I can think of lots of adjectives to add to Smith’s hamfistedness. Velvet ain’t one of them.
And what usually happens after you see DFLers posting “attagirls” over inexplicable media. puff pieces?
Some dirt comes out on them. .
For example – during the session, the DFL noise machine broke out into a round of praise for Rep. Finke. It went from zero to 60 in three seconds, as if the Representative had just pulled someone from a burning building Clearly something had happened.
That something was Finke had charged across the House floor at another representative over retweeting a trans-skeptic account.
So am I too cynical in asking “what dirt is coming out about Smith?”
“First, they ignore you. Then they. mock you. Then they attack you. Then you win” – Gandhi
I remember during the heyday of the Tea Party, in 2009-10, living through Gandhi’s aphorism – and, in the end, seeing how very overrated Gandhi was as a keeper of profound wisdom.
But I digress.
The Democrats, MSM (ptr) and the Mitt Romney wing of the GOP did their best to pretend it didn’t matter.
And then we won – at least, in 2010. Big Left and Big GOP still don’t want to talk about it, but the Tea Party beat both establishments like Keith Moon beating a rack tom.
Of course, in 2012 and onward, the Empire struck back. Big Left and Big GOP teamed up, in effect, to smother the insurgents. It didn’t help that, by dint of being elected to actual office, the Tea Party became “the establishment” that the Ron Paul crowd railed against in the next presidential cycle. The momentum ebbed – as it often does when grassroots movements have to get back to their day jobs.
These conservative mothers and grandmothers, who in recent years have organized for ”parental rights,” including banning discussion of gender identity in schools, have been classified as extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have also been among the most coveted voters so far in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Donald Trump praised their work, saying organizations such as Moms for Liberty had taught the liberal left a lesson: ”Don’t mess with America’s moms.” Ron DeSantis said ”woke” policies had “awakened the most powerful political force in the country: mama bears.” His wife, Casey DeSantis, who launched ”Mamas for DeSantis” in leadoff-voting Iowa, said moms and grandmas were the ”game changer” in DeSantis’ blowout win for a second term as Florida governor. She predicted they will be again as he runs for president.
Who wants to tell columnist Sara Burnett know that nobody outside the mainstream media thinks the SPLC has any more objective down the middle credibility than ISAIAH or Moms Want Action?
Ye shall know them by their opposition:
”Republicans have decided that this is, I think, their golden ticket for the primaries to rile up their base,” said Katie Paris, who runs Red, Wine and Blue, a network of women pushing back on GOP-backed policies such as the anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans efforts of Moms for Liberty.
Leave it to Big Left to try to rally women around box wine. What next – an activist group called “Valium Girls?”
”Call it ‘parents’ rights,’ call it ‘mama bears,’ and try to make it sound like something that would be common sense. … The reality about ‘parents’ rights’ is that it’s just about the rights of a vocal minority that is trying to carry out an extreme political agenda.”
I can’t wait for the next Minnesota DFLer to try to comment on that last sentence.
At some point over the last five or six years, Big Gun Control – a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Left – decided they were done trying to debate second amendment rights groups.
Its hard to fault them on their reasoning. Every time they have tried to debate the issue against a “near pair opponent“ in the past 35 years, they have fared incredibly badly.
With the flameout of the mascist establishment over Dr. George Hotez crab walking away from a challenge to debate Robert F Kennedy, Junior, the entire the left’s noise machine has switched into full gaslighting mode.
After two solid years of being busted using power, instead of fact to shut down debate on issue after issue after issue – on Fomite spread, the Wuhan Lab origin story, on vaccines preventing spread, and on and on – suddenly not only will they not debate, but…
"'Debate me' has become a bad faith propaganda tool for the right, designed to legitimize lies & target critics for harassment. It’s ripped from the right's 'free speech' playbook, which demands bad actors get access to all platforms & audiences – or else" https://t.co/7Qlig7swdi
Of course, when you’ve been wrong about climate change guns, transgenderism, welfare, the Soviet Union and pretty much everything else, I suppose avoidance is understandable.
But let’s call this what it is. Gaslighting.
The Left is America’s narcissistic abusive spouse. .
This, according to [UST Housing Director Zoe] Chang, is done as discreetly as possible in order to avoid upsetting parents. The video, OMG said in an email, documents the “mountain of rule changes and preferential treatment provided to trans students when it comes to their housing accommodations.”
The video:
1st OMG Citizen Journalist-Led Story:
A Citizen Journalist was rewarded $1000 for this recording obtained about a Catholic University allowing "trans girl" to room in the girl’s dorm without their knowledge. pic.twitter.com/eFmsTZnm1W
In the wake of his move to Twitter, some bad news for Tucker Carlson.
He’s been banned from…
…uh…
BREAKING: Tucker Carlson is hit with bad news as new Twitter competitor Tribel announces that they just permanently banned Carlson from their growing social media app, declaring that, “Tribel has decided to permanently ban Tucker Carlson from our network because Mr. Carlson is a… pic.twitter.com/svAaoeKUwy
— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) May 10, 2023
“Tribel”.
Because apparently nobody’s banning people on Mastodon.
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:
Twitter has labeled National Public Radio as ''state-affiliated media'' on the social media site, a move some worried Wednesday could undermine public confidence in the news organization. https://t.co/Hjx7QDZoNG
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:
Subsidies and other grants from many other levels of government that are turned into program subscription fees that go…to NPR.
Perigovernmental and pseudogovernmental bodies – the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and various foundations, whose goals are in lock step with big government.
With that swag honestly counted, the total is by some counts well into the 30-40% range.
It was probably 15 years ago that I wound up running into a young Assistant US Attorney at a social event.
We got to talking – as I am wont to do with, well, people.
What quickly became evident in talking with him – early 30s, graduate of an Ivy League law school after having been a legacy Ivy League undergrad – was the sheer contempt he had for the people outside the federal “criminal justice” system he met.
Example: we got to talking about gun control. He was a Hillary guy. And he went to a demo the ATF put on for federal “criminal justice” employees, where they learned some basic firearm safety, and got to test-fire some of the guns the Feds used. And with that, he did in fact consider himself to be one of the class that should have the right to keep and bear arms (not that he would). The rest of the plebs, naturally,, should be disarmed forthwith.
Now bear in mind this AUSA wasn’t working on organized crime. Or even “crime” as most of us would understand it. His bailiwick was various abstruse import regulations. Not cocaine or fentanyl, mind you; things like wood, food and alcohol, livestock, furniture.
So that’s right – he oozed with sneering contempt for otherwise honest people who ran afoul of abstruse import regulations.
And he didn’t seem to be all that unusual among federal “criminal justice” employees.
My own struggles with the Saint Paul school system were at a time when the big dumb consultant idea was “zero tolerance” for even the faintest most ethereal hint of “violence”.
Dumb as that could be – and outmoded as it has apparently become, given the evaporation of safety in Saint Paul schools – it was a fart in the breeze compared to the contempt shoveled at parents since the dawn of “woke” education.
I figured – correctly – that Saint Paul and Minneapolis would be pretty hopeless.
But – Little Falls (via Gary at LIberty & Proosperity Blog)
“My name is Cassie Fredregill, a local resident of Little Falls. As my 10-year-old daughter came home from school one day, she told me that there was going to be a class on sexting. As any concerned parent, I reached out to her teacher to confirm what my daughter told me and asked what this class was going to be about.” The thought of a 10-year-old getting taught about sexting is utterly repulsive…
…Cassie wondered why she hadn’t received paperwork that permitted her to opt her daughter out of the class.
In response?
The school district barred her from parent teacher conferences.
She was not happy (jump to 5:25):
Point being, a distressing number of schools are starting to see parents as the enemy – and themselves as a class of aristocrats who shouldn’t have to be troubled by them.
But…has the organization learned the right lessons?
(Emphasis added):
When asked about his priorities, Lansing invoked what he has called the network’s “North Star” since his arrival in the fall of 2019: a push to ensure the network has a bigger and broader audience base, rooted in younger and more diverse listeners, readers and consumers. The emphasis, he says, must be on drawing in “the future audience to make NPR sustainable for the next 50 years.”
“Younger”? Well, over the past decade, the network has sure jammed down more than its share of breezy mediocrities (“It’s Been a Minute”, “The Moth Radio Hour”) – not sure if yesterday’s news is a verdict on that.
As to “more diverse” – they’ve tripled down on antagonizing half their audience. Even their “game shows” carry the message; the once excellent “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me“, which used to include the late PJ O’Rourke as a regular panelist, has become as lively and politically unpredictable as “Late Night with Steven Colbert“.
But you remember above, when I said I didn’t take joy in others misfortunes?
Well, I’m going to ask forgiveness for this, since I’m going to make an exception. Emphasis added:
The layoffs are in keeping with an increasingly grim landscape for media companies over recent months. Vox Media cut jobs by 7%; Gannett and Spotify by 6%. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, eliminated its Sunday magazine and a handful of other jobs. After becoming part of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN cut hundreds of jobs and killed off its brand-new streaming service, CNN+.
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.
In 2018 Hunter Biden claimed he owned the house where Joe Biden kept classified documents alongside his Corvette in the garage Via @jj_talkingpic.twitter.com/L7c80MRRiS
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 Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco is hosting the “Third Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit,” – discussing the “needs of transgender patients in healthcare,”
Just kidding. It’s the “Sanford Research Center”, in Sioux Falls.
Both Sanford and the Transformation Project are representative of the larger forces that are working to bring the transgender movement to the deepest-red corners of the United States — a coordinated, well-funded campaign for which South Dakota has become something of a trial run. That campaign’s influence has reached the Republican-dominated state legislature, where dozens of anti-gender-ideology bills have failed over the past decade. “No one thought South Dakota was a state where this could be stopped,” Libby Skarin, the campaign director for the ACLU of South Dakota, boasted in February. “I think the fact that we have consistently stopped these bills has been a source of hope for folks, like if they can do it in South Dakota, we can do it in our state.”
Sanford, which purports to be “the largest rural health system in the United States” — it currently employs nearly seven times more South Dakotans than any other business in the state — has played a pivotal role in orchestrating those conservative failures. In 2021, a National Review investigation detailed the medical giant’s links to the failure of House Bill 1217, which would have banned males from competing in women’s sports. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem had sparked conservative outrage by vetoing the bill earlier that year — a move that dampened her status as a rising Republican star, even after she hastened to reintroduce an analogous bill at the outset of the next legislative session.
The Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) agenda is being pushed into very red places by very blue big business – as a project to try to “convert” red parts of the country.
And in the case of Transgender ideology in South Dakota, it’s working:
Despite the overwhelmingly Republican composition of South Dakota politics, gender ideology has made inroads in almost every area of the state’s governing institutions. Last month, for example, SDSU drew conservative criticism for hosting a “kid-friendly” drag show, an event that multiple local lawmakers argued could be illegal under the state’s prohibition on “show[s] or other presentation[s]” deemed “harmful to minors.” Elsewhere, the Noem-appointed head of the state’s Department of Corrections signed a new “Management of Gender Dysphoria” policy specifying that state-prison inmates could request transfers to facilities that corresponded with their “gender identity” rather than sex — and be provided with sex-change drugs on the taxpayer dime.
But no set of institutions in South Dakota has embraced gender ideology more than the state’s Sanford-dominated business community, which sits well to the left of the state’s political center of gravity. (In November 2020, Sanford replaced its CEO of 24 years after he informed employees that he wouldn’t be wearing a mask around the office, arguing that he had recently recovered from the Covid virus and therefore posed no threat of spreading it.) The state’s Chamber of Commerce chapters, which are closely tied to Sanford, regularly lobby against social-conservative bills, including medical conscience rights, the prohibitions on sex changes for minors, birth-certificate gender changes, transgender locker room use, and bans on men in women’s sports.
“It’s Been a Minute” (henceforth IBaM) s one of the current plague of podcasts repackaged as radio shows that plagues both public and commercial broadcasting. As we discussed yesterday, some are better than others – some are OK radio, some are utterly dreadful as radio.
IBaM is pretty clearly trying to sell infotainment coverage smothered in public broadcasting convention, but to a black audience. It is, by public radio standards, breezy, sometimes to the point of sounding just a little contrived. But radio standards, it’s not the worst podcast on the air.
But this past weekend’s episode – about the wave of social media misogyny aimed at rapper “Megan Thee Stallion”, after she was shot in the foot by her…uh, paramour, rapper Tory Lanez. It features a “senior producer” from, guess what, another NPR podcast – Gabby Bulgarelli from a podcast called “Louder than a Riot”, and you’re on your own with that one.
Dog Bites Man. There’s an old newsroom bromide, passed down through Journalism 101 classes throughout the past 100-odd years. “Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news”. If something is the norm, the expected, the utterly mundane? If you’re not the man being bit, it’s not realy news.
Anyway – I listened to this epi of IBaM, so you don’t have to. But if you’re curious – smoke ’em if you got ’em.
Here’s the part I wanted to focus on. It’s around 6:00 into the segment:
BRITNEY LEWIS (HOST): The coverage of this trial feels somewhat muted compared to the coverage of another trail that gained a lot of public attention this year, Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard. Why do you think that this case feels so different?
BULGARELLI: One, nobody cares about black people. Two, it’s close to the holidays. Three, because it’s a closed court…in some ways they feel similar. A lot of the arguing (sic) against Megan feels similar to how people rallied against Amber in support of Johnny Depp…
LEWIS: Mmm Hmmm
BULGARELLI: …the way Megan has been made out to be a liar – I don’t think anyone believes Megan to be a victim, so they don’t care…
I can’t comment on the merits of Bulgarelli’s argument, presuming there are any.
But she’s ignoring two elephants in the room:
Rappers shooting rappers is, regrettably and tragically, dog bites man. No, seriously – the list is long, and spans genres, coasts, even nations. It’s been a generation, and we still haven’t a conclusive idea who killed Tupac and Biggie. Ms. Thee Stallion was shot in the foot during a domestic squabble. It’s senseless, and stupid – but Ms. Thee Stallion survived, and will no doubt see her profile increase as a result. Oh, yeah – violent misogyny in the world of hip-hop doesn’t even rise to the level of dog-bites-man; it’s more like “Dog Licks Dog” . It’s ugly, and awful, and it’s the norm, to the point that pushing back against it is, in fact, the news in the show-biz press.
On the other hand, what – besides skin color – distinguishes the Depp/Heard trial from the Lanez/Thee Stallion dust-up? A woman’s claims of victimhood have been torpedoed by overwhelming, sworn evidence that she was in fact an emotional and violent abuser – something mainstream narrative denies exists. Millions of men who’ve suffered, either in silence or in the face of open derision from cops, social service professionals and society at large saw at least some vindication, even if only vicarious. The dominant narrative – “the power differential means only men can commit abuse” – was stomped flat, opening the door for millions of men to perhaps, one day, be taken seriously.
The inconvenient truth for identity-thrashers like Bulgarelli is the Lanez/Thee Stallion is “Dog Bites Man”; Heard/Depp is “Man puts mayo and a slice of tomato on a dog and takes a big chomp”, trashing a different bit of identitarian dogma outside Bulgarelli’s career specialty.
I’m going to guess most of you didn’t know that Sunday was “World Toilet Day“ (I personally celebrate the Eastern Orthodox Toilet Day, which is December 3)
Something I didn’t know about the humble toilet; to at least one part of Big Left and, to at least one part of Big Left, it’s a social justice issue:
Unsafe toilets are robbing girls of their futures.
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…
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.
I think the first time I noticed America’s political class divide when I was doing my first talk show, at KSTP, way back when. I made the, um, profound observation that while the American Left had always sought a “class war” in which they – or at least the garden variety of “they” – saw themselves as the little guy revolting against the Leviathan, in at least one contest, the gun control “debate”, they were in fact the patricians, trying to keep the plebs in line.
I was young and naive. Literally every cultural argument breaks down on those lines, down to the rhetoric Big Left uses.
And that class war’s biggest flashpoints in recent years were Brexit in Europe, and Donald Trump in the US. The Big Government response to Covid was an extension of that skirmish.
Which brings us to this weeks’ most interesting story, the argument over the case for or against Amnesty for the culture-war criminals.
It was a salvo in the class war – America’s patrician class’s way of getting the plebs back for Brexit and Trump.
One of many “money” pullquotes:
Public faith in objectively shared political ground was already dissolving while my daughter gestated. If the Virtuals have a problem now, it’s that their counter-volley to Trump and Brexit consumed the last vestige of trust in that shared political ground: our faith in science. And the notion that such ground exists is the sine qua non of Virtual political legitimacy in its current technocratic form.
In this light, Oster’s call for amnesty can present itself as an effort to rebuild the neutral space of shared political endeavour after a period of conflict. But it reads as a continuation of now-familiar efforts to weaponise the appearance of such neutrality and common purpose, in the interests of one side of that conflict.
We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign [the “In This House…” mob – Ed.] priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.
“Fridays and breaks can never come soon enough for me this year. I’ve always been able to make it to MEA without needing time off to recover, but not this year. This year I feel like I’ve been run over by a train every day I leave. This week I politely asked a student, that wasn’t supposed to be in my room, to go to her class. This was four minutes after the bell had rung. Her response, ‘Quit talking to me. Get out of my space.’ I was 3-4 feet away. I then calmly repeated that she needed to leave, and she responded with, ‘Shut the fuck up you bitch ass ho.’”
This is an inevitable result, not only of people like the woman in the first tweet, but of the concrete policy prescriptions of “Pacific Educational Group” – the San Francisco consulting firm employed by the Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Edina and many other metro school districts.
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he will forgive $10,00 in federal student debt for most borrowers, fulfilling a campaign pledge and delivering financial relief to millions of Americans.
Biden will cancel up to $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants.
“Both of these targeted actions are for families who need it the most,” the president said in remarks from the White House on Wednesday afternoon.
I love the smell of moral hazard in the morning. But if there’s a cohort of our society that really loves this sort of thing, it’s the folks who assumed their “Studies” degree was their ticket to the carriage class. The donks long ago realized they have neither reason nor incentive to bestow other people’s resources on the working class or the small business dudes, because they aren’t picking up the check at Le Diplomate. The “S” in an S corporation now stands for suck it.
At this point, the game is evident even to those who’d rather not think about politics — helping the commonweal is right out. Higher education is the best thing the donks have going and subsidizing their efforts is the highest and best use of other people’s money. And if you look at the price tag, you’re probably a denier. And if you paid your own way to go to trade school, you’re a chump. The rewards go to Derrida, not derring-do.
The timing is crucial here — there’s no question this move will piss off millions of potential voters, but there’s also no question that we’ll all be getting a steady supply of ether from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and the constellation of like-minded political action groups flattering the Studies majors from Olaf and Kenyon and Swarthmore (and Eau Claire and Bemidji, too) that despite everything, they are actually part of the in-crowd. The checks will clear in plenty of time for the clientele, but the unwilling benefactors will be too busy trying to make payroll to get out and door knock.
Former Trump hand Michael Anton, writing for Compact, offers a bracing view of the various pathologies of Trump haters, whose numbers are legion, at least among the chattering classes. I am going to pull a few quotes; this article is a festival of pull quotes, truly a “read the whole thing” special. But a few of Anton’s observations deserve particular consideration, to wit:
Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.
All along the Potomac, you can sense it: oh boy, here comes the hoi polloi. The whole point of the current January 6 show trial is to demonstrate, beyond question, that your concerns do not matter. Stay outta the 202, y’all. The enmity Anton describes began before Trump — before the MAGA hat became the visible headgear from hell, the tricorner hats of the Tea Party were not a source of great amusement to our betters, but rather an unwelcome interruption to the exciting new world on offer. The concerns of those citizens mattered not at all then and little has changed.
The Tea Party did not last; it was leaderless by design and easily coopted and dispersed by the professional Republicans who serve as junior partners in the Beltway ecosystem. So nothing changed. What did change? This time the hoi polloi had a herald, who happened to be a publicity hound from Queens.
Why did Trump get the gig? Why wasn’t the herald someone more housebroken, like Marco Rubio or “Jeb!” or John “Daddy Was a Postman” Kasich? Amazingly, it was because a carnival barker like Trump was more credible than the other worthies in the field were. Back to Anton:
The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.
What Tea Party/MAGA types want isn’t hegemony over their betters. Rather, they want to be left alone, without the ministrations of those who have plans for how they ought to live their lives. Can’t have that, of course. And if you are old enough to have had friendships of over 30 years, you understand and have likely experienced the following:
People I have known for 30 years, many of whom still claim the label “conservative,” will no longer speak to me—because I supported Trump, yes, but also because I disagree on trade, war, and the border. They call not just my positions, but me personally, unadulterated evil. I am not an isolated case. There are, as they say, “many such cases.”
Kevin Williamson and the NR gang, pick up the white courtesy phone. Then Anton gets to the nub:
How are we supposed to have “democracy” when the policies and candidates my side wants and votes for are anathema and can’t be allowed? How are we supposed to live together with the constant demonization from one side against the other blaring 24/7 from the ruling class’s every propaganda organ? Why would we want to?
I am not sure we can. There’s more, a whole lot more, at the link. Consider it carefully, as we are in a dangerous moment.
People often would send in lists of “non-essential” businesses that remained open or weren’t strictly following masking requirements, according to files from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA).
Another complaint reported on people for purchasing non-essential items at a convenience store in White Bear Lake. “Customers are coming and saying, ‘I’m bored and needed to get out of the house.’ They buy lottery tickets, a candy bar, a soda … those items are not ‘essential.’”
I was about to write“This might not be my better self speaking“.
But I think everybody’s better self wants a chunk out of these people, too.
The “MN Reformer” is yet another effort to start a news organization by progressive plutocrats with deep pockets – because after the Minnesota Monitor, the Minnesota Independent and MNPost, certainly the fourth time’s the charm.
They’ve actually done some decent reporting over the last year.
Emphasis on “in the last year” – when there wasn’t an election on the way.
But there is.
The Reformerran an op-ed by Dr. Hannah Lichtsinn calling for the state medical authorities to revoke Dr. Scott Jensen’s medical license. Jensen is, by the way, the GOP candidate for Governor. He’s also been an out-front skeptic of our state’s hamfisted, tyrannical public health response.
Neither the op-ed, the Reformer’sbio-blurb about Dr. Lichtsinn, nor any of the Reformer’s social media traffic makes any mention of any political bent that she might have.
Anecdotally – and I’m the one with the anecdote, here – Dr. Lichtsinn has been pretty much the polar opposite of Jensen; on social media, she was a positively strident proponent of lockdowns, mandates of every kind, and draconian enforcement.
And the reason for that is, she’s every bit as much a Democrat activist with portfolio as she is a doctor:
It’d be fair to say that, when not playing nice and empirical in op-eds intended to be marketed to the unconvinced center, she’s a “groaningly strident” progressive
Apparently the Reformer didn’t think the reader needed to know that.
Which is why the Reformer – unlike the MN Monitor and the MN Independent before it – bothered with all that “decent reporting” last year; to put up a veneer of legitimacy around what was intended to be yet another DFL PR operation during the 2022 campaign season.
First, some background to catch up on. In January, in this Newsweek column, Todd Zywicki pointed out how cancel culture has infected even the buttoned-down world of banking.
This past November, Missouri’s conservative Defense of Liberty PAC scheduled a high-profile event featuring a speech by Donald Trump, Jr. On November 9, however, WePay—a JPMorgan Chase subsidiary that provided the payment services for the event—announced the termination of those services. WePay accused the organization of violating its policy against promotion of “hate, violence, racial intolerance, terrorism, the financial exploitation of a crime, or items or activities that encourage, promote facilitate or instruct others regarding the same.” Although WePay eventually reversed its decision, the organization had to cancel the speech.
WePay’s actions followed a series of similar incidents in recent years that includes the cancellation of former president Trump’s personal bank account, Michael Flynn’s credit cards and at least one Christian nonprofit organization. The fossil fuel and firearms industries have been targeted too. Businesses selling controversial materials have had their payments services terminated and consequently shuttered. The decisions to cancel these high-profile individuals or groups are often reversed after public outcry and dismissed as a “mistake” by the providers. But what about individual people who lack the public standing to fight back?
In February then, the Minnesota Bank and Trust threw Mike Lindell (of MyPillow fame) out the frosted glass doors and onto the street.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been terminated as a client by the Minnesota Bank & Trust a month after the financial institution described him as a “reputation risk.”
Insider viewed two letters sent to Lindell by the bank dated February 11. In one letter, the bank said Lindell’s accounts with the bank would be closed by the end of business on February 18.
In March, Biden issued (er, that should probably be “Biden” “issued”…) an executive order calling for studies on the feasibility and ramifications of implementing central bank digital currencies. The EO calls for several reports due by September 5.
One such report was issued last week by the Treasure Department on a “Framework for International Engagement on Digital Assets”.
China is already taking steps towards a digital renminbi. Here, the central banks have several reasons for being interested in a digital currency. One is the threat that cryptocurrencies pose to their hegemony.
There’s the danger in a cbdc, though. The implementation will probably not involve something like a blockchain or some similar form of distributed ledger for tracking and verifying transactions. Rather, the state, or a state body, will track things in some kind of database.
And that’s why the Left is interested. Imagine the power the Left would have over you if the state can see all your digital transactions, and worse, has the power to stop them.
Hey, Joe Citizen, I don’t want you buying that firearm. Transaction denied. Hey, Joe Citizen, you’ve bought too much gas this month already and you’re killing the planet. Transaction denied.
If Elizabeth Warren is for it, that alone should be a red flag. The Left means to control you, by any means at their disposal. We’re a long ways from the innocent days when your neighborhood bank was part of your community and there to serve you.
