Is Saint Anthony resident got this letter recently, about their Christmas light display:

I wonder if the Karen who wrote this realizes they live in…

Wait for it…

… Wait for it…

… Saint Anthony.

Background: “Cultural appropriation” is one of the few sins actually recognized by the Wokemob. One can not, it seems, be white and wear african jewelry or cook mexican food, at the risk of inciting the Wokemob.

They seem to be more tolerant of people of non-Western descent using things invented in the west, like free speech and respect for the individual (as long as they are that individual), but let’s not get carried away in technicalities, here.

Foreground: The actress formerly known as Ellen Page – most famous for starring in Juno, the inescapable and insufferable indy sensation that put former Minneapolitan “Diablo Cody” on the map way back when – is now Elliot Page, and has asked to be referred to by the pronouns “he” and “they”.

And the media – mainstream and social – have complied with that demand at a clip that would have terrified Orwell, and probably Emmanuel Goldstein as well.

Elliot Page was never a woman, Winston.

Appropriated: Brendan O’Neil has an excellent piece at Spiked on the subject, focusing on three subjects – the Orwellian completeness of the “transformation”, the deleterious effect of the Transgender mafia on gay kids…

…and the bit that caught my attention: Page’s cultural appropriation. I’ll add some emphasis.

The disappearing of Ellen Page, and the demonisation of anyone who dares to mention that woman’s name, matters because it tells us a great deal about the increasing instability and elitism of identity politics. There are many reasons we should have a frank, legitimate discussion about Ellen Page rather than robotically repeating that she is now a he and that anyone who says otherwise is a moral reprobate. First, is it really the case that Page is male? A he? How can someone who doesn’t have male biology and who has had no male experiences – boyhood, male puberty, masculine impulses, being a brother, an uncle, a father – be a ‘he’? How does that work? Is it magic? Or have words like male, he, brother and father been so denuded of meaning thanks to the cult of genderfluidity that anyone can adopt them as their preferred identity? It is not prejudiced to ask these questions; it is reasonable, and important.

And the same goes the other way, for “women” who grew up male as well. If eating a burrito made by a white woman is genocide, what is being an insta-male or female?

It’s not you. It’s not even your identity. It’s the costume of the day.

Nancy Pelosi’s haircut and blowout was more important than the public health measures whose jamdown she supported – after which the speaker and masses of her droogs took it upon themselves to try to defame the stylist for apparently fooling the hapless speaker of the house and Powerful Woman into acting like Marie Antoinette.

Chicago mayor Lori “Walker” Lightfoot also needed a haircut denied to mere proles – and figured hobnobbing with masses of people celebrating a Biden win would be immune, because “relief” conveys immunity, apparently.

Gavin Newsom’s swanky and flagrantly non-compliant dinner, with his public health authorities, was apparently not only an exception to the rule but so awesome that the Mayor of San Francisco did the same thing, the next night, at the same $400-a-seat San Fran restaurant.

The Mayor of Denver got on a plane not 30 minutes after telling his subjects…er, constituents not to even think about traveling. As did the Mayor of San Jose.

Not to be outdone, an LA County supervisor went to a big dinner, right after voting to shut down outdoor dining.

I’d ask “what do they all have in common?”, but after almost 19 years on this blog, we all know, don’t we?

I maaaaaay just have to raise some money to start distributing a few thousand of these:

And, of course, coating them with a caustic chemical.

…when the Southern Poverty Law Center did actual useful work fighting real injustice.

Those days are at least 30 years behind us. The SPLC today is no less a lefty PR firm than Media Matters or Common Cause.

And it appears the ACLU is well down that same path.

In a shocking late-breaking story, Roseville – a first-tier northern suburb of Saint Paul – has broken with its long-standing tradition of embracing and upholding racism, and has undertaken a bold stance:

It’s good to see cities swim against the current.

Courage.

Of course, I drove further, and on seeing the single coolest jungle gym I’ve ever seen in my life, something that actually made me want to be six years old again, I had to wonder…

…if their next bold stance would be against militarism, and phallocentric patriarchy.

Because you just know one of the Karens that’s taken the suburb over is going to go there, don’t you?

I may owe Ryan Winkler an apology.

I mean, growing up in rural North Dakota back when only Al Gore had access to the Internet, even I knew what “uncle Tom” meant when applied to a black man – so naturally I figured someone in his position, Harvard grad and all, would as well. Clearly, so did many others.

And although I’m an Anglo from the northern Plains, I’ve known what a Coyote – a slang term for a human trafficker who brings people across the border, either as illegal immigrants, sex slaves or mules – was for quite a while now.

But apparently a Harvard education does one no better in this context:

Y’know what’s “sickening”? Having a bunch of people whose opinion is considered above the rest of the world by dint of being a “blue check”, who are given to lecturing the deporables about their cultural illiteracy, who are themselves so culturally illiterate:

Just remember that when Blue America starts talking about getting rid of the electoral college.

…that there might be some portion of society too inherently based in innate logic and divorces from social subjectivity to get sucked into the madness…

…well, you’d be wrong.

Let’s say you had again for a candy bar. Maybe even a whole bunch of them – like, you wanted to distribute candy bars.

A “Mars“ bar, perhaps, or maybe a pack of M&Ms? Which are, as it happens, a product of the Mars company?Where would you go? Especially if you are a diligent quarantiner, and can’t leave the house?

“Maybe“, do you think, “I can go to the Capt Mars Candy Company website“.

Certainly, you might think, that would be a place you could go to find out more about candy bars.You might think that.

And you would be wrong.

Go ahead – see how far down you have to scroll to find any reference to, well, candy.

A whole bunch of general counsels for a whoooole bunch of media outlets are changing their drawers right about now:

I’m smelling panicky settlements in the air.

These tweets have made the rounds of conservative social, cable and broadcast media.

Which doesn’t mean they don’t need to be splattered far and wide.

Berg’s Seventh Law is omnipresent:

“Irony” – Judge Coney Barrett is already one of the nation’s most powerful jurists, even if she never gets on the SCOTUS (and here’s hoping she does, and soon). She’s accomplished more in her life, so far, than any of the people yapping on Twitter about “The Handmaids Tale” “parallels” in her faith life.

Just saying – if “People of Praise” preaches “subservience for women”, they’re doing a terrible job of it.

Oh, yeah – Berg’s Seventh Law”

If the left didn’t have double standards…

…well, you know where we go from here.

Professor Larry Jacobs on Twitter last week:

On, if only.

But, sadly, no.

The NYTimes is trying to disappear some of their own paper’s history in re the “1619 Project”, which claimed that, based on the premise that America was founded primarily to exalt slavery, the nation was really founded when the first slave arrived.

Or…so they said. For a while:

Editors recently removed (without explanation or acknowledgment) the provocative statement that the project “aim[s] to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” from the article series’ online introduction. Lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones has repeatedly claimed it is a myth that the project proposes 1619 rather than 1776 as the country’s birth year: She blamed bad-faith critics on the right for tricking the media into believing otherwise.

“One thing in which the right has been tremendously successful is getting media to frame stories in their language and through their lens,” wrote Hannah-Jones in a subsequently deleted tweet. “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”

Forget for a moment that Hannah-Jones’ Twitter banner is a picture of 1776 crossed out and replaced with 1619. Forget that multiple progressive media outlets that were sympathetic to the project’s aims used the 1619-as-true-founding summary in order to explain it. Forget that a year ago, after the articles were published, both Hannah-Jones and New York Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein described the project in exactly these terms: “We sort of proposed the idea in a variety of ways that if you consider 1619 as the foundational date of the country, rather than 1776, it just changes your understanding and we call that a reframing of American history.” Just consider one last piece of evidence that Hannah-Jones is being deceptive about who invented the 1619-not-1776 framing.

My guess – she’s not being “deceptive”. She, and the Times, are backfilling and memory-holing because Identity Politics stands to cost the Democrats.

Again.

Consider the possibility that humans evolved over millions of years. Consider the possibility that survival traits selected for evolutionary value are different for women than men. Consider the possibility that the most evolutionary successful survival traits for women include the herd instinct, and maternal instincts.

College teaches women to be strong, independent, career-oriented people who have children late in life, if at all. Everything about modern feminist education directly contradicts the millennia of hardwired evolutionary instincts. The endless mental conflict between what society tells you to do and what your instincts tell you to do, is exhausting and depressing.

But that’s all silly, isn’t it? That’s just white privilege and mansplaining and patriarchal oppression. 

Isn’t it?

Joe Doakes

To answer your observation of the contradictions, shut up.

White, Jewish girl from Kansas City pretends to be Black girl from the ‘hood, for her entire career.  

She has a Ph.D.  from U-W, Madison.  Figures.

What do you bet she rode the Affirmative Action express all the way up?  “Black” woman applying to college and then to grad school – guaranteed admission.  “Black” woman doing “research” for a Ph.D – easier grading, more help, less criticism.  “Black” woman academic with excellent grades applying to be college professor – the script writes itself.

The news story compares her to Rachel Dolezal, the White woman who pretended to be Black to get a white-collar job (running a branch office of the NAACP).   True, but oddly, the story makes no mention of Elizabeth Warren, the White woman who pretended to be an American Indian so she could ride the Affirmative Action escalator into a professorship at Harvard.

That’s all fine, this woman confessed, she’s out in the open, and then . . . well, then what?  The college says they can’t comment on personnel matters, which implies she’s still working there.  She didn’t quit?  She didn’t give back the job she gained under false pretenses, the money that should have gone to another, more morally deserving person?

I see the confession . . . where’s the penance?

Joe Doakes

Penance is a form of white supremacy.

Haven’t you been paying attention, Joe?

Dennis Prager puts it well – the Left (today’s extreme left, not the center-left American liberalism of Hubert Humphrey or John F. Kennedy) destroys everything it touches.

The American Civil Liberties Union of the sixties and seventies, the ACLU of Nat Hentoff and other principled center-left civil libertarians was an organization with a political point of view, but that realized civil liberties were for everyone; that if the Manhattan crowd infringed rural Missouri’s civil liberties, they’d eventually regret it.

I’ve been joking – and then “joking” (see Berg’s 21st Law) – since the nineties that the ACLU should obey truth in advertising laws and change its name to the San Francisco, Hollywood and Upper East Side CIvil Liberties Union (SFHaUESCLU), since that’s really all they represent.

So I’m not sure if I should be happy or concerned that the ACLU has dropped all pretense to the contrary.

John Thompson – the DFL endorsed candidate for the Minnesota House, who threatened to burn down Hugo, Minnesota – is clearly not a fan of the police.

And it’s causing the DFL problems – while by all indications Ken Martin is keeping Thompson locked up in a closet and not letting him anywhere near the public, the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, normally a reliable endorser of DFL candidates, has switched its endorsements in two swing House districts, and possibly more. The kerfuffle – which the media hasn’t been able to bury, despite their best efforts – caused the DFL to bag a fundraiser with Thompson and other DFL officials last week, which is a big deal, two months before an election.

Now, I’ve had a policy since the beginning of this blog: I leave peoples’ families out of it. Some of my various stalkers haven’t been quite as discriminating – and yes, that does make me a better person than them.

And I’m not going to change that now.

But while it seems that candidate Thompson’s son has had some brushes with the law, it also seems that the son also owes his life to one of the Saint Paul cops who, Thompson the Elder reminds us, “ain’t s**t”:

In early August 2018, a St. Paul officer was credited with saving his life after he was shot outside a funeral home on the 700 block of Portland Avenue.

Thompson was found in an alley with gunshot wounds to his chest and abdomen after a confrontation with a fellow citizen became violent. The St. Paul Police Department said that officer Mathew Jones aided Thompson and stemmed his bleeding until EMS arrived to transport him to the hospital. It is unlikely that Thompson would have survived without the medical care Jones administered, authorities said.

Reports from Fox 9 and the Pioneer Press identified the man who was shot on Aug. 6, 2018 as Thompson’s son Damarco. The St. Paul Police Department confirmed with Alpha News that Damarco’s life was saved by Jones, who received the Life Saving Award for his actions that day.

“While the saving of a life is generally attributed to the hospital and responding EMS crews, the officers who take those initial actions, such as Officer Jones, should receive the lion’s share of the credit,” St. Paul Fire’s EMS coordinator, Captain Kenneth Adams, said of the incident. “For if it were not for them and their actions, the EMS crews and hospital staff would not have a patient to work with.”

I leave families out of things – but it doesn’t seem remotely unfair to point this out.

OK, that’s not the real tag line on the story.

Yet.

But it doesn’t seem implausible at all, does it?

Minneapolis couple out on the town in the North Loop, attacked by 8-10…

…well, the piece leaves that wide open:

Probably more white supremacist Hells Angels. They’re behind everything that’s wrong in Minneapolis.

Darned white supremacists.

A friend of the blog emails:

Last night at a prayer meeting one of the members of the group told us that Minneapolis public schools made a change to job titles. This friend of mine is a teacher at Minneapolis South. He said it was announced yesterday that all titles in the Minneapolis public school system with the term Chief in them will be changed. It’s the end of racism as we know it.

Excising a word that existed in a constant context in the English language for hundreds of years?

Yeah, that oughtta fix it.

…don’t you dare say the left is waging a war…

…against Western Civlization itself.

To: Rep. Ryan WInkler, House Majority Leader
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Timing

Rep. Winkler,

Yesterday you tweeted in re the shooting in Kenosha:

Rep Winkler, I say the following with all due respect.

I’m just spitballing, here, but maybe a white, suburban Harvard grad who called one of the leading jurists in the nation an “Uncle Thomas” because he departed the Democrat Party’s plantation, might want to sit out the whole “white supremacy” thing.

That is all.

Remember when “racism” meant “hating, disparaging or discriminating against someone because of their ethnicity?”

And the good guys and gals sought “equality” – the whole “judging by the contents of peoples’ hearts rather than the color of their skin” thing.

Those were quaint days indeed.

Today? Big Left isn’t seeking “equality”. The goal is “anti-Racism”.

And the “racism” they are against is, when you dig beneath the twaddle, all of Western CIvilization.

This is treated with (justifiable) revulsion.

The reporters who treat it with justifiable revulsion go here for a drink after work and see people wearing these and say not a single word.

To: Seth Rogen
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Issues In Fulfilling Your Request

Mr. Rogen,

In regards to your request that everyone who questions “Black Lives Matter“ should“F*** off” and not go to any of your movies: We’ve got a bit of a problem here.

I’m not going to say I haven’t enjoyed a few of your movies; “Zack and Miri make a Porno” was worth a watch. And Freaks and Geeks was pretty essential, although that was mostly a Linda Cardellini thing – and you played basically the same role you’ve played in just about every movie since.

Which brings us, with all due respect, to the point; you’ve kind of got a formula – to the extent that once you’ve seen one of your movies, you’ve kind of seen them all.

Which puts us in a bit of a pickle. I can’t “f*** off” and skip your movies, since logically, unless your formula changes, I have already seen all your future, lovable-bumbling-stoner/slacker-fish out of water movies as well

Please see to this.

That is all.

“If You’re ‘On The Fence’, You’re Complicit”\

No. If I’m “on the fence on an issue”, then neither side has convinced me yet. “Better to be quiet and have people think you might be a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.

And being considered a fool by anyone using a line like the star of today’s piece is at best irrelevant and at worst mutual.