Why, no, stupid peasants. Nobody is taking your guns.
I mean, nobody is taking your gas stoves.
Ooos. Nobody is going to convert all cars to electric.
Whoopsie. I mean nobody is going to surreptitiously convert the power grid to something that can’t sustain life in any place where the temperature gets below 40.
D’oh! I mean, nobody is…
…er, what’s nobody doing?
Oh, yeah. The bug thing. That’s what hobody ever said anything about.
Your bad.
It’s this blog’s considered position that DFL politicians can say pretty much anything they want; they know that the typical DFL voter, while invincibly smug about their education, is incredibly badly informed and, being a trained regurgitator of dogma, has no capacity for critical thought. They also know that the Twin Cities’ subservient news media – being mostly from that same population – won’t do anything to fix that.
Which is why Melvin Carter can write bilge like this:
Now, you know gun store owners aren’t clairvoyant. And I know it.
And so does Melvin Carter.
He knows that a “straw buyer” is someone who:
And Mayor Carter also knows that neither the Hennepin nor Ramsey County attorneys, going back decades, is especially enthusiastic about going after straw buyers. Nobody ever got elected Senator by putting a gang-banger’s girlfriend in jail.
But they typical DFL voter? Someone who learned their law enforcement from a video game or an episode of “Criminal Minds?” They likely do think there’s some way for a gun store worker to tell if the person showing their ID is one of the 99.999% of gun buyers who are legit, or that other one who’ll sell a gun to a ne’er do well who goes on to shoot up a bar in Saint Paul.
And they just don’t care that much anyway.
Minnesota DFLers are giving themselves rotor-cuff issues patting themselves on the back…
…over, uh, this:
Minnesota came in one slot of Texas. I’m old enough to remember when Minnesota was overwhelmed with New York City. Plus ca change…
But what is the rationale for this list, from always-Democrat-friendly CNBC?
I’ll add some emphasis:
To determine its rankings, CNBC factored in metrics across 10 categories, listed here in order of their weight: workforce; infrastructure; economy; life, health and inclusion; cost of doing business; technology and innovation; business friendliness; education; access to capital; and cost of living.
So – according to a list that ranks stuff HR cares about well ahead of stuff Accounting cares about, Minnesota beats Texas…
…by one.
Wheeeeeee.
Congrats, DFL.
Humans: “My God, this is horrible. Those poor girls…“
DFL/Media (pardon the redundancy): “OK, who leaked the video?“
Well, no – I’m actually not exaggerating (thread):
The problem, Ms. Moriarty, is that nobody trust you or your office. Not even a fair chunk of people who would never consider not voting for the DFL.
Fox9 – the laziest of the Twin Cities four TV stations – is suddenly concerned about “divisive rhetoric”.
“Jared Goyette” – never heard of him – cited a grab bag of more or less conservative statements absent any meaningful context, including one from Albertville Rep. Walter Hudson…
Speaking five days after Trump was indicted by a grand jury in Miami, Minnesota GOP Rep. Walter Hudson used militaristic rhetoric to describe Democrats in a speech to the Republican Seniors of Minnesota.
While making no reference to Trump, Hudson, who has a background in conservative talk radio and is known for his bombastic style, referred to Democrats as “unAmerican” and accused them of engaging in “demonic behavior.”
“You’re dealing with a party that has declared war upon you. The goal of modern Democrats is to conquer you. What do I mean by that? Conquer you? Think about what’s entailed in conquering a people. You’re physically displacing them, get out, go somewhere else,” he said.
…that was dishonestly wrenched out of context, as Hudson invites you to see for yourself, and which is in no way completely inaccurate, as we pointed out last week.
In the meantime – criticizing gender ideology is “Genocide”, according to gender ideologue and Woman of the Year Leigh Finke:
Not a word from Fox9 or Jared Goyette about that.
Still waiting for declarations of sympathy from Jews, Tutsi, Cambodians and Rohinga on the whole “genocide” thing.
Zawahiri: “Austere Religious Scholar”
Lenin: “Controversial worker’s rights activist”
Nashville school shooter: “Tragic Victim”
Days of rioting, burning, looting: “Mostly Peaceful””.
Dolt in a MAGA hat carrying out perhaps the lowest level of vandalism possible:
“Terrorism”.
By the way – during the early days of the Civil Rights movement, activists were painstakingly trained not to lash out or do stupid things, since they’d be held against the entire movement.
The Tea Party got that pretty instinctively (which is why Big Left and the GOP Consultant Class had to invent their entire case against the Tea Party).
Someone’s gotta tell MAGA.
UPDATE: As you can see from the tweet, people figured it out.
Earlier this week, we pointed out something that, after thirty years of the worthless Steve Sack, I thought I’d never need to: A Strib “editorial cartoonist” actually causing consternation on both sides of the aisle.
Mike Thompson seemed to me to be a huge improvement over Sack’s flaccid, entitled, completely predictable drivel:
I ended the piece earlier this week by predicting there would be consequences.
Of course I was right. Publisher Steve Grove – a man who has never many pretense of being independent of the DFL – issued the first of what I suspect will be many mea culpas:
The least sinister interpretation: after 30 years of publishing, Steve Sack’s thud-witted, one-sided, uncreative drivel, of course The Strib becomes “accountable to the community“ after publishing one cartoon that roils their publisher’s cocktail buddies.
Most sinister? The DFL directly controls what the state’s most powerful news outlet presents, and how.
They’re already trying to avoid getting a ding on their Minnesota social credit scores.
More on that tomorrow and, most likey, on the show Saturday.
The Strib finally hired a new editorial cartoonist to replace the worthless and unlamented Steve Sack.
It’s Mike Thompson.
And he’s brought a new sound to Minneapolis.
No, not the popping of the Glock full-auto conversion.
It’s the wailing and gnashing of entitled, plush-bottom, White progressive Minneapolis Yoo-hoos losing their spit over being lampooned by an editorial cartoonist.
They have no frame of reference. Modern MSM editorial cartoons have all the intellectual diversity of The Colbert Show or NPR.
So the calls for “canceling” Thompson have already started.
It’ll be interesting to see if Thompson is forced to repent of his sins.
So, businesses are opening in a building that got re-opened after…uh, some unfortunate events, apparently:
“The 2020 fires”?
A bad streak of accidents?
Spontaneous combustion?
Flaming rocks from the sky?
In a city full of media that bellows “off what?” when the DFL says “jump”, KARE11 has lapped the field at going “woke”.
He called out America’s de facto Ministry of Information for what it is:
Big Media is rallying around their own – as they always do:
“Could undermine confidence”
NPR hosts actively pine for Marxism. They plot, in the open on the air, for ways to censor dissident media, not to mention using media to direct politics in their desired direction.
Anyone who sees the need for an impartial media that holds all government accountable should feel no confidence in NPR – Big Left’s PR shop.
That’d be a good start.
UPDATE : By the way – NPR’s “Fact check” of Twitter sniffs that the network only gets around 1% of its budget from government.
It’s technically true.
But the figure doesn’t count:
With that swag honestly counted, the total is by some counts well into the 30-40% range.
Qualifies as state media in my book.
This is how they describe the free lunch bill:
A “tax cut”.
I suppose public education is a “tax cut” because parents aren’t doing teaching at home, too?
Silly peasants. There’s no such thing as “Woke!”:
[Ipsos] latest poll confirms that no one really knows what “woke” means, particularly when respondents aren’t provided with any accurate definitions. “Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on ‘woke,’” USA Today’s write-up of its survey began, “but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.”
Or if it does exist, it’s an unalloyed good thing!
Hear that, Republicans? Everyone loves “woke”! Well, at least 56 percent of those surveyed endorse the word when they’re told it describes someone who is “informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” By contrast, just 39 percent of respondents express a negative view of the word insofar as it describes someone who is “overly politically correct” and is inclined to “police others’ words.” Having deemed the Right’s obsession with “wokeness” a quixotic endeavor, USA Today bellyflops into a solipsistic reflection on how the public’s perceptions “raise questions” about the Right’s self-defeating myopia.
Of course, this is an example of two institutions that should be distrusted and veriied – media:
This is a prime example of journalism that works backward from a conclusion in pursuit of evidence to support it.
and the polling industry:
A quick perusal of the polling on the issue exposes the flaw in USA Today/Ipsos’s methods.
When respondents are not primed with erroneous definitions and are instead asked only if they would vote for a self-described “woke” candidate, as CBS/YouGov did last October, they found that 58 percent of likely voters would be less likely to pull the lever for that candidate. That same month, a Harvard-Harris poll found that 64 percent of respondents, including a majority of Democrats, blame “the increase in crime” on “woke politicians” as opposed to “other factors.” That’s, at the very least, odd if most Americans don’t understand the word or believe it only describes a heightened social consciousness.
…that should be distrusted but verified, and then almost to a mathematical certainty distrusted some more.
For those who need a primer:
Wokeness in practice is not something so quaint as speech-policing and “political correctness.” It encapsulates an alternative theory of social organization that often enters into conflict with the Constitution. It prescribes not just otherworldly speech codes but programs of reeducation for those who decline to subscribe to them. It necessitates the redistribution of economic and social goods in the pursuit of “restorative justice” for wrongs committed by generations long passed. It redefines cosmic constants like the laws of mathematics, operating on the bigoted assumption that those laws are incomprehensible to those who were born into certain identities. “Woke” does not describe a persnickety busybody who cannot abide your verbal miscues. It describes a revolutionary.
But, like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that isnt, the “Republican War on Women” that never was, the “Threat to Abortion” that never existed in Minnesota, the “De Santis Book Ban” that isn’t and the “Blogger Registration” law that never will be, the new attempt to gaslight the right on the existence of “woke” (and critical race theory), the intended audience isn’t people who can reason or think critically.
It’s aimed at Democrat voters.
Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true.
But if there’s one thing the American media does well, it’s come together to deflect attention away from its collective misdeeds. (emphasis added): .
Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.
In other words, “the truth may change, but it is always what we say it is”.
And nothing changes the definition of truth more than you-know-who:
In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.
Because to the – there is no better term – clique that sees itself as running America’s media and messaging, it’s not even the medium that’s the message. It’s the messenger:
In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”
It’s hard to do anything but taunt big media anymore.
The Strib notes that the DFL is going on exactly the orgy of “progressive” legislating I (and everyone with a brain and a useful education) knew they would.
But I come not to talk policy.
I come to take optics.
Look at the photo:
I’ve got a couple of questions:
So we learned – after the 2020 eection, naturally – that if the whole population had heard about the Hunter Biden laptop story, enough Biden voters would have switched to Trump to have created a bit of a landslide.
So, whew, good thing the media and big tech hushed up the story, right?
Of course, the Minnesota media did cover Mark Dayton’s myriad physical and mental health issues – in January, 2010, about nine months before anyone in Minnesota cared about the election, which Dayton won over Tom Emmer, largely due to the presence of potemkin Republican, Tom Horner, but significantly because the media refused to report anything non-regal about Dayton other than long before anyone cared or long after it mattered anymore.
Ilhan Omar’s family and financial issues? Mitch, please.
And now, we learn that the media – this is shocking, I know – sat on the details of John Fetterman’s stroke until Pennsylvania was safe from the scourge of (checks notes) Mehmet Oz.
Mr. Fetterman declined to be interviewed for this story. But aides and confidantes describe his introduction to the Senate as a difficult period, filled with unfamiliar duties that are taxing for someone still in recovery: meetings with constituents, attending caucus and committee meetings, appearing in public at White House events and at the State of the Union address, as well as making appearances in Pennsylvania.
The most evident disability is a neurological condition that impairs his hearing. Mr. Fetterman suffers from auditory processing issues, forcing him to rely primarily on a tablet to transcribe what is being said to him. The hearing issues are inconsistent; they often get worse when he is in a stressful or unfamiliar situation. When it’s bad, Mr. Fetterman has described it as trying to make out the muffled voice of the teacher in the “Peanuts” cartoon, whose words could never be deciphered.
Nick Coleman used to claim the conservative bloggers that so bedeviled him were “trying to shut down the Strib”.
It wasn’t entirely true – back then.
Today? That’s the kindest possible interpretation.
Hunter Biden paid $50K a month to rent a house he claimed he owned:
Hunter Biden claimed he paid $49,910 a month to live at President Joe Biden’s Delaware residence where classified documents were discovered, a document shows.
The file, labeled “background screening test,” shows Hunter Biden lived in the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence between March 2017 and February 2018. Hunter Biden also claimed to “own” the property, according to the document.
The document was originally discovered on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, according to the Washington Examiner, and was reshared on Twitter by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine.
Of course it’s money laundering. It won’t be confirmed until long after Biden has left office, but STFU. This is a payment to the Big Guy.
My only question: how will Big Leftymedia limber up for the logical and factual gymnastics they need to do to bury this?
The U of M paid Nikole Hannah-Jones $50K to speak at the U – and complied with a demand to conceal the evidence (emphasis added by me):
Hannah-Jones participated in a Dec. 6 “moderated discussion” as part of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs Distinguished Carlson Lecture Series.
According to a contract obtained by Alpha News, the university paid Hannah-Jones’ agents $50,000 for her appearance on campus. The contract prohibited the university from recording the live event, which some school officials took issue with.
“Is the no recording item firm? I would like to remove that if possible. I am looking at one of our local news reporters for the moderator, and we’ve had great success with replaying the conversation via Minnesota Public Radio when we use their hosts. This, along with providing the recording to classrooms for instruction and discussion is important to us,” wrote Gail Fridlund, an events manager with the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
But of course, the U acquiesced.
Tom Gagnon, executive vice president of the Lavin Agency, said “that provision is firm” but offered to explain the “good” reasons for the recording prohibition.
“I don’t want folks to think she’s being a diva!” he said in a later email.
The university ultimately agreed to prohibit recording and covered the costs of Hannah-Jones’ travel and lodging expenses.
Those “good reasons” are none other than you and me – taxpayers with the capacity for critical thinking. They’ve seen what happens when the plebs see how the grift works.
If someone knows someone with a samizdat recording, let me know.
The Strib hails the…uh, “diversity” of the incoming class at the MN Legislature.
As Alan Dershowitz said, the Strib’s and DFL’s (pardon the redundancy) idea of “diversity” is…
…someone in with different color skin, or in a skirt, who thinks exactly the same as you.
I’m not sure if the Strib noted the fact that the House MInority leader and several other incoming GOP freshmen in both chambers are “Republicans of Color” – but I suspect most echo the words of former Representative and now Senator Eric Lucero:
As a Hispanic minority myself married to an Indian minority, I categorically reject the Democrat definition diversity equals skin color. I firmly hold to the truth content of character over color of skin and true diversity equals diversity of thought and ideas.
Which is a message today’s Left actively disparages.
I listen – as rarely as I can – to NPR’s “On the Media”. The show is basically an unthinking cheerleader for America’s “elite” media.
And their latest theme is participating in the war on “Nostalgia” – particularly, against the notion of looking to the past for lessons that might help with the present and the future.
The first segment was keynoted by a fellow – some sort of historian – who declaimed in an adenoidal ,mid-Atlantic voice no different than a thousand others on NPR “What does nostalgia for the fifties get you? It gets you dead, sooner! The life expectancy was 66 years! Now it’s 78!”
That’s right – if you think society could gain by returning to some of the social and moral stanards of the past, you also have to roll back science! And bring the Klan back too!
Not really exaggerating that last bit – because nostalgia isn’t just wanting to derive some wisdom from another time. Nosirreebob, it’s bringing Hitler back to life!
You’re not learning from the past. You’re begging to repeat it, all of it, especially the worst of it.
We can not defund NPR fast enough.
This bit, from Thomas Sowell, seems appropriate…:
…in light of Big Media’s meltdown over a number of Twitter suspending the accounts of a number of “journalists” who were, by any rational definition, doxxing Elon Musk.
And after two years of social media canceling those who said there are two genders, that masks are pointless, and even writing satire (the Babylon Bee just got reinstated recently)…
…suddenly we’re looking at a crisis!
But don’t you dare claim that the media only cares about its own civil rights.
The funniest part? Journos who didn’t get suspended, trying to grab their own little slice of victimhood:
There’s a reason people trust used car salesmen more than journos these days.
I flipped on NPR last night to catch a (large) part of a Terry Gross interview with historian Adam Hochschild, on his new book about the grave threats to democracy during World War 1.
And it was a dismal time indeed. “Sedition”, defined broadly, threw thousands in jail. The Department of Justice deputized people to enforce government speech codes and arrest people for suspicion of, basically, thought-crime; it was the first time in history that federal institutions had enough power and budget to get weaponized, and that is exactly what happened. Jim Crow was, by the way, federalized.
But here’s the thing; while Hochschild calls the repression “Trump-y” at one point, and Gross makes a raft of her usual Kaelian innuendos, you can listen to the piece all the way through…
…in vain for a reference to the fact that Woodrow Wilson, the father of modern “progressivism”, and an enthusiastic actual white supremacist to boot, drove all of this from the ground up.
“He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past”.
…when the center-right Christian satire site [1] Babylon Bee got banned from Twitter for “misinformation” – for writing satire – and not a single media outlet lamented the erosion of freedom.
To say nothing of gundecking, at government request, stories from Mark Dayton’s health up through Hunter Biden’s kickbacks to “Big Guy”.
I’m old enough to remember when big leftymedia was incredibly blasé about public-private partnerships leading to de facto censorship.
But you’d have to be very young indeed to remember the day Big Leftymedia started squawking about being victimized. It’s a brand new thing. Emphasis added by me:
According to a report in The Intercept, Musk has suspended several notable left-wing accounts over the past week or so. A number of them were anti-fascist researchers and organizers who focused on documenting far-right activity.
Notably, the disabled accounts documented in the report were singled out for criticism by the far-right writer Andy Ngo, who Musk often publicly interacts with on Twitter. “Musk invited Ngo to report ‘Antifa accounts’ that should be suspended directly to him,” the Intercept reported. In at least once case, Ngo seems to have succeeded at directing Musk to suspend an account that Ngo failed to get suspended by Twitter before Musk took over the company.
Just you watch. “Censorship” – of the left, natch – will become a topic, starting right about…now.
Democracy desperately needs a free, inquisitive press that holds all government’s feet in the fire.
And we objectively do not have that today. And people know it.
[1] Also perhaps the most legitimate news source in the US
To: Every Single Progressive
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreperous Peasant
Re: Berg’s 18th Law
To some extent, I created Berg’s 18th Law to protect me, and people like me, from going out on long, brittle factual limbs.
The law is pretty clear:
Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident. It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.
But after a couple of days of listening to people like you claiming that all conservative social and economic thought was a form of “stochastic terror” aimed directly at LGBTQIAetcetc people, it’s worth noting that I wrote it even more for you.
Are you old enough to remember when our Expert Class (TM) sicced it’s PR machine, and Big Left’s army of howler monkeys, from Stephen Colbert down to its horde of demi-human twitterbots, on anyone who expressed even ambivalence about Ivermectin?
“Hahaha, he’s peddling horse medicine!” was about the level and extent of the discourse?
Are you that old?
If you’re a toddler, yes – you are.
If you’re older than a toddler, you remember the “expert” response – from the ridicule…
…to the regulators:
But never mind history; they’re trying to change that:
“Hey, it’s not our fault if you took all that gaslighting and all those insults seriously! We’re the FDA, maaaaan”.
Don’t get gaslit.
So you read the headline of this Strib article, and you think perhaps straw-purchased guns are turning up more often, or maybe that some people out there with clean criminal records are going out to Fleet Farm, picking a gun from the display case, conducting a completely legal and above board purchase, and then embarking on the life of crime.
But then you read the lead, and it’s…
…about stolen guns being used in crime.
That were purchased legally, at one point or another.
I’m not sure if they’ve thought this through.
Unless some enterprising gang conducts a heist from the loading dock add Glock USA, literally every firearm available in the United States was legally purchased at one point or another.
“Even the Mauser KAR 98K grandpa brought back from World War II?“
Well, yeah, the German government purchased it from Mauser in the 1930s or 1940s, and give it to some soldier, from whom your grandfather got it by means fair or foul.
I don’t mean to make light of what is, honestly, a fairly scabrous campaign on the part of big left, the anti-gun movement and the media; the latest chanting point is “there’s a very fine line between legal guns, and legal gun owners, and criminals“.
Of course, with the owners, there is almost invariably not. The overwhelming majority of people who commit crimes with guns have significant criminal records and aren’t allowed to touch, much less own, a firearm.
With the guns? I mean, as long as you gloss over theft (or the federal felony of straw purchasing), it’s both technically true and complete balderdash.