Berg’s Seventh And Twentieth Laws Never Need To Fabricate Any Truths

Jussie Smolett was convicted of lying about being hate-crimed, three years ago, by a roaming band of Trump supporters. In downtown Chicago.

Most of the lefty commentators who proclaimed the case a damning indictment of American society were – “unexpectedly” – silent over the weekend.

And they may have been the smart ones.

Ja’Han Jones – a writer of sorts for MSNBC who is described as a “futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics”, meaning pretty much someone who partied with the right people in college – warned conservatives about what we “should realize before they relish the Jussie Smollett verdict“.

Nonetheless, the strange, seemingly ever-changing details in the case have provided nearly three years’ worth of material for comedians and online commentators. Some of it has been quite funny, in fact. 

Of course, there’s not a lot of there in the piece, which concludes:

Even more comical, in my view, was the predictable conservative outrage over Smollett’s allegations. Conservatives took to social media in 2019 to express outrage over the dropped charges. How dare someone make such a heinous claim about followers of their dear leader, they screeched. Violent, masked white guys who shout Trump slogans and use chemical agents to attack victims? 

Many on the right shamed those of us who knew such a claim was totally plausible — and then the Jan. 6 insurrection happened.  

And that’s it!

Of course, Berg’s Seventh Law applies. I’m sure there were conservatives that, after a decade and a half of watching hoax after hoax, and retraction after retraction of narrative-based claims of hate crimes, indulged in a bit of schadenfreud at a verdict that, had it not been on a case tried in crazy-blue Chicago, was utterly predicable to anyone with two brain cells to rub together to get some sparks.

But Jones is projecting, of course; it was everyone on the left – not just hoi polloi in comment sections, but an unbroken phalanx of blue-checks – who were dancing and cavorting about the usual chanting points; gut-shot to white cis-hetero privilege that this “hate crime” represented, the spotlight it still showed on the hatred that, they’d tell us, still roils beneath the surface of every honky.

Berg’s Twentieth Law – assume widely-publicized “hate crimes” are hoaxes until proven otherwise, which I obeyed in every particular even before I watched Smollett’s “alibi” crumble like a donut fresh out of a microwave – gave way to Berg’s Seventh Law; when the left accuses you fellow conservatives of moral turpitude, it’s almost invariably projecting.

Smollett’s verdict brings me no joy; we have a society that actively enables this sort of narcissistic showmanship, and uses it to further tribalize a society that doesn’t need any more.

Ruparing

I’d like to claim this as a late addition to the DFL Dictionary – but alas, it’s actually from the Urban Dictionary:

Rupar (Verb): To purposely (sic) mislead. To completely mischaracterize a statement or video by omitting context.

Yesterday, at a “press conference” on the Capitol steps, as embattled representative John “Burn Hugo Down” Thompson, the DFLer from either Saint Paul, Superior or someplace else, was promising not to resign, a woman – “Tammy Jo”, we’re told – drove “onto the Capitol Mall” (looks like the upper parking lot to me) and waved a Trump flag.

KARE11’s John Croman – who is distinguised by being “Not Quite Esme Murphy” – tweeted what would appear to be a troubling outburst:

Now, my first thought was that “Tammy Jo” was likely a DFL plant, a DFLer from Woodbury, sent to lend Thompson and his press conference a cleansing blast of the unambiguous victimhood that is his only line. That, I surmised, would explain why not a single member of our city’s press corps – the people who ran down “Umbrella Man” and his life story run down while the rubble was still burning last year – has come up with a complete identification of “Tammy Jo”.

I’m sure it’ll happen.

But even given the in-the-bagginess of the Twin Cities media, that seemed a bit of a stretch.

Still – it’s not merely the Twin Cities media; it’s KARE11, the station that led the local TV market to “Woke”-ness. There’s got to be a DFL-upsucking angle, I thought. I mean, this wasn’t a “hate crime” per se, but Berg’s 20th Law seems to be proximate: “All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.” There might need to be an Esme Murphy Corollary: “Hoaxes, and/or DFL PR operations”.

Because the DFL had a need, and Croman fulfilled it.

Leave it to David Steinberg, who on issue after issue – Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar, the riots, the Minneapolis City Council – does the reporting the Minnesota Media can’t be bothered, or haven’t been told by Ken Martin they’re allowed, to do.

So – what really happened?

Aaron Rupar isn’t the disease. Coming from the Twin Cities media scene as he did, he’s just a symptom.

Berg’s 20th Law Is Omniscient And Omnipresent

Two points

  1. “Racial Conflict” is a cover for “Cultural Conflict”.
  2. Cultural Conflict is a pseudonym for “Class Conflict”.

Oh, yeah – and Berg’s 20th Law of Social Justice Warmongering is not called “Berg’s 20th Impromptu Notion” for a reason:

All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.

I say this not to deny that hate speech happens, by the way – but to stop diluting the term.

But we saw it again: student at a posh college makes a claim against a couple blue-collar white guys. Blue collar members of the majority – a janitor, a cafeteria worker and a campus cop – get disciplined, and “cancelled”.

And then?

Then an outside investigation determined that, basically, it never happened. The campus police officer, the janitor and a cafeteria worker had been falsely tarred as racists, but they were not the beneficiaries of apologies, “compassion for everyone involved” or anything else. 

“Check your privilege” is a common term around higher education, but the notion that white janitors, cafeteria workers and campus police are “privileged” in that environment is not simply absurd, but monstrous. As Smith janitor Mark Patenaude told the Times, “We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone.”

Privilege is the ability to get an employee of many years punished simply by making a complaint, even a false one.  

As we’ve noted in the past, the woman who coined the term “white privilege” did it to deflect away from her absolutely colossal class privilege. And I’m not saying, flat-out, that it’s a psyop to cover a fairly deliberate class war…

…but if it were, it’d be hard to figure what they’d be doing differently:

The gentry class is in firm control of most of the institutions in America, from big corporations, to media organizations, to, most especially, colleges and universities. The Democrats are the gentry class’ party, as the GOP increasingly becomes a diverse coalition of working-class and small-business people. And the gentry class is letting the working class have it.

Barack Obama boasted about driving coal mines into bankruptcy; Joe Biden tells miners they need to learn how to [build solar panels]. There’s talk of forgiving student-loan debt, which would effectively transfer wealth from high-school educated truck drivers to social workers with graduate degrees. Biden’s open-borders immigration policy will once again open the “immigrant spigot” to push working-class wages down. Piling ruin upon ruin.

The US – at least, the “blue” parts of it – are starting to resemble Britain in the 1600s.

At best.

Berg’s 20th Law Rules All It Surveys

It’s gotten to the point where hearing about any emotionally charged claim of abuse gets me thinking “deep breath, wait – the odds it’ll be a hoax are just about even, if not better”.

I mean, there’s a reason it’s not called “Berg’s 20th Suggestion“.

Keep it in mind, and you’re disappointed…well, pretty rarely, to be honest.

(Not gonna pullquote it – the whole thing is worth a read).

This Is A Job For The Counselor Squad

Shot: Vandals of sorts “attack” Lisa Bender’s house:

Chaser: And in response Bender filed a…

…well, let’s look at the Channel 5 story:

The Minneapolis Police Department told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS there is an incident report filed concerning an act of vandalism that occurred at the home of Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender last week.

Bender declined an interview request from KSTP.

I smell some more private security for the more-equal animals.

And I’m not the only one, if you read between the lines:

Three Minneapolis City Council members, Andrea Jenkins, Alondra Cano and Phillipe Cunningham recently received threats that prompted safety concerns, and the city paid for private security companies to provide extra protection.

Jenkins told KSTP there have been protests outside the homes of several city council members in recent weeks. After the vandalism at Bender’s home, she said she has never seen this type of vitriol aimed at the city council during her 16 years of work at city hall.

And remember – there are two Betg’s Laws in effect here; the 18th Law covers the media’s reaction, and let’s not rule out the 20th Law in re Councilwoman Bender or her staff themselves.

“But Mitch – Why Does Berg’s Twentieth Law Exist?”

I’ll cop to it – I’ve been pretty cynical about “hate crimes” lately. Let’s stipulate in advance – they do happen.

But Berg’s 20th Law – “All incidents of ‘hate speech’ not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise” – is a law for a reason.

Or, rather, many, many reasons – including this one from, what else, a poitician from the west coast:

Jonathan Lopez, who is Latino and was a recent candidate for Umatilla County commissioner, claimed he discovered the hate-filled missive in his mailbox on June 23, the East Oregonian reported.

On his now-deleted Facebook account, he shared a photo of the letter, which said that Lopez and other “Mexicans” were “not welcome here,” according to local news station KEPR-TV.

“Don’t waste your time trying to become anything in this county we will make sure you never win and your family suffers along with all the other f–king Mexicans in the area!” the letter said.

Lopez wrote in the post that he “holds no resentment for whomever wrote this,” the outlet reported.

Oh, I bet he holds some resentment for the writer – or at least the writer’s judgment…:

“Our investigation has shown that Mr. Lopez wrote the letter himself and made false statements to the police and on social media,” Hermiston Police Chief Jason Edmiston told the East Oregonian.

“The end result is a verbal and written admission by Mr. Lopez that the letter was fabricated.”

Edmiston said the case would be forwarded to the Umatilla County District Attorney’s Office for review on charges for initiating a false report.

“This investigation is particularly frustrating as we are in the midst of multiple major investigations while battling a resource shortage due to the current pandemic,” Edmiston told the outlet.

In a party where reputations and political capital are ever-more based on intersectional virtue-signaling and dog-whistling, politicians are gonna virtue signal and dog-whistle.

Well, presuming the guy’s a Democrat.

Because Mr. Lopez’s party is never mentioned in the article.

Weird, huh?

Prediction And Opportunity

Last week, the “hate crime” at Saint Olaf – a typewritten racist message left under a black students windshield wiper – turned out to be a hoax.

As, in fact, have the vast majority of “Hate Crime” incidents in the past six months; for all the caterwauling about the wave of hate certain to accompany Donald Trump’s election, nearly every episode has turned out to be lefty false-flags.

I Don’t Make The Rules::  It’s gotten to the point where it’s time to codify this as law.  Berg’s Law – in this case,

Berg’s Twentieth Law of Social Justice Warmongering:   All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.

No, Actually, I Do Make The Rules:  Saturday, the City Pages ran a story involving some anti-semitic, anti-muslim imagery around Uptown and Lake of the Isles:

The street sidles Lake of the Isles one block to the west in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis.

On Thursday, a resident was enjoying the agreeable spring morning when she came upon a disconcerting sight. Affixed to light poles on the northwest side of the lake along a paved trail were anti-Semitic and Islamophobic stickers.

“Fuck Jews” read one. The other had a hand giving the middle finger and the word “Islam” below it.

She summarily took down the stickers and contacted Councilwoman Lisa Goodman,  telling her, “I was so shocked. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like that in Minneapolis.”

As of late Thursday afternoon, neither the Minneapolis Police Department nor the Park Police had received report of the incident.

itemprop

At the bottom of the Islamophobic sticker listed a website: tightrope.cc.

“It’s not illegal to be white… yet!” reads tightrope’s main page.

The site is a one-stop shop for all goodies intolerant, from the “Racist Joke Book” to “White Lives Matter” stickers to KKK hats.

This episode doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Whi;e, “Tightrope.cc” could just as easily be legitimate as a false flag ( the proprietors die in a fire, either way), putting a link on a poster is easy.

But the posters around Uptown and Lake of the Isles?  My BS detector practically jumped out of its mounting bracket.

First – cutesy photoshops with mid-level production values that look like they were done by art school fops, profaning religious imagery?  That’s a Minneapolis lefty thing (If I didn’t know better – and I actually don’t – I’d say that middle finger up above looks like Ken “Avidor” Weiner’s work – but I’m told he’s at least semi-retired from whatever it was he did).

And Uptown and Lake of the Isles?   Please.

Most people who do this sort of thing stay on home turf.   There’s a reason the snowflake at Saint Olaf dropped a racist note at ˆSaint Olafˆ- because it’s home turf.   The perp knows that if he’d have dropped anti-black racism in North Minneapolis and been caught, they’d be finding pieces of him in dog stools for weeks.

My guess – and it is a guess, but if I were a gambling man I’d bet money on it – is that this was done by a couple of twenty-something social justice snowflakes looking to false-flag the right – all the right.

Am I right?

Who knows?   I’ve been wrong – once or twice.

But’s called “Berg’s 20th Law” for a reason.

Getting Ready To Mint Another “Berg’s Law”

And if I do, it’s going to read “All claims of racist “hate speech” not delivered face to face by someone proven not to be a ringer should be presumed hoaxes until proven otherwise”.

Because when I got the first word of this “attack”, the first thing that crossed my mind was “No way, just  no way, that that actually happened”.

I was right.  I’m almost always right

Let me be clear (because liberals have a hard time arguing with anything but straw men, so a conservative must always straw-proof their argument) – any actual hate speech needs to be met by overwhelming opposition, as well as any rules that apply (and don’t violate everyone’s free speech rights).

It’s just that it’s so very hard to find such an episode that isn’t a hoax perpetrated by social justice weasels looking for a headline.

White Supremacist Terror

Yet another “false flag” “hate crime” hoax; the arson attack on a Bhutanese shop owner in Charlotte turns out to be…

…well, we know where this is going, don’t we?

NBC Charlotte states that police describe the man as black, 5-foot-8 and about 200 pounds with a short afro and goatee.

He is accused of not only leaving the note but setting the victim’s store on fire and smashing its windows as well.

The store owner, whose name is Kamal Dhimel, is reportedly scared for his life because of the letter and fire, which the FBI is investigating.

This blog will henceforth consider all reports of “white supremacist” “hate crimes” as hoaxes until proven otherwise.

That “Epidemic” Of White Supremacy

An arrest was made in connection with a series of “hate graffiti” incidents in Nassau County, New York:

According to authorities, Jasskirat Saini, 20, of Central Park Road, was arrested at 12:38 p.m. for multiple bias incidents at Nassau Community College. Police say Saini drew two swastikas on the exterior wall of Building H and “KKK” on the floor of F Building Cluster 225 before his arrest on Tuesday.

Police had been responding to the campus for instances of swastikas drawn on buildings since October. Most of the swastikas were found drawn in men’s bathrooms in the various buildings around campus.

As the “Garden City Patch” is part of the left-leaning “Patch” chain of community “news” sites, one may assume that had Mr. Saini had even the most tenuous link to the GOP, much less Donald Trump, it’d have gotten mentioned.   That doesn’t necessarily mean that Mr. Saini was a Democrat who was hoaxing the media to create the fraudulent impression that Nassau County was a hotbed of racism.

No.  Of course not.  Perish the thought.

Fake But Accurate-ish

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Whole Foods suing the hoaxer who lied about the cake.

It was all a lie, just like “hands up don’t shoot” or “he was cuffed when they shot him.,”  Why does the media believe it’s okay to substitute a desired result for objective truth?

I’m not talking about mindlessly parroting The Narrative on climate change, or gun control.  We expect that.  I’m talking about breathlessly reporting gay-threatening rainbow nooses (turned out to be an art project to raise awareness of LGBT suicide) or campus rape hoaxes, like Mattress Girl.   Their attitude seems to be that the fact the incident did not occur doesn’t mean it might not have occurred.  So falsely accusing someone of rape is simply a way to raise awareness of a problem that doesn’t exist, but could exist. 

Same idea with forged documents claiming Bush not serving in the military – fake but accurate, per Dan Rather.

And now gay-slur cakes.  Same idea.  Didn’t happen.  But could have.  So it’s all good.  The fact that an honest business had its reputation trashed doesn’t even cross their radar.

Liberals seem to believe an untruth told in furtherance of The Narrative is not a lie, it’s a Greater Good than the actual, verifiable truth, so you should be happy to be slandered. 

I hope Whole Foods pounds this guy into the dust for spreading lies about their business.

Joe Doakes

I expect an eventual, not-too-onerous settlement.  Fellow travelers and all.

Journalism Saves The Day

The City Pages got out there are did that gumshoe journalism that they’re famous for, in noting that this photo…

…attributing a quote to Michele Bachmann, which has been sweeping Facebook for the past week, is in fact a hoax.

Just one problem: She didn’t say it, and a version of this fake quote has been circulating since 2011

Whew.  Of course, some version or another of that quote has been around for decades – P.J. O’Rourke noted something like it in Holidays in Hell, twenty years ago, if I recall correctly.  If you tell a liberal a conservative Christian supports snake-handling, they’ll believe it without question.

But this is good!  Actual fact-checking!

I’ll urge the City Pages to start working on this one:

Or maybe this:

It’s good that we have highly-trained info-ninjas, watching society’s ramparts.

Ends Justify Means

(SCENE:  MITCH Berg and Avery LIBRELLE meet at the coffee shop).

MITCH (Walks into store):  Hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE (leaving store holding a latte): What’s that?  You want to kill me?

MITCH:  Beg pardon?

LIBRELLE:  You hate me for my stances on abortion and gun control and you want to shoot me with your assault weapon?

MITCH:   Um, start over.  What are you talking about?

LIBRELLE:   Was that another threat?

MITCH:  I’m just here for, er, coffee…

LIBRELLE: Help!  Raaaaaaaape!

(And SCENE).

Fiction?

If only; a U of Wyoming liberal activist has been busted threatening herself with rape on Facebook.

Oh, she did it under a sock puppet “conservative” ID:

And the Laramie police weren’t fooled:

University of Wyoming student targeted by an anonymous Facebook posting that included a threat of sexual violence had posted the item herself, police said.

The university in Laramie, Wyoming announced on Tuesday that campus police cited Meg Lanker-Simons for misdemeanor interference with a police investigation by giving false statements

On the one hand, it’s an attempt to frame conservatives, especially gun rights supporters. And Lanker-Simons’ supporters are doubling down, naturally:

‘I will tell you, I believe Meg is innocent of this outrage,’ Kandt told the Laramie Boomerang, adding she believes the citation issued by police is a ‘classic case of blaming the victim.’

‘I mean, my God, who would do this to herself?’ she added.

(Ditto her husband, who answers the question “What ever happened to “RB” from those Arby’s ads?”)

It does, in fact, happen all the time; the Duke Lacrosse Team, the Tawanna Brawley incident, even (as I recall, but can’t find) a case at Saint Cloud State in the past decade or so.

On the other hand, it’s no worse than the stuff Michelle Malkin gets every day from real liberals with the tacit blessing of the Democrat establishment and media.

 

I Feel About 75% Safe In Predicting…

…that this loathsome incident

A doll found hanging off a Main Street building in Plains is causing controversy.

Controversial enough to get the United States Secret Service involved.

Witnesses say it was an image of President Barack Obama with a rope around his neck, and the display was found hanging in one of the city’s most recognizable sites dedicated to former President Jimmy Carter.

…will:

a) be blamed on the “climate of hate” that all conservative opposition to Obama is being speciously linked to, and

b) eventually be found to be a hoax by a lefty trying to discredit conservatives.

I said 75% safe.  Not a lock, just fairly confident. 

We’ve been down this road a few times.

Pearls Clutched

I was thinking the other day that, in the Twin Cities’ leftymedia, many of the same people who last month were ready to indict Rep. Michele Bachmann for “aiding and abetting” in the death of census worker Bill Sparkman are the exact same people who are demanding absolute forbearance in the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan; one tried to conclude on Sunday that the investigators had determined terrorism wasn’t involved at all.

Jeff Goldberg notes that it’s not just a local thing:

Remember when Andrew Sullivan fretted about “Southern populist terrorism” in the death of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman? (Investigators now believe it to have been suicide.) Remember how Frank Rich interpreted the NY23 special election as “nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war,” demonstrating how “the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult”?

The tendency of elites to leap to hysterical, far-fetched interpretations when dealing with phenomena associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Right is counterbalanced by their “nothing to see here” reaction when confronted with events that implicate pet causes of the Left.

The nature of elite reaction is not strictly a matter of the potential political ramifications of events. There is also the matter of complexity and nuance, which are specialties of the intelligentsia. When events seem to teach a simplistic liberal lesson, there is no need to seek out any mitigating factors. Yet when the simple lesson would seem to favor a conservative argument, there is a frantic search for mitigation, or else the event is dismissed as meaningless.

See:  all of the hoax “hate crimes” that swept college campuses, the Duke Rape Case, the implication of talk radio in the Oklahoma City bombing…

The murder of Matthew Shepard was interpreted as evidence of mass homophobia induced by Christian conservatism, even though the murderers were a couple of two-bit hoodlums with no known ties to the Religious Right. Yet here we have Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly screaming “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down U.S. troops and . . . well, this means nothing.

On Twitter yesterday, I watched, somewhat slack-jawed, as a couple of reporters argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin debated exactly how unconfirmed the “Allahu Akbar” rumors really were.  Neither had heard anything about Hasan’s alleged links to radical clerics who’ s been linked with Al Quaeda, or had at least neither had opted to address them.  We’ll see if that ever fits into the template.

Fearless Prediction

After this story, coming on top of a bunch of other similar stories…:

 A woman robbed at knifepoint at a Pittsburgh ATM told police her attacker knocked her down and carved a “B” in her face after noticing a John McCain sticker on her car.

Police say the victim refused medical attention for the wound. An officer saw the injury, but a police report does not describe its size or severity.

…I’m waiting for a huge media expose on…McCain Voters Gone Wild.

When I first saw the story, I was a little leery – I’ve been burned by too many hoaxes.  Still am leery, actually.

But if it pans out, I think our course of action is clear; sanction Rush Limbaugh for creating a “climate of hate”. 

I mean, duh.

UPDATE:  Yup.  Burned again, or so it’s looking.

So look for this apparent hoax to get wall-to-wall coverage, and the all the other similar stories to be completely ignored.

Just saying.

Yet Another Hoax

If conservatives aren’t being obligingly bigoted, frame ’em!

A group of seven GW students sent an e-mail to The Hatchet late Tuesday night admitting to hanging hundreds of controversial posters around campus early Monday morning.

The students – Adam Kokesh, freshman Yong Kwon, senior Brian Tierney, freshman Ned Goodwin, Maxine Nwigwe, Lara Masri and Amal Rammah – said their motives were misinterpreted. Students for Conservativo-Facism Awareness hung the posters in opposition to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, an event being held beginning Oct. 22.

Kokesh, a graduate student and Iraq War veteran, gained celebrity over the past year because of his vocal opposition to the war. Nwigwe and Rammah are also graduate students.

In related Saint Paul news – on the local politics discussion boards, some of the lefty commentators have been going to amazing lengths to try to show that any violence that breaks out at the GOP convention next year is equally likely to be from right wing agents provocateurs.

They were conveniently short on actual incidents.