The weekend before last, I spent the better part of an hour on the NARN with Walter Hudson​, a longtime friend of the show (and someone who needs to be back on the air, one way or another).  It’s one of the the better hours I’ve had on the air recently (and I’ve been proud of a lot of my recent shows).  

Which isn’t to say it was an easy subject to talk about.   

What IF this society’s differences are irreconcilable?  

Dennis Prager points out – mostly correctly, I think, that Americans are more divided today than they were in 1861 [1].   How do we know this?  Because when the South split off, they formed a government that wasn’t a whole lot different than the one in DC.

But for four decades,  “the Great Sort” has been going on.   Americans have grouped themselves socially, economically and especially politically into at least two (I think actually three of four) major blocs, that not only have very little in common with each other (which isn’t all that new), but whose “rules” have made honest conversations about those issues impossible.

Part of America thinks – and is painstakingly training a new generation to think – that America, and Western Civilization itself –  the nation and civilization that have brought more well-being and humanity to this planet than any other in history, combined – are evil and rotten to their core, and needs to be completely rebooted, by means that are, depending on who you ask, more or less revolutionary and intolerant of dissent.   It’s not just “Anti”-Fa and the other militant revolutionary groups, either; some of our biggest, most respected institutions have been dragged on board.  The New York Times has gotten full force behind not only the perversions of the “1619 Project”, but the idea that journalism itself needs to abandon its traditional role of “putting out the facts and giving the consumer the info they need to make up their own minds”, but to use their outsized bully pulpit to directly affect current events.   That part of America believes that the Constitution – the contract that joins the several states together into a federation – is outdated at best, evil at worst, and needs to be radically overwritten, with the electoral college and the deliberative Senate and gun rights eliminated, and the majority disinhibited from absolute rule.   They  pay homage to the politics of Europe or the Pacific Rim nations, Japan at best, China at worst.  

Part of America, sorry to say, believes that America’s first priority is prevailing over that first America.   President Trump tapped in to that anger, and a lot more,  four years ago, and might just do it again.  We’ll see.  

And part of America believes that America, imperfect as it (like all creations of man) has had its problems, and (say some of us) has strayed from its best political instincts over the past 100 years, but on balance has still been far and away the greatest bringer of freedom, of human dignity and the prosperity that make freedom meaningful, in all of human history, and has been the primary driver in the fact that the 21st century, so far, is the best time in history so far to be a living human being.  

These divides aren’t “new”, per se.  But Blue America’s intolerance for the rest of the country started becoming a serious problem after the 2000 election.   And the other Americas started paying it back after 2010, when the establishments of both parties teamed up to slander the Tea Party – the most egalitarian, civil mass movement in recent history – back into the shadows.    (Wanna know where Trump came from?  Shut up about Racism, Putin, Xenophobia and Misogyny – millions of good-hearted Americans saw what coloring inside the lines and playing nice got you).  

So – how do 2-3 societies that neither trust nor care for each other get along?  

The *right* answer is “recommit this nation to Federalism – the system of checks and balances and shared but countervailing powers, from the federal down to the local levels, that made a “nation” of thirteen very diverse states possible in the first place.   Of course, that first America doesn’t want to share power – the idealistic among them say “it doesn’t move America forward”, which shows the complete failure of civics education in this country over the past forty years, from a conservative perspective.   The “revolutionary” part of that first America sees federalism as a bug, not a feature – if they know anything about it at all. 

The wrong answer?  Civil war – which would not be like 1861-65, with 2-5 groups of state withdrawing into their separate camps and starting over as nations.   Although we may wish it were that simple.  “Sorted” as America is, it’d much more likely look  like Bosnia or Kosovo or Rwanda than Gettysburg and Appomattox.

The “right-ish” but likely fantasy answer?  A civil divorce, with the 2-5 Americas staging an orderly breakup, each writing their own Constitution, each forming a new nation and rebooting the idea of (at best) self-government.   That’s not going to happen – between the masses of people who mindlessly chant “we settled that in 1865, you traitor” and people in Blue America eventually realizing that Paul Krugman was full of, er, privilege and that the prospect of having to import all the food and materials that they currently get for domestic prices?   And after that, when the “red” parts of “blue” states try to get out of the inevitable vassaldom (as, indeed, parts of California are already proposing)?    Elegant and easy as it seems – I’d love to see the US281 Corridor and the rural west turn into an energy and food superpower – it’s just not happening without a fight.  See the previous paragraph. 

The middle way?   As Walter puts it in the third segment up above, it’s time for Americans who care about freedom to start making it count, where they live. 

Stop acquiescing to your schools teaching your kids crap – by pulling them out, if need be, with whatever sacrifices that entails.  

When your local business defies Governor Klink’s hamfisted diktats, show up when Keith Ellison’s goons come out with their papers and show them what “defending freedom” really looks like.  

Start taking freedom seriously – vote for candidates, ESPECIALLY locally and the state legislature, who actually care about freedom, and are chomping at the bit to start rolling back the madness at city hall and in Saint Paul.    If you don’t know who I’m talking about, then ask.   State Senate candidates like Alexander Buster Deputie – an immigrant from a war-torn country – and Diane Napper, who being from Philadelphia is about the same – are two great places to start.   

Buy a gun (yes, I know – they’re scarce.  There’s ways to get around that.  And while all my guns fell in the lake, and they terrify me anyway, I do remember a thing or two).  Learn to shoot.   Join your local gun rights group.  Show up.  Be one of those numbers that terrify society’s ninnies.  Because this is one area of the culture war the good guys are winning, these days.  On all individual liberty issues, we can’t just “win” – we need crush it.  

If you’ve got a representative who’s already made their stand for freedom – a county commission that’s declared themselves a Second Amendment sanctuary, a libertarian/conservative City Councilperson who’s made a dent in a DFL cesspool, a sheriff who’s said they’re not going to enforce Governor Klink’s latest “bring me a shrubbery!” outburst, a state legislator who’s fought the fight and has the smear pieces in the media to show for it?  Don’t just vote for them.  Call them to thank them.  And then ask them how you can help. 

 Because it’s when good people see that there are other good people – other people who want that third America, above – that we start pushing the cultural needle back out of the red. 

The alternatives?   Ongoing collapse, or that First America taking power. 

But I repeat myself. 

…who has been paying attention: Violence in Portland is being orchestrated by a behind-the-scenes organization who, we are told, doesn’t exist:

We have overwhelming intelligence regarding the ideologies driving individuals towards violence and why the violence has continued,” Murphy wrote. “A core set of threat actors are organized, show up night after night, share common TTPs [tactics, techniques and procedures] and drawing on like minded individuals to their cause.”

But Minneapolis and Saint Paul?

It’s gotta be “white supremacists”.

Dennis Prager puts it well – the Left (today’s extreme left, not the center-left American liberalism of Hubert Humphrey or John F. Kennedy) destroys everything it touches.

The American Civil Liberties Union of the sixties and seventies, the ACLU of Nat Hentoff and other principled center-left civil libertarians was an organization with a political point of view, but that realized civil liberties were for everyone; that if the Manhattan crowd infringed rural Missouri’s civil liberties, they’d eventually regret it.

I’ve been joking – and then “joking” (see Berg’s 21st Law) – since the nineties that the ACLU should obey truth in advertising laws and change its name to the San Francisco, Hollywood and Upper East Side CIvil Liberties Union (SFHaUESCLU), since that’s really all they represent.

So I’m not sure if I should be happy or concerned that the ACLU has dropped all pretense to the contrary.

A lifeboat floating in the ocean has a limited carrying capacity.  This
many people – we all survive; add one more – the lifeboat sinks and we
all die.  And if somebody in the lifeboat is actively trying to chop a
hole in the bottom of the boat, we throw her out to save our own necks.

What’s the carrying capacity of a nation? When do we start throwing
people out?

Yes, we can too ask that question.  It’s happened time and again, when
nations realized their existence was in danger from certain groups. No,
I’m not talking about the Nazis so send Godwin back to his closet.  I’m
talking about Ferdinand and Isabella expelling the Jews and later the
Muslims;  Idi Amin expelling the Indians (dot, not feather); Ahmose 1
expelling the Caananites; everybody expelling the Roma (Gypsies).

We’re told that multiculturalism is inevitable and desirable, that all
cultures are equally valid and will play nice together. Are we seeing
that in America this summer?  Note well – this is not a race issue. 
There are people of all races on both sides of the “burn it all down”
movement.  This is a different issue, a philosophical issue, a point of
view, a belief about how society should be ordered.  In Antifa culture,
it is acceptable to do X, Y and Z to The Other because They deserve it. 
Can American culture survive that?

Insisting that law and order comes from a place of white privilege will
drive the nation to collective suicide.  I thought we decided against that?

Joe Doakes

A century of unparalleled wealth has convinced a lot of people – even self-styled critics of the system, like the putative revolutionaries of The Squad – that we’ve repealed the laws of human nature.

We have not.

John Thompson – the DFL endorsed candidate for the Minnesota House, who threatened to burn down Hugo, Minnesota – is clearly not a fan of the police.

And it’s causing the DFL problems – while by all indications Ken Martin is keeping Thompson locked up in a closet and not letting him anywhere near the public, the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, normally a reliable endorser of DFL candidates, has switched its endorsements in two swing House districts, and possibly more. The kerfuffle – which the media hasn’t been able to bury, despite their best efforts – caused the DFL to bag a fundraiser with Thompson and other DFL officials last week, which is a big deal, two months before an election.

Now, I’ve had a policy since the beginning of this blog: I leave peoples’ families out of it. Some of my various stalkers haven’t been quite as discriminating – and yes, that does make me a better person than them.

And I’m not going to change that now.

But while it seems that candidate Thompson’s son has had some brushes with the law, it also seems that the son also owes his life to one of the Saint Paul cops who, Thompson the Elder reminds us, “ain’t s**t”:

In early August 2018, a St. Paul officer was credited with saving his life after he was shot outside a funeral home on the 700 block of Portland Avenue.

Thompson was found in an alley with gunshot wounds to his chest and abdomen after a confrontation with a fellow citizen became violent. The St. Paul Police Department said that officer Mathew Jones aided Thompson and stemmed his bleeding until EMS arrived to transport him to the hospital. It is unlikely that Thompson would have survived without the medical care Jones administered, authorities said.

Reports from Fox 9 and the Pioneer Press identified the man who was shot on Aug. 6, 2018 as Thompson’s son Damarco. The St. Paul Police Department confirmed with Alpha News that Damarco’s life was saved by Jones, who received the Life Saving Award for his actions that day.

“While the saving of a life is generally attributed to the hospital and responding EMS crews, the officers who take those initial actions, such as Officer Jones, should receive the lion’s share of the credit,” St. Paul Fire’s EMS coordinator, Captain Kenneth Adams, said of the incident. “For if it were not for them and their actions, the EMS crews and hospital staff would not have a patient to work with.”

I leave families out of things – but it doesn’t seem remotely unfair to point this out.

…I can think of for this piece of bilge in The Atlantic is that the magazine didn’t know why Babylon Bee should have all the fun, satirizing Big Left.

This really sums up the entire Democrat messaging, in Minnesota and nationwide, perfectly:

There’ve been 27 people charged so far in connection with the rioting over Memorial Day week.

Just curious – look at the list.

Anyone appear to be a “white supremacist” to you?

Because on the one hand, white supremacists are a bunch of inbred losers. On the other, they evade capture like Mossad agents.

Weird.

Let’s assume Governor Walz’ response to Covid-19 is not part of a larger
Democrat hoax, not an attempt to frighten voters into believing
President Trump has failed them, not a coordinated attack on the
American way of life.

Let’s assume Governor Walz truly has Minnesotans’ best interests at
heart.  That’s why he declared a Peacetime Emergency.  That’s why he
implemented one of the strictest Stay Home orders in the nation.  That’s
why he implemented the mask mandate and why he refuses to relinquish his
emergency powers.  Assume that’s all true.

What’s his end game?  When does the Peacetime Emergency end – when the
virus is defeated?  How will we know when we’ve won?

Walz was on television September 3rd reminding viewers that masks are
mandatory to prevent the spread of the virus.  But his own Health
Commissioner admitted days earlier that we cannot stop the spread, we
can only hope to manage it at some unspecified level of transmission. 
Oh, and if you are sick, wearing a mask doesn’t protect the people you
interact with.

So we know the virus will continue to spread and that’s okay, just not
as fast as it’s presently spreading.  Why does that matter?  The curve
is flat.  No hospital is overwhelmed.  There was no surge.  The
refrigerated warehouse bought to store plague corpses, sits empty. 
We’re at fewer than 2,000 deaths – even crediting the phony numbers –
which is 72,000 deaths short of the computer model prediction. No child
has died, no teen, but schools are closed.  Daily deaths are in the
single digits which is indistinguishable from the normal death rate (123
Minnesotans die every day, from all causes).

“Cases” tell us that people are carrying the virus in their bodies, but
people carry around lots of viruses.  The rhinovirus causes the common
cold.  Herpes simplex virus causes cold sores. Everybody has them and
they flare up occasionally, but we don’t count “cases” of them because .
. . nobody cares.  People don’t die of a cold sore.

And they’re no longer dying of Covid-19, either.  The vulnerable
population has died off.  The hardy survived, same as every epidemic
throughout the history of humankind. We don’t need to keep fighting the
virus.  We’ve won.

Time to declare victory and move on.

Joe Doakes

All of those assumptions at the beginning of the article were for purposes of argument. I will give Governor Klink the benefit of no such doubt.

To be a conservative in Minnesota (forget for a moment that neither Trump nor today’s GOP are “conservative”) is to assume all hope is illusory, even a little bit cruel.

And yet Biden and Harris are spending time here – a state that should be a gimme for them, at least at the Presidential level.

I hate to harbor hope.

But sometimes I still do.

Ryan Winkler, the House Majority Leader, isn’t thrilled with President Trump stealing Joe Biden’s thunder:

Then the Majority Leader has had a pretty sheltered life.

Know what’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard?

Other than the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Gulag, the Holodomor, the Rape of Nanking, the subjugation of Tibet, the history of Haitian slavery, or pretty much an garden-variety genocide?

Well, not this…

But it was pretty bad anyway. And if Bogdan Vechirko – who owned no “white supremacist” paraphernalia at all, and heroically avoided hitting anyone (who wasn’t trying to get hit) wants to sue for slander, I’ll host a fundraiser.

Have you people call my people.

The bail fund promoted by Kamala Harris kicks another sex offender loose.

This is the same basic bunch that bailed an “Anti”-Fa thug who beat the snot out a Twin Cities’ bar owner for…

…well, we’re not sure yet. But it was a mostly peaceful protest.

200 people were completely encircled by the current round of wildfires in California.

CALFIRE – the agency with the Suharto-esque title responsible for fighting the state’s wildfires – wrote them off.

And then, as the California National Guard went to rescue them anyway, CALFIRE told them to wave off.

The Guard did it anyway.

Entire thread on Twitter:

It was a moment of immense heroism, and a Berg’s Third Law reference if there ever was one.

It’s been a bad year for bureaucratic “experts”.

I rarely watch pay television, I’m generally reading a book or watching a movie on Netflix. So I was surprised at the quality of Joe Biden’s campaign ads.

If I didn’t know he’s been hiding in the basement the last six months, didn’t know he stumbles and flubs his way through interviews, didn’t know he’s been silent in the face of riots across the nation, I’d be impressed. He talks like a patriotic American. 

The ads are lies,  but they are good lies. 

We know hardcore conservatives will vote for Trump and hardcore liberals will vote for Biden. It’s the mushy headed individuals in the middle, who don’t make up their mind until right now, just before the election. Those are the ones who decide the election in the end. If these ads work for them, Trump is in trouble.

Joe Doakes

They are good – although if you listen to the audio, you can tell Biden’s voice-over track is spliced together. There’s no way the old fella did those reads sitting behind a mike in one take.

Donald Raleigh is running for MN State House in District 38A.

On this, the anniversary of the last major catastrophic attack from without, it’s time to look at a potentially vastly more devastating attack from within.

Worse than 9/11?

Very likely, yes.

“Anti”-Fa – which, we are assured, doesn’t actually exist, except in the earnest hearts of a bunch idealistic kids – is worse than a “terrorist organization”. It is an invading army.

Read this account. While the website it’s on my whisper “sketchy”, the narrative presented should scare the living bejeebers out of you, if “defending freedom against “Progressivism’s” direct action arm” is your goal.

The final graf:

Bottom line: don’t go to an Antifa protest where you can put yourself in that situation. And if you find yourself in that situation, expect them to employ tactics that take away your situational awareness, and complicate the use of force continuum.”

But you should read the whole thing.

Worst part?

There are two, really.

First – the Normals, Real Americans, believe that because the good guys have most of the guns that Big Left – which they see as a bunch of aging hippies, Grievance Studies professors and shrieky, spoiled, over-schooled / undereducated millennials, and not without justification over 90% of the time – will lose if civil society ever does collapse and anarchy reigns.

But there are things more important than just having the guns. A plan. Some semblance of training, leading to some semblance of teamwork under stress. Infrastructure to support your operations.

Big Left has all these. And, now, guns.

The Second Amendment alone isn’t enough.

And, we’re told, either is the First Amendment – where Big Left’s information analogue is doing to “journalism” what their neo-Brownshirt arm is doing to opposition on the streets.

It’s high time Real America took this seriously. This isn’t “protest”. It’s not even “rioting”. This is an armed, trained, organized insurgency. It needs to be treated as such.

Remember when your “progressive” acquaintances would scoff and say “there’s no such thing as a ‘limosine liberal’, a ‘condo pink’, or any of that?”

I do.

And they’ll do it again.

But here – along with Lori Lightfoot’s haircut and the blowout that was apparently inflicted on Nancy Pelosi by GOP operatives – is Exhibit A.

Salem had “witches”.

The far right and far left in Europe from the middle ages through the 1940s (and beyond) had “Jews”.

Jordan, Minnesota had “satanists“.

And Governor Klink and Mayor McDreamy had “white supremacists”.

It seems like such a long time ago that Big Left started predicting an imminent wave of “right wing white supremacist terrorism“.

And, like OJ, they are still looking:

This notion – that Big Left has been getting ready to launch a violent war against dissent, while blaming mostly-phantom “right wingers” – is where Berg’s Seventh Law ceases to be funny.

Kyle Rittenhouse. Murder.  Another tough case for the prosecution. 

Sure, the prosecution has a tape of a kid shooting people.  But the defense gets a turn, too.  Here’s their opening salvo.

And that’s not to mention that all three of the people he shot were convicted felons – not exactly the kind of people Kenoshans want roaming their streets.

Three criminals trying to destroy our town.  A good kid standing up for what’s right.  A racist prosecution to appease the mob.  Liberals may not think those themes will resonate with the jury.  I suspect they will.

Joe Doakes

If he gets acquitted – and I’m far from sanguine, but I think there’s hope – heads will melt.

And that melting will express itself in yet more riots.

We’ll take a break from stanching the flow of blood from Western Civilization to reach across the aisle to admire on of the civilization’s crowning achievements.

Submitted for your fan-geek edification, this very long, gloriously detailed oral (well, transcribed) history of perhaps the greatest single episode of comedy television of the 2000s, the “Dinner Party” episode of The Office.

Verdict…:

…true.

Lenin, Stalin and Castro were all children of the middle-to-upper middle classes – people with a certain amount of privilege in the context of their times.

Hitler was from a bourgeois background. Most of the “Hitler Cabinet” that ran Germany and then the Nazi empire fro 1933 to 1945 were artists, self-styled or successful or, often, not – painters and writers, playwrights, sculptors, musicians, mostly mediocre at best, but all from the class where that kind of pastime was possible.

Most of America’s rioters in the 1960s were the children of the upper middle class – people who could while away their draft eligibility in college, back when college was simultaneously affordable and not the default post-high-school option for vast swathes of society.

The woman who coined the term “white privilege” was, herself, from a family that personified class privilege, who coined the term largely to racialize her, and her colleagues’, immense class advantages.

But has that changed? After 120 years, is the radical left actually made up of the workers whose struggles they’ve appropriated?

Mitch, please.

On May 31, prosecutors learned Floyd died of an overdose. On August 25, they admitted it in court.

Charges against the officers still have not been dismissed. One remains in jail, in super-max prison, in Oak Park Heights. 

I seem to recall someone in the comments lecturing me on the ethical duties of a prosecutor as explanation why he was confident the state would win a conviction.  Yeah?  Not when your own medical examiner concedes it was an overdose. 

I’m ready for my apology.  I bet Chauvin is, too.  I wonder if the Lawyer’s Board of Professional Responsibility is taking complaints in person these days, or on-line only.  Because sitting on exculpatory evidence for three months, publicly branding a man you know to be innocent as a murder, encouraging people to riot to protest a crime that never occured . . . those acts seem to violate the Rules of Professional Conduct, particularly Rules 3.8 (a), (d) and (f).

Joe Doakes

Part of my enduring pessimism about politics in Minnesota is that, between the media, the irregularities in the election system, and the mass of brainwashed droogs that would vote DFL if Josef Mengele came back from the dead and got the DFL endorsement by standing on his head while chanting “Black Cadavers Matter” and give him 70% of the vote anyway, is that accountability – at least, the accountability not manifested by people voting with their feet – always evades them.

If it doesn’t happen soon – in some form other than “Minneapolis turning into a cold Flint” – I’m not sure that it’ll matter anymore.

“Prog” columnist looks at the statute and the evidence, concludes Kyle Rittenhouse will likely be acquitted.

I don’t disagree – and find that there’s ample grounds for caution for all the rest of us that take the Second Amendment seriously.

I homed in on these two passages:

When [the first “victim”, Joseph] Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, finally cornered Rittenhouse, he grabbed for the teenager’s gun. Multiple shots rang out, and Rosenbaum fell, mortally wounded.

Did Rittenhouse have a reasonable belief under the circumstances that if Rosenbaum got his gun he would suffer death or great bodily harm? Jurors in Wisconsin are instructed that “reasonable” means “what a person of ordinary intelligence and prudence would have believed … under the circumstances that existed at the time.”

And this bit here:

A third victim, Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, of West Allis, Wisconsin, who survived, first held up his hands in a gesture of surrender at a distance of a few feet. In one of his hands, he held a gun. But when he “moved toward” Rittenhouse, prosecutors said, Rittenhouse fired, striking him in the arm.

That final shooting “will be the most serious problem” for Rittenhouse at trial, Kling said. ”The guy did have a gun in his hand. But he wasn’t pointing it at or threatening Rittenhouse.”

My first carry permit instructor, the last Joel Rosenberg, used to put it this way: “You’ll be making a life-or-death decision in a split second, likely under incredible stress, in the dark, with incomplete information. The prosector will have weeks and months in a warm, well-lit building, protected by metal detectors and deputies, to decide whether you were right”.

Another of Joel’s sayings: “Shooting in self-defense is a choice between losing your life, and ruining it”.

Because while there’s a lot of rhetoric about deterring the madness, to say nothing of resisting it, it’s still incredibly risky, and under normal circumstances – and even some garden-variety extraordinary ones – best avoided:

Overwhelmingly I hear from the professionals that their plan for dealing with riots and mayhem is “Don’t be there.” Check the ego. Back away from the social media siren call to “be part of the solution.” Inserting yourself into a riot (AKA “war zone”) where we now know there are armed violent criminals (often felons) who are there with the expressed intent to do extreme violence to someone is, in my view, just foolish.

It’s said that good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. I sure have found that to be true a lot of times. In flying, we say you have a skill bucket and a luck bucket. You hope to fill your skill bucket before using up everything in the luck bucket.

For your consideration.

This was posted on one of those insidious neighborhood Facebook pages around which America’s newest plague, “Karen”, congeals:

So, let me get this straight: people, mostly college students, being in an age bracket that has suffered precisely zero COVID-19 deaths in the state of Minnesota, are going to a bar staffed mostly by people in their 20s and 30s (who have also experienced zero COVID-19 deaths so far), To celebrate going back to school after six months of absurd, ineffective, potentially counterproductive and onerous quarantine that has left them, like the rest of society, aching for some kind, any kind, of social contact at a time in their life when that is what they’re supposed to be doing?

What did I get wrong?

I’ll tell you what the paragraph above got wrong: They haven’t gotten into the bar yet.

Plums (a reliable, responsible-drinking source tells me) observes standard sociall distancing inside, as well as on the patio out back, notwithstanding the fact that they are nearly no confirmed cases of outdoor spread of the virus, no matter what your distance, no matter whether you’re wearing a mask or not.

I’m not saying the Karen involved is a totalitarian.

I am saying actual totalitarians need lots of people like her in society to have a chance of taking over.