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.

“So, Mitch – why are the Democrats and media (ptr) spending so much time saying that Trump wants to delegitimize the election?”

The answer, of course, is because they need to deflect away from the fact that they are trying, in advance, to delegitimize the election.

The Story of the Little Governor Who Cried Surge, by Joe Doakes

Once there was a Governor named Timmy.  He had a fine house and many servants, but he was bored.  “I know,” he thought, “I’ll cause some excitement. That’ll be fun.”

So Timmy ran through the streets yelling “Curve! Curve! We’re all gonna die!”  People panicked and bought hand sanitizer, toilet paper and bottled water.  But they did not die.

Timmy laughed and laughed.  But then he got bored again.  He ran through the streets again, yelling “Covid! Covid! We’re all gonna die!” People panicked and worked from home.  They wore masks.  They ate take-out food. But they did not die.

Timmy laughed and laughed.  But then he got bored again.  He ran through the streets a third time, yelling “Cases! Cases! We’re all gonna die.” But the people had read the headlines.  They knew there were many new Covid cases but hospitalizations had fallen and nobody died.  The people did not panic. 

Timmy was furious.  This was no fun.  He argued with the people.  “We’re on the edge of a cliff.  As cases spread, hospitalizations will rise and people will die, in a surge!  A massive surge!  I warned you all Spring that it was coming in May, could be June, or possibly July.  We got lucky in August but now it’s September and look out!  The Surge!  The Surge!  We’re all gonna die in The Surge!”

But the people turned away.  They threw their silly masks in the rubbish bins.  They went to weddings for young people starting a new life.  They went to funerals for old people ending a long life.  They went to backyard bar-b-ques with friends to celebrate the good life.  The did not listen to Little Timmy at all.

And Little Timmy cried and cried.

The End

In much of the Metro today, it pretty much is a children’s story. More later.

OK, that’s not the real tag line on the story.

Yet.

But it doesn’t seem implausible at all, does it?

Minneapolis couple out on the town in the North Loop, attacked by 8-10…

…well, the piece leaves that wide open:

Probably more white supremacist Hells Angels. They’re behind everything that’s wrong in Minneapolis.

Darned white supremacists.

My jaw dropped to the floor when I saw the latest Biden ad, about the violence in our cities.

It’s not what’s in the ad, per se. It’s what’s missing.

Go ahead. What do you not see in this ad?

I’ll wait.

No identifiable “Anti”-Fa or BLM.

The only identifiable people in this ad are “right wing” protesters – in no case violent, not of of which burned or looted anything.

Biden – well, the people operating his animatronic controls, anyway – would have you believe the rioting, burning and looting, the coordinated and paid tantrum of the American Left (TM), was Trump’s fault.

This is what every spousal abuser says about their victims.

A friend of the blog emails:

Last night at a prayer meeting one of the members of the group told us that Minneapolis public schools made a change to job titles. This friend of mine is a teacher at Minneapolis South. He said it was announced yesterday that all titles in the Minneapolis public school system with the term Chief in them will be changed. It’s the end of racism as we know it.

Excising a word that existed in a constant context in the English language for hundreds of years?

Yeah, that oughtta fix it.

If I told you that scientists had discovered a new virus which was
guaranteed to kill one guy living in Schenectady, New York unless the
entire nation went into super-strict lock-down, should we do it?

No, because public policy isn’t made for one guy, or ten, or 100, or
1,000 or even 10,000, which is more than the number of confirmed deaths
due to Covid-19, according to newly revised figures from the CDC.

Liberals are scrambling to explain that the new number doesn’t mean what
it says it means.  To them, ‘died of’ and ‘died with’ are the same.  If
Covid is listed as a ‘contributing factor,’ then it’s still a deadly
disease and we should still be in lock-down.

Nonsense.  When I die, the cause of death will be heart failure and the
contributing causes of death will be obesity, diabetes, high blood
pressure, high cholesterol and cirrhosis of the liver. But I didn’t die
of any of those contributing cases.  You don’t pick and choose which of
the underlying causes is the scariest. You pick the cause that killed me.

The existence of the virus is not a hoax.  The panic response is a
hoax.  And this is proof.

Joe Doakes

This is one of those areas where I thing both sides are putting out terrible information.

If someone who’s 100 pounds overweight and has hypertension and diabetes gets Covid and dies, what killed her? You could say all the comorbidities were at fault . You might not be wrong, per se – but if she’d have hypothetically lived another ten years but for the Covid, what then?

Medicine involves a lot of ambiguity. Politics – at least, political messaging – doesn’t.

It’s Labor Day – a transfer of wealth in the form of about .004% of most companies’ payroll to workers, given as a sop to organized unions at the height of their powers – a transfer I happily accept, like most of you, every year.

I’ll pay homage to the date with my own sojourn through the world of organized labor; my semester teaching at a local MNSCU university.

When I signed up, I was given a choice – pay $120 to the MNSCU faculty union, the “Inter-Faculty Organization” (IFO), or pay $108 for “Fair Share”, ostensibly my portion of the union’s negotiation efforts. I figured eight dollars was a worthwhile trade for a lifetime of being able to virtue-signal my DFL friends about being “a union guy”, and I paid it gladly.

As part of on-boarding, I had to attend a union orientation session.

There, the school’s shop steward – an English professor who as I recall was actually in a classroom 3-6 hours a week gave us an update on the concessions he’d wrung from the – I’m not making this up – “bosses” at MNSCU, his tone growing more impassioned, his face turning just a little bit red, a vein starting to bulge on his neck, like he was a Wobbly talking to iron miners in the 1910s about putting a safety cage on their elevator.

So – with all due respect to the union organizers who actually did make a difference with workers back when life actually was nasty, brutish and short (as opposed to some of the efforts we see today), enjoy the day.

We knew the numbers were bullshit, but not why.  This article explains why – any trace of the virus counts as a “case” even if the amount is so tiny the carrier is not sick or not even contagious.

Once again, the numbers have been inflated to frighten the public into believing they are in danger and it’s all Trump’s fault so they must vote for Biden if they value their lives.

Sickening lies, all of them.

Joe Doakes

Rahm Emanuel told them never to waste a crisis.

They don’t.

Whereas the United States’s death toll per million citizens ranks as the eighth-highest among significant nations (forget about Andorra and San Marino), at 572 Covid fatalities per million…:

And whereas every state with a death toll (in fatalities per million) higher than 572 per million (as of September 2, 2020) is a “blue”, Democrat-run state with the sole exception of Mississippi:

And whereas within even those states, the overwhelming concentration of the death toll in terms of fatalities per million is in those states’ “blue”, Democrat-run urban areas (Example: New York):

(Example. California):

And whereas the states about which the American left has been caterwaulilng about – Florida and Texas – have per-million fatality rates below the de factor national average of 572 per million

(and whereas even in those examples, the fatalilties are overwhelmingly concentrated in Democrat-run areas within those Republican-run states (Texas shown below),

and

Notwithstanding the fact that after months of insisting that “Red” states were going to get completely bludgeoned by the virus, any day now, every single state (with the exception of sparsely populated Vermont and Maine and isolated Hawaii) in the bottom 15 states in terms of fatalities per million is a Republican-run state, even after the resurgence of infections in July, and

Wheras the deaths among the most vulnerable, the elderly, are overwhelmingly concentrated in “Blue”, Democrat-run states from New York to Minnesota, as a result of policies that were systematically abjiured in “Red” States, and

Whereas terms like ‘Wuhan Flu” and “China Vinus” are, we are told, inaccurate not to mention racist,

Be it resolved that from now on, the Covid-19 virus shall be known as “The Blue City Democrat Plague“.

…don’t you dare say the left is waging a war…

…against Western Civlization itself.

I keep hearing these words  used interchangeably, typically by liberals.
That is wrong; they are not the same words. They do not mean the same thing.

Equality is when everyone gets the same. Equity is when everyone gets
what they deserve.

You studied hard, went to class, turned in assignments on time. I never
cracked a book, skipped class, failed to turn in assignments.

Equality means we both get A’s.  Equity means you pass and I fail.

Doesn’t matter that you came from a culture which values education and I
came from a culture which does not. Culture has nothing to do with
equity or equality of results. That’s just an excuse for lack of
individual effort.

Now, it’s gone even farther.  Now equity means reparations. Someone
whose hair and nose looked like yours had a rough life 150 years ago? 
Sorry about that, let me adjust your grade . . . here’s your A.

Annoys me.

Joe Doakes

All that, and it’s unsustainable.

Problem is, society may well find that out by the literal and figurative collapse of everything that “equality” built that can’t, in all equity, continue.

On August 31, 1939, groups of SS officers staged “attacks” on several German border outposts. Near a radio station near the village of Gleiwitz (modern day Gliwice, in Polish Silesia), a group of operators “captured” the station and broadcast militant Polish propaganda, and then dumped a group of recently-executed prisoners, dressed in Polish uniforms, around the station and other border outposts.

The bodies, and the attacks, were “false flag” photo ops designed to let the Germans claim to the world press that the invasion of Poland – which occurred hours later, and which started the European phase of the largest, bloodiest conflagration in human history – was provoked by Poland. It was patent balderdash, but within Nazi German is was pretty much gospel.

“Poland provoked us!”

It’s a situation familiar to anyone who’s dealt with domestic abuse; the abuser never believes it’s their fault.

So “Big Left” wanted violence. They welcomed it. They begged for it in as many words, over and over:

Until it started hitting them in the polls.

Then? They were “Trump’s riots”.

There have been so many ginned-up moral panics over the past four years that they simply dissipate into the ether. Reminder: The National Guard hysteria — “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun,” for example, warned Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times — happened right before the “fascists are snatching our mailboxes!” hysteria.

“As right-wing groups increasingly move to confront protesters in U.S. cities, demonstrators are assessing how to keep themselves safe,” says the same New York Times today. By the time this is all over, rioters will be remembered as the true victims.

Democrats thought they could somehow take advantage of radical protests to help them win 2020. It has backfired. Once distaste for the violence began showing up in polling, and once Republicans could circumvent media coverage during their convention and focus on David Dorn and other victims of leftist violence, the Democratic Party and their allies switched the narrative.

Today, the dangerously unserious House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff blames Trump and, who else, the Russians for “willfully fanning the flames of this violence.” Joy Reid, recently given a primetime show on one of the country’s major news networks, claimed that the riots were false flag operations perpetrated by “armed white nationalists” deployed as a nationwide strategy to help reelect Trump.

I’m pretty sure Schiff, Walz, Frey, and the rest of the gallery of “elites” don’t believe this.

I do believe they are counting on their voters not being smart enough to tell the difference.

Here in the Metro, I’m not sure they’re wrong.

It’s your fault, dirty <strike>polack</strike> deplorable.

Hopkins School Board Vice-Chair Chris LaTondresse – did he tell you he’s an “Obama administration alum” yet?

The Defund the Police movement hitches it’s wagons into the western suburbs.

In the apparently halcyon days of April 2018, students and school officials of the Hopkins School District gathered together in what was called “National Walkout Day” in memory of the horrific tragedy of the Columbine school shootings 19 years earlier.  Students spoke of issues of gun control and school safety.  And while none of the student speakers were even alive when Columbine occurred, a common theme of seeking safety at school echoed in the various speeches.

A time-traveler from that April day in 2018 would have a hard time reconciling the Hopkins School District of just two and-a-half years later as the School Board voted to keep guns out of their schools – guns in the form of local police protection:

The Hopkins school board on Tuesday night embraced a student-led call to remove police from Hopkins High School — with the action to come at year’s end.

The 6-1 vote brings a suburban voice to a national movement that has sought to end the use of school resource officers, or SROs.

The move to defund Hopkins School Resource Officers comes after several months of intense online lobbying by a group calling themselves “CopsOutHHH” and a poll of Hopkins students in favor of the movement – a poll in which only 183 of the District’s 1,600 students voted.  By the end of the year, Hopkins will sever it’s relationship with the Minnetonka Police Department (the Hopkins School District includes parts of Edina and Minnetonka) in a move that supporter and Board Vice Chair Chris LaTondresse bizarrely described as not actually “defunding” the police since the contract was due to expire anyway.

LaTondresse, a DFL endorsed candidate for Hennepin County Commissioner who touts his consulting work for USAID as making him an “Obama administration alum” in the same way that I apparently was a member of Congress because I visited Washington D.C. once, claims the move will allows for more mental health funding.  Considering the SRO budget is $113,142 out of a budget of $91,502,418, the idea that shifting 0.01% of the School Board’s resources away from security and towards mental health will address either issue is laughable at best and incredibly dangerous at worse.

It’s also a conclusion that files in the face of peer-tested research.  Carleton University conducted a two-year study of SRO programs and in their report, published by Routledge in 2019, they concluded that for every dollar invested in the program, a minimum of $11.13 of social and economic value was created.  While attention would likely focus on the role the SRO could or did play in the estimated 525 school shootings over the past decade (a number in partial dispute as it groups any gun-related incidents on a school campus together), left unreported are the number of incidents prevented by early SRO intervention.  The group Averted School Violence has begun to attempt to collect and analyze such data, a task made somewhat difficult by the very nature of the endeavor – incidents that don’t escalate into violence rarely make the news.

LaTondresse and the Hopkins School Board also want to cite that SROs make students of color fundamentally uncomfortable.  While data can’t contend with feelings, even a Brookings Institute report from 2018 which was less than fully supportive of SROs as agents of school safety didn’t see any correlation between SROs and race.  Brookings believed context for arrest records and racial backgrounds were lacking and thus a poor metric to judge whether or not SROs were more likely to discriminate or otherwise negatively impact minority students.

But no amount of data – or even common sense – was present on Tuesday night as the Hopkins School Board voted to eliminate basic security without even so much as a concept of what would replace their School Resource Officers.  Instead, a small but vocal minority has continued to push a partisan agenda that endangers students for the goal of striking symbolic blow against the police.

A friend of the blog writes:

Just had an online meeting with our kid’s teacher. Expectations were laid out and kid is expected to be on time and we can expect a daily schedule that has the kid doing school work live, on line from 9-3:30. (There are breaks built in as there are during in person learning). 

We are at a charter school. Compare that expectation with the public school teachers union, who wanted one hour weekly of live in person, online learning.

We need more advocacy work like what Rashad Turner is doing. here. 

These are crazy days indeed, with me being on the same side of an issue as Rashad Turner.

Just curious about the vigilance committees the NAACP formed in Minneapolis, after the riots. 

624.61 ARMED ASSOCIATION.

It shall not be lawful for any body of persons, other than the National Guard, troops of the United States and, with the consent of the governor, sons and daughters of veterans and cadets of educational institutions where military science is taught, to associate themselves together as a military company with arms, but members of social and benevolent organizations are not prohibited from wearing swords. Any violation of this section shall be a misdemeanor.

Should I expect to read about charges being filed, soon?

Joe Doakes

I’ve also noticed a certain…difference in tone in covering groups of “people of color” and immigrants (including a number that I consider friends) arming up to defend their property, and white people doing exactly the same thing with exactly the same motivation.

I listen to NPR so you don’t have to.

And there are some reasons it’s worth it. I mean, that’s where you get Live From Here with Chris Thile.

Well, for now, anyway.

Otherwise, there’s…

…well, a lot of racial virtue-signaling. I suspect the most lilywhite of America’s organizations is fearing a lot of backlash when the Bolsheviks come for the Mensheviks.

Speaking of which, it’s always a bit of a chuckle when the “progressives” that are NPR’s staff, social circle and pool of sources try to explain things like economics to the pool of “progressives” that are NPR’s audience.

Case in point – a piece from yesterday’s All Things Considered, an interview with one Eula Biss, about her new book about Capitalism.

Biss – a “non-fiction writing” major who has lived within the academic echo chamber her entire career, is the author of “Having and Being Had” – a primer on…

…wait for it…

…Capitalism.

Or, rather, a coddled, over-schooled/undereducated resident of the academic echo chamber’s perversion of the cartoon term “capitalism”, itself a hijacked representation of “the free market”…

…not that either term isn’t completely lost on Professor Biss.

Let’s start with this passage, which the NPR crowd will no doubt take for an emanation of wisdom, but merely proves that Biss’s son and babysitter are smarter than she is:

PFEIFFER: At one point, you’re talking about your son paying for a Pokemon card, although someone else thought he overpaid for the Pokemon card. What was it like for you to watch your son try to figure out what something was worth and why and maybe not figuring it out correctly?

BISS: Oh, it was amazing. In watching him learn how to play Pokemon the way it was being played in first and second grade at his school, I felt like I was seeing an economy be invented. But it was also somewhat excruciating to me because I saw the ways in which other children and his babysitter and I were training the values of capitalism into him. So, yes, at one point, he gave away a valuable Pokemon card because he just didn’t like it very much.

And then I heard his babysitter saying to him, were you a smart negotiator? And I thought, oh, no. What are we doing? This kid is only 6, and we’re already training him not to be generous and to get as much out of an exchange as he can possibly get out of it even if he doesn’t care about the thing he’s giving away.

PFEIFFER: Oh, that’s so interesting. I mean, diamonds are objectively very expensive and valuable, but if I don’t care about them and I just want to give them away, is that fine, or is that flawed financial thinking?

BISS: Under the logic of capitalism, it’s insane, right? But by some other logic, it makes perfect sense, especially since diamonds aren’t incredibly useful. You can’t eat them, and you can’t live inside them.

The interview – and one suspects the book – is a cavalcade of white progressive guilt, the sort of consequence-free wailing that afflicts our current layer of pseudointellectual societal overburden:

BISS: One of the things that I didn’t want to have happen to me as I entered this new life and lifestyle [i.e. – bought a house in a tony neighborhood near Northwestern Universitiy] was I didn’t want to begin to think that I had what I had because I’d worked hard, which is one of the patterns of thought very common to upper middle class. I don’t believe that I got what I got because I worked hard. I believe that I got what I got because the system favors me in a number of different ways – one, because I’m white, but also because I started out middle-class.

Notice she doesn’t mention “…because I’m part of an academic-industrial complex to which being a recipient of Urban Progressive Privilege gives me a priority ticket”.

Ms. Biss: If you’re that concerned about the things your “work” didn’t “earn” you, give up your teaching gig at Northwestern and become one of the people you describe later in the interview:

I think one of the possibilities that I could perceive, especially once the pandemic arrived, was the possibility of – what if we compensated the people we speak of as essential workers? So what if everyone who is essential to the daily workings of our lives was paid well and had health insurance and had basic security? That’s entirely possible. It’s even possible within capitalism, but that involves us making a series of changes in policy and, to some extent, in what we collectively value.

It’s entirely possible – say, within the context of a real epidemic, a modern-day Plague with a two-digit mortality rate, something that legitimately shuts down society for the duration of a disease serious enough to impinge even Nancy Pelosi or Lori Lightfoot’s lifestyles – for the skills and presence of “supply chain” workers, from the farm to the Walmart, to become very, very valuable. Vastly moreso than, say, writing professors at Northwestern.

But I don’t think that’s the “policy change” she’s referring to.

The bad news: these are the people teaching the “next generation of leaders”

The not-so-bad news: nobody she teaches will amount to anything outside the academic-industrial complex.

A family watches their grandmother die, through a window – if they’re lucky.

More often, they are barred from the hospital where their loved one spends their last hours.

Thousands – possibly as many as 30,000 – cancer patients die because their needed care has been, and is being, deferred due to absurd coronavirus restrictions. Nobody has even estimated the toll for other diseases.

A father is barred from his pregnant wife’s ultrasound. This isn’t just missing a cute gender-reveal or a heart-warming first-encounter; the wife has had several miscarriages; a lot of mental health is riding on this test. No dice, Dad. Wait in your car until summoned. Put a mask on, while you’re at it.

Nancy Pelosi gets a blow out.

You have just discovered the meaning of socialism.