I’m not the world’s biggest Matt Walsh fan.

Not because of what he says. Mostly because he’s a podcaster whose podcast gets plopped onto radio with a little editing. It’s not necessarily great radio.

But radio purism aside, I watched “What is a Woman?” last week.

And the part that stuck with me, the part I didn’t already know?

Between hormones, surgery and other clinical charges, every single transition yields a total of $1.3 Million.

The return on investment has to be far better than Covid was.

With that in mind, I caught this the other day. It’s a thread – if you cllck into it, it should yield 5-6 related tweets:

“It’s a racket” would certainly explain a lot of the hamfisted way the DFL jammed the issue down this past session.

Briana Rose Lee is the chair of the Minneapolis DFL.

She tweeted this yesterday.

She spent the next couple hours defending her assertion to a mass of revulsion before, one presumes, Ken Martin cut off her Victory Gin.

Remember all the MNGOP leaders who partied ’til dawn when Paul Wellstone died?

No, you don’t. There were none.

Lee is 37. years old; she’d have been 2 when Ronaldus Magnus left office. She can have no impression what life was really like before Reagan ,so I take most of her opinion with a block of salt.

But I get the impression that Lee is one of those kids who, back in college, read The Gulag Archipelago and thought the NKVD were the good guys.

How dumb was the tweet? After doubling and tripling down that she was never going to do it, the tweet disappeared because it was dumb enough that even Ken Martin had to yank her leash:

But in a statement, DFL Chair Ken Martin said her tweet about Reagan did not “reflect the values of the DFL Party.”

“While there is nothing wrong with debating the policies and legacies of elected officials, mocking the passing of an American president is beyond the pale,” Martin said. “We expect better of leaders within our party, and we will continue holding ourselves to the high standard that Minnesotans deserve.”

Oh, yeah – Senator Jen McEwen, who actually is coming for your guns, agrees:

Gotta feel or Ken Martin: In the past couple years, he’s had to deal with:

• His staffer calling Navy ships “Murder Boats”
• A state representative candidate (who would to on to serve a term in the House) calling for the destruction of Hugo and the murder of its citizens
• Another staffer calling for Republicans to be guillotined
• Two cities destroyed by his voters
• Another staffer trying to go all Sonny Corleone on…a friendly MinnPost reporter
• Another comms staffer with a habit of tweeting like a sixth-grader who stole Mommy’s instagram password
• This.

Turns out there’s some dissent within the DFL’s ranks – between the “The only good Republican is a Dead Republican” set and the “Don’t tell the Hoi-Polloi the whole truth” crowd (read the whole thread), which exposes the full depth of the DFL’s internal squabbling…:

…although don’t get too excited: Democrats, being basically intellectual herd animals, will all fall in line and obey orders come election time.

As Dennis Prager notes, conservatives think leftists are wrong. Leftists think conservatives are evil.

SCENE: Minnesota DFL Executive Meeting.

KEN MARTIN (Chait of the MNDFL): Next order of business.

INGE “LUCKY” CARROLL (A former guidance counselor at a school for monomaniacs, Inge is Head Meme-Buffer at “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”). Our next plan is to start building safe spaces for hard drug use.

STACEY HINTON (Executive Director of “Keep All Racists Eternally Nonplussed”, a white progressive support group). Brilliant.

GRETEL STROMBERG ()Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, Stromberg is married to both a woman and a male illegal immigrant) Here’s the news coverage:

KEN MARTIN: Great piece. Fawning and morally bankrupt without going too over the top.

STROMBERG: Like Esme Murphy. .

KEN MARTIN: Yep. Now, we’ll be building these “safe spaces” at places like Summit and Chatsworth, and Crocus Hill, and down amid the condos across from the Guthrie…

( Entire group sits silently, in disbelief, jaws literally dropping).

KEN MARTIN: Hah! You shoulda seen your faces. Nope, we’re building them among the proles.

(Various expressions of relief)

KEN MARTIN: So – between legal weed and shooting galleries, and the schools teaching the next generation to be ignorant, uncritical , compliant and distracted by contrived grievances, the next generation should be really solid DFL voters!~

Round of applause as the scene fades to black.

2022 was an upset and a good year at the polls for the DFL, largely on the strength of:

• Hysteria about abortion, whipped up after the SCOTUS overturned Roe.
• “Fully Funding Education” – a concept literally no DFLer could or would define.
• …that’s about it.

In terms of divisive issues that turn out Democrats in droves, the big kahunas of recent years? They can’t re-overturn Roe, re-legalize pot, re-sanctify stalking and Munchausens Syndrome, re-legalize same sex marriage – and they got literally everything they asked for in education, so the schools should be “Fully Funded”, whatever that is.

So – let’s do some predicting.

What will the the next issue the DFL uses to try to panic their herds of ill-informed, uncritical, gullible, emotion-driven hysterical voter base to the polls?

Leave ’em in the comments.

I made a series of notes to myself at the beginning of the session, re all the promises the DFL made in the wake of their “trifecta”

There were a lot of them.

Some of them won’t matter for a while, or won’t be measurable for quite some time. (Is the DFL really going to cut child poverty by 1/3 in the next year/)

But one can be tested today: “Did the DFL legalize Cannabis?”

And they did.

I’m a little surprised. While on the one hand a buzzed, stuporous electorate is a perfect DFL audience, I figured the issue was worth more to the DFL as a social wedge.

Of course, the law is full of gimmies to Big Pharma, and handouts to well-connected political insiders, and will benefit small producers not one iota. And as Colorado discovered, the taxes and regulation won’t actually affect the black market criminal sale:

Instead, in 2023, Colorado’s cannabis entrepreneurs face a perfect storm of problems: too much supply, not enough demand, plunging prices, heightened competition in other states, the allure of black market weed, a lack of cannabis tourism and more. That’s on top of the shaky economic forecast for the rest of the year, even though inflation is steadily slowing….Earlier this year, marijuana giant Curaleaf shuttered its operations in Colorado, along with California and Oregon. “We believe these states will represent opportunities in the future, but the current price compression caused by a lack of meaningful enforcement of the illicit market prevent us from generating an acceptable return on our investments,” CEO Matt Darin said.

There is ample evidence the DFL spent even less time thinking about unintended consequences than Colorado did:

The greatest effect is likely to get rid of the Marijuana parties that’ve sapped DFL votes in recent years.

There were so many promises. This’ll keep us busy for a while.

Democrat have been trying to wedge hunters apart from other gun owners for decades.

And they’re not happy that its not working.

“Jilted”

Oddly, that’s not the word the Strib used when Klink refudiated his “A” rating with the NRA. I’d use “stabbed in the back”, personally.

Anyway – welcome to the party, deer hunters.

PJ O’Rourke said it best: progressives in power are like crack whores with a stolen Platinum Card.

They certainly had their party this session – and ended things with a budget-signing yesterday that had Leni Riefenstahl sending a chef’s kiss from the great beyond:

The social media blitz of endzone-happy dancing, featuring gigabytes of the DFL’s one real product, the smug selfie, was worth of Kim Jong Un’s minions.

But the hangover is coming.

The first lawsuit to try to tamp down the Trifecta’s power-sodden overrreach is on the books:

The DFL admitted publicly they were targeting Northwestern and Crown due to their religion – and they didn’t care.

And it ain’t the last lawsuit you can expect to see.

Rep. Andy Smith, wannabe kommissar and ultraprogressive rep from Kim Norton’s side of Rochester, seems to see himself as a left-of-center Steven Crowder. Or at least, that’s how he comes across.

Here’s his ode to enabling Munchhausen Mommies:

He truly is one of Minnesota Progressivism’s intellectual thought leaders.

Anyhoo, yesterday was his birthday:

I celebrated by tripling my monthly donation to the MN Gun Owners Caucus.

I invite you to do the same.

And anyone who wants to challenge him? I will give you whatever airtime it takes.

“Representative” Andy Smith, DFL-Rochester, is so annoyed by having to deal with dissent:

I’m not saying DFLers are all totalitarians at heart.

I’m just saying when they elect hamsters like this, their “hearts” are irrelevant.

UPDATE: Smith’s legislative priorities seem to be, in order: Taking selfies, getting his hair just perfect, jumping off things the Teachers Union tells him to jump off of, and eating donuts.

Throughout the media, it’s a universal truism: Smart people with personalities go into radio; people who get by on looks go into TV.

It’s conventionally-accepted wisdom throughout the world of mass communications.

I have exactly as much factual oomph saying that as former Channel 5 weatherperson and DFL senator Nicole Mitchell (DFL, what else, Woodbury) talking about the civil liberty law:

She’s referring to Schenck vs. United States – in which an anti-draft protester during World War One sued over having his civil rights trampled on by the Woodrow Wilson administration, often regarded as a toxically stupid decision, one which the SCOTUS reversed in defense of a Klansman’s right to free speech.

But you know what’s more toxic than that?

Let’s say, for purposes of argument, that society has the communal wisdom to abrogate rights “for the public good” without doing vastly more harm than good – again, just for purposes of argument.

Who defines “the common good?”

Traditionally, it was families, churches, and traditional social institutions that had stood the test of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years .

The DFL and Big Left have been tearing those institutions down, and replacing them with…

…themselves.

It’s as plain a statement as there is that the DFL wants your civil rights – all of them – to be political swag to be doled out as rewards, if at all.

You and your significant other each earn $60,000 a year. That’s a total household income of $120,000.

Your bills – housing, transportation, loan payments, food, everything you do – come to $10,000 a month. Your family budget is balanced.

You go out to the casino one night, and get the luckiest break ever; you walk out $80,000 ahead. 

You buy a bigger house, a newer car (and a bridge loan to finish paying off your old one), do some remodeling, put a couple of vacations and cruises and a whole lot of happy hours, on your capital one card. 

With the new mortgage, car loan, revolving credit and loans to pay for all the other goodies, your monthly expenses go up to $16,000 a month – requiring a $200,000 a year income between you and your significant other – who, remember, are still earning $120,000 a year between you. So when you’ve burned through that $80 windfall, you’ll be coming up $80,000 a year in the red.

Your options to avoid insolvency, foreclosure, and repossession are:

a. Downsize, quick – go back to a smaller house, cheaper car, etc.

b. Keep going back to the casino and hope for another big score, and hope your significant other isn’t too stupid to know what a longshot that is.

c. Browbeat your significant other into earning more money so you don’t go bankrupt, and hope he or she doesn’t leave you. As the significant other why they hate children if they don’t ratchet their income up, but fast.

That’s exactly what the state legislature and Governor Klink have done; the pandemic left the state with a one time windfall that they have spent, and much more. 

And you and I, the taxpayers of Minnesota, are the significant other. 

So what are they going to do about it?

Well, they’re going to hope that you’re a dumb spouse that thinks you can bank on casino winnings. But they are just going to hold out for option C, and demand you pony up more.

That’s exactly what just happened.

If this were a marriage, you would call the big spender an abusive spouse. 

So when you are the victim, what do you call the perpetrator? 

Representative Alicia Kozlowski – one of the DFL‘s leading public intellectuals and thought leaders – had this to say over the weekend about illegal immigration

So, apparently, Rep. Kozlowski‘s (and the DFL‘s) new taxes and gun control laws can be ignored, then?

For that matter, given that by her logic, the legislature itself is illegitimate, she shouldn’t actually have a position of any authority at all?

Urban Progressive Privilege means never having to really rationalize your only rationality.

Is there nothing in the worlds of negotiation, of convincing people to think and do things they aren’t entitled to, with the elegance, the power, the pure majesty of simply capping off one’s argument with a jaunty “full stop”?

If Abraham Lincoln had told Jefferson Davis “abolish slavery and rejoin the union, full stop!” there would’ve been no Civil War.

Had RIchard Nixon said “I am not a crook – full stop“, there’d have been no Watergate, no impeachment, no resignation.

If WInston Churchill had punctuated the Dunkirk speech – “…we shall fight on the beaches and the landing grounds, we shall never surrender, full stop!”, Hitler would have pulled back from France, abdicated, and fled to Mongolia.

Had the Pope responded to Martin Luther with a decisive “Iustificamur ex operibus, plenus finis” (“We are justified by works. Full stop“), there’d have been no Reformation, no 100 years war. \

If the guys in Milli Vanilli had simply said, “We are the real singers! Full stop!”, they would be bigger than Madonna, Elvis, the Beatles, Taylor Swift and Slim Whitman today.

So pity the poor Minnesota GOP. Who can stand in the face of such remorseless logic and deft rhetoric?

For example – I, personally, started out believing that “Rights” are inalienable, non-material things with which one is born, and from which one can not be legitimately separated except by very solemn due process.

But then I read this:

And voila! I’m convinced! A “right” is a bit of material swag bestowed on the deserving by the political process!

Even “Lieutenant” Governor Flanagan, who punctuated one of her (very, very few non-risible) arguments with this…

Is there nothing that phrase can’t do?

…

If there are two bright spots in this current legislative session, it is the emergence of Harry Niska and Walter Hudson, as two of the best state legislators in the United States.

Here, Walter finishes the job Harry started, giving the single best explanation of why the DFL, and the StarTribune, are lying about the removal of language, regarding pedophilia from state statute.

Pass this around, like it’s hot.

On Saturday, I had a chat with Shawn Holster about the new, vastly streamlined Minneapolis GOP. It’s a reform that makes sense – going from four Senate district and 13 ward committees to a single city organization. No more wondering what side of what arbitrary dividing line you live on, no more wondering if you went to the right meeting, no more wasted effort among a dozen sub-units, more focus on what matters- it’s freaking brilliant, and Saint Paul should do the same.

It starts at the :33 mark:

In the meantime, as I was talking with Shawn, this was the MInneapolis Ward 10 convention:

Ken Martin – who runs the party of Bill “Guillotine Republicans!” Davis, of Matt “He Who Flexes on Reporters who are 30 years older than him” Roznowski, of Leigh “Thrilla On the House Floor” Finke, whose party has presided over probably half a dozen cycles of Minneapolis district conventions breaking down into riots…

…is making vigorous noises about violbla beingbla bla unacceptibiblablabla.

Dems: Public broadcasting is NOT state media! 1% of their funding comes from government!

Normies: Then defunding won’t hurt anythi…

Dems: NOOO! You’ll KILL ELMO! Why do you hate Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers?

Just a quick reminder as to the level of intellectual acuity the DFL is bringing to this session.

Dems: Trans women are women!

Normies: Except in athletic competition, where their innate masculine physical traits are a huge advantage, not to mention in prison where they tend to rape bio-women…

Dems: Genocide!

DFL: Let’s fully fund education!

Normies: Could you define that term? Because we already pay an awful lot of money, and the results keep getting worse…

DFL: You hate children! Why do you hate children?

Dems: Blue America *carries* Red America. Without us, Red America would starve.

Normies: OK. Let’s talk national divorce, since you don’t need…

Dems: Why are you talking treason!?!? NEVER!

To: Rep. Samantha Vang
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Gaslighting

Rep. Vang,

You wrote the “Social Credit” bill (you call it ‘Stop Hate’, but my title is more accurate) that I talked about on my show over the weekend.

You got a storm of criticism – almost all of it justified.

This was your response:

Well,no. That’s not what it does.

Y’see, the market for hate crime far, far outstrips the supply, notwithstanding the DFL’s “Reichstag Firing”. For example:

The mosque fires were set, not just by one guy, the the one criminal in Minneapolis dumb enough to actually commit a crime that Minneapolis’s city government still gives a sh*t about.

No – Rep. Vang’s bill will essentially collect statemens about “microagressions” reported by protected classes.

Bumper sticker they don’t like?

Something overheard in a cafe?

A Trump sign?

Nobody knows. The bill allows no scrutiny, no Data Practices requests, no accountability or transparency of any kind.

It is, in every respect, a “social credit” bill.

Which is a key part of the Communist system, Rep. Vang, that your parents and her people fled.

That is all.

DFL: Walz runs the most transparent administration in history.

Normies: His administration us utterly opaque, hides information, and communicates only in giggly selfies.

DFL: Our HR office will be in touch.

In a tweet related to this morning’s post, Rep. Koslowski wrote:

Rep. Koswlowski: You are an elected official, part of the non-profit/political/industrial complex who will likely spend the rest of your life earning a comfortable living at least, at taxpayer and donor expense.

OK, that’s the system.

However, logic gives you a choice:

• Call Republicans “fascists”
• Vote for the DFL’s social credit bill.

You get to pick one, and only one.

There’s sure been a lot of aggressive rhetoric from the DFL, especially its “LGBTQ” caucus, for the past (checks watch) 24 hours or so.

Here’s Alicia Kozlowski, elected representative from Duluth and, as such, person witih a lifetime sinecure of living on the public dime ahead of her:

Wow. That sounds serious.

It’s certainly got Rep Kozlowski’s dudgeon up:

And then there was Rep Leigh Finke with, curioiusly, the exact same type of rhetoric:

Wow. Two marquee members of the LGBTQ caucus making “defiant” noises.

I wonder what’s up with that?

Oh:

A Republican lawmaker was verbally accosted by a Democratic colleague on the House floor Wednesday because she shared a tweet from the organization Gays Against Groomers, she told Alpha News.

Rep. Dawn Gillman, R-Dassel, retweeted a post regarding legislation that would have removed existing language in Minnesota law stipulating that pedophilia is not a protected sexual orientation.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Leigh Finke, DFL-St. Paul, who confronted Gillman about the retweet. Gillman said she was “yelled at and intimidated” by Finke, who apparently shouted “no!” when a colleague suggested moving the conversation off the floor.

“My interaction on Wednesday evening with Rep. Finke left me shaken and fearing for my personal safety. Instead of coming to talk to me, I was yelled at and intimidated on the House Floor,” Gillman told Alpha News. She said that this type of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated in other workplaces.

The incident was corroborated by multiple representatives who were there. Gillman asked to be escorted to her car after session.

Finke reportedly upbraided [1] Gillman over circulating this article.

Several questions, here:

1. Is House HR going to get involved, or are they still chasing after Peter Callaghan?
2. Is House HR going to come after me for writing this?
3. If this story is accurate, it’d appear that the House Cisgender Caucus is the one that needs a mutual defense agreement.
4. I wonder if writing this is going to put me afoul of the DFL’s new Social Credit policy?

Speaking of Social Credit policy, I’ll be talking about that, the Giillman/Finke incident, and much. more on the show tomorrow. Tune on in.

DFL: The surplus is immense, and a monument to DFL wisdom.

Normies: It’s mostly one-time money. You turned it into permanent spending. It’ll be a deficit next session.

DFL: We ALWAYS said it was one-time money!