Merry January 6!

It’s one of modern progressivism’s high holy days – along with Roemas, May Day and Feast of the Entitlements. 

Have a blessed January 6!

They got caught cheating in the HD40B election

And the DFL is contrite about it.

Just kidding.  They’re going to go on strike until we thank them for cheating:

Minnesota House Democrats are mulling not showing up for the first two weeks of the legislative session. Doing so would effectively shut down the House as Democrats seek to block Republicans from using their 1-seat majority to elect a GOP House speaker. https://t.co/SUFr1JGZpy

— Michelle Griffith (@michellemgriff) January 6, 2025

Because that’s the battle – the battle against “pouncing” – that matters. 

This tantrum is going to be epic.

In the past week or two, we’ve seen:

• The HD54A recount in Shakopee, which showed DFLer Brad Tabke winning by 14 votes, with 30 ballots turning up missing, it seems they’ve found a significant number of duplicate votes. Any guesses who they voted for?
• In the HD40B, Curtis Johnson’s election was erased. The DFL is trying to jam down a special election, even though state statute says the seat needs to be vacant – which is won’t be until January 14, when the new legislature gets sworn in. It’s still Jamie Becker-Finn’s seat. (Note to Rep. Becker-Finn: drapes don’t have shoes).
• In SD 50, where former Senate Majority Leader Kari Dziedzic died, Governor Klink jammed down a special election on January 14 – including a one day filing window, on New Years Eve. For a seat the DFL considers their property, they have to try to squeeze out any competition.

In the 1960s, when Democrat-run states in the deep south were found to have gamed the election rules to keep minorities from the polls, the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations stepped in and put most southern states under consent decrees, requiring them to report to the Department of Justice to ensure their elections were fair and unbiased.

Maybe it’s time for Trump’s DOJ to do the same in Minnesota.

Here’s Abby Wolters website. She’s running in the special primary on January 14, and the special election on January 28, for control of the Minnesota Senate. To find out more about Minneapolis BPOU politics, hit up Shawn Holster – email chair@mplsgop.org.

And here’s today’s music list:

After six years in office, four of them plagued with massive scandals including the largest Covid-aid scandal in the US, in absolute numbers (forget about per-capita), Governor Walz is swinging into action!

https://twitter.com/FOX9/status/1875199197290365110

For those unfamiliar with government – say, who never watched “Schoolhouse Rock” as children – the Governor is in charge of the executive branch of state government.

Which means it’s his job to enforce the laws of the state, along with the rest of the executive branch. It’s literally one of duties, defined in the state’s Constitution.   He’s supposed to be aided by the Attorney General, who is the state’s lawyer, and the State Auditor, ostensibly the state’s bookkeeper.  Walz, Keith Ellison and Julie Blaha already have not only the power, but the duty to be dealing with the fraud that happened on their watch.

And fraud is already illegal.   There is literally a law for that, as evidence by the fact that the Department of Justice is currently prosecuting Minnesota fraud cases. 

The only need for a “legislative package” is to try to deflect some responsibility for the feeding frenzy of this past four years to the newly (and temporarily) GOP-controlled House of Representatives, and evade his and the MNDFL’s culpablity for the four years the Governor spent taking selfies eating Pronto Pups and standing by liked a hog that’d been smacked on the head with a hammer as his voters looted and pillaged a billion dollars or more from the state treasury.

The media will try to help him with this evasion.

And if the “conservative media” in this state ever had a mission in life, making sure they can’t enable that evasion is it. 

As we careen toward a special election in a likely-illegal-but-what-are-ya-gonna-do-about-it-huh two weeks in Senate District 60, it’s worth taking a moment to remember this bit of actual reporting from almost exactly a year ago:

The FBI is investigating multiple allegations of cheating and chicanery that plagued the Minneapolis DFL party during the endorsement process for Minneapolis City Council last spring:    https://t.co/G5JG28F7oG via @mnreformer

— Deena Winter (@deenafaywinter) January 12, 2024

And to ask yet again – if the DFL runs roughshod over due electoral process in their own party, why do we believe they do any better in the city they proudly say they own?

I detest the term “Yacht Rock”.

No.  Detest.

I never could quite articulate why – it was one of those definitions I figured I’d get around to someday when I had a moment. 

Fortunately, Rick Beato did it for me:

Like Beato, the term is hereby and henceforth expunged from my life.

So – what were the five most important stories of 2024, according to that most dispositive of sources, yours truly?

Glad you asked.  Here goes:

5. I, Knucklehead – Recently, we learned that Harris’s insiders knew she never had much of a lead or chance. But that wasn’t what we saw, or even inferred from the data we saw out here in the wild. Even some fairly reliably intelligent conservative pundits were prepared for the worst as of 7PM CT on November 5.

So I was driving up to North Dakota last summer, worried that Harris was going to pick Josh Shapiro as her Veep nominee.  The conventional wisdom was that the road to the White House led through Pennsylvania, and that Shapiro would deliver it, and likely make Trump’s path to victory a lot longer and more convoluted. 

I was driving home from the same trip when I got the news that Giggles had picked Tim “Piglet” Walz as her running mate.  And I let out a huge sigh of relief, and maybe a gleeful cheer or two, as I careened down I94, my mood having brightened about 145 degrees.

His debate performance against JD Vance was a revelation to some – but almost an anticlimax to me.  I knew from the moment I got the news that Vance would mop the rest-room floor with Walz.  He didn’t disappoint. 

4. He Killed Medicare – It wasn’t just Joe Biden that collapsed in the infamous June debate with Trump. It was the entire campaign of gaslighting that the Democrats and media were trying to run.

And I was about to add my usual “pardon the redundancy” after that last sentence, but I think that everyone with eyes to see and the interest in using them caught it. While the bloom was off the mainstream media’s rose long ago, this past year took a heat gun to whatever was left of that shabby wallpaper.

3. The Big Stick – The Mossad attack on Hezbollah’s leadership via remote controlled boobytrapped pagers and radios was a brilliant kick-off to what appears to have been a slow but definite end-game to Israel’s year-long campaign to crush the Iranian proxies who’ve sworn to Israel’s destruction this past three generations.

It’s all the more important when you remember that it happened when the American election was still very much up in the air, at least outwardly. The Israelis were making hummus while the sun shone, unsure what the status of their alliance with the US would be after January 20. Of course, after the Trump victory, Israel emasculated Iran’s entire air defense network, leaving them basically helpless before any retaliation for any future aggresssions, rebooting much of the math in Middle Eastern politics.

2. “Fight, Fight, Fight” – The leaks about Harris’s real internal polling notwithstanding, the first assassination attempt against Trump was, I think, the point where it started to feel like Trump had more than just an election to win; it was more of a rendezvous with destiny.

I know – I hate being that dramatic without cause. But I think it may actually have been appropriate in that case. It started to feel like it had to happen. There was a change in the campaign’s momentum and, really, a change in Trump.  He seemed a lot more focused, not only as his ear healed, but through the rest of his campaign.   The Twitter-firebomb-throwing Trump of 2015-2020 wasn’t gone, per se – but he seemed much more on task.  Calmer? 

And as much as the Harris campaign tried to co-opt the term “Joy”, it started to feel like there was some sort of je ne sais quoi to the Trump effort – not “joy”, but “purpose”?  “Sense of mission?”

It felt a lot more intense and immediate after that. 

And #1. – Red Green Shoots – It was the year you saw conservative media and “influencers” (much as I hate the term) start to hit their stride. The cultural right hit its “Battle of Midway” moment in myriad battles for the culture:

• Research undercutting “Trans” ideology and medicine started to take on a critical mass.
• Young people, Latino men, married women, and increasing numbers of black men voted for Trump
• There are signs that GenZ is tiring of the meaninglessness of the left’s modern culture.
• Hollywood’s “woke-ism” is taking flak, with cultural resistance to the PC-ing of tentpole projects like Star Wars and Snow White and Netflix’s ongoing woke-y decay reaching, if not critical mass, at least notable, sustainable velocity. 

Feel free to sound off in the comments. What the heck.

Minneapolis boosters have been chanting, non-stop, that “crime is down in MInneapolis”.

Seems everyone got the memo but the criminals:

Minneapolis had 4 more homicides in 2024 than in 2023 https://t.co/uL0iK8ppLX

— KARE 11 (@kare11) January 2, 2025

And it wasn’t just homicides – a quick look at the Minneapolis crime dashboard (before they rolled the data over for the new year) showed:

• 3 more non-justified homicides (Minneapolis’ dashboard lumps justified police and civilian shootings together, and there was one more justifiable homicide last year than in 2023).
• Robberies up 10% in past year.
• Vandalism up 14% in year, 31% in three years.
• Assault has been steadily rising over past three years.

And the categories that *are* dropping are doing it very slowly.

One of the more satisfying stories of this past year was watching the accelerating decay of the mainstream media’s influence over society.

And this was one of my favorite examples:

Remember when legacy media colluded with the DNC/Kamala camp to run the “Joy!” campaign?

In retrospect, it’s hysterical.

🤡🌎 pic.twitter.com/oxHBnURRV1

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) December 30, 2024

Watching the orwellian “Joy” campaign get pelted with rhetorical rocks and garbage by the commoners was one of the greatest, er, joys I’ve had, at least politically, in recent years.

The below is an update of a piece I first wrote almost five years ago. It was at that moment about the time when people – smart people, anyway – were starting to realize that Covid wasn’t the new Bubonic Plague, that the sky was not falling, and that whatever “model” Governor Klink was reading that was predicting 70,000 deaths in Minnesota alone by mid-July of 2020, and 20,000 dead as a best case if they shut the state down completely, was perhaps…wrong.

I was looking at the gutting of civil and religious freedom that Minnesotans had countenanced – perhaps more or less voluntarily in March,

Next week, Big Left will go through what’s become an annual orgy of celebrating what’s become their secular holiday, January 6.

Governor Klink took a break from his regimen of selfies of him being fed donuts by Co-Governor Flanagan to have his social media intern blurt this out:

In the three years since the January 6 attack on our nation’s Capitol, we’ve taken bold action to protect democracy, expand voting rights, and ensure free and fair elections.
 
Minnesota will continue to stand as a firewall against any and all attempts to undermine our democracy.

— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) January 6, 2024

The DFL, likewise:

Donald Trump’s mob attacked the US Capitol 3 years ago today. But instead of standing up for our democracy, Minnesota Republicans have fully embraced Trump and the Big Lie.

— Minnesota DFL (@MinnesotaDFL) January 6, 2024

So – a 2.5. years after Governor Klink reluctantly gave up his “emergency powers”, and two months after his risible run for Vice President, and after four years of Joe Biden serving as the doddering mouthpiece for Barack Obama’s third term as the greatest stealth authoritarian since Woodrow Wilson, let’s take stock of the state of “democracy”, in Minnesota and nationwide.

One of the obligations of a free people – and especially of a free people that wants to stay that way – is to push back when government overreaches. Not just in emergencies (although that was the initial subject of the original post), but always, on every facet of liberty. Conservatism holds that order and liberty exist in a constant state of tension; without order (or health) prosperity is impossible; without health, freedom is academic (subsistence farmers don’t have time to petition for redress of grievances); without freedom, order is onerous and, let’s be honest, prosperity is most likely concentrated among those keeping the order.

Three years ago, I said that Government power is like a handgun – sometimes, a necessary tool in extreme circumstances, under terms that are as strictly circumscribed as any rule on justifiable use of lethal force. And like any necessary tool, free people need to make sure that the newbie isn’t sweeping people at the firing range with her hand on the trigger, and that government isn’t getting drunk and profligate with its use, or abuse of power.

Of course, four years later, it’s clear that the Biden and Walz regimes great government power less like a handgun on the nightstand, and more like a Reaper drone, orbiting loudly above everything, ready to strike arbitrarily and without a whole lot of reason or respect for the niceties of constitutional law.

Just as Governor Piglet’s administration used Covid as a pretext for seizing unprecedented arbitrary power, Democrats nationwide are waving “January 6” around like a bloody shirt, to try to justify their ravaging of the spirit and letter of AMerican democracy.

So lets list the outrages. Let me know what I’ve missed; I intend for this list to live on as long as needed:

Life and Liberty

• The emergence of the crypto-Maoist “Democratic Socialists of America” as the most powerful bloc in the Democrat party nationwide, and even moreso of the DFL – as both parties arrogate more power, wealth (transferred from taxpayers)
• The multi-pronged bringing to heel of the education system, from pre-school through the post-doctoral level, is “the long game” in attacking not just liberty, but the entire underpinning of Western Civilization. Creating a generation of ignorant droogs who think “freedom” is just material satiety is both a key goal of those who’d gut the American experiment and, seemingly, a long way toward being accomplished.

The Pursuit of Prosperity

Here, the DFL’s disdain for business and private property rears its head, above and beyond any actual response to the epidemic.

• The DFL “Trifecta” burned through nearly $18 Billion worth of “surplus”, every dime of which came from a taxpayer of some kind or another. That’s nearly $3,000 for every man, woman and child in Minnesota – nearly $12,000 for a typical family of four. In one year. And they raised taxes enough to cover that and a whole lot more. And given that the state is inevitably falling into deficit while the Democrats control the Legislature, it’s going to get much worse. That money would, in fact, be better employed by the people.
• As Governor Klink established during Covid, the right to transact business is clearly subject to arbitrary, and in some cases seemingly capricious, interference. Small businesses are shut down (as big ones, and business with more, better lobbyists remain open), in many cases without regard to the business’ actual susceptibility to the virus (lawn services? nd smoke shops aren’t. It’s best that your vices not be politically unfashionable.
• Looking a back at the concept of “Essential” and “Non-Essential” workers – designations determined almost entirely via the political expediency of the designations, and their importance to the lifestyle of the “Laptop class” workers who make up the political class – feels like staring into the soul of Orwell’s universe, even three years later.
• The government started by barring all evictions and foreclosures, and halting student loan payments. The Twin Cities governments have moved on to rent control – furthering the road to gutting the affordable rental market, and completely foreclosing the existence of the small landlords that used to provide most of the metro’s “affordable housing” – while the Biden regime tried to unilaterally wipe out personal obligations to private student loan lenders.

Government Transparency

• The DFL created a “Hate Speech Registry”. What’s in it? What’s it for? How do we see what, and who, is in it? For what purposes will it be used? The registry’s supporters couldn’t and wouldn’t answer questions. They just jammed it down.
• The Governor’s “Covid Snitch Line” showed us not only the DFL’s ability for setting up a Stasi-like network of informants, but how much they genuinely enjoy it.
• School boards around the state are gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, being turned into rubber-stamps for district administrators and the state department of Education.
• For years, people complained, legitimately, that most of the legislature’s big decisions were made by the Governor, the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, operating behind closed doors. That was intolerable and stupid when there were opposing parties involved in those negotiations. Now that they’re all with the same party? While elections have consequences, this is pure authoritarianism.
• Covid-era restrictions on meetings have morphed, post-pandemic, into a glib disregard for state open meeting laws, which serve more as suggestions these days.

First Amendment

• The collaboration of Big Government, Big Tech, Big Media and the Big Left’s non-profit/industrial complex completely gutted free speech in time for the 2020 election. The vituperation of their response to Elon Musk buying Twitter tips the hand; the Axis of Authority really, really wants “free speech” to be more about crappy art than actually holding government accountable.
• And as Big Left endlessly drones on about the “Threat” of “endemic white supremacist terrorism” that we’ve been told for 15 years is everywhere, honest, one of these days now – the threat of being swatted, of crowds of professional protesters and rioters making your free exercise of too much inconvenient speech potentially dangerous is always there. The March 4, 2017 “Anti”-Fa attack on a Republican gathering at the MN Capitol rotunda (and the fact that Ramsey County’s “criminal justice” system did everything but take the “protesters” out for dinner to apologize for the inconvenience of being arrested) was a warning; shut up, or you just might get cut up. Democrats and the DFL are very aware of this, because that malevolent mass of wannabe thugs are their children, nephews, classmates.

Second Amendment

• While the Second Amendment community remains strong, and with the departure of Wayne LaPierre may get some of its teeth re-sharpened at the national level, the attacks on the law-abiding gun owner in Blue jurisdictions are increasing, unconscionable, and not consistent with “protecting democracy”. More below.

Fourth Amendment

• The surveillance state has gotten steadily worse.
• The presence of anonymous “snitch lines” – and especially “hate crime” lines, may not have led to any Fourth Amendment perversions of probable cause yet – but don’t bet against it.
• “Red Flag” laws have largely trashed the Fourth Amendment (more below).

Fifth Amendment

• With the courts pretty much closed your right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury is pretty much toast for the duration.
• Let’s not forget how the state gutted the justice system – including the rights of defendants to speedy drials, to face their accusers, and of their attorneys to effectively prepare cases – under the pretext of “public emergency restrictions”.

Privacy

• Among the many other depredations of Minnesota’s “red flag” law – “Mental Health” professionals are in fact now deputized to participate in the abuse of those laws. I’d say “consider the unintended consequences”, but I don’t think there’s anything “unintended” about them.
• Government used your cell data to track the effectiveness of social distancing. Think that genie’s going back in the bottle?

---

When Democrats refer to Republicans as “fascists”, it’s a Berg’s Seventh Law case. .

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Anderson Cooper’s New Years Eve broadcasts from Times Square since Kathy Griffin was still an A-lister – or, maybe, starting her descent toward the Z-list.

But perhaps the biggest story of this past year, along with and tied to Trump’s re-election, is the change in the culture over the past few months.

Suddenly, it’s…well, not “safe”, per se, to attack our narratives’ sacred cattle. But people are starting to play around with the idea.

Which brings us to Whitney Cummings – a comedian about whom I’ve never felt any compulsion to comment at all [1].

Can anyone imagine a comic, other than Dave Chapelle or Ricky Gervains, riffing on mainstream TV like this, even a year ago?

NEW: Anderson Cooper stands completely speechless after Whitney Cummings says Dems couldn’t hold a primary because they were too busy holding up a dead body.

“It was amazing that the Pro-Choice Party didn't give their voters one…”pic.twitter.com/EtxIcMKRXZ

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 1, 2025

The good news is, it feels like the cultural pendulum is swinging.

The other news, neither good nor bad but definitely worth paying attention to:  these swings need to be solidified.  Talk about Trump ushering in permanent change is only not premature if we make it stick. 

[1] That’s not entirely true. Cummings briefly had a TV series, “Whitney“. I saw about ten minutes of it, and it was pretty dreadful, but somehow it eked out two seasons.

Anyway – Ed Morrissey walked into the studio and said “I just heard, Whitney’s dead”. I responded. “Thank God. It’s about time”.

Ed looked at me, a little horrified.  “The TV show?”, I asked?

“No.  Whitney Houston.”