One campaign-season cliche we can retire:  “money buys elections”.

Trump won is election very much on the cheap:

Of course, the battlefield was already littered with candidates from both parties that outspent their opponents, only to lose. Meg Whitman, John Corzine, Linda McMahon and a host of other famous and unfamous names outspent their opponents on the way to defeat in previous years. But Trump may put all of those elections to shame when it comes to disparity of resources.

Consider that Hillary Clinton’s campaign outspent Trump by more than two-to-one. Pro-Clinton ads outnumbered pro-Trump ads by three-to-one. Independent groups (the “super PACs”) supporting Clinton outspent independent groups supporting Trump by three-to-one. The average contribution to Trump was smaller than the average contribution to Clinton. And on and on it goes.

Which, in a reasonable world, would put a hard kibosh on the idea of campaign finance “Reform”:

We’re told by campaign finance “reformers” that we must restrict spending in politics so that “people” can have their voices heard. But voters in 2016 ultimately chose the candidate without even a “real” super PAC to speak of.

This tells us two things: First, that money is simply the facilitator by which candidates speak to voters, but that voters will make up their own minds. Second, it shows us that money simply can’t make up for a message that people aren’t interested in. After his defeat, the man in charge of Jeb Bush’s $100 million super PAC remarked of the voters: “They just weren’t buying what we were selling.”

Let’s hope the same goes for tired tropes on money in politics.

Look for the Democrats to push a bill establishing minimum spending.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I question whether Liberals and Conservatives hear the same things.

 

When a Liberal says “Joe Doakes is a racist,” I suspect other Liberals hear “Joe Doakes is dangerous.”  That triggers a fight-or-flight response.  The listening Liberals know they should shun me – at a minimum – and fight me if they can do it from a place of safety.  Thus, we get unfriended on Facebook, one-star Amazon reviews, one-star Yelp reviews and secondary boycotts to pressure employers to fire the accused.

 When a Liberal says “Joe Doakes is a racist,” I suspect Conservatives hear “Joe Doakes is a poopy-head.”  That triggers a scornful response.   The listening Conservatives know they should ignore the Liberals – at a minimum – and actively support me, even if it brings Liberal wrath down on them, too.  Thus we get Trump’s cabinet nominations.

 This may be the new litmus test.  When a politician hears someone called “racist,” watch how they react.  If they react like Liberals, then they are Liberals at heart, regardless of which party affiliation they wear at the moment. 

 When everyone is a racist, no one is a racist.  The term as no longer has an agreed-upon meaning.  Does this mean I hate Black people and want them to die?  No, it means the word is worn out from overuse.  Find another word.

Joe Doakes

They will.  They will.

Check out ♫ today’s music playlist.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

Today on the show:

• Why are the left such a bunch of spoiled babies?
• My call to the GOP-controlled legislature

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is normally heard on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

In Minnesota, the DFL lost its majority in the Senate, and were reduced in the House.   It’s a wonderful thing.

To look at what is possible, though?

In North Dakota, the Democrat-NPL party was reduced on election night from “minority” to “barely there”.

And it’s a very very wonderful thing:

The shellacking North Dakota’s Democrats got on election day is absolutely the fault of [state DFL chair Kylie] Oversen and the candidates Democrats put on the ballot this cycle. They saw not a single statewide candidate get over 30 percent of the vote while in the Legislature they lost their House and Senate leaders, their party chairwoman, and now have just nine seats in the state Senate and just 13 in the House.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s not enough elected members of the Legislature for Democrats to cover all of their committee assignments.

Now, MInnesota liberals have been taking it on faith that, since wildcat drilling has stalled, the state must be in freefall.  If that were true, the opposite would have likely happened on election night.  Right?

Right?

Well, no – North Dakota’s 3% unemployment rate remains a solid point below Minnesota’s low rate of 4%.

By the way, congratulations to North Dakota’s governor-elect, Doug Burgum, the former CEO of “Great Plains Software”, the little software shop that could; it was purchased by Microsoft in the 2000s, and has become Redmond’s biggest campus outside of Washington State.

And, I should add, congrats to North Dakota’s new First Lady, my high school classmate Kathy.

A good guy with a gun shoots two robbers at a pizzeria in Levittown, Pennsylvania:

The shooting happened late Tuesday night at Porfirio’s Pizza and Pasta, located in a shopping plaza in Levittown, about 25 miles northeast of Philadelphia.

The customer took out a gun and shot both men after they allegedly pistol-whipped him, Middletown Police Chief Joe Bartorilla told reporters.

The police are still investigating.  But I’m pretty sure we all know where this ends up.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota has early voting.  People were coming to the office two months before election, to cast absentee ballots.  That was before most of the major revelations about Hillary.

 To what extent did early voting artificially inflate Hillary’s support?  Had those voters been required to vote on election day – knowing the full story about her – would some have changed their votes?

 Joe Doakes

The answer, I suspect?  To borrow a phrase, “bigly”.

Ramsey County attorney John Choi released the findings of the investigation of the Philando Castile shooting.  Ramco charged Saint Anthony Park police officer Jeronimo Yanez with second-degree manslaughter in the death of the Saint Paul school employee last summer.

There are better commentators on the legalities and the sociology of this incident than me.

But there’s one angle that might be of some concern to those of you who exercise  your second amendment rights.  Castile was a carry permittee – meaning he had a clean criminal record (which also enabled him to get a job in a public school).

When you go through carry permit class, you’re taught that getting stopped by the police while carrying is one of the more dangerous times for a permittee.   The rules are vague, and cops are (as we saw in the incident) often badly trained on the law and how to respond to carriers.  But there are two generally-accepted trains of thought for the civilian carrier:

1. Mention your permit and firearm only if the cop asks you to get out of the car.  If it’s a simple traffic ticket, it’ll never be an issue.
2. Mention, calmly and casually, up front, that you have a permit and are carrying, and where, and ask the officer how they’d like to proceed.

According to the evidence released yesterday, Castile went with #2:

Officer Yanez is, of course, innocent until proven guilty.

But – assuming the timeline above is accurate (and that will no doubt be a major subject at trial), it appears officer Yanez had a very intense reaction to…

…to what?

To the fact that Castile was a black male who, according to some stories circulating last summer, allegedly resembled a suspect in a robbery?

If that were true, Officer Yanez apparently didn’t follow felony stop procedures; he approached it as a stop over a broken tail light.  Which might, to the casual observer, make it appear like he wasn’t concerned Castile was the suspect.

Which leaves what?  The carry permit status and the gun.

It’s possible Officer Yanez reacted with panic to learning that Castile had a permit and was armed, and over the course of seven seconds, went from asking a question to shooting Castile seven times at point blank range.

Why?

We don’t know.  We may or may not find out at trial.

But I suspect, at least in part, that the hysteria about carry permittees and their guns spread by the anti-gun groups in this state had a role.   Groups like “Protect” Minnesota and “Moms Want Action” have been painstakingly training people, mostly in and near the urban core, to be terrified of firearms in the hands of civilians.

And if that’s true, then there’s blood – the real kind – on the hands of the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence and the rest of the pack of liars she leads.

Kevin Williamson on the return of at least some old fashioned values among Democrats after the election of Donald Trump who, let’s forget, had more in common with Bernie Sanders than any other candidate on the ballot:

The pretensions of the imperial presidency are going to haunt Democrats for the immediate future, but they’ll quickly rediscover their belief in limits on the executive. While they’re rediscovering old virtues, they might take a moment to lament Senator Harry Reid’s weakening of the filibuster, an ancient protection of minority interests in the less democratic house of our national legislature. They might also lament Senator Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to permit the federal government — which in January will be under the management of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and — incredibly enough — President Donald Trump — to regulate political speech, deciding who can speak, about what and when, and on what terms. Perhaps they’ll thank those wicked “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court for saving basic political-speech rights. If they are smart, they will rediscover federalism, too, and the peacemaking potential of a school of thought that says in a diverse nation of 320 million souls, there is no reason that life in rural Idaho must be lived in exactly the same way as it is in Brooklyn or Santa Monica. As Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out, the same people who until ten minutes ago denounced federalism — which they mischaracterize as the doctrine of “states’ rights” — as an instrument for the suppression of African Americans are now embracing secession, which, in the American context at least, has a little bit of its own racial baggage.

Read the whole thing, naturally.

Other than the Trump campaign, and the people (should a conservative spring take hold)?

Us.  The alternative media.

We pounded the mainstream media in this election like a piece of WalMart veal.

After more than a decade of storming online to expose the national media as the serial-lying, double dealing, leftwing anarchists and activists they truly are, we have finally beaten them.

At long last our efforts to use truth to expose the media for what they truly are has resulted in these insulated, lying, cultural supremacists finding themselves so de-legitimized, so marginalized, so distrusted, disliked, and resented, that they could not do it … Summoning all of their mighty and evil powers, firing everything they had, leaving nothing on the field … they could not do it.

And the beauty of it is that the media’s targets were so precise. Everything they had was geared towards a fear-mongering hate campaign specifically designed to convince women, blacks, and Hispanics not to vote for Trump.

Moreover, the campaign was so dishonest that for 18 months we were told over and over again that the Precious Data proved poetic justice was on the way … that Trump would lose these groups by spectacular numbers.

All of those lies, all of that propaganda, and … they failed.

The “elite” media’s efforts in this past election indicates that they read the work of Dr. Albert Mehrabian – dealing with the role of media and “polling” to create a “bandwagon effect”, discouraging ones’ opponents from coming to the polls – just like I did.

I started noticing the fracture sometime during the Bush II administration;  vast swathes of conservatives who could simply not tolerate other vast swathes of conservatives.

It was unheard of during the Reagan era – and even under Newt Gingrich in 1994, conservatism was a fairly cohesive voting bloc as well as strategy.

But somewhere during the Bush years – when our “conservative” governed more as a Democrat than his Gingrich-haunted predecessor did – the flaking started happening.

By 2008, “conservatism” had split into three separate factions.  I identified them as:

• Northeastern:  These are your grandfather’s Repubicans.  They are focused on GDP growth and domestic and national security; much weaker on personal liberty, limited government and cultural issues.   Think Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie, or the original Mitt Romney.  At one point, Arne Carlson would have qualified.
• Southern:  The culture warriors.  Also strong on national and domestic security, but perfectly comfortable with big government.   Think Mike Huckabee.
• Western:  Heavily into limiting government and personal liberty, especially property and privacy rights.  The heart of the Second Amendment movement.  Non-intentionist on national security, laissez-faire on the economy.   Think Barry Goldwater, the Paul family and the Tea Party in its original conception.

James Heaney in Federalist, in a piece called “Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism” reaches a similar conclusion.

He divides the movement…

…well, no.  The “movement” is dead.  He divides it also into three major centers of activity:

• Populists:  Nationalists, not uncomfortable with taxes and government intervention.  Mostly Trump voters, intuitively enough.
• Establishment:  Focused on growing GDP.   Think the Jeb or Kasich voters.
• Grass Roots:  The culture warriors.  Think Cruz and Rubio voters.

The problem is, the three largely detest each other – in some cases, more than the Democrats (indeed, the Populists drove a “former” Democrat who favors more Democrat-friendly policies than the other 18 contenders he beat to the nomination, all the way to victory).

Is there a way forward?

Not sure Heaney answers it.  But he notes that the way back – to a fundamental definition of what conservatism is supposed to be – is important:

When the modern conservative movement started out under the political leadership of Barry Goldwater and later Reagan, it was built on centuries-old principles handed down by men like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Toqueville. In 1953, the great intellectual, Russell Kirk, summarized those central premises of conservatism.

In his “six canons,” Kirk articulated a conservativism that embraces “a transcendant order, or body of natural law,” because “[p]olitical problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” Conservatives, Kirk said, reject “uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims,” even as they recognize “ultimate equality in the judgement of God and… before courts of law.” They maintain the importance of property rights against Leviathan government, and distrust “sophisters, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society on abstract designs.” Finally, a Kirk conservative is prudent, recognizing “that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.”

The modern “conservative movement” has lost touch with these essentials. The establishment builds entire fiscal plans out of the “abstract designs” of “calculators and economists,” and the Wall Street Journal editorial board wouldn’t recognize a “body of natural law” if that body hauled back and punched L. Gordon Crovitz in the nose. Even if they did take notice, the Journal and its Acela Corridor buddies would find it gauche in the extreme to actually speak out loud about political problems in fundamentally “religious and moral” terms.

The populists, for their part, often preach about problems in highly charged moral language, but their only common theme is outrage, and their chosen avatar is Trump, the serial adulterer. Moreover, their desire to burn down all our political institutions is the very definition of the “devouring conflagration” Kirk warns of.

Conservatism has failed, then, partly because a large swath of the “movement” has lost touch with its central ideas. The very word “conservative” has been badly damaged. Corrupted and polarized, the label has become little more than a tribal marker, and alienates many voters who would otherwise naturally align with Kirk’s principles.

I’m going to try to write more about this in the coming week or so.

If John Podhoretz gets it wrong, it probably didn’t need to be said anyway:

Liberals spent 40 years disaggregating U.S., until finally the largest cohort in the country chose to vote as though it were an ethnic group

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) November 9, 2016

Read the whole thing…

…no, wait – you just did.

Lego has jumped on the “diversity of opinion and dissent are “hate”” wagon…

Lego will stop advertising its products in the Daily Mail, following a public campaign calling on big companies to drop adverts from newspapers accused of promoting “hatred, discrimination and demonisation”, the company has announced.

…and also the shark.

No more Legos.  It’ll hurt, but I can’t handle the language or the discourse being raped like this anymore.

A brief-ish article about Jason Lewis’s “upset” win in the 2nd CD by the always astute Matt Pagano.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s the good-news takeaway:

One more (extremely local) angle is that Lewis’ win will likely help revitalize the CD2 Republican Party. In the past few years, the local Party had come to be defined by infighting between opponents, and loyalists, to incumbent Rep. John Kline. Lewis’ election offers the opportunity to move past the Republican-on-Republican violence within the local Republican parties that has raged the past few cycles. If you’re a conservative activist who isn’t happy with Jason Lewis as your Congressman, you ain’t never gonna be happy.

https://medium.com/@mjp4liberty/unpacking-jason-lewis-win-in-mn-cd2-9ef3918c577b#.kpez2p77y

At least one lefty keyboard commando on Facebook isn’t ready to make nice:

The little fella apparently lives in upstate New York – his Facebook page has disappeared – so I’m not sure how he plans to evict people from red states.  I’ll look for his plan.

Someone is clearly compensating for something.

If you can spare some prayers for the little fella’s sanity, the timing might be just about right ifyaknowwhatImean.

You’ve been given a priceless opportunity; to have the first woman president be someone we don’t all have to be ashamed of.

Don’t screw it up again.

That is all.

This may be hard to believe, but I truly do try to see the best in people.  I really do.  I actively try to find ways to find empathy with people, even – or especially – with people I disagree with.

For example, while I agree with nothing Barack Obama did as president, I always figured he was a decent human and a good father.  Time will tell, of course.

So when I first heard the story of the woman who ran into Hillary Clinton on a stroll in the woods the day after the election – which seemed to be a story of a plaintive, human moment – I wanted it to be legitimate.

Of course, doubts nagged at me. Hillary Clinton, walking in the woods without a Secret Service perimeter?

Much as part of me wanted it to be a legitimate story, it nagged at me.

As always, the nagging was for good reason.

If it’s the Clintons, it’s pure artifice.

Commenter “Dog Gone” finally responded to my challenge a few weeks back, in this thread.

To her credit, she cited a source to one of her claims.

To her debit?  It isn’t a very good source.

Anyway, “Mitchketeers” – feel free to go and respond to the response.

To:  House GOP Caucus, Senate GOP Caucus
From:  Mitch Berg, ornery peasant
Re:  Focus

Dear Cauci,

Congrats on taking the majority.  I’m truly overjoyed.

Now, let’s get real.

Focus:  Ever watched someone doing karate?  When they do a strike, they focus all their energy, from their waist on down through their hands, into their knuckle.  One or two of them.  Because that’s how you inflict as much force as possible on your target – focusing the energy.

We’ll come back to that.

Focus Some More:  When the Allies landed in Normandy in 1944, it took eight or so weeks of brutal fighting to break through the German defenses.

And when the Allies forced that breakthrough, did they then pause, and redirect to the invasion of Denmark?

No!   They focused on driving to Berlin, and destroying any enemy that got in their way!

They focused on the mission at hand!

No.  Really Focus:  You have the majority in both chambers of the Legislature (if only by a vote in the Senate).

You got it for three reasons:

1. The Dems brought us MNSure, and you were able to tie it around their necks
2. The economy in greater Minnesota isn’t nearly as spiffy as it is in the Metro
3. Just like nationwide – the metro “elites” are utterly disconnected with the experience of Greater Minnesota.

That is why you have the majority.  Not to protect marriage.  Not to argue about who goes in what bathrooms.

Heathcare.   Economy.   Elites.  

No more.  No less.

I Said Focus, MKay?:  It was six short years ago that voters last gave you both chambers of the Legislature.  Even with a DFL ideologue for a governor, it was a golden opportunity.   You were given that majority because:

1. Obama overreached – on healthcare
2. The economy in Greater Minnesota sucked!
3. The DFL had made a hash out of the budget.

What did you – or at least the previous leadership – do?

Well, good work on the budget, to be honest.  But that wonky triumph was overshadowed by the national, media-stoked furor over the Gay Marriage issue.  The legislature bet a ton of political capital…

…on an issue that had nothing to do with you getting your majority.

Nothing!

If you’re a North Dakota or Montana Republican, with a near-permanent majority and an opposition Democrat party that barely qualifies as a party at all, you can spend political capital on anything you want, and there’ll be no consequences.   It might even work (long enough to get struck down by the Supreme Court, anyway).

But not in Minnesota, the purplest of purple states.

Focus Focus Focus Focus Focus!:  This is not North Dakota.  Perhaps if you hold your majorities long enough to bring a quarter century of unbridled prosperity to Minnesota and we might become so lucky.  But we’re nowhere close to that yet.

You were elected by a fickle electorate over…what?

Let’s run the list again:

1. MNSure
2. The economy in greater MN
3. Our idiot elites

You have political capital – a mandate, indeed.

And like the Allies after D-Day, you need to focus that capital on beating the enemy in front of us; MNSure, taxes, regulations, mining-phobia.

And like Bruce Lee, you need to focus that energy straight to the metaphorical knuckle, as narrowly and overwhelmingly as you can to win on the issues we, the voters, sent you there to win!

For The Love Of God, Focus!:  I’ve heard talk of legislators discussing floating some legislation:

• Rest Rooms:  Don’t be idiots.  We already have laws making mischief in bathrooms illegal. And all it’s gonna take is one angry father or grandfather at some Target somewhere to make that issue pretty well self-enforcing.  It’s a private property issue,   And it’s a distraction.   Deal with the restrooms when the majority is rock solid safe.
• Abortion:  It’s an important thing.  I get it.  It’s also not why you were sent to Saint Paul.  Not this time.  If you win long and big enough, you’ll get your chance.  This is not that chance.   Do not screw this up.  
• Other social issues:  Stop.  Just stop.  Now.  Seriously. 

GOP legislators:  today, you control the agenda in Saint Paul.  It gives you a huge opportunity.  With the opportunity comes risk; if you take the GOP majority off beam, and bog the party down in a fight that has nothing to do with why you have the majority, fighting a veto you can’t win over an issue that does nothing but focus all of the Big Democrat Money, all their bottomless funding and masses of drooling droogs, over something that the voters that sent you to Saint Paul don’t care about nearly as much as healthcare and the economy, you will deserve to lose again in 2016.  

Focus.

Focus.

Focus focus focus.

Kill MNSure.  Kill regulations.  Lower taxes.

No.  More than that.  Focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus.

No.  More than that.

Sing along with me:  Kill MNSure.  Kill regulations.  Lower taxes.  Kill MNSure.  Kill regulations.  Lower taxes.  Kill MNSure.  Kill regulations.  Lower taxes.

Win the war we sent you there to win.

Oh – and focus.

No.  More than that.

In an incident overnight, a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit shot and killed a man who was pummeling the stuffing out of a sheriff’s deputy in Estero, Florida, near Fort Myer:

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office told local news media that the deputy who was involved, 12-year veteran Deputy First Class Dean Bardes, is expected to be okay. The suspect who was fighting with the deputy was killed during the struggle and WINK is reporting that a passerby is the one who shot him.

“The passerby, who had a Concealed Weapons License, exited his vehicle and instructed the suspect to stop beating the deputy…after noncompliance from the suspect, the passerby shot the suspect three times,”  sources said.

Local TV news report below the jump (since it launches automatically).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve said for some time now that there have been two reasons I could get behind Trump; his SCOTUS picks, and his stance on healthcare.

And now there’s a third:

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump — who said he has a concealed carry permit — called for the expansion of gun rights Friday, including making those permits applicable nationwide. In a position paper published on his website Friday afternoon, Trump called for the elimination of gun and magazine bans, labeling them a “total failure.”

“Law-abiding people should be allowed to own the firearm of their choice. The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own,” Trump wrote.

And he brings some fairly ineluctible logic to the argument:

The permits, which are issued by states, should be valid nationwide like a driver’s license, Trump said. “If we can do that for driving — which is a privilege, not a right — then surely we can do that for concealed carry, which is a right, not a privilege,” Trump said.

It may be political red meat to keep his base whipped up.

Good.

To:  All Democrats
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re:  Prescription

Democrats,

What this guy said.

You didn’t go far enough to the left.

So let’s endeavour (Canadian spelling! Wou hou!) to:

• Condescend to the working class more
• Write more editorials sniffing down your nose about the “Best Interests” of “Flyover Land”
• Insult gun owners more!

You can do it!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My Facebook page is full of complaints by Liberal friends. They’re hurting now because ignorant racist misogynist Trump voters rejected Hillary.  They demand that Trump voters be respectful of their feelings.  Don’t gloat over winning: reach out, be inclusive, help heal America.  They’re unfriending family members who crow about Trump winning because if they did that, they really can’t have been very good friends to begin with.

In other words, Liberals demand a ‘safe space’ on Facebook. Everyone is entitled to an opinion as long as it agrees with theirs; dissent is hatred.  Winning requires surrender.

Yeah, well, I remember the attitude they showed to us when Obama won.

Man, am I sick of Liberals.

Joe Doakes

My sense of sportsmanship pretty much foreswears all but tongue-in-cheek gloating.  I may have been the last generation raised with the idea of “sportsmanship” – and that’s not a good thing.  We’d be a better place.

But yeah, Joe, I totally hear you.

Earlier, I noted that Donald Trump’s election is a result of liberal attitudes.

Here, a liberal agrees.

Language NSFW.

By the way? Now that Republicans (not necessarily conservatives) are in power, it’d be good to make sure the good guys take this to heart.

Trump’s election has thrown a good chunk of the American left for an unexpected loop.

Not least of the loopers is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), famous for “ELCA Hair” and unctuous, smug politics slathered on a fairly neutered reading of the Bible.

And over at their “Engage” blog – the ELCA’s gun-grab propaganda organ, which blindly opposes the Second Amendment and bows down to Michael Bloomberg – they are more depressed than most these days.  They posted about the current lay of the land:

The recent election spells difficult days ahead for gun violence prevention (GVP). Trump’s victory, coupled with his blind support of the Second Amendment and bowing to the NRA, spell high odds against any GVP laws being passed.

I’d like to ask someone from “Engage” what exactly they mean by “Blind Support” – but I suspect none of them actually knows.

But I’d very much like to invite a representative from “Engage” onto my show, on any weekend of their choosing.  Because I’m dying to find out – among other things.

Similarly, with the Republicans now in control of the Minnesota House and Senate, similar negative progress is probably the norm. Elections matter.

They can take some solace in the fact that they actually haven’t mattered that much for a little over a decade.  Even when the DFL controlled both chambers two short years ago, there was a functional pro-Second Amendment majority in the Legislature.  You guys have been in a deep hole since about 2002, and it just got a lot deeper.

As it should be.

Now what? We can take heart in Luke 21:5-19. It is the end time of Jesus’ earthly ministry. He has entered Jerusalem. The final countdown has begun. He told his disciples the Temple would be destroyed, they would be persecuted by the state and religious leaders, some of them would be executed, and they would be rejected by friends and family. Yet, these realities would give them the opportunity to give testimony to the truth, and by their persistent endurance in telling the truth in the face of negative odds, they would save their souls.

Right.  It’s a great verse – one that’s resonated with a lot of us Second Amendment advocates, especially here in urban areas, for a long time.

The right to defend ourselves, our homes, our families and our society from aggression is granted to us by God Almighty himself.

That right – enabling us to bear the responsibility of defending our earthly freedoms while we’re in this world – is one of few that separates us from subjects of a king or dictator.  Without that right and ability, our “rights” merely exist until government – or someone bigger and stronger than us – decides to take them away.

History is full of innocent, unarmed people who were wiped off the map by bigger, stronger people; sometimes the victims shared our faith; sometimes the killers did, too.

Citing Luke indicates you put yourselves in the position of the disciples.

You are not.

You are in the position of Herod’s Jews, the ones that collaborated with the Romans in oppressing other Jews.  You are the oppressors, working hand in hand with those who would render us, not citizens, but mere subjects.

And while I’m a subject of God’s kingdom, on this earth, I’m a citizen.  Not a subject.  And if you want to take that away from me by civil means, last Tuesday’s loss isn’t the last you’re going to face.

By consistently telling the truth in the name of Jesus, we will gain our souls! We will be faithful disciples. God’s grace is sufficient for the task!

I’m not going to speak for God.  Neither should you.  On this issue, you are not qualified.

I’d be more than happy to debate this – although clearly you don’t have enough faith in God’s grace to face me in a civil discussion.