come January, you will find her in Washington D.C., representing New York’s 14th District as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

But just because she is making history, doesn’t mean she is making money. Ocasio-Cortez recently revealed that she is currently unable to rent a D.C. apartment.

Of course, being in Congress has its perks – an upper middle class salary, connections, power. AOC’s not exactly “the one percent” just yet, the movement is, uh, emphatically “up”:

Year	AOC Net Worth (estimated)
2019	Not Available
2020	$100,000
2021	$200,000
2022	$350,000

She – and Frost, for that matter – appear to be on the track to cash out juuuust fine.

But I’m wondering – is this going to be a biennial tradition? The media bemoaning some young, “progressive” pols brief brush with DC rental reality, on their (unstated) way to a sinecure, a federal pension, a “commentator” job at MSNBC, and connections that lead to millions of lifetime wealth?

I think Mr. Frost’ll pull through somehow.

The hits keep coming for Minneapolis, as more restaurants  are calling it quits:

In Minneapolis alone, a number of long-standing institutions have called it quits. Rock Bottom Brewery, Seven Steakhouse and Sushi, Williams Pub and Peanut Bar, Amore Uptown and Stella’s Fish Cafe to name a few.

Some of them date back to long before I moved to the Cities – in this case, Asia Chow Mein in Columbia Heights:

“It was very hard to decide that,” Ng said. “At first, I was going to have my son take over, but now with so many obstacles and so many unknowns in this industry, I just hate for him to take over and he will be struggling like we have the last three years.”

Winnie said what served as a mold for success the prior generation, is one that no longer fits.

“The American dream maybe is for our parents,” Winnie said. “Because they think, immigrate here, they will make a better living, a better education for the kids. But I really don’t know what the outcome would be if we were to stay. I still have cousins and people back home and they’re doing really good too, you know?”

Ng said she is grateful for the sacrifice that her and Tim’s parents made. She recognizes the difficulty of moving to America, without speaking English, with the hopes of providing a better future for their children. She admired that they took the time to learn English, to navigate American cities, to learn how to walk in the snow, to learn to love eating American food.

In completely unrelated news, Downtown merchants and other leaders are trying to figure out what to do to revive downtown…

…which is back,and also never went away and has no crime or vacancy problem, and if you think it does you’re a rube from Waconia or Maple Grove.

I flipped on NPR last night to catch a (large) part of a Terry Gross interview with historian Adam Hochschild, on his new book about the grave threats to democracy during World War 1.

And it was a dismal time indeed. “Sedition”, defined broadly, threw thousands in jail. The Department of Justice deputized people to enforce government speech codes and arrest people for suspicion of, basically, thought-crime; it was the first time in history that federal institutions had enough power and budget to get weaponized, and that is exactly what happened. Jim Crow was, by the way, federalized.

But here’s the thing; while Hochschild calls the repression “Trump-y” at one point, and Gross makes a raft of her usual Kaelian innuendos, you can listen to the piece all the way through…

…in vain for a reference to the fact that Woodrow Wilson, the father of modern “progressivism”, and an enthusiastic actual white supremacist to boot, drove all of this from the ground up.

“He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past”.

Two people murdered at downtown Saint Paul’s Central Avenue transit station on Monday night:

Officers responded about 8:30 p.m. to the corner of Fifth and Cedar streets, where they found two people suffering from apparent gunshot wounds in the stairway/elevator structure that connects the skyway to the Green Line Central Station light rail stop, according to Metro Transit Police spokesman Drew Kerr.

Both of the wounded people were taken to a nearby hospital, but they both later died, Kerr said.

Another man was murdered on the same station’s platform last spring.

The “Transit Memorial Day” post next June is going to be a doozy.

DeSantis tops Trump in a new poll – and not by a little bit.

Emphasis added by me:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) leads former President Trump by 23 points among Republicans in a hypothetical GOP presidential primary, according to a poll released Tuesday. 

The USA Today-Suffolk University poll found that 56 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters prefer DeSantis, while only 33 percent would support Trump. More than 60 percent said they want a nominee who will continue Trump’s policies but is not Trump, while 31 percent want the former president to run. 

I don’t care about mean tweets. I do care very much about slashing regulation (and, since Trump didn’t do it, spending as well) and acting in the nation’s best interest.

I’m not interested in relitigating the 2020 election; rooting out the corruption that does exist, sure; barbering on about remedies that aren’t anywhere in the Consitution, not so much.

Most of all? I want to force the Democrats to defend themselves, their record, their squatting on American democracy, in 2024. Without Trump to deflect to, they fail.

Well, the latest testing statistics show that Minnesota teachers are doing a less than average quick job of teaching students how to do math clearly someone at the admin knows how numbers that up.They spent $4 million on contributing to the DFL‘s sweep of the 2022 elections.

And now, they’re after their payoff:

Union president Denise Specht, whose political action committee donates huge sums to DFL candidates each cycle, told WCCO Radio she will be asking the Legislature for more than $5 billion to address “chronic underfunding,” increase teacher compensation, and pay for mental health staff.

“The voters rejected the Republican Party’s strategy of obstruction and forced austerity. Now it’s time for Gov. Tim Walz and the leadership in the House and Senate to spend the state’s resources to improve the lives of working Minnesotans,” Specht said in a statement.

She said the state needs to “make up for funding lost to inflation” and “then go farther.”

My fearless prediction: driven by jackals like Specht, the DFL will turn the “surplus” – overtaxation – into permanent spending and grift for their stakeholders, just in time for a recession to crater the tax revenue, and leave us with a multibillion dollar deficit in 2026, and likely 2024.

It’s on my calendar.

Big Left’s latest atrocity against the language – a perversion that looms large in the “Twitter Files” story – is the debasement of the terms “Attack” and “Safety”.

One example:

The “attack” was more commonly or germanely known as “showing evidence of wrongdoing on Fauci and Roth’s parts”, of course. And the fact that Roth was Twitter’s “Safety” czar, with “safety” in this case meaning “insulation from conservative dissent”, closes the circle on my lede.

But the larger point is, Big Left is actively debasing terms that used to have fairly vivid meanings.

“Attack”: Leaving out actual physical assaults, it meant a malicious verbal or written aggression – not “building a case for someone’s malfeasance”.

“Safety”: The state of being protected from or preventing harm – once upon a time. Now: the existence of an informational echo chamber.

The list goes on: Fascist, Holocaust, Nazi, Hitler, Man, Woman, Family, and on and on.

It’s not accidental, of course – controlling language is a key part of controlling society, and removing the redolence in language that harkens to the lessons of the past ensures that any future tyrant can dispense with any foreknowledge of what they are up to.

It’s pretty brilliant, really. Also evil.

Anyone remember Mika McFeely? He’s sort of the Filene’s Basement version of Ed Schultz, another guy who got his start talking about grown men chasing balls around fields, and decided to go into being a political, talking head. He’s the Heitkamp family’s token liberal on KFGO in Fargo, and proof that the talent bench for progressive talk hosts in Fargo is even shallower than in the Twin Cities.

I wrote about him (checks notes), a little over 12 years ago, when he wrote easily the stupidest hatchet piece I’ve ever seen, about Mary Franson, during the 2012 elections.

Anyway – he came to Minneapolis over the weekend. Ironically, it was to see Les Mis, a play featuring an out of touch patrician class that attacks a plebaian class whose travails they neither share nor understand.

Oh, yeah – he had a great time!

In other words, he went to a show, with hundreds of other people, and then went to a tony restaurant on the south end of the gentrified North Loop. Back to the hotel – or on the road back to Fargo? – by 11!

And look – no crime!

Guess all those people talking about crime in Minneapolis are wrong!

Speaking of crime – tourist McFeely has an interesting perspective on recent Twin Cities history:

Not sure it’s “Anti”-Fa that’s shooting up crowds after bar closing on First Avenue.

But he’s getting a little warmer: “Anti”-Fa are the children of the Twin Cities bon vivant class. But they didn’t burn the Ordway, or Kenwood or Linden Hills. They burned East Lake and University – the places where immigrants and lots of entrepreneurs and workers try to earn a living.

But he didn’t go to a show on Lake, or Uni, or up at Plymouth and Sheridan, now, did he?

Well, I guess that settles it!

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

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

,,,but just couldn’t quite say it.

Today’s song list:

Today’s song list:

Outgoing speaker Pelosi poses with her cheerleaders…

…hahaha. Just kidding. She’s posing with (most of) the female members of the White Houe press corps…

…oops. Distinction without much difference.

Anyway, here’s the photo:

Now, the cynics among you – like the Tweeter I’m linking – might scoff “Whoah, check out all that diversity!”.

Pish-tush. Some of them are from Ivy League schools, and some are from Oberlin!

How certain is the DFL that at least a plurality of Minnesota voters just aren’t very good at logic, civics or critical thinking?

Sure enough that they’re treating the $17 Billion “Surplus” a big win for progressive governance, and proof of some divine mandate:

What it actually is, of course, is a combination of:

• BIllions of dollars in federal Covid stimulus dollars
• The normal Minnesota DFL overtaxation…
• …with receipts driven up by inflation in the cost of the goods being taxed
• All that taxation and inflation going on over an epipandemic surge in stimulus-swollen consumer spending

Mark my words – and I have marked them myself, with “to dos” on my calendar on the first Mondays ijn December of 2024 and 2026: the following will happen:

• The DFL will turn that “$217.6 Billion in Surplus” into permanent spending
• The economy will slow into recession (as even the DFL’s cheerleaders in their bespoke press are starting to observe).
• Without the Covid stimuli, and with the economy contracting, tax receipts will crash again.
• The state will have a multibillion dollar deficit by 2026, probably 2024.

We’ll check back on this.  Oh, yes we will. 

Close on the news that two of downtown Minneapolis is nicer office towers are going up for auction, to avoid foreclosure?

The Hilton, one of downtown‘s premier hotels, and site of the NARN‘s first big surprise triumph (the 2004 debate party between George Bush and John Kerry, where we expected and planned for 100 attendees, and got more like 700)

Yeah, things are looking up downtown, aren’t they?

20 years ago, this blog observed the Pearl Harbor anniversary by noting the annual gathering of hundreds of survivors – and the time, men in their late 70s on up – and noted the jarring statistic that at that time, the generation of World War 2 veterans was passing on at a rate of about 300 per day. This blog observed the demise of the last known World War 1 veteran – a man who’d enlisted as an ambulance driver after lying about being 14 years old – probably 3-4 years after it started, half a generation ago. .

Today, perhaps a dozen doughty, well-nigh indestructible centenarians will have made the trip to Hawaii. Today, the death rate has slowed, if only because, according to VA statistics, about 98.5% of those who served have died.

And, unconscionably, much of the knowledge that the Greatest Generation had seems to be passing with them.

War is hell.

Some things are worth fighting for.

Mankind is not inherently good, but is in fact capable of horrors beyond human comprehension that are simultaneously utterly banal and commonplace.

Some things are worse than fighting – but not many.

Sometimes, you need to get past the things that divide us to survive and prevail.

I fear our nation – really, the whole of Western Civilization – has Santayana’d itself; forgotten its history, and thus condemned itself to repeat it.

UPDATE: I’m not going to say the Millennial and Z Generations don’t have people like this.

I’m saying the zeitgeist is not favorable for creating a lot of them.

The MN Department of Natural Resources is apologizing for…

…well, I’ll let the story explain it:

“Yesterday we sent out the latest issue of the Trailblazer newsletter with a theme of gratitude. Today I’m sharing with you our deep regret for unintentionally omitting wópida, which is the Dakota word for ‘thank you,’ from what we had intended to be an inclusive message of thanks,” Ann Pierce, director of the DNR’s Parks and Trails Division, wrote in an email Friday.

In addition to Dakota, the newsletter does thank everyone in Ojibwe, Spanish, German, Italian, Somali, Hmong, Greek, and English…

…but not Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Russian, or any of the languages spoken much more predominantly in Minnesota than Dakota is.

But in the spirit of the season? Takk, kitti, dziękuje, spasibo and thankewverymuch for the bounty of material.

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

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

The price of food and gas is waaaay up.

Your rent is going up. Lots.

The cost of borrowing has more than doubled.

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

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

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

And in that, you should take comfort.

Signed
Minnesota State Government

…when the center-right Christian satire site [1] Babylon Bee got banned from Twitter for “misinformation” – for writing satire – and not a single media outlet lamented the erosion of freedom.

To say nothing of gundecking, at government request, stories from Mark Dayton’s health up through Hunter Biden’s kickbacks to “Big Guy”.

I’m old enough to remember when big leftymedia was incredibly blasé about public-private partnerships leading to de facto censorship.

But you’d have to be very young indeed to remember the day Big Leftymedia started squawking about being victimized. It’s a brand new thing. Emphasis added by me:

According to a report in The Intercept, Musk has suspended several notable left-wing accounts over the past week or so. A number of them were anti-fascist researchers and organizers who focused on documenting far-right activity.

Notably, the disabled accounts documented in the report were singled out for criticism by the far-right writer Andy Ngo, who Musk often publicly interacts with on Twitter. “Musk invited Ngo to report ‘Antifa accounts’ that should be suspended directly to him,” the Intercept reported. In at least once case, Ngo seems to have succeeded at directing Musk to suspend an account that Ngo failed to get suspended by Twitter before Musk took over the company.

Just you watch. “Censorship” – of the left, natch – will become a topic, starting right about…now.

Democracy desperately needs a free, inquisitive press that holds all government’s feet in the fire.

And we objectively do not have that today. And people know it.

[1] Also perhaps the most legitimate news source in the US

Part 243,320: By 2028, feminists who want to meet with women – as in, people born with two “X” chromosomes – will have to meet underground.

A bar and restaurant explicitly aimed at revitalizing Downtown, and at “bringing Minneapolis together”,as a “place of healing for people” as one of its owners said, and overturning the image of downtown Minneapolis as a crime-ridden area enmeshed in a death spiral, has…

…oh, do I even need to finish the sentence?

I mean, let a thousand lights shine and all. It takes more gumption to try to open a restaurant downtown than I, for one, have.

But some of this stuff just seems to be the cosmic equivalent of taping a “kick me” sign on your back. The “Baghdad Bob” vibe alone was just tempting Murphy’s Law…

In March, a bartender at Ties Lounge & Rooftop told Alpha News that downtown Minneapolis is “very, very safe,” even though the city had released data at the time showing increased thefts, gunshot victims, and assaults in the area compared to the previous year.

…even if crime, and downtown’s eroding status as a destination, didn’t do it first.

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

LIBRELLE: Merg!

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

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

BERG: Republicans and conservatives are, in droves.

LIBRELLE: But when are they going to condemn it?

BERG: Uh…they re?

LIBRELLE: But when are they going to condemn it?

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

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

BERG: (Backs slowly away)

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

BERG: (Leaves building)

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?

(And SCENE)

“But our money is for a good purpose, so…”

Minneapolis father chases car thieves who stole his car, with his four kids inside:

Derek Gotchie, the father of children, was close by and jumped into the stolen vehicle the suspect arrived in and chased his stolen car until he rear-ended the car near Plymouth Ave. N and Penn Ave N., according to the Minneapolis Police Department. 

The suspect then exited the vehicle and fled on foot. 

Let me be the first to day – hooray for toxic masculinity!

Today’s music playlist: