Compare And Contrast

SCENE: It’s the studio at Minnesota Public Radio. MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, is guest-ghosting “MInnesota Insights”, a program of insights about Minnesota,. She is interviewing Gretel STROMBERG, Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”.

SILBERMAN: So, big news in Los Angeles. The city is banning gasoline-powered leaf blowers. What’s your take on that, Gretel?

STROMBERG: (sounding audibly giddy). I could hardly be happier! That noise every fall just drives me crazy. And sturdies show that a leaf blower creates a biggest carbon footprint in an afternoon than a car driving from Minneapolis to Fresno.

SILBERMAN: Hmmm.

STROMBERG: But it’s also the fact that it’s just a horrible sound.

SILBERMAN: Oh, same for me!

STROMBERG (sounding like she’s trying to head off a faux pas), let me say that what I’m saying is from the perspective of a white woman of privilege…

SILBERMAN: Of course…

STROMBERG: Because white woman privilege is huge and powerful.

(Scene cuts to a community clinic in Coleraine, Minnesota, where Angela PULJUU, an LPN, is driving home from a 12 hour shift in an assisted living center)

PULJUU: Huh.

(Scene cuts to a tony home in Deephaven, facing Lake Minnetonka. Karen BERHEIM-WOLD, part-time realtor, ex-wife of a successful entrepreneur and current trophy wife of a bank CEO, is having a cup of Nespresson in her three season porch overlooking the lake)

BERHEIM-WOLD: That is so true.

(Scene cuts to a small farm in Goodhue County, where Janelle HELMBACHER is looking at price hikes in the meat aisle at the local grocery store)

HELMBACHER: What, now?

(Scene cuts to an opulent mansion in Chicago, where for whatever reason Oprah Winfrey is listening to the live stream)

WINFREY: Testify!

(Scene cuts to a school bus in South Saint Paul, where teachers aid Pauline SCZEPANSKI is wrangling a bunch of junior high kids who have gotten un-used to being around kids or following rules).

SCZEPANSKI: Huh.

And SCENE

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Urban Progressive Privilege: Chicago On The Mississippi

A friend of the blog emails:

On Tuesday, St Paul voters will vote on rent control.

Several council members are surprisingly against it. Of course, no surprise that CM Jalali is in favor of it. She tweets about how much she has supported development, and how even that development has not been enough to help tenets who continue to face high rent increases.


If she were really honest, she has mostly supported the tear down of single family houses in order for one developer to build apartments on Marshall Avenue. That particular developer was identified in The Villager as someone who donates to Jalali’s campaigns. She has opposed developments of decades long vacant lots elsewhere.

As for the rent control measure on the ballot, I don’t see how it turns out any differently than the garbage collection- small, local landlords bought out by bigger, corporate landlords. They would be the only ones able to afford the rent control. And Jalali probably won’t stop until all the privately owned homes are bought out by corporate landlords so we all become renters, so we can all feel like one, you know. (So we can all be indebted to the whims of our overlords).

Like most everything in Saint Paul politics, this is a group of upper-middle-class progressives in Crocus Hill and Merriam Park playing “let’s build a utopia” with a real city – more or less – as their lab. Just like the indoor smoking ban, or the Tony Soprano Trash Collection “system” [1], or Minneapolis’s “Public Safety” charter referendum, there is no thought to unintended consequences, and plenty of reason to believe it’ll just be another money transfer to the city’s political class.

Given that the inevitable result of “rent control” is rent becoming inexorably less affordable, the developer class – which is finaincially joined at the. hip with the political class. – stands to benefit handsomely.

Saint Paul. Chicago on the Mississippi.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Boundaries

One of the most futile memes in the conservative alternative media is “If this were happening to (fill in a democrat, or Democrats), this would he treated as a hate crime”.

It’s futile because the people who care have no power, and the people in power don’t care.

Still and all, it applies.

A protester – inoculated from blame in some quarters by being an “immigrant youth” – followed Kristen Sinema into a rest room at Arizona State (where SInema teaches) to…

…well, badger her:

And while the meme is threadbare, the fact remains – if anyone were to do this to Ilhan Omar or Tide Pod Evita, this would be treated by the media as a hate crime, accompanied by “think”Pieces about the vanishing of civility.

Urban Progressive Privilege:Somebody Else’s Neighborhood

Saint Paul progressives are all about high density housing and development.

In the Midway. Or out on the East Side. Or all up and down University Avenue.

Not, you know, where they live:

Neighbors who rallied together under the title “Friends of A Better Way St. Paul” had said the St. Paul Planning Commission had mishandled a series of zoning variances related to the height and density of the proposed structure, which would span 80 residential apartments and four restaurant-ready commercial spaces at ground level.

Fearless prediction: the development gets built, but only after the city spends enough on fighting the court case against the well-heeled neighborhood to have hired 200 cops.

Checked And Balanced

A state district judge has thrown out a lawsuit by a group of parents Who were seeking an order requiring the governor to issue a state wide mask mandate and to reinstate the state of emergency.

Thankfully, the judge shot the request down:

“While this court is gravely concerned about the public health consequences of the failure of school districts to implement the guidance of the CDC and the Minnesota Department of Health regarding the use of masks for children, teachers, and staff in K-12 public schools,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “the judiciary cannot order a co-equal branch of government to exercise its discretionary, political judgment to implement a specific educational policy.”

In other words…

… (Mitch takes a deep breath)…

…the parents wanted a member of the judicial branch to compel the head of the executive branch do seize all of the authority of the legislative branch.

Sure, we have a public health crisis. We have an even bigger crisis in civics education in this state.

Urban Progressive Privilege: My Scientific Research Project

Title: Analyzing the Propensity of Modern Feminists, Progressives and the Media to Overstate Accrued Virtue.

Aim of the Experiment: The aim of the experiment is to test whether there is any activity approved of by “Big Left” that a woman can do, that will not be turned into a example of supreme personal moral virtue.

Hypothesis: It is predicted that, provided the activity is one promoted by “Big Left”, that there is no activity a woman can carry out that will not be referred to as “Brave”, “Courageous”, “Fierce” or other such superlatives.

Background Theory: It is believed that the rhetorical “Bar” for an action to be considered an act of personal moral courage, when the action is:

  • Congruent with the values of modern political and social “progressives”, and
  • Performed by a woman

…has dropped to the point of nearly being indistinguishable from any normal activity.

Methodology: The research team:

  1. Observed an extensive list of actions
  2. We specifically looked for examples of morally unremarkable, mundane, even counterproductive activities not being referred to in morally superlative terms
  3. We documented the results.

Results: We found no examples.

Discussion of Results: In comment section

Conclusion: There is literally nothing a woman can do (provided it’s congruent with the values of Big Left) too unremarkable, mundane or even destructive that won’t be called ‘Brave’.

Unexpectedly

I wasn’t living here in 1980. I’m not sure how Minneapolis’s Loony Left reacted to the “Solidarity“ protests in Poland – where the Polish “Solidarity“ trade union led a year of demonstrations against Poland’s communist government. The demonstrations – which newly elected President Ronald Reagan supported morally, symbolically and materially – were the beginning of the end of the communist bloc, and the Soviet Union with it.

I have vague memories, arriving in the Twin Cities years later, of sensing that an awful lot of Minnesota leftists had bet on the wrong side in that particular episode. I mean, two decades later some of them still did, in my comment section.

Now, 40 years later, as a similarly benighted country protests for similar reasons, a Democrat government is lending the Cuban demonstrators a bit of rhetorical support from a senile president, along with an executive branch that is, as we noted yesterday, laying down the law hard in favor of the regime.

And the Minnesota left?

They are showing themselves to be as morally depraved and intellectually bovine as ever:

Facing an economic crisis, food and medicine shortages and rising prices, the Cuban people are demanding that the communist regime give up power.

“We have to see the larger context of the pandemic, COVID-19. The economy has also collapsed, Cuba depends on tourism,” said Nimtz. The Minnesota Cuba Committee is also calling for an end to the U.S. trade embargo.

“What we are doing here is to demand, demand that the Biden administration end the embargo, lift the embargo, and do as he promised,” said Nimtz.

Minnesota Progressives; reliable communist useful idiots for 60 years.

The Memory And Perceptions Holes

A friend of the blog emails re what’s going on in Uptown Minneapolis:

If the local media doesn’t report on what’s happening does that mean it doesn’t exist?

As far as political life and the institutional history of Minneapolis at this point in history observed by our political class?

Rhetorical question, right?

Urban Progressive Privilege means never having to feel awkward about the devastation your policies inevitably lead to.

The Asylum

MInneapolis City Councilor Andrea Jenkins, presumably feeling herself swaddled in Urban Progressive Privilege and Intersectional Armor, went to a demonstration.

And was promptly out-lefted:

“BLM” blocked her car, demanding she sign a list of their demands:

Which, naturally, happened.

Let’s assume for a moment that this whole spiel isn’t staged, to give Jenkins’a whiff of the intersectional activist’s most important commodity, victimhood – and the fact that “BLM” put a dorky white kid in front of the car, allowing Jenkins to bellow about “white suprmacy” just loudly enough for the camera to pick it up, lends at least casual credence to the theory…

…and the more I think about it, the more I think “staged”.

But let’s pump the brakes. What if it was legitimate and organic?

Remember – if anyone replaces the clown car that is running Minneapolis – Frey, Jenkins, Cunningham, Alondra Cano, Jeremiah Ellison – it’s going to be someone to their left.

Behold, Minneapolis 2023

After a solid year of “protests” – they might be more accurately called “a ‘ultra-progressive’ coup on the streets” – Portland’s coalition of Big Left constituents is starting to fracture.

[The “anarchists”] have shown themselves at times to be violent — one was charged with attempted murder after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the police — destructive of property and highly adaptable, using social media tools and other strategies to divert the police from the targets they select.

Direct actions are promoted on social media with the phrase “No gods, no masters,” a 19th-century anarchist term that indicates a rejection of all forms of authority. More traditional protesters from Black Lives Matter and other movements who try to curtail violence are now ridiculed as “peace police” by the anarchists, who mostly consist of young, white men.

Demetria Hester, a member of Moms United for Black Lives, continues to push for defunding the police but disagrees with the current call for dismantling the entire political system. “Breaking windows is performative,” she said. “That satisfies them at night, but they don’t have a plan.”

Some prominent Black leaders have been formally distancing themselves, with some calling the anarchists’ rejection of gradual progress just another symbol of privilege that Black people do not have.

“Being able to protest every night is a white privilege, being able to yell at a police’s face is a white privilege,” said Gregory McKelvey, a prominent Black organizer who ran the mayoral campaign last year for Mr. Wheeler’s opponent, Sarah Iannarone. “Most Black people across the country do everything they can to avoid cops.”

Of course, the McKelvey’s statement shows his own class bias; wanting to “burn it all down” and “revolution”, like all such revolutions, are the affectation, not of those who have nothing to lose, but of those who believe they have nothing to fear about everyone else losing everything.

I Think I Figured It Out

An allegory in three acts:

Act 1

SCENE: An elementary school classroom.BULLY is sitting at the desk next to KID. A half dozen pencils lie strewn about the floor around KID’s desk.

BULLY: Throws a pencil at KID. KID looks annoyed, but shakes it off.

BULLY: (Sotto Voce) Hey, kid! (KID looks over as BULLY whips another pencil at him. KID, more annoyed, shakes it off)

BULLY: (Sotto Voce again). Hey, kid!

KID: Tries to ignore BULLY.

BULLY: (Flings pencil, hard . The pencil catches KID in the corner of the eye, and it hurts.

KID: (Jumps up). What’s your problem?

BULLY: Ms. Walburn! Ms. Walburn! The Kid is trying to pick a fight with me!

MS. WALBURN: Kid, you have detention tonight!

BULLY: Ms. Walburn, have I not been warning you about Kid’s propensity to bullying for days, now ?

KID: What the…?

And SCENE

Act Two

SCENE: In the kitchen of a single-wide trailer. WIFE Is sitting on the floor sobbing. HUSBAND is looking around, apparently making sure nobody saw what just happened.

HUSBAND: Look, you provoked me.

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, OK, hitting was wrong, but you have to admit, the way you badger me about things is emotional abuse. And you know what they way – emotional abuse is worse than physical abuse.

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: And you were badgering me. I mean, criminy, we both have big problems, here.

WIFE (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, since emotional abuse is worse, and you do a lot of it, we’re really still not even even-up, here…

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, you’re lucky I’m willing to call it even. It’s a gift.

WIFE (Sobs)

Act Three

SCENE: The United States, today.

BIG LEFT: “Whiteness” is a mental disorder that goes along with merely being white. Whiteness and systemic racism are inseparable.

NORMALS: That’s bulls#it.

BIG LEFT: That’s your privilege, racism, misogyny, transphobia and ethnocentrism talking.

NORMALS: That’s just word salad at best. “Inclusion language” – an arcane code designed to show you’re one of the “good ones” – at worst.

BIG LEFT: What if your employer were to find out about your retrograde thinking? They might not appreciated it.

NORMALS: So you’re going to try to cancel me, now?

BIG LEFT: Pffft. There is no such thing as “cancel culture”.

NORMALS: Sure there is. If we’re mainstream conservatives, and haven’t gone as undercover as a Mossad operative in Tehran, we can’t get jobs in Academia, public education, much of private education, Hollywood, many public employee unions, the news media, a whooole lot of BIg Tech, an increasing number of smaller companies. And if we break cover – or any “evidence” of mainstream conservatism is found, we can get hounded out of our jobs, our hobbies, our volunteer work, deplatformed, and have our personal lives upended as well.

BIG LEFT: Republicans do it too!

NORMALS: So let me get this straight – it doesn’t exist, but Republicans do it too?

BIG LEFT: Evangelical groups picketed LGBTQ bookstores! Gays were oppressed!

NORMALS: OK, so that’s a “yes”. And let’s be clear on this – you go back almost forty years, to very localized episodes, to find behavior that pretty much every significant conservative repudiates today. As opposed to people being barred or drummed out of whole swathes of academia, business and culture. No cancel culture? Please.

BIG LEFT: Nope. There is only “accountability culture”.

NORMALS: “Accountability” for what? Having, much less voicing, utterly mainstream Republican views?

BIG LEFT: For the results of your Privilege and Whiteness!

NORMALS: Privilege – an Orwellian deflection of classist and cultural privilege shared by the left’s “elites” over to race? “Whiteness” – a bit of made-up pseudo-social-science designed entirely to denigrate and invalidate people without needing to engage in any facts?

BIG LEFT: Sounds like “white fragility” talking…

NORMALS: More word salad, with a siding of making facts up as you go along.

BIG LEFT: Here’s the only “fact” you need: January 6! The worst act of terrorism in American history!

NORMALS: Leaving aside the fact that it’s far from the only partisan violence at the seat of American democracy, January 6 was something that every significant conservative repudiated. But you keep on trying to apply it to everyone you disagree with, as if it gives The Left a permanent intellectual get out of jail free card.

BIG LEFT: Bet you wouldn’t be talking so big if you had a bunch of protesters in front of your house, would you? It’d be a shame if something…broke.

NORMALS: Go ahead. Make my day.

BIG LEFT: It’s a threat! It’s a threat! Behold the wave of white supremacist terror we’ve been warning you about for the past fifteen years!

And SCENE.

City + Other People’s Money + Urban Progressive Privilege = Fun For Progs!

A friend of the blog emails:

I’m not going to weigh in on whether the Interstate system was bad for some neighborhoods when it happened. 

But, every urban renewal project since then (like St Paul’s Green Line) seems to have been worse in terms of the impact on these neighborhoods. The goal in these current projects seems to be to keep poor neighborhoods poor and segregated. 

So, I read this and anticipate that current St Paul activists/councilmembers are looking at Syracuse and drooling at what they can do to I94 and the businesses owned by Immigrants and POC that survived the Green Line and the 2020 riots. And how many accolades they’ll get from Macalester Groveland for “saving those people” from pollution of cars by destroying their businesses and displacing them out to suburbs. 

It’s funny- they supposedly hate cars so much, but they never ask to close the section of Snelling Ave down between Selby and Grand, for instance. It’s always about shutting down streets in neighborhoods where they want to make sure to keep control of the residents.

I’ve wanted to tell these people – you want to make a statement? Muster all that political clout you have and shut down Lincoln and Portland Avenues from Hamline to Western. Or Dayton from Snelling to the River . Or just block all the streets south of West Seventh from Eagle down to Grand. Or Como from 280 east to Raymond. And make Crocus Hill, Merriam Park, Irvine Park and Saint Anthony Park, respectively, the urban meadows you envision.

Lead by example!

Cause -> Effect?

A few weeks back: U of M “student government” official (and Tina Smith employee) calls for students to resist the U of M police – in as many words, to “make their lives hell“.

Today – the U is turning into a cold Newark:

University of Minnesota police are warning students, staff and neighbors to be on alert after a rash of sometimes violent robberies and thefts in the Dinkytown and Stadium Village areas of Minneapolis…One of the more violent incidents occurred midafternoon Sunday at SE. University and 14th avenues, where a young man took someone’s phone and fled in a stolen vehicle. As the suspect drove off, he hit his victim with the car, causing minor injuries.

Y’know, for all the flak being heaped on all conservatives for the first-ever act of political violence in American history, January6, you’d think someone might do the same for all the damage “progressive” rhetoric has wrought…

oh.

Urban Progressive Privilge: Two Americas

It would seem there are two black Americas.

One whom upper middle class white progressives have appointed themselves leaders – the type that call Tim Scott “Uncle Tim” and jabber on about defunding and actively harassing the police “for racial justice“…

…and the actual people who live in the neighborhoods that are being gutted.

In Brooklyn Center, where the destruction was visible firsthand, respondents (nearly all black men of various ages) overwhelmingly opposed rioting. An African-American man in an “Army Veteran” hat commented: “We’re human, and we want to be treated with respect,” but we also need to show “respect.”

A man in construction gear remarked: “I guarantee you the people that were looting, nine times out of 10, weren’t from this area. . . . If you feel the need to lash out, then don’t get mad when people, you know, address you as a looter or a rioter.”

A woman in a Black Lives Matter mask agreed: “These are two different things: We have protesters, and then we have rioters.”

The people of Brooklyn Center seemed to hold a pretty nuanced view about the difference between protest and destruction.

On the streets of Washington, on the other hand, support for riots among the capital’s bourgeoisie was almost universal. One young woman said that “if change needs to be made, and it’s not getting done in the traditional avenues, then rioting is a good option.”

All the Democrats had to do to get the black working class that voted for Trump in two-generationi-high numbers back in the fold was not be crazy.

They just can’t do it.

Urban Progressive Privilege Means Never Needing A Moral Compass

Erin Maye Quade – who, you may recall, came within an epic suck up to the progressive movement of being Minnesota’s lieutenant governor – had this to say about Tim Scott’s rebuttal to the presidents… whatever that was Wednesday night:

This, on top of Ryan WInkler’s “Uncle Tom” jape at one of the most accomplished jurists of any race in US history, and of course the “Uncle Tim” slur earlier this week, is enough to make any moral creature ask…

…what is the Democratic Party going to do about its racism problem?

UPDATE: I’ve “cloned” this post from yesterday. You’ll see why in a moment.

Toxic AF Romper Room

This is an open thread for all the random dick-measuring y’all wanna do. Like arguing about the Holocaust.

An even on which this blog has been crystal clear throughout its history, if you happened to read any of it.

Or branch out and flame away over whether Van Halen is “Metal” or “Hard Rock”. Knock yourselves out.

The conversation — one of the most comical threadjacks this blog has had since “Dog Gone” was fumigated – will not metastasize into any other threads. I need say no more.

Well Groomed

There was a little bit of kerfuffle earlier this week over this tweet, by “a member of the U of M’s student government”:

Is this not the ultimate expression of “white privilege?”

It can almost go without saying that she’s got a job coming up in Tina Smith’s office. So you can forget about the whole “accountability” thing.

Urban Progressive Privilege: In Which I Defend A Cake-Eating Private School

Around the time of the Chauvin verdict, and in the wake of the Brooklyn Center shooting, a group of students at posh Creti\-Derham Hall – a private Catholic school in Saint Paul – held a walkout.

Now, that’s fine. It’s a foreign concept to me, of course – in my day, at my high school, with its principal who’d served as a Marine fighter pilot in World War 2, it was pretty well understood a student’s place was in his damn desk. I honestly think both approaches have their merits.

Now, with Cretin-Derham Hall (henceforth CDH) which charges $14,765 a year in tuition (which, even after adjusting for inflation, is about 40% more than I spent for undergrad college at a private four-year institution), there’s the added imperative with one suspects at least a few parents, to spend more time on learning and less on the social-justice chatter one sees being substituted for “Education” in the public system.

They Doth Protest Too Much

So – was it OK for the students at CDH to walk out? That’s between the students, the faculty and the ATM machines. Er, parents.

What can not be considered OK is the alleged behavior by some of the students, as related in the Pioneer Press’s story on the subject (emphasis added by me):

As the group gathered back at the school, a student organizer used a school megaphone to lead an anti-police, “F— 12” chant, which administrators quickly sought to shut down.

Meanwhile, a group of girls recorded a video taunting a police officer’s son, who stayed home from school on Monday.

Students told the Pioneer Press that at least six students of various ethnicities were suspended.

Into the fray steps a woman – a “Chicano Studies” professor at the U of M, and not only a CDH graduate, but a second generation alum – with an open letter to CDH’s administration (and, of course, all the social media) with the social justice verdict on the subject. Here’s the letter – I’ll leave it to you to read it, if you want. I’ll pullquote it in case it disappears, not that the professor (who I won’t name, because why?) wijll face any consequences for writing it.

She repeats, several times, that she was a “student of color” at CDH -but also mentions that her father also graduated from CDH, that she’s gone onto an academic career including a PhD from UC Santa Barbara and a position at the U of M teaching in a discipline ending with “…Studies”, which I present with no further comment, other than to say that if she was oppressed (as she claims repeatedly in the letter, although generally in the form of “microaggressions”), it’s not apparent from her implied curriculum vitae. Not only did someone spend an awful lot of money to send her to school – implying at least one generation cared about her education pretty profoundly – but someone did the same for her father, somehow.

Failure To Communicate

Her letter is…

…well, about what you’d expect from someone who’s a professor of anything ending in “studies”. But there are a couple of bits that:

  • Show the parlous state of higher educations today
  • Given the amount of cheerleading support the professor got on social media, show the dismal state of logic in society today.

The first part:

Your call to understand “BOTH” sides, and that “we can be politically conservative or liberal or somewhere on the broad continuum of thought AND coexist in a respectful environment built on common values,” [Bold is original] fails to understand what is currently happening in our city, state, and nation. This is not a matter of hearing each other out. This is a matter of life and death. Black people are killed by police at alarming rates

Have you noticed how often sentences that says a statement “…fails to understand” something almost inevitably deflect someone’s perfect understanding of a situation?

And what actions, that the public knows about, crossed any sort of ideological line? The protests?

No. It was the six kids that allegedly bullied the cop’s kid.

While CDH wouldn’t specifically comment on the nature of the six suspensions, the school confirmed to me that no students were suspended for protesting legitimately. Who does thjat leave? There are only so many possibilities.

So – not only is she saying there are not multiple sides of this issue, and there is not room for multiple perspectives, but that if you think there are you clearly favor killing black people; accusing people of racism for supporting a dialog about issues is bad enough.

But she’s bringing that accusation to bear to support six alleged bullies. Criticizing, not the protests, but the bullying that sprang from them, is racist!

As Dennis Prager points out, it takes an elite education something something something. I forget thje rest.

Speaking of Consequences

Later, apparently criticizing the suspension of (I’ll say it again) six kids who made a video harassing someone for being the son of a policeman, she writes (and I add empjasis):

As educators we must impede the school to prison pipeline. Taking this type of disciplinary action as opposed to teaching, listening, and engaging with these young people is not only a missed opportunity, but continues the same punitive action that this present moment is fighting against.

The professor apparently would have you believe that suspending students at a posh private school for allegedly bullying a fellow student is:

  • Going on the students criminal records
  • On a moral par with not only being killed by the police, but killed for no cause whatsoever.

The galling part about this is not that someone who teaches our kids is writing this sort of stuff with a straight face. This sort of thought would appear to be the water in which PhDs in anything ending in “…Studies” swim.

The galling part was, when someone posted the letter on a neighborhood social media page, watching the locals – it was in Highland Park – tripping over each other to compliment the writer’s wisdom. And when questioned in any way, how many of them reverted immediately to…

Because Trump.

Moral vacuity is a barrel that has no bottom to scrape in Saint Paul.

Quick Note: Any commenter that asks “So, you’re ok withj black people being summarily executed” will be blocked, forever, and urged to go pay penance for being the moral plaque on societies arteries that you are.

Another Quick Note: “What, Berg – you’re a conservative, riffing on private schools? ”

No. I’m riffing on Cretin-Derham Hall. What the Ivies are to the nation, CDH is to Saint Paul, and I don’t entirely mean that in a good way. There’s a CDH. mafia ijn this town. Which makes the professor’s letter doubly ironic; if CDH grads are “oppressed” in the Twin CIties, it’s because they’ve worked hard to feel oppressed.

Parody Meets Reality. As Usual.

Babylon Bee tries to parody the hypocrisy of the Twin Cities political class.

They’re running a solid four years behind the Twin Cities pollitical class’s ongoing self parody.

One of the traits of Urban Progressive Privilege – being the beneficiary of a double standard makes no more impression than the concept of “water” does to a fish.

The Racism Of Commoditized Expectations

In the wake of the verdict yesterday, Speaker Pelosi thanked George Floyd for his “sacrifice”:

“Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice,” Pelosi said Tuesday outside the Capitol where she was joined by the Congressional Black Caucus.

“Because of you and because of millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice. And now we have to make sure justice prevails in the sentencing.”

Has there ever been a more perfect symbol of what black people really mean to the Democrat party?

Here, in one of the most “progressive” cities in the country:

  • The “achievement gap” is the biggest in the nation, and getting worse even as the districts get more “woke” every year (not that those are in any way contradictory
  • In cities controlled by Democrats for generations, the wealth gap is among the highest in the nation
  • “Black” neighborhoods (we don’t really have them in the sense they exist elsewhere – which actually reinforces the point) are basically social service warehouses. Compare this with places like Atlanta or Jacksonville – Minneapolis doesn’t come across very well at all.

These same patterns are true across all of “blue” America. Quick – think of a “blue” city where that’s not the case? Atlanta is an arguable exception.

Indeed, the decline of the black middle class and the black family coincided – and, let’s be honest, were caused by – the Democrat Party’s ongoing campaign to bring all of black society under its social wing.

So yeah. Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for doing the one thing she expects of any black man – providing her a crisis to not waste.

None Dare Call It Slander

I mean, when even Bill Maher gets uncomfortable…

Former North Dakota Senator and current useless mouth Heidi Heitkamp calls Gina Carano a “Nazi”. Plain and simple, full stop.

I’ll chalk this up to the (utterly true) idea that any Democrat can parrot any narrative twaddle, no matter how moronic, without fear, knowing that their audience hasn’t the critical thinking skills to call them on it. Or anything.

But I won’t get mad. I’ll just get on the air. I sent this to her Facebook page.

Senator,

I’m Mitch Berg. I grew up in Jamestown. My mother, Jan Berg/Brooks, was a volunteer for any number of your campaigns at the state and federal level.

I fell a bit farther from the tree, politically, of course.

I’d like to make a media request – I’d love to interview y ou on my show (WWTC AM1280) in the Twin Cities regarding your assertion that Gina Carano is a “Nazi”.

I can either do it live on Saturday at 2PM, or record an interview at any time convenient to you.

Hope we can discuss this.

Thanks.

Why, sure – I expect a response! Why wouldn’t I?

Among The Biggest Advantages…

…that DFL politicians have is that they can say anything, no matter how illogical, preposterous and risible, anything at all , knowing that not only will the media never call them out on it, but that “their” voters, of all races, classes and education levels, having as they do zero critical thinking skills, will gobble it up.

Councilman Philippe Cunningham, in a “Neighborhood Safety Manual”, repeats the assertion from last year that “Klansmen”, complete with robes and pointy hoods, were roaming North Minneapolis during the riots.

Note to non-MSP residents: Klansmen in robes will occur in the Twin Cities about the same time I go on a hot third date with Anna Kendrick.

Hometown Boy Makes Good Idiot Of Self

The good news: After hearing Ben Shapiro roasting Rupar last week on his radio show, I have to say it’s been amazing seeing that more people nationwide are learning what we in the Twin Cities have known for most of a decade: that City Pages alum and Vox “writer” Aaron Rupar is a really terrible “journalist” and not an especially bright man (read the whole thread):

The bad news: these days, competence and discernment are less important than ideological purity and loyalty.

And, Rupar being simultaneously a definer and beneficiary of Urban Progressive Privilege, he’ll never be held to account for it any more than Jim Acosta or Esme Murphy.