One of the guarantees in the invisible NPR tote bag of goodies and spiffs that “Urban Progressive Privilege” is, is the knowledge that not only will the institutions that participate in that privilege with you will actively ensure your worldview never gets challenged, but they’ll make sure the “oopses” in your worldview won’t influence anyone, either.
Gwen Walz – the First Lady of Minnesota – apparently had a very bad evening on a panel about racism in the justice system.
But were it not for Alpha News, we’d never, ever know this – because Channel 2 deleted the embarassing interview from public view:
The moderator of this discussion was Toussaint Morrison, a black man.
Soft-ball questions that Morrison was supposed to ask were circulated ahead of time“within the Department of Corrections and the governor’s office.”
But when the audience noticed that most of the men behind bars in the documentary were non-white, the issue of race came up—indeed, racial minorities make up around 20 percentof Minnesota’s overall population, but account for about half of Minnesota’s prison inmates.
Morrison ran with those questions about race, and Gwen Walz appeared to be stumped. Some in the crowd felt she was sidestepping the race issue entirely….Once the event was over, the Walz administration scrambled to get the video of the event deleted.
Kristin Beckmann, deputy chief of staff for Democrat Governor Tim Walz is alleged to have put pressure on TPT President and CEO Jim Pagliarini to delete the tape.
Sarah Walker, a former Department of Corrections (DOC) employee who was pushed out over a lobbying scandal, was also on the panel. Walker seems to suggest that her not properly defending Gwen Walz during that panel led to her eventual exit from the DOC. Walker told MPR that Beckmann, Walz’s deputy chief of staff, told Walker over the phone: “It’s taken care of … We talked to TPT.” According to Walker, Beckmann continued to say that “The TPT president has now apologized and agreed to destroy all of the videotapes that were made of the event.”
That’s further confirmed by Donna Saul Millen, managing director of events and engagement at TPT, who wrote in an email: “The short answer … the first lady’s office made the request and we didn’t have plans to use it (at least not at that time) … The obvious answer [to explain TPT’s action to delete the tape is that] it was an easy way to smooth out ruffled feathers.”
Urban Progressive Privilege is knowing you’ll never be held accountable by “your” people.
There is no doubt that many Negroes end up convicted where wipipul skate because they cannot afford a good lawyer. It’s also true that in most cases, Negro poverty is a direct reflection of the choices their feckless parents made in raising them, and their own reckless choices later in life.
*However*; in a fair justice system, financial wherewithal shouldn’t be a factor. Society bears the blame of commercialization of the justice system. Leftist reprobates don’t bat an eye when the fact that doctors get a big haircut with Socialist medicine is mentioned…but try suggesting “Single payer” legal representation and see what happens.
With all that said, it’s still an inescapable fact that most Negroes in prison are there because they’re criminals.
13/50 is a truth.
That’s how Ms. WALZ should have addressed the questions, but of course she can’t because she’s part of the reprobate team.
Oh crap…I used the “S” word again.
There is no doubt that many Negroes end up convicted where wipipul skate because they cannot afford a good lawyer. It’s also true that in most cases, Negro poverty is a direct reflection of the choices their feckless parents made in raising them, and their own reckless choices later in life.
*However*; in a fair justice system, financial wherewithal shouldn’t be a factor. Society bears the blame of commercialization of the justice system. Leftist reprobates don’t bat an eye when the fact that doctors get a big haircut with Soci@list medicine is mentioned…but try suggesting “Single payer” legal representation and see what happens.
With all that said, it’s still an inescapable fact that most Negroes in prison are there because they’re criminals.
13/50 is a truth.
That’s how Ms. WALZ should have addressed the questions, but of course she can’t because she’s part of the reprobate team.
Until last month, we had no access to the internet other than a wireless hotspot – which despite what the provider claims, is NOT unlimited. Today, our access is truly unlimited.
It happened because on one of my long walks, I noticed a new antenna on an old barn. Viola! Micro-wave access from two miles away.
I mention this because public broadcasting was my go-to network. I enjoy NOVA, American Experience, the Brit-coms and whenever in a good mood, I can stomach NEWSHOUR for almost 15 minutes.
But I would never send them a dime. I enjoy but do not pay. Does that make me evil?
Now, its NetFlix and good-bye PBS,….
Can’t afford a good lawyer? The system is rigged against them?
When Minnesota became a state, each town had a Justice of the Peace for local offenses and each county had a judge for criminal offenses. Over time, JP’s were folded into county judges, who were folded into Judicial District judges, who became state employees, same as the Supreme Court in St. Paul. One unified system of laws, rules, sentencing guidelines and oversight, all administered by Democrats in St. Paul.
Public Defenders were originally appointed by the judge on the bench by picking somebody from the local bar. In those days, you might get a crappy general practice lawyer who knew nothing about trying a criminal case. But that system ended before I started in practice. PD’s were criminal defense lawyers in private practice who also were hired on contracts by the county, so they knew what they were doing. And for at least a decade, all public defenders are state employees, same as judges. One unified system of training, staffing, oversight, administered by Democrats in St. Paul.
When it comes time to pick new judges, the Judicial Selection Commission uses the criteria in Minn. Stat. 480B.01, Sec. 8, to recommend candidates to the Governor. Most of the criteria are fluff and indefensible in a discrimination lawsuit so the process boils down to (a) are you a woman or minority and (b) how many cases have you tried?
Most cases don’t go to trial, they settle because trial is too expensive. So the only lawyers who can afford to take cases to trial are ones whose employer pays them to do it. Look at the people picked for judge – fully half are county attorneys and public defenders, more than that in the minority-heavy metro.
In order to support a claim that the lawyers are crap, the system is unfair, and the defendants are innocent, you’re intentionally ignoring real life.
You’re talking about a system in which everybody is a career professional state employee who spent years working with criminal defendants – but they are ALL hateful racists? A woman who went into public defending to protect the oppressed and now sits on the bench at sentencing, suddenly sheds a lifetime of liberalism to unleash her inner Klan? Sure, the cops are all hateful racists who arrest the few Blacks they don’t shoot on sight, but why are the judges going along with it? Why aren’t they freeing all those innocent victims?
I call bullshit.
I’m with Swiftee on this one. The reason more Blacks are incarcerated is they commit more crimes. You never hear of little Asian girls pistol-whipping someone at a light rail station, you never hear of American Indians shooting each other outside the State Fair, even the Mexicans tend to limit their shooting to disputes over a woman, unlike Blacks who are documented to do more killing by reliable studies including the FBI.
The inability to distinguish fantasy from reality is a mental illness called “delusion.” It’s fine to be delusional if you live somewhere safe and other, more capable people will look after you. In certain parts of St. Paul and Minneapolis, thinking everyone is Minnesota Nice will get you killed.
That doesn’t square with critical theory which dictates that only racism, sexism and homophobia accounts for disparate outcomes.
So something must be done.
We can’t let murderers, rapists and thugs go free – but then how to abolish racial, ethnic and gender differences in arrests and convictions?
There can be only one solution.
Society must arrest, convict and sentence more whites, Asians and females.
I suggest we start with the epicenter of privilege, the university….therefore anyone who violates a law on a college campus should suffer in accordance with their privilege.
Lets’s say that Susie Creamcheese, a white girl, throws an ash-tray at a conservative speaker. This is assault, but a black male would be 100 times more likely to be arrested, convicted and serve time than a white female.
So to achieve racial and gender balance, when it comes time for Susie’s sentencing, the guidelines must be multiplied 100 fold to to adjust for the difference.
Please don’t think this idea is crazy. It is the only effective and equitable solution – and it may, just may, wake up a few suburban soccer moms whose daughters are serving hard time in Shakopee.
There is something very interesting, per Joe’s comment, that the wife of a guy who is basically responsible for the current system can’t bring herself to say “with the system we have, this is representatives of the inmates we have. If you believe that certain convictions are unjust, you are welcome to lobby to change the laws under which they are incarcerated, and you are welcome to work with advocacy groups which work on behalf of inmates they believe are wrongly incarcerated. In fact, these groups sometimes show the weaknesses of the present system, so we welcome this.”
Now to be fair to Gwen Walz, she’s a teacher by trade, not an expert in criminal law. No worries that she was flummoxed by that. However, I would suggest that her handlers might have done a better job helping her in this. They should know the lay of the land.
^ Her handlers prepared her for it as it was scripted, as it pertained to the topic it was supposed to be about … getting a degree in prison, yada yada. Problem was one of the participants, Toussaint, is from the activist left and went topically rogue given an opportunity there to confront the institutional left.
There is quite a bit of friction between the institutional left and the progressive left on criminal justice, to the point that its an obvious question why the first lady took on incarceration issues as her cause. Its risky that way, it ain’t like fighting illiteracy.
its racist and discriminitory to say black people, and other minorities, commit more crimes than white peoples. It is not their fault, somehow it is all our faults for it. How? Nevermind that insignificant detail you plebe.
Society must arrest, convict and sentence more whites, Asians and females.
I suggest we start with the epicenter of privilege, the university….therefore anyone who violates a law on a college campus should suffer in accordance with their privilege.
Lets’s say that Susie Creamcheese, a white girl, throws an ash-tray at a conservative speaker. This is assault, but a black male would be 100 times more likely to be arrested, convicted and serve time than a white female.
So to achieve racial and gender balance, when it comes time for Susie’s sentencing, the guidelines must be multiplied 100 fold to to adjust for the difference.
Please don’t think this idea is crazy. It is the only effective and equitable solution – and it may, just may, wake up a few suburban soccer moms whose daughters are serving hard time in Shakopee.
Greg is seriously onto something here.
I’ve told this story before, but…
A (white) guy from the hollers of West Verginny I know was smart enough to go to Harvard Law. Bright guy, hard worker, wanted to help the poor downtrodden folks and he figured going to law school would help him help them. Graduated in a respectable place in his class, had an offer from Big Law and went to work as a public defender.
Years later, I moved back to our Midwest mid-sized college town and I met him again playing softball. We got to talking about his work at a bar after a game and I asked him if losing a case for someone he thought was innocent was bad. He looked at me hard and said, “You don’t know the folks I work with. I figure if they haven’t done this, there’s something worse they didn’t get caught for.”
He’d gone from the “misunderstood innocent” of the fresh graduate to “incorrigible reprobates” of the seasoned public defender in just a few years. And of course, his view of them didn’t mean that he defended them any less vigorously, it just meant that he knew the quality of the folks he was dealing with — I heard him cussing at a new prosecutor for not beating him in one case where he was upset that he’d won (not in court, of course, rather in an establishment were both teams were doing 12 oz curls after softball).
I graduated from West High School in Minneapolis in the 70s. West was a majority-minority school., my class was about 70% black, 20% native American, and 10% white.
All the kids, white, black, and indian, did about the same amount of crimes. Smoking weed and selling small amounts of drugs, stealing, getting and giving beat-downs, underage drinking, etc. We all came from poor families.
But only the black and indian kids seemed to get into legal difficulties. The Minneapolis cops weren’t more forgiving of white kids — they hated us all — but for some reason the black and indian kids were always in trouble with the law, while few of the white kids were.
Racism, straight up, right?
Nope.
The white guys weren’t smarter, but they took minimal efforts to avoid the cops. They smoked weed in hidden corners. They looked around before they sold a joint or two, and they didn’t sell them to people they did not know. To the white guys, arrest was a foreseeable and avoidable consequence of committing petty crime.
The black kids and the indian kids did not see things that way. They just did things and they expected to be caught occasionally and to be in trouble with the law all of the time. Some of them never changed their behavior as they grew older, and went from slap on the wrist as a juvenile small time dealer to pleading to a felony rap in exchange for time served as an adult. The white kids (with one exception) grew up, got jobs, and went to trade school or college. The black and indian kids kept getting into trouble.
Once you have a record as a felon, even if you only served a few days in the city pokey, you are well and truly f*cked. Employers won’t hire you, for anything. Landlords won’t rent to you. In most cases a drug-related conviction makes you ineligible for a student loan.
An awful lot of the black guys you see working as day labor in construction are felons. Did they deserve to have their lives ruined for committing minor drug offenses when they were nineteen?
Greg, your idea has merit but it’s too limited. we also need to encourage people who don’t commit crimes in sufficient numbers. How about a system of incentives, adjusted based on how badly we need volunteers to fill the quotas?
Latinos: commit a felony, we’ll give you $1,000. White people: 5,000. Asian women: $25,000. Or you could take the equivalent in student loan reductions.
Aw, heck, it wouldn’t work. First thing you know, Liberals would complain Blacks are being discriminated against. Prisoners at Stillwater would demand back pay for the crimes they already committed. The Taxpayer’s League would fret about busting the budget which Democrats would insist on balancing through tax hikes and the City of St. Paul would pass along via special assessments for “justice system enhancements.”
Forget it.
Never mind.
Joe, the problem with you scheme is that you are thinking like a traditional liberal and just giving money away. Bad idea. The Great Society is dead. HHH is dead. We are never going back.
(Except for my pony. Elizabeth Warren promised me a pony)
You need to think more like a social reforming millennial and look for crimes that privileged white people do that marginalized minorities don’t. This will expand the universe of crime in the proper directions.
Here are just a few ideas for felonious behavior:
– Charging what something is worth.
– Wasting fossil fuel on a vacation to Scotland.
– Demeaning a Latina by saying “hello” when entering an elevator.
– Showing up for work on time.
– Doing your homework.
– And the worst of all, saying “thanks Ma’am” to a feminist or heaven forbid, an individual who does not identify as a “ma’am”.
I considered including “bribing your kid into UCLA” which is already a white people’s crime, but considering the progressive donor base, it shouldn’t be.
Am I crazy, or is Gwen Walz a doppelganger for Hillary Clinton?
golffdoc50, you may be correct. At least, they both display a similar level of stupidity.
Some people actually believe that Gwen and Hillary are the same person. This is not true. Hillary is unit number 160023 and Gwen is 394402. Although both share the same major, minor and bug fix number scheme, Hillary is build number 4522 and Gwen 7673.
I hope that clears things up.