22 year old Dylan Robinson was arrested earlier this week in Breckenridge, Colorado, on suspicion of torching the Third Precinct.

Well, with a name like “Dylan”, he’s certainly not immigrant or black.

But what about “White Supremacist”? Is he one of the crowd that the Governor and both Mayors blamed for all the violence and destructrion, as well as all that leftist graffiti all over town?

Let’s check and see:

Nope. While you can’t judge a book by its cover, I’ll bet a shiny new quarter he’s either with, or likes to pretend he’s with, “Anti”-Fa.

I bet another shiny new quarter that the Henco Attorney’s case gets quietly gundecked, and Robinson ends up skating, since – another quarter here – he’ll be connected with some Democrat poobah or another.

Any takers?

Two St. Paul City Council members want to completely abolish the St. Paul Police Department.

Nelsie Yang, representing Ward 6 (NE St. Paul, Phalen area) and Mitra Jalali representing Ward 4 (NW St. Paul, Hamline-Midway, Merriam Park, Saint Anthony Park, and parts of Mac-Groveland  and Como).

I wonder if they plan to replace the cops with armed citizens forming vigilance committees to dispense street justice? 

Joe Doakes

Jalali – who seems to have dropped the “-Nelson” from her last name just in time for prime ethnic virtue-signaling season – has been particularly Canoesque.

SCENE: Debate hall at the University of Minnesota. Mitch BERG is getting ready for a debate with Stacey HINTON. HINTON – a white woman from Edina – is president of the group “Keep All Racists Equally Nonplussed”, a social justice group without portfolio. The moderator takes the stage, as a small audience rustles in its seats.

MODERATOR: Mr. Berg, Ms. Hinton, you know the rules (both nod ). Let’s get started. What do you advocate doing about the Covid virus.

BERG: Look, I think the only things that have worked are first, protecting the vulnerable – certainly more effectively than we do here in Minnesota – then isolate the infected, and re-open the economy for everyone else.

MODERATOR: Ms. Hinton?

HINTON: You’re white.

BERG: Well, yeah, I am.

HINTON: So that’s your privilege talking.

BERG: What does “privilege” have to do with observing that the places with the best combination of public health and medical performance all did exactly that?

HINTON: Check your privilege.

MODERATOR: OK. On to the next topic. Whither Minneapolis? We’ll start with you, Ms. Hinton.

HINTON: The rioting was a bunch of white boys running around vandalizing neighborhoods of color.

BERG: Well, there certainly were “white boys” and girls doing the rioting. The implied message is “white supremacist” boys and girls. If so, they were pretty ingenious “white supremacists”, coating entire neighborhoods with graffiti associated with the left.

HINTON: Spoken like a white boy.

BERG: What does that even mean?

MODERATOR: Let’s move along. What do we do about reforming law enforcement? Mr. Berg.

BERG: Get serious about reforming qualified immunity. It is used to excuse a lot of horrific abuses, not just by the police, but by every other variety of public employee. It basically turns public employees into a higher legal caste. This doesn’t bode well for self-government.

HINTON: Something a white guy would say.

BERG: Ma’am? Do you have any thing to add other than my ethnic background?

HINTON: Yes.

BERG: Let’s hear it.

HINTON: It’s true of all white guys.

MODERATOR: Let’s move along. Ms. Hinton – what do we need to do about race relations in this country?

HINTON: White people need to listen to black peoples’ stories, and check their privilege.

BERG: Huh. All due respect, ma’am, but that’s the kind of meaningless word salad that people like you – “progressives” who are, if I may say so, a lot whiter than I am use to try to diffuse their own white liberal guilt.

HINTON: Again, that’s your privilege talking, white boy.

BERG: To the extent I have “privilege”, it’s because I was born in a functional two-parent household, with parents who stayed together until I was an adult, taught me a work ethic, and made sure I stayed in high school. And that kind of privilege is not an exclusive club – in fact, like freedom, the more of this “privilege” society has, the more there is to go around.

But let’s cut the crap. The concept of “white privilege” was, from its origins, a way for wealthy white progressive academics to try to expiate their guilt about the privileges their class gave them. To insulate themselves from gnawing class guilt while preserving that holier-than-thou feeling that white progressivism feeds on, they created and adopted the preposterous concept that being white meant a hot tar roofer from Arkansas has “privileges” that Oprah and Jay-Z don’t, while giving the likes of Mark Dayton and Mark Zuckerberg a moral pass, like indulgences sold by “church” that never forgives and offers no salvation.

MODERATOR: Ms. Hinton?

HINTON: Whitey white white white white white. White white white.

MODERATOR: Thank you all for coming out to today’s debate!

The question wasn’t whether someone would carry out a troll like this, but when.

Remember in 2004? When a bunch of bars up and down the not-yet-very-gentrified West Seventh in Saint Paul signaled their virtue by posting themselves “No Guns Allowed” after the passage of carry reform…

…for about two weeks, until they realized the posted bars were getting robbed?

Like, a lot?

I”m sensing that some pizza chef / social justice unicorn with a food truck is going to be getting a similar rude awakening:

And..voila. It didn’t even take armed robbers to harsh the hipster’s mellow.

Back in the 1800’s, after the United States bought the Louisiana Purchase which extended its territory from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains,  our young nation encountered Indian nations living on the lands we bought.  Conflicts ensued, which were settled by a series of treaties. 

The land on which the statute of Christopher Columbus sat on the grounds of the State Capitol was not “stolen” from the Indians.   The Indians sold it to us. 

Now, the Indians want it back.  That’s the behavior that gave rise to the term “Indian giver.”  The fact the Governor and Lt. Governor don’t understand the history of the state they govern, is shameful.

Joe Doakes

True enough.

But to Big Left, it’s never about history, math, or any other factual basis of analysis.

It’s inevitably about because shut up.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is looking for almond flour at a Cub Foods, when Cat SCAT, designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, and the office manager at a small phrenology practice, glomphs up from behind.

SCAT: Hah hah, Merg! People are removing racist statues from the Capitol grounds! That’s gotta make all you fat angry old white men wet your pants with rage!

BERG: (Beholding the red-faced, utterly Caucusoid and, shall we say “zaftig” SCAT, and silently contemplating and then thinking better of commenting). Yeah, it’s the mob showing the rest of the world that they don’t have to play by the rules.

SCAT: It’s no different than the fall of the Berlin Wall!

BERG: The…Berlin…Wall?

SCAT: Haha! Yes! Take that!

BERG: OK, let’s compare and contrast.

Columbus: Problematic but incidental figure, who wasn’t even the first European to come to North America – that was the Norwegians, five hundred years earlier – and who has had no affect other than symbolism on anyone in centuries, the un-personing of whom from history should be a cause for a critical discussion.

With me so far?

SCAT: Yeah! Evil white man!

BERG: Riiight. OK – the Berlin Wall: Not just a symbol of the contemporary division of Germany and the current subjugation of tens of millions of people to the bloodiest regime in history, but an actual current militarized barrier along which seventeen people had been murdered in the decade, and three in the year, before it was destroyed. The demolition of which was subject discussed thoroughly but quickly in the immediate aftermath of people on both sides of the wall deciding to jettison the Communism that had reigned in the East (the government that many of the statue-yankers are shilling for, interestingly enough), and, other than the massive “vandalism” of the wall after the Bornholmerstraße incident and the collapse of the DDR (which was one of the great images of my lifetime, but remarkably ineffective, leaving as it did a, well, wall through the middle of Berlin), was dealt via due process leading to its orderly and deliberate demolition, with remarkable worldwide unanimity, mourned by nobody that didn’t have hands still dripping with fresh blood.
Other than that? Same/same!

SCAT: So what about the alt-right taking over those six blocks in Seattle, and turning it into a slave plantation?

BERG: It’s “Anti”-Fa, and they turned it into an “Occupy” camp, only mixing in extortion with the rape and filth, and you’re changing the subject as well as lying about the substance of both subjects…

(But SCAT has already wandered away)

And SCENE

A friend of the blog writes:

I don’t know who re-worded this Villager article, but it was a white woman who thought she was pretty clever on Twitter. I haven’t actually looked at the Villager article yet, but did have fun making the “clever” woman’s edits more real-

A man died while in police custody May 25. The four officers involved are now in custody awaiting trial and charged with 2nd degree murder. The death sparked protests to highlight that police brutality still exists. Others took the opportunity to loot and commit arson in two marginal neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. The neighborhoods, which have higher populations of people of color, have been the target of DFL endorsed politicians for years as DFL endorsed mayors and councilmembers pushed through light rail construction, zoning changes, house developments, soccer stadiums and bike lanes despite calls from residents that those were not the priorities for their neighborhood. 
“They’ve been wanting to get rid of our community for years, and this is the last straw,” says one black resident who only gave a first name of Tyrone.
Other local business owners of color are saying, “we survived the 2008 recession, the never ending construction, the zoning changes since we weren’t immediately remodeling, but this is the absolute end. We’re packed and already moving.”

Hope springs eternal that black, Latino and Asian voters will figure it out: the riots the DFL wanted, condoned, celebrated and in many cases DFLers (or their idiot children), participated in, in the city whose entire economy has been jiggered against them by progressive plutocrats with deep pockets, just might not deserve their continued loyalty…

… And is scheduled to appear on the Joe Piscopo show, on AM970 The Answer in New York City at 7:25 central time/825 Eastern today?

Um…

OK, you can’t actually see me pointing my thumbs at myself, so the joke doesn’t make much sense.

Anyway, as this is written I am scheduled to appear on Joe Piscopo’s morning show in New York this morning. Notify the media!

Wait. I am the media.

Anyway, if you’re in the New York City area, tune in!

Looking at the SF article on armed citizens again – 

“As the car fills with the acrid scent of burning chemicals, Ellison tells his friend in the driver’s seat to pull over. Before they come to a stop, Ellison, 30, flings open the door and jumps out with a pistol in one hand and a small fire extinguisher in the other. He walks briskly down the street, scanning the block for the origin of the fumes.”

Even assuming he has a permit to carry, that’s “brandishing,” and it’s a crime.  What are you doing waving a gun around, one-handed?  What’s your target?  Where’s the imminent danger?  Why is that damned thing out of the holster???

His father’s the attorney general. That’s his legal justification, peasant.

“At one checkpoint, a young man nervously looked down the street as a car approached, his finger on the trigger of a semiautomatic rifle half-raised in front of him.”
Get Your Booger Hook Off The Bang Switch!!  What the hell is wrong with you?  Have you no firearms safety training at all? 

The author is PRAISING these idiots for running around the streets with loaded guns and no idea how to use them safely.

Every time a new group gets frightened enough to run out to buy guns – women, gays, trans – I make the same offer:  I will teach you how to use it, safely, for free.  Time to step up my game.  Whole lotta people desperately need help before somebody gets hurt from sheer stupidity.

Joe Doakes

There are a whole lot of people who’ve come over to the 2nd Amendment side this past few months. There are a lot of opportunities for us to show them how it’s done.

Although I’m not sure Jeremiah Ellison is going to be one of the ones who learns much.

Recall Governor Walz – help with money, time, and with a little luck petition signatures before too long.

Sia Lo is running for Congress in MNCD4. Website here.

This is one for my friends to the left of center.

I don’t care much for Christopher Columbus, one way or the other. He wasn’t even the first European to reach North America – that was Leif Ericsson, 500 years earlier. You can make a case that Columbus was an awful person, and I might even agree.

But are you sure you want to make the case that groups of people should be able to destroy public (or for that matter private) property, as long as they feel it’s really really right? That some causes are just more important than the slow, dirty work of seeking consensus and working via a process?

Especially done with the implied threat of violence against anyone who might have tried to stand in the way?

Before you answer, remember: six weeks ago many of you were up in, for lack of a better term, arms over multiracial groups of protesters, some of them openly carrying firearms, demonstrating peacefully at the Michigan capitol and outside the Minnesota governors’ mansion. The demonstrators broke no laws [1], and there was certainly no violence – and yet many of you acted like that was a threat to democracy.

But actual law-breaking and vandalism, and a very clear implication of potential violence (and in many cases, it goes well beyond implication), is OK – as long as its’ the correct cause?

Because there’s a statue of Floyd Olson on the Capitol grounds. He was a socialist demigogue who governed Minnesota long ago, and there’s no rational way to deny that his policies have caused far more damage than good, especially to disadvantaged communities in this state. Olson represents the worst traits of this state – jamming down equality of outcomes as one-size-fits-all decree, with dire effects on the poor. Did he do as much harm as Columbus? No, but we’re talking principle, here, so let’s not quibble about degrees of evil.

It’s high time someone – me and my friends who feel strongly about the damage Olson and his cronies did to this state – did something about that goddess-forsaken statue. And if the process doesn’t work fast enough (and in a state dominated by the Urban Progressive Privilege that Olson’s policies cemented in place as the dominant class, it won’t), then we’ll have to “expedite” things ourselves.

Because if you’re not part of (our) solution, you’re part of the problem (as we define it).

So – are you SURE you want to set this as a precedent?

[1] Open carry is legal in the Michigan capitol, and let’s not even pretend any of you know the actual statute re “brandishing”, so I’ll not allow the conversation to get side-tracked over that subject.

May 14: Ken Martin, chair of the DFL, makes a bold prediction and a really dumb statement:

Fast forward nearly a month: as of June 12, Wisconsin’s death rate per million is half that of Minnesota. Its active cases are a solid 40% lower than Minnesota’s.

And that was after Wisconsin started out “leading” Minnesota in both categories.

The problem?

I don’t suspect it’s that Ken Martin believed anything he wrote in his May 12 tweet (least of all about the useless and idiotic Steve Sack).

The problem is that Martin can count on his DFL voter base – bovine herd animals with the critical thinking skills of a Teen Vogue reader – to know the difference, or care if they can.

This was the House Democratic leadership, doing their (nothing but) symbolic photo-op before the George Floyd funeral:

They’re wearing “Kente” cloths – apparently Ghanaian in this case, but there are similar adornments all through Africa. They have cultural significance.

And to Pelosi and her little claque, they are nothing but costumes.

Some actual Africans were not amused at the virtue-accessorizing:

But remember – don’t go eating burritos, honky.

Urban Progressive Privilege: when making the right progressive-y noises is enough, at least within your social circle.

The Washington Post, which endlessly editorializes in favor of stricter gun control laws and bans, writes approvingly of armed citizens carrying assault rifles, shotguns and pistols in the streets of Minneapolis. 

NAACP, which advocates strict gun control laws and bans, is organizing the armed citizen patrols.

Neither of these organizations come right out and say it, but by their actions, they’re basically conceding that I was right all along, and they were wrong. 

I am now prepared to accept their apologies.

Joe Doakes

The good news: we might be starting to see parts of the left (including, unfortunately, some of the worst parts) voting on this issue with their feet.

The bad news: all that energy is going to go into more bad ideas.

In the wake of – or perhaps as a next chapter of the George Floyd riots, “Anti”-Fa are setting up an “Autonomous” enclave in Seattle. They are extorting businesses in that enclave for protection money.

And unlike Minneapolis, where President Trump steamrollered Governor Walz into sending a more-than-token National Guard force with threats of invoking the Insurrection Act and units of combat-veteran regular military to East Lake Street, the President is silent on Seattle.

People – including fellow Trump-skeptic Mike Cernovich – are asking questions (language NSFW, but who pays attention to that these days?):

Maybe I’m a cynic, but it seems simple to me: nobody is calling Washington a swing state. Their electoral votes are off the table – at least until the parts of Washington outside the Seattle/Tacoma metro area secede and join Idaho.

That’s why Trump “doesn’t care” about Seattle.

Or Pelosi, for that matter. Nothing’s moving Washington out of the “hard blue” column any time soon – least of all an insurrenction led by the children of her biggest donors.

Minnesota? It’s at least hypothetically in play, especially if suburban and exurban Republicans, alarmed by the collapse of the Twin Cities, and bolstered by the President’s strong alternative, turn out in apocalyptic numbers. As they will have to to stave off a complete Democrat majority at the Capitol.

And that’s why everyone – not just Trump – is letting Seattle turn into Beirut on the Sound.

The Daily Caller published transcripts from the Chicago City Council’s “meltdown” during the riots.

And it’s not pretty. It’s the sound of modern “progressive” urban government getting its ass smacked by reality.

A couple of the excerpts are of particular interest (emphasis added by me):

“A war zone.”
Lopez said his district had turned into a “war zone” as gang members were taking neighborhood security into their own hands. “It’s just like a war zone right now … The gang members are now getting involved, walking around with AK-47s, threatening to shoot, I hate to say it, black people,” Lopez said, whose district, the 15th Ward, has a large Hispanic population. Lopez previously said in a May 31 tweet that members of the Latin Saints gang were “engaging and chasing looters” in his ward.

Huh.

So – gang bangers in a city with rigid, comprehensive gun control, have “AK47s”?

Weird.

“There aren’t enough cops.”

“Right now and I’m sure I echo what everybody else has said, there aren’t enough cops. We’re getting overwhelmed in this thing,” Burke said on the call. The mayor agreed. “It’s hard to fathom that we have 13,404 [officers], the highest headcount that we’ve had in probably a decade, and given the volume of looting, it feels like we’re a tiny police force,” Lightfoot said.

“Private citizens, they’re going to become vigilantes, they’re going to protect themselves, because the police aren’t reachable, there’s not enough men or women to respond when the call is made but the call doesn’t get answered,” Burke added.

Wait – you mean if government doesn’t do one if its few legitimate jobs – preserving order – then people will do it themselves?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Political scientists love to talk about the Spectrum, left-wing parties versus right-wing parties.
I look at it more from the point of view of government control. Anarchists are on one end, no government control it all. Totalitarians are on the other end, government control of everything.
Pure Liberty is pure license. It’s the right to do anything you want at anytime to anybody. We saw that during the riots. That’s anarchy. Nobody wants that.
Which means that in order to have real Liberty, there must be order. And ordered Liberty requires restrictions on what people can do. And restrictions require someone to enforce them, with force if necessary. Which means police.
If Minneapolis seriously goes forward with the plan to abolish the police, they are intentionally heading toward Anarchy territory. It’s no wonder businesses are uninterested in rebuilding there, and residents are talking about fleeing.
Joe Doakes

WIthout order, prosperity is impossible.

WIthout prosperity, liberty is pretty much academic.

Without liberty, prosperity is pretty much a “ruling clicque” thing.

The tension between liberty and order is what kept the founding fathers up all night writing the Constitution.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking out of the local Korean joint with a container of Galbi. As he’s committing to going out the door, MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats.

SILBERMAN: Mister Berg.

BERG: Er, hi, Ms. Silberman. What’s new?

SILBERMAN: Not much time for small talk. I’m doing a story about cancel culture.

BERG: You mean, about how the titans of the progressive media, the Guardian, have their roots in laissez faire policies regarding slavery and the future of the American union during the civil war?

SILBERMAN: No, no. I’m looking for examples in the world of politics.

BERG: You mean like the town in Alabama whose entire base of wealth was built on the products of slavery, but posits itself as a bastion of “progressive” thought today.

SILBERMAN: Alabama?

BERG: Yuuup.

SILBERMAN: Go ahead. I’m listening.

BERG: This town in Alabama built its entire civic wealth between 1815 and 1865 on textiles – an industry based on slave-produced cotton – and tobacco, which was…

SILBERMAN: …raised by slaves. Yes. Yes. Keep going.

BERG: And they voted for the Democrat, pro-slavery candidates for President, in 1860 and 1864.

SILBERMAN: I already hate them.

BERG: And then, when the Civil War was well underway, they undertook a pogrom against not only blacks – whom they blamed for the war, and for the economic hardships the war brought them – but against whites that supported abolition, destroying their businesses in an epic riot.

SILBERMAN: Perfect. Probably fundamentalist Christianists to boot. These people need canceling.

BERG: I’ll say.

SILBERMAN: What town in Alabama?

BERG: It was…wait, did I say Alabama?

SILBERMAN: You did.

BERG: My bad. It was New York City. Your hometown, if I recall.

SILBERMAN: (Stands, stunned).

BERG: You’ve been canceled.

SILBERMAN: (Jaw flaps, but no sound comes out)

BERG: Try the dok buk uhm. It’s divine. (BERG walks out)

And SCENE

… if anyone has asked Minneapolis’s various city council members if this applies to them?

Remember when the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down Governor “Nanny” Evers’ lockdown?

And cheeseheads swarmed into bars, sans masks and social distancing, et avec about two months worth of socializing to catch up on?

Remember the carnage the Twin Cities’ media and Karen class predicted?

EIther will they, if they have anything to say about it:

There were 203 positives out of the total 7,589 test results, or 2.67%. That’s the fourth day in a row the rate was below 3%.

Testing had been above 10,000 daily since last Tuesday.

The state’s death toll is now 646. That’s down from Sunday’s report of 647; the state Department of Health Services (DHS) says a patient in Milwaukee County was counted twice.

The last time the state had no COVID-19 death reports was May 17.

I’ll bet a shiny new quarter that locked down (except for protesters) Minnesota gets and stays sicker than Wisconsin. 

And Iowa. 

And the Dakotas.  Both of ’em. 

And Florida. 

Any action on that bet, Progs?

Our “elites” lecture us about climate change, then fly home in private jets.

They “order” us to stay indoors even as the actual evidence starts to show that the “models” they used, if they were put out by the private sector, would be considered frauds.

As parts of the “elite” get wealthier beyond belief, the media gets ever more flooded with puff pieces touting the virtues of insect-based diets, “high-density” living and “new normals” that sound ever more miserable…for the rest of us?

Worried that our new tech superstars are censoring speech on “social media” just as the political and media superstars do in the traditional media – and their kids at the universities are doing the same, literally and physically, in the working world just as they did in college?

Concerned that political “elites” like Lisa Bender to AOC consider whatever you *have* earned in this world to be a “privilege” to be extracted, statutorily by the IRS or by force by whatever group decides, with a nudge and wink from local politicians whose younger relatives they are, to take it at the point of a Molotov Cocktail and a baseball bat?

Think you’re seeing society sorting out, not by race, but by class, with the “elites” forming an ever-more cloistered pseudo-aristocracy, which gets to play by its own rules?

Well, you’re right. You are.

Hayek’s classic of conservative thought was titled The Road to Serfdom. It envisioned a different mechanism for this decline into feudalism – the telephone was the only social medium, back then – but he was, as always, right.

Joel Kotkin now argues the world is becoming more feudal – an “overclass” that becomes wealthy by turning everyone else, including most of you – into dehumanized production machines, no better than the gilded age robber barons did?

The situation can be saved – but victory is by no means assured, nor easy.

I’ gonna urge you toi read the article. Then the book. And my NARN people are calling his people as we speak.

…I have gotten more furtive, almost samizdat, questions from liberal/progressive friends of mine about buying and carrying firearms than ever before. Other “out” shooters (or in my case, gun rights activists, since all my guns fell into Mille Lacs in 2018 and I’m terrified of them anyway) have reported the same. And on Saturday, the line out the door at Bill’s Gun Shop in Robbinsdale, while admittedly exacerbated by “social distancing” requirements, was still an hour long. To get in the door. Not to mention finding a firearm, and going through the paperwork, if applicable.

The opportunity is there for law-abiding gun owners to win a whooole lot of the support we’re going to need to weather what may well be a challenging decade in Minnesota.

Stay tuned for more.

Republicans have the temerity to point out where DFLers are completely screwing the pooch.

Damn those Republicans:

I, myself, prefer “curb-stomp”.

North Carolina speedway declares its stock car race a “peaceful protest”:

A North Carolina speedway drew a crowd of more than 2,000 spectators in defiance of the state’s coronavirus restrictions after declaring the race a “protest.”

The governor’s office had warned Ace Speedway in Elon earlier this week that a crowd of more than 25 would violate the state’s Phase 2 coronavirus restrictions.

But news outletsreport that more than 2,000 attended a race Saturday night. A sign from management outside the speedway said, “This Event is held in Peaceful Protest of Injustice and Inequality Everywhere.”

That might be what I need to do to have that NARN Tenth Anniversary party.