To: Jon Collins, Senior Reporter on Race, Class and Communities, MInnesota Public Radio
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Anniversary + Findings

Mr. Collins,

As I have every year since 2021, I hope this day finds you well.

It was four years ago yesterday you sent this out on your listener mailing list::

“South Minneapolis: I know this sounds crazy. But it’s 2020. And I’m working on story now about white supremacists coming to Minneapolis to foment race war under cover of the protests. I need your help, and your friends help. Please refer anyone with real, credible info (not rumor or speculation) or sources to me at (I’m gonna redact that)

What the heck – let’s give this a shot:

Now, I know MPR reporters don’t generally deign to respond to the peasantry – in fact, I know MPR News management specifically tells staff not to engage with the unwashed masses.

But for the fourth June in a row, I’m genuinely curious – did you find anything?

It’s not of idle interest to me.  Mine was one of the neighborhoods that got burned, looted and vandalized in May of 2020 (noting at the time that I saw a lot of “AmeriKKKa” and “Destroy the 1%” graffiti, but not a single swastika or “14 words” reference, I’m thinking the Twin Cities either got the most inept “white supremacists” in the history of bigotry, or they were the most ingenious – fiendishly tricking a whole city full of leftists into doing the job for them – the sort of fieldcraft that’d make a Mossad agent envious).     

While I am a very overt conservative (I went from Bob Collins’ Christmas Card list to…well, very much off of it during his unfortunate unpleasantness a few years ago), I also spent time covering radical groups of all stripes back when I was in the mainstream media.  

I ask because a not-so-cursory look through the last three years of your reporting doesn’t seem to show anything.  

And as I do every year on the anniversary of this event, I’d like to invite you on my show (Saturday, 1-3PM) to talk about your findings.   Because it’s everyone’s city. 

Thanks,

Mitch Berg
Host, WWTC-AM

A group of federal law enforcement agents – FBI, DHS – apparently served a warrant for drug trafficking and money laundering on a restaurant at Lake and Bloomington in South Minneapolis yesterday. 

And it’s almost – I say, almost – like Twin Cities Big Left is trying to coax a riot out of the situation:

I mean, a riot over ICE, or whoever, would certainly divert attention away from the collapsing schools, the crime, the downtown that is disintegrating and leaving a gaping maw of taxes that will wind up being made up by an increasingly beleaguered middle class, a dysfunctional city government and a state government run by a bunch wastrels that squandered a $18 Billion surplus, wouldn’t it?

It’s not news to anyone who’s been following the subject – education is in crisis.  

And the mainstream conservative response seems to be “let it burn!”   If you talk with a lot of mainstream conservatives, the kids should be heading straight out into apprenticeship programs and becoming electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, truckers…

And I get it; the urge to chuck a mainstream education culture that has grown to hold most of “us” in contempt is tempting.  

But there’s a catch.  Someone’s gonna have to write the history books.  Someone’s gonna have to tell tomorrow’s cultural narrative what today’s cultural narrative was.   If politics is downstream of culture, and conservatives are doing the flooring and concrete finishing for the people that pass that information along, what do you think happens to culture in the future?

More of what is happeninbg tioday, that’s what.  

Which is what I thought when I read this piece by Joanne Jacobs, a Brit academic critic, about today’s woke fad of only teaching kids authors that are “relatable” to people today:

There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.

Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”

School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”

Remember – “education” and schooling are very different things. 

And it seems to me if you want to make a society decline and collapse, you take away its imagination.  What could do that faster than focusing on the here and now?

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Members of the German Parliament have been talking tough about Trumps tariffs.The tariffs will hurt Americans worse than Germans. America doesn’t make anything anymore.  There’s nothing they need from us.  

 

Excellent. High tariffs are gone. And so are our soldiers, airmen, Marines.  Germany can have those empty bases to fill with their own soldiers to stare down the Russians.

 

 Peace, friendship, and honest commerce with all; entangling alliances with none. Wise words from one of our founders. Glad we have the opportunity to get back them. 

 

Joe Doakes

And it’s time for one of the great new Minneapolis summer traditions (X thread): 

One apparently dead, five more shot, and one woman injured in the brawl that inevitably followed at Hennepini County Hospital.

Early reports say it was ELCA vs. Missouri Synod.