On Monday, third district Congressman Dean Phillips claimed complete ownership of Labor Day:
Don’t tweet about #LaborDay unless you support the right to organize and collectively bargain. Unless you’re working to lower the cost of healthcare and childcare, and fighting for paid family leave, pre-k, and the child tax credit. America’s heroes need support, not bbq’s.🇺🇸
Seems a little presumptuous – foreclosing all communication that is ambivalent to opposed re unions – unless Phillips is a real champion of labor.
But a quick search doesn’t indicate that the Phillips distillery in Princeton Minnesota is unionized; a look through a court document related to a workmen’s compensation case mentions no union involvement on behalf of an injured warehouse worker, so I don’t think it’s a reasonable stretch to assume the plant is not, or not fully, unionized.
I will be putting in a call to representative Phillips‘s office on this today.
In the first 150 odd years of the Minnesota State Fair, law abiding citizens were discouraged, and perhaps even told in as many words not to bring guns to the Minnesota state fair.
And yet they did. From statehood until 1974, law-abiding Minnesotans didn’t need a permit to carry a firearm, so it’s completely preposterous just say not a single law abiding citizen brought their firearm to the fair.
And we know that in the “shall issue” era, people might have brought a gun or two. In fact, I know of at least one radio station where every single staffer at the fairgrounds may have had a legal firearm, and a clean criminal record to go with it.
 And in that 150-odd years, there were countless fights…
… and exactly one incident with a gun, an armed robbery probably five or six years ago – an incident that happened about the time the fair stepped up the “gun free zone“ signs and rhetoric. If you guessed that the perpetrators were legal gun owners, actually entitled to hold, much less own, a firearm or carrier in public legally, you would have guessed wrong.
So that’s the first 160 years of Fair history..
Then, last year (before the Covid-addled 2021 Fair), the Minnesota State Fair announced that they were going to put some teeth behind the “gun free zone“ designation, putting up metal detectors and searching fairgoers. They took that policy to court, and prevailed (so far).
The official policy of the Minnesota State Fair is that law abiding citizens should be defenseless against whatever miscreancy any ne’er-do-well wants to carry out.
After about 160 relatively tranquil years, it took exactly 10 days for some party pooper to settle his argument – probably over a fish story or a bet on a Gophers game, I bet – with a gun that just couldn’t possibly have been there, because it’s a gun free zone.
There is a lesson here that we can, and should, apply to the sort of spectacular violence that has the white middle-class part of our society so exercised, the mass shootings in places like schools and government offices and schools and grocery stores and schools.
If you want to deter violence, nobody actually needs to carry a gun. All that’s needed is the knowledge that nothing prevents good people from protecting themselves.
Criminals aren’t as a rule the brightest people – but they have a sense of self preservation.  in the months after Minnesota past its “shall issue“ carry permit statute in 2003/2005, something weird happened: an alarming number of bars that posted themselves as “gun free“ wound up getting robbed. Most of those signs – especially in the less than posh neighborhoods – disappeared from bars by about 2006.
There are two lessons in last nights story:
1) The Minnesota State Fair board values the anxieties and aesthetics of its white, upper middle class governing board and political circle more than your safety.
2) an ounce of prevention is worth all the self righteous politically correct hubris in the world.
160+ years of law abiding citizens carrying firearms on the fairgrounds: zero shootings.
Two years (one of them after Covid) of security Cedar and at law abiding citizens: the first ever shooting on the fairgrounds (an increase in violence around the fairgrounds).
Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation. But in this case, I’m pretty sure it does.
The line of people looking to find out more about Scott Jensen at the State Fair yesterday:
The crowd outside the Tim Walz booth:
I’m not saying crowds at the fair translates necessarily to results at the ballot box; the state fair is sort of like red Minnesota’s daycamp in the city, and Republican booths pretty routinely draw better crowds.
But I’ve never seen it quite this unbalanced, before.
There are two ways of looking at last nights exercise of the will to power masquerading as a speech by a senile old man:
The Ultimate Exercise of Berg‘s Seventh Law: Brandon, leader of a party whose acolytes have been dismantleing the rule of law nationwide, using administrative power to stifle opposition,and sending bands of thugs out to keep people in line,speaking from an SS-issue black and red stage flanked by Marines, painted half of America – his political opponents – as threats to democracy and domestic terrorists.
A Masterful Diversion: instead of talking about inflation, energy prices, a failing education system, unaffordable health care and education, catastrophic crime rates, the border crisis, national debt, the collapse of America’s foreign-policy, a nationwide mental health crisis, we are all now talking about Donald Trump.
And given how much extremism benefits from extremism, I don’t doubt for a moment that the Branden ministration is hoping last nights “Build back with Triumph of the Will“ address goads some less stable Trumpkin into doing something stupid, accompanied by lavish media coverage, to further deflect the nations attention.
Something else I recently watched on Disney Plus is Hamilton. It was long. I wasn’t enthusiastic about watching the entire show in one sitting -might be better live.
But, I started listening to the soundtrack. Some of those songs are pretty good. I think they are uplifting in a “I’m proud of my country and it’s history” way. It’s good to hear modern day pride in our country and our founders.
But, one song sticks with me in particular. “You’ll be Back.”
https://youtu.be/JF23buZH4WU
It makes a mockery of the King of England. But, I can’t help think some of these lyrics apply to many present day Democrats.
There are times that honestly wonder how many would repudiate the terms of the Declaration of Independence, in a double blind test…
So what would you do if you met an SS stormtrooper, in mid-depredation? One of the people who conquered Europe and ran the concentration camps? An actual “fascist”?
We’ll come back to that.
Boogie Man
So what defines an authoritarian, whatever label (“fascist”, “Nazi”, “Communist”, “Banana Republic”, and on and on?).
Here’s one trait.
Remember when this scene, from 1984, seemed fictional?
Authoritarians, from the Pharoahs to Kim Jong Un, knew that total authority rested on having a boogeyman – simultaneously the nadir of depravity and an existential threat – to divert the attention and energy of the people.
Remember that old trick from junior high, where you’d stare up at ceiling until other people started staring up with you to see what you were looking at?
“White Supremacist” groups have been shedding members at the rate of an order of magnitude per generation: they had millions of members in the 1920s (they the KKK drew 50,000 to a rally in Rocherster Minnesota in the ’20s), to hundreds of thousands in the ’60s, to tens of thousands in the early 80s (which saw the last great spasm of militant violence from those groups – the Posse Comitatus, the Alan Berg murders, and of course Oklahoma City).
Notwithstanding that, about the time Barack Obama got elected, Big Left started chanting “there’s going to be a wave of white supremacist/ultra-right terror that’ll dwarf 9/11. Any day now”.
And they’ve done their darnedest to tell that story – from portraying 100 doughy losers parading with tiki torches while outnumbered 10 to 1 in Charlottesville a “White Supremacist Uprising”, to shaking and baking more “right wing attacks” from the ether…
…almost as if they’re trying to goad someone into doing something as stupid and destructive…
…as the stuff “Anti”-Fa and BLM have been doing nationwide for the past couple of years.
But it’s not just about deflection.
It’s about making your side think the other side is just a little less noble, worthy and human than the people on your side.
Charlie Crist, taking the next step on his road toward being the Harold Stassen of the deep south, told Republican voters to take their votes elsewhere, for their “hateful” act of (checks notes) supporting Ron DeSantis. .
Which is mostly par for the course, these days.
What, Are You Gonna Cry? Huh?
The propensity for bullies to try to goad their opponents to strike first, so they can appear to be defending themselves, is pretty much bully human nature. Extremists benefit from extreme responses; among the biggest supporters of German president Von HIndenburg’s “Hitler Cabinet” were the Communists, who bet long (and, while ultimately mistakenly, not without good reason) that promoting extremism in their opposition would benefit them.
But as we wait for the “President”‘s speech on “the soul of the nation” tomorrow, the chanting point has been deafening.
If brains were gasoline, Eric Swalwell couldn’t drive a Vespa around the inside of a Cheerio. But that’s the nice thing about being a “useful idiot” – being an idiot won’t count you out of the job:
Boy these guys don’t like being called fascists. Maybe they should stop trying to overthrow their government and forcing raped women to have babies.
Berg’s Seventh Law alert; who said anything about a civil war?
And this next bit, from Brandon – is it yet another senile rant, or does he actually think that “right wing Americans” are killing cops?
Or does he just want his dumber, less critical supporters to think it?
Biden repeats the lie that "you can't go out and buy a cannon" and then claims "brave right-wing Americans" are "shooting at these guys behind me." pic.twitter.com/Pt9jKwDoWg
Well, clearly Big Left wants people to think someone’s itchin’ to do some killin’:
A staffer of mine—who’s 1 month into her job—received a call from a man saying he’s coming to our office w/ an assault rifle to kill me. I hesitate to share this but how else do I tell you we are in violent times, & the architects are Trump & McCarthy. Bloodshed is coming.
(Note: not gonna say “this didn’t happen” I am going to say it happens all the time, and like Ilhan Omar’s “death threats” just in time for the state fair last year, calling them out, especially on the part of an intentional incendiarist like Swalwell, is more a matter of political optics than actual law-enforcement. I’m going out on a short little limb to suggest this is but one of many threats people on all sides of the aisle get – but this one happens to fit a narrative. Prove me wrong)
Now, it may well be that “bloodshed is coming”. We’ve already had a couple of examples – although neither this nor this are the examples Swalwell is thinking of.
But the larger point is, Big Left is trying to make half the nation into “boogiemen”.
“But the right does it too! What about Willie Horton? What about Reagan’s ‘welfare queens'”?
Say what you will about both of them; nobody ascribed their traits to half of the entire electorate.
Big Left is “othering” half the population; social media is a “90 Seconds Hate” that never ends.
Why?
You Travel Back In Time And Meet Teenage Hitler…
To answer the question from the first paragraph – what do you do if you meet an actual SS Stormtrooper?
Because the “fascist” of cultural lore was an enemy of humanity. There is no “semi”-concentration camp guard, is there?
You do what our grandparents did at Normandy or Bastogne or Saint Lo? You attack and destroy them. Right?
They are making about half the population into boogiemen so the other half doesn’t see them as human beings with political differences, but rather as villains to be feared, hated, subjugated, destroyed metaphorically or literally.
Let’s see if that’s part of Biden’s speech about “the nation’s soul” later today.
In 2020, a group of activists tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the Capitol mall in Saint Paul.
Although the entire episode was carried live in TV, only one person was arrested; that person was “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the evils of Columbus, which is a little like sentencing drunk driver to teaching mixology to high school kids.
This happened, even as the person in charge of the Capitol Architecture Commission, Peggy Flanagan (have you heard she’s Native American?), had the power in her hands to remove the statue via due process – which is slow and boring, compared to having your activist buddies do it for you.
And lefty social media was clogged with addlepated lefties nodding and going “rules, schmules; at least it’s gone”.
One needn’t imagine what’d happen if some non-DFL group decided to tear down a statute of their bete noir; I’ve thought about how fun it’d be to rip down the statue of noted authoritarian socalist Floyd Olson. I don’t suspect I’d get “sentenced” to teaching high school kids about the evils of socialism.
This episode highlights three facets of the sort of authoritarian government that is, in fact, the sort of “fascism” that Big Left is trying to paint the right with:
The Rule of Law is for Other People: Don’t want to go through the Capitol Architecture Committee – or get your Student Loan Redistribution passed by Congress, or have to convince the American people and their state legislatures of the rightness of your cause, or convince Republicans of their wrongness? Just have your buddies tear it down, or declare $10K null and void with no statutory authority, or pack the Supreme Court, or send your “Anti”-Fa crowd in to bust some heads. Rules are for peasants.
Different Versions of Justice For the Political “Haves” and “Have Nots”: Lois Lerner will never go to jail for gang-raping the First Amendment. Not only did the Ramsey County Attorney’s office not actually punish Woody Kane for leading a planned, coordinated assault of Republicans, they may as well have sent him off with a voucher for a hooker and dinner at the Saint Paul Grill.
The Ends Justify The Means: If your idea of government, like the people approving of the tearing down of the statue, is “to get the things I want done, done”, or the shorter but more cynical “move things forward” – whether good, evil or indifferent – then you don’t really get self-government, and likely don’t want to.
“But Trump did all those things!”
Are you sure you want to make “our leadership is doing the same thing the person we call ‘literaly Hitler’ did” your lede?
Just A Note Before We Go
We’ve talked about four attributes of authoritarian government – defining boogeymen, circumventing the rule of law, and making one’s ends justify one’s means.
There’s one more; wrapping ones side in some larger cause, be it “history” or nationalism or, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess, “the soul of the nation” – about which President Brandon will be talking today.
Last week, President Brandon accused Republicans of being “Semi-Fascists”.
To be fair, it sort of sounded like one of his “is he senile, or just not very bright” moments:
I could go either way, to be honest.
But it got me thinking about a couple of things.
What’s In A Word
The left has been devaluing the term “fascist” since I was in high school, and long before, if I recall.
If you want to be pedantic about it, in the 1910s Benito Mussolini – at the time a prominent Italian socialist – figured that while a command economy, a welfare state and state ownership of the mean of production might go over just fine, Internationalism – the concept near and dear to socialism that eventually all borders will be rendered moot by the unification of workers around the world – was not going to fly with Italy, which was had been a nation for about fifty years, and had a lot of nationalist energy about it.
And, presto change-o, Mussolini did some tinkering; in founding the Italian “Fascist” Party, he chucked the “internationalism”, and replaced it with a heaping helping of nationalism. The command economy, nationalization of assets and welfare state, of course, he kept – to Italy’s chagrin in World War 2, as the command economy lagged the rest of Europe so badly that the Italian war machine was positively handicapped.
Most “Fascist” movements – the Nazis, Franco’s Falange and so on – repeat that pattern, keeping the small-l socialism, substituting nationalist dogma for internationalist chanting.
Of course, the left’s version of “fascism” is more nearly described as “saying or doing anything I don’t agree with”.
These days, references to “fascism” almost invariably seek to “other” those your crowd wants to erase from the public square;
And we’ve been seeing an awful lot of that, lately.
How much?
More tomorrow.
Drop The F
So as we close in on President Brandon’s “speech about America’s Soul” on Friday near the Liberty Bell, let’s talk about some of the attributes of…
…well, not ‘fascism’, per se. Or at least not only fascism.
Let’s talk, instead, about authoritarianism, by whatever name you want to call it.
About government that:
Ignores, subverts and/or perverts the rule of law in favor of the rule of men
legitimizes itself in comparison to some boogeyman, without or within – a boogieman that personifies all evil in the eyes of the state, and who must be subjugated for “good” to prevail.
Sublimates everything to a more or less utopian vision of what the world could be, if they had the means
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died yesterday at 91.
The media has been eulogizing him as the person who led the way in ending the Cold War – the coverage lists Reagan almost as an afterthought.
A quick remiinder:
In 1980, literally nobody was predicting the fall of the USSR. Everyone claiming in 1992 that they knew all along it was inevitable was full of s**t. The Left thought Reagan in particular was insane for believing it could fall.
Gorbachev was not selected by the Politburo to dismantle the Soviet Union. He was brought in to preserve and update it – think “China”. It didn’t work.
Or, to put it in a pithier vibe:
Still and all, it could have been much worse. The disintegration of the USSR could have been a bigger disaster than it’s actually been (and that’s been bad enough).
SCENE: At a studio at “Yoicks”, a new streaming service. On one side of the table, Bernie BRICKMAN, head of development for Yoicks, sits, brow furrowed, reading a script. By his right elbow sits Beyonce CAPRIÉ, his assistant.
Across from him is Ashley KLEIN, age 27, graduate of Oberlin’s screen writing program, veteran of the writer’s room at several streamcasts – Cringey, Can You Hang and Millennial Hellscape Bachelorette.
KLEIN: Gen-Z angst and hopelessness meets post-Covid dystopia in a world shaped by Trump.
BRICKMAN: I like it! Let’s see. So we’ve got…
KLEIN: The show follows the ongoing life, love and adventures of Isabella “Izzy” Cohen, 26 years old, from Darien Connecticut, a graduate of a small liberal arts school who works at a social justice non-profit (CAPRIÉ makes a check on a checklist), and as she navigates the modern world of work, love and society.
BRICKMAN: So the cast of characters…
KLEIN: Yep. Roommate Queen Jenkins, her high school and college classmate, valedictorian at both, majored in Afro-American studies, and is the youngest woman on the partner track at her downtown law firm (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist), who’s navigating a complicated relationship with her boyfriend and supervisor, junior partner Geoffrey Belcher, a former Ivy League lacrosse player – which is complicated by her friendly and occasionally intimate relationship her her and Izzy’s other roommate, Natasha Kim, a genderqueer Asian woman of color (CAPRIÉ makes yet another check on the checklist) who works as chef and caterer, and is a closet alcoholic (CAPRIÉ makes another check).
BRICKMAN: And Izzy’s love interests…this Kyle Dershowitz…?
KLEIN: Kyle is sort of a neurodivergent child-man-child (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist), lost in the world, clinging to Izzy as his only real link to the heterosexuality he is so clearly uncomfortable with (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). He loses his job as an executive assistant to Izzy’s in the first episode, and has to go to work at Natasha’s catering company, and he thinks he’s good at it, but he is just terrible, and realizing that sends him into spiral.
BRICKMAN: I see Dershowitz as sort of a Woody Allen type character…
KLEIN: Yes, only less masculine, especially after Izzy meets her other boyfriend, Tyrone Marley, a Jamaican-American bicycle messenger and rapper (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). The love triangle is the big conflic
BRICKMAN: And Queen tells Izzy to follow her truth…?
KLEIN: Yes – but the twist is, Izzy has no idea what her truth, or any truth, is (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist).
BRICKMAN: Heavy.
KLEIN: Could get dark (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). .
BRICKMAN: So, Beyonce – where does that leave us?
CAPRÉ: (Adjusts her glasses) It appears it checks every box on the modern young adult streaming dramedy checklist.
Releasing a story the Friday before the Labor Day weekend?
Wow. This must be a real disaster:
MN Legislative Auditor will release its special review of the Southwest LRT project on Friday. Review includes reasons for cost overruns, project delays, current cost estimate, amount Henneco and other government entities committed so far, contingency funds, timeline. 1/2
The southwest light rail, the biggest civil engineering project in state history, is shaping up to be an epic disaster.
And if, after all the terrible news of this last year, they’re still doing their news dumps before the weekend when literally everyone is doing something else?
Fearless prediction: Governor Klink won’t be going to the fair this weekend.
With the impending retirement of Dr. Fauci, we are learning more about how much our federal and state public health bureaucracies deceived the public in the interest of “the public good“.
When experts or agencies deliver information to the public that they consider possibly or definitively false to further a larger, often well-meaning agenda, they are telling what is called a noble lie. Although the teller’s intentions may be pure—for example, a feeling of urgency that behavioral change is needed among the lay public—the consequences can undermine not only those intentions but also public trust in experts and science. During the first year of COVID-19, leaders were faced with an unknown disease amid a politically sensitive election in the era of social media, and the preconditions for noble lies became especially fertile. Not surprisingly, we witnessed several examples. More than anything, these examples illustrate the destructive potential of such lies.
The moment that I realized we were being lied to at the state level? May 11, 2020 Dash the Governors press conference, where the states “healthcare economist“ told a reporter that they had no plans on releasing the code for the “models“ that had predicted between 20,000 and 70,000 deaths in Minnesota by July 2020, because “people might use that to reach different conclusions than we did“.
That is the opposite of science, and a repudiation of any idea of trusting that particular institution.
“It’s really our obligation and duty to do whatever we can to protect them. And we talk about school shootings, and you have an active shooter, a killer, in your building, the number one way to save lives is to address the killer immediately,” Spirit Lake Community School District Superintendent David Smith said.
This being Minnesota, they are doing with an extra special bureaucratic twist; they are selecting (secretly, and anonymously) 10 staffers, and putting them through some extra training.
Which is way better than nothing; merely knowing that the school is not a “gun free zone“ will go a long way toward detering any potential nonsense.
This being Minnesota, again, there will be dissent:
“I believe there are better ways to go about it, and all kinds of security measures that can take place as opposed to adding more guns into a school building,” said Harold Prior, a Spirit Lake resident and former school administrator.
I always want to delve into the vast self-defense experience of people like Mr. Prior and ask them what they think is “better ways”.
But I will take this – to my knowledge, the first school district in Minnesota to openly lose the “gun free zone“ label – is at least a move in the right direction.
sometimes it feels like the world is in a race between those who are inventing fusion Power too cheap to be metered, and those who are trying to send us back to the 1600s as serfs to the progressive nobility.
I mean, an honest report would note that, for the incumbent Attorney General, this (if true, which you can never really assume with the incumbent attorney general) would be a 180° reversal of course…
Ellison supported #DefundThePolice, recently appeared as the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for Minnesota Freedom Fund (which bails out criminals), and has an intentionally anemic criminal division in his AG office.
Unanswered – and, as far as I know, unasked by most of the media – does he actually have the authority to unilaterally erase loan balances and transfer it all to the deficit?
Of course not – not if you take enumerated powers seriously:
As of yet, Congress has provided no authorization for the executive branch to arbitrarily write off some of the money that borrowers owe to taxpayers. As of yet, Congress has passed no rules that allow down-on-their-luck presidents to throw money at people for political gain. As of yet, Congress has given no instruction that if the president’s friends might like a little more cash, he can raid the Treasury to give it to them. Certainly, Congress has set up a loan program. But the deal there is rather simple, all told: First you borrow, and then you pay back what you borrowed. There is no mention of “forgiveness” days or of “help” or of rolling Chekhovian jubilees, and by pretending otherwise, President Biden is making a mockery of his oath to uphold the Constitution.
To be fair and accurate, there’s never been any indication Biden understood that oath, even before his senescence.
But mark my words: colleges – their endowments untouched – will start telling prospective students “Borrow whatever you need – there’ll be another forgiveness soon”.
You and I, and our grandchildren, will be paying off the loans of these
I stay pretty relentlessly civil, especially when discussing politics. There’s enough pointless anger out there.
But I’m going to say this, and I don’t care what you think about it: If you are part of the lefty social media mob that thinks “Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer”, you are a flat-earther.
Complicated stuff follows. Stay with me, progressives.
You think someone’s trying to kill you. You shoot them – maybe fatally, maybe not. You’re arrested. The DA presses charges – assault, homicide, whatever.
To even be allowed to *argue* self-defense for assault or homicide, you have to show a judge evidence, to a legal standard, that:
you reasonably feared being killed
That threat was immediate – it was literally them or you, right then and there.
you were not the aggressor [1]
you used ONLY the force needed to end that lethal threat.
in many states (including MN, but not WI), that you *reasonably* tried to get away [2].
That’s *before* the trial. If your evidence on any of those 4-5 criteria doesn’t stack up, you’ll be a defendant in a murder trial, not a self-defense trial.
Once you’ve gotten past that? On to trial!
And there, if the prosecution disproves any of those 4-5 factors beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury? You’re going to prison – for assault if nobody died, and murder if they did.
That’s a pretty high burden of proof for a “Murderer” to skate past. (Don’t think so? That’s just ignorant.
“But the judge was biased”
No, he wasn’t.
Rittenhouse may not have been a hero [3]. And if you think the whole episode is stupid and unfortunate, I don’t disagree – although in a moral society, the burden should fall on those who set out to damage and destroy others property.
Either way calling Rittenhouse a “murderer” is ignorant at best. And there’s an implied clause after “at best” [4]…
…but again, I try to stay civil.
I try. But I’m only human. It can’t last forever.
[1] And no, doing something you have every legal right to do does not make you an aggressor. Rittenhouse had a right to be where he was, and to carry a rifle. Don’t like it? Take it up with the Wisconsin Assembly.
[2] Where “reasonable” is defined by statute or, much more usually, in a stack of case law references that you have to be a lawyer to understand.
[3]But after seeing the mayhem that the entitled children of the politicalclass got away with scot-free in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha, it’s not hard to understand why some people think he is a hero.
[4] And that implied clause may or may not but definitely does include the thought that a whole lot of the “Rittenhouse is teh murdererer” crowd think rioting and rioters are justified, which is a pretty problematic view.
Since it’s state fair time Dash the time when at least some people in Minnesota start paying attention to the upcoming elections – let’s make sure we remember: when minutes counted, Governor Klink took days to respond to the collapse of law and order in Minneapolis.
And I cringe at some of the things said in the name of “conservative Christianity“.
Which I hasten to add, because some of the things I’ve seen from “progressive Christians“, including some friends and classmates, this past few days have had me cringing even more.
Three things, specifically:
“Christ came to earth to forgive mankind‘s sins – so if you oppose loan forgiveness, you’re not a very good Christian“.
This is not “loan forgiveness”. This is transferring the loan to people who didn’t borrow it.
Will it benefit some people? Sure, it must be nice to have $10-$20,000 in balance disappear.
But this political act has nothing to do with Christ’s grace – dying for the sins every individual commits. It’s more like rounding up randos off the streets because someone else committed a murder. 
“It’s predatory lending!”
You can make that case. But unfortunately, the “forgiveness“ will do nothing to change that. In fact, it will only accelerate the “predatory“ lending, since everyone applying for those “predatory loans“ is going to figure “the first $10,000 is going to be free, again, anyway…“.
In fact, if the administration had sat down in a room to figure out the worst possible solution to student debt, this would’ve been it.
They could’ve made universities, with their hundreds of billions of dollars of endowments, share some of the risk. They could’ve even just cut interest rates.
But no. Fighting predatory lending by making everyone else pay is like fighting street crime by dumping piles of wallets out on the street and hoping people will stop holding other people up.
“New Ministers Go Deep Into Debt – and Don’t Make Much Money”
A couple of (it’s fair to say) “liberal” clergy I know have pointed out that their denominations require a Masters in Divinity (MDiv) to be ordained – which can cost up to $200K, as much as law school or medical school – but their first jobs out of seminary pay something close to minimum wage. And it’s fair to say outside Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar and Pope Frank, nobody goes into the ministry to get rich.
But isn’t that a little odd – an academic discipline (a product and service) that pays badly, and doesn’t necessarily cater to the children of immense wealth, costing well into six figures? I mean, if “products and services for people without a lot of money to spend on them” were prone to spontaneously inflating out of reach, the McDonalds cheeseburger would be $25.
At any rate – presenting this as a gesture of Christian grace is cynical, manipulative and profoundly wrong.
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he will forgive $10,00 in federal student debt for most borrowers, fulfilling a campaign pledge and delivering financial relief to millions of Americans.
Biden will cancel up to $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants.
“Both of these targeted actions are for families who need it the most,” the president said in remarks from the White House on Wednesday afternoon.
I love the smell of moral hazard in the morning. But if there’s a cohort of our society that really loves this sort of thing, it’s the folks who assumed their “Studies” degree was their ticket to the carriage class. The donks long ago realized they have neither reason nor incentive to bestow other people’s resources on the working class or the small business dudes, because they aren’t picking up the check at Le Diplomate. The “S” in an S corporation now stands for suck it.
At this point, the game is evident even to those who’d rather not think about politics — helping the commonweal is right out. Higher education is the best thing the donks have going and subsidizing their efforts is the highest and best use of other people’s money. And if you look at the price tag, you’re probably a denier. And if you paid your own way to go to trade school, you’re a chump. The rewards go to Derrida, not derring-do.
The timing is crucial here — there’s no question this move will piss off millions of potential voters, but there’s also no question that we’ll all be getting a steady supply of ether from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and the constellation of like-minded political action groups flattering the Studies majors from Olaf and Kenyon and Swarthmore (and Eau Claire and Bemidji, too) that despite everything, they are actually part of the in-crowd. The checks will clear in plenty of time for the clientele, but the unwilling benefactors will be too busy trying to make payroll to get out and door knock.
