American society eventually coughed Alex Jones out of its system.
Could we maybe do the same with Tucker Carlson?
The thing is, once he gets up the nerve to finally name Trump the person he’s yapping about, he’ll have a whole new career joining Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arne Carlson as “the good Republicans”.
Not sure why he’s waiting.
He’s talking about the Nick Shirley video that’s brought the Minnesota fraud scandal to a few million new sets of eyeballs:
Nick Shirley’s video (I’ll link it in the comments) has gotten a ton of traffic and is bringing the story of Minnesota’s fraud pandemic to a lot of people for the first time – but Bill Glahn, Liz Collin, Scott Johnson and even some MSM reporters (Lou Raguse, Jay Kolls) have been reporting on the fraud problem, including this very daycare, for literally four years. Shirley’s video is a great contribution, especially in terms of eyeballs on topic (pushing 100 million as I write this) – but the fact that it’s the first coverage you’ve *noticed* about the fraud doesn’t make it the first coverage. Do a little listening. Some of us have been beating the drum on this story literally for years [1].
Now, let’s move on to Mr. Mannarino and his invincibly ignorant post.
“While you clowns collect fat paychecks to audit and oversee the government”
Strap in for some ninth-grade civics.
Who does Mr. Mannarino (or anyone who read what he wrote and went “that makes sense!”) think does the “Auditing” of state government?
The executive branch.
Who runs the executive branch?
Since 2011, the DFL. Completely. 100%. Minnesota Republicans have had zero influence into any part of the work of *the executive branch* – the Attorney General, the Secretary of State and especially the entire bureaucracy that reports to the Governor – since Tim Pawlenty left office about this time 15 years ago. [2]
The GOP has had intermittent power *in the legislature* since then – both chambers for two years, no chambers for four, and divided government the rest of the time.
And this is basic civics; the legislature doesn’t tell the governor how to run the executive branch, other than via the budget and, indirectly, via hearings. The legislature doesn’t have arrest or prosecutorial power. [3].
The DFL controls the Governor’s office, has a one-vote majority in the Senate, and a tied House of Representatives. Which meant nothing got through the legislature without *some* biparatisan support – in the 2025 session. Which is how the GOP shut down the DFL’s budget plans in 2025, and how the GOP managed to set up the Fraud Committee that is doing *everything a legislative body can* to fight fraud – hold hearings and make information public. In 2023 and 2024, the DFL controlled *everything* – governor, the whole legislature and the Supreme Court.
So when uninformed social media pundits like “Joey Mannarino” start yapping about “primarying every Republican in the legislature”, I keep asking: “what, SPECIFICALLY, did the GOP not do, that it was legally allowed to do, and was procedurally *able* to do being out of power in 23-24 and with only the power to say “No” today, that it SHOULD do?”
And the responses I get are usually things like…
“Get TOUGH”. OK. How?
“AUDIT them!” The Legislature doesn’t have that power, and even if it did, the DFL has the votes to block it.
“Walk out!” The DFL tried that. It cost them their budget. Given the tied House and minority in the Senate, it’d likely cost the GOP more.
“Arrest the governor!” The Legislature doesn’t have arrest power, even if the GOP had the majority.
Still waiting on an answer.
“Primarying the MNGOP in the Legislature” will affect fraud about as much as, I dunno, going after Menards’ rebate program. Anyone who tells you otherwise is engagement farming and/or fundraising off the ignorant.
Don’t be “the ignorant”.
[1] I’ve interviewed many of the principals on the fraud story since literally 2022 at the latest: Glahn, Johnson, Collin and others from Alpha, and some local Somalis as well.
[2] By the way – the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, the two largest parts of the executive branch, are both clogged with fraud, and the Attorney General is at the very least circumstantially tied to the fraud (having been recorded telling a room full of people who donated to his and his son’s re-elections that he’d fight AGAINST the Education Departments attempts to investigate them, a month before the FBI raided them and, eventually put them in prison) – but don’t you DARE suggest Secretary of State Simon and our election system aren’t above it all!
[3] And the governor can’t control how the legislature legislates – which is why Gov. Walz failed at armtwisting the legislature into agreeing to his agenda for a special session on “gun violence”
This fall and winter – when the Minnesota fraud story finally broke nationwide – has been a long time coming.
As has been a broad realization, at least among modestly independent media, that the Twin Cities media is exactly what we’ve been saying it is for the past 20-odd years:
“The Minnesota Star Tribune masquerades as a newspaper,” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine posted on X. “It’s actually a Democrat front, hiding news, twisting facts, lying outright. One of the worst in the country.”
Additionally, the paper’s CEO is Steve Grove, who served as Gov. Tim Walz’s former commissioner of employment and economic development, which has sparked criticism from some who say that the paper is hesitant to pin Walz to the fraud crisis.
Fox News Digital spoke to several locals who argued that media outlets either didn’t cover the scandal thoroughly enough or, in cases where it was covered, Walz’s oversight role was downplayed.
“The Minnesota Star Tribune has proven itself to be nothing more than communist fish wrap,” Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who represents Minnesota 6th Congressional District, told Fox News Digital.
A free, independent press – the one they envisioned when they wrote the First Amendment – is one of the things that makes self-government above the “tribe” level possible.
Maybe we’ll get one of those in Minnesota someday.
The Strib has run three pieces on the past few weeks pondering who paid for Rick Kupchella’s “A Precarious State” – which lays out the state of Minnesota’s decay, and lays much of it at the feet of the Minneapolis and legislative “Democrat Socialists of America”.
Who’s paying for Kupchella to put the facts out?
My question is: who’s paying the Strib to cover them up?
OK, I have another question that I’ve been asking of Kupchella’s many left-wing critics: which fact presented are in error?
Other than “who funded it?” (who cares, if the facts are correct?), the closest I’ve gotten to an answer is “it’s one-sided”. To which I respond “so is the flat-earth debate. That doesn’t mean one side is wrong”.
You be the judge:
“Haha! The FBI says there’s no evidence that Taylor Robinson was a member of any group! That means the killing of Charlie Kirk was non-political!”
So here’s an incomplete list of politically or socially-with-plenty-of-politics-motivated spree killers, terrorists and assassins who *weren’t affiliated with any group*:
And, let’s be honest, Timothy McVeigh, who *had* been part of a group, of which he and Terry Nichols were pretty much the two remaining members.
The problem is, it’s a big country with a lot of people with mental health issues, and when you spend enough time and effort telling unstable people that “speech is violence” and that some inscrutable murky sinister evil force is going to “erase” you/destroy democracy/steal your future/commit “genocide”/are “Nazis” or “fascists” – people against whom we fought a life or death war two generations ago – eventually someone’s going to connect the dots and start shooting people.
And if you ARE part of a group whose goal is to destabilize society, having people who *aren’t* in your group do the dirty work is a feature, not a bug.
So don’t believe the hype.
I don’t wish anyone trouble with their jobs.
And that includes the poor saps who work at the Strib’s printing plant.
Well, worked. Or will have worked…:
I mean, the schnooks in the plant don’t set the editorial policy. They’re not the ones painting Ilhan Omar’s toenails in the boardroom, or telling Rochelle Olson what hit pieces to write.
So I’m sorry about the jobs, guys ‘n gals.
But if it’s another step on the Strib’s road to extinction? That’s a silver lining.
The paper will be printed in Iowa – presumably the day before it reaches the newsstands (or wherever you get paper papers these days – I dunno).
Next stop Mississippi.
Anyway – turns out the late Nick Coleman may have been right about something. I wasn’t rooting for the demise of the Strib back when he was accusing us bloggers of doing that.
But I sure am now.
When Jim Smorada was teaching me how to write the news, he taught the same cliche every other journo student and cub reporter gets: do the who, what, when, where, why and how of the story.
So I caught this yesterday:
And I thought – maybe it’s just the social media intern doing a terrible job of clubbing and burying the lede?
So I looked into the story proper:
Brooklyn Park Police said a crowd gathered for a cultural event had to be dispersed Saturday evening due to people trying to force their way into a stadium.
According to police, officers were working at Park Center Senior High on Brooklyn Boulevard, where a cultural event was taking place.
Police said a crowd had gathered outside the event, which then began to try and force their way into the school district’s facilities.
So let’s break it down:
Who: A crowd, and “people”. Who? What people?
What: A “cultural event”. What culture? What event?
When: Saturday evening.
Where: Park Center High, in Brooklyn Park.
Why: Uhh…
How: With…er, “force” apparently.
And this is the Five – the least PC-whipped of the local TV stations.
(Hat tip to Bill Glahn, who had the same idea).
Merely rejoice that he is gone.
Colbert – the unctuous and desperately un-funny little man who replaced David Letterman and became the standard-bearer for the collapse of late-night TV – is leaving the air after this season.
Oh no.
Pass the beer nuts.
Never watched the guy for more than a couple minutes live, and maybe a few clips – and when I did, I almost couldn’t tell if it was Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or Seth Meyers or pretty much anyone on late night but Craig Ferguson – who was funny – and Greg Gutfeld, who is flensing the Big Three in late night.
My interest is lessin the departure of…oh, look, I/ve already forgotten his name, and more in the way Big Left is trying to spin this.
Elizabeth Warren:
And for a completely different perspective, here’s Pramila Jayapal:
And now for something completely different; Adam Schiff:
Anyway – I’m not so much going to ask why he’s gone.
I’m merely going to celebrate the fact that he is gone.
Adios, un-funny man. You shall live forever in Dog Gone’s heart.
So, with the revelation last week that hiring managers and the MN Department of Human Services need to explicitly justify hiring white (presumably especially male) candidates for jobs, it’s not unreasonable to wonder – there must be some kind of deeply racist person driving these policies.
Your reasonable question has been rewarded with an answer:
The tipster raised concerns about Phillips and claimed his social media page is “littered with racist comments about ‘white folk.’”
After reviewing a Facebook page under the name Vonnie Phillips — filled with the type of content described by the tipster and a video tagging a woman whose name matches Phillips’ wife in public records — Alpha News sent an inquiry to Phillips’ state email address.
In his response, Phillips confirmed the Facebook page was his and lashed out at Alpha News reporter Jenna Gloeb in a profanity-laced tirade defending his posts.
“Good luck,” he wrote. “My Facebook page is within the ‘protected concerted’ activity guidelines, therefore, do what you want; nowhere on my Facebook page lists my employer; and the person, the gutless, worthless coward that reported me, the hell with them, please tell them I said that fool.”
Ooof. Someone played that one wrong.
And played it, and played it…
The worst part, to me at least, isn’t Phillips’s statements or actions.
It’s the culture of bureaucratic entitlement that allows bureaucrats to think that they’re OK acting like this on taxpayer time.
A leftist murders two Jews in DC. Big Left staged riots in LA and (almost, again) Minneapolis.
The mainstream media attacks…
…well, who do you think?
“White Supremacist” group membership dropped by an order of magnitude every generation over 100 years from millions in the 1920s to the single-digit thousands in 2016.
But we’re to believe that, now, all of a sudden, it’s because they think they won?
To: Jon Collins, Senior Reporter on Race, Class and Communities, MInnesota Public Radio
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Anniversary + Findings
Mr. Collins,
As I have every year since 2021, I hope this day finds you well.
It was four years ago yesterday you sent this out on your listener mailing list::
“South Minneapolis: I know this sounds crazy. But it’s 2020. And I’m working on story now about white supremacists coming to Minneapolis to foment race war under cover of the protests. I need your help, and your friends help. Please refer anyone with real, credible info (not rumor or speculation) or sources to me at (I’m gonna redact that)
What the heck – let’s give this a shot:
Now, I know MPR reporters don’t generally deign to respond to the peasantry – in fact, I know MPR News management specifically tells staff not to engage with the unwashed masses.
But for the fourth June in a row, I’m genuinely curious – did you find anything?
It’s not of idle interest to me. Mine was one of the neighborhoods that got burned, looted and vandalized in May of 2020 (noting at the time that I saw a lot of “AmeriKKKa” and “Destroy the 1%” graffiti, but not a single swastika or “14 words” reference, I’m thinking the Twin Cities either got the most inept “white supremacists” in the history of bigotry, or they were the most ingenious – fiendishly tricking a whole city full of leftists into doing the job for them – the sort of fieldcraft that’d make a Mossad agent envious).
While I am a very overt conservative (I went from Bob Collins’ Christmas Card list to…well, very much off of it during his unfortunate unpleasantness a few years ago), I also spent time covering radical groups of all stripes back when I was in the mainstream media.
I ask because a not-so-cursory look through the last three years of your reporting doesn’t seem to show anything.
And as I do every year on the anniversary of this event, I’d like to invite you on my show (Saturday, 1-3PM) to talk about your findings. Because it’s everyone’s city.
Thanks,
Mitch Berg
Host, WWTC-AM
Compare and Contrast:
The number of people in “white supremacist” groups dropped by an order of magnitude every generation from 1916 to 2016, from millions down into the single digit thousands.
News media: “Meh”.
Today:
News media: “It’s because they think they won“.
No matter how much you hate the media, it’s not enough.
Tony Snow dies.
Democrat “Influencers”: “Hah! Conservative puppet had it coming!
Ronald Reagan dies.
Democrat “Influencers”: “Hah! The only good thing he ever did was die!”
No, really:
Jerry Falwell dies.
Democrat “lnfluencers”: Although we believe in neither God nor Hell, he’s certainly going to one and not the other!
George HW Bush dies.
Democrat “lnfluencers”: Good riddance!
Steve Scalise almost dies.
Democrat “lnfluencers”: “OK, that’s one semi-automatic rifle we can make an exception for!”
Rush Limbaugh dies.
Democrat “lnfluencers”: “The world is a better place today!”
Trump survives two assassination attempts.
Democrat “lnfluencers”: “Maybe there’ll be a third try!
Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis revealed:
Conservatives: “He was a lousy president, but also a human. I pray for a recovery”.
Democrat “Influencers”: “Don’t you dare politicize this man’s illness!”
Literally, hundreds of them, mostly identical, in the past 24 hours.
But while I have no desire the politicize this, I would like to medicalize it:
If the medical staff actually missed this cancer., in one of the most examined people on earth for the past four years, then it’s pretty epic malpractice.
If they didn’t, then this is yet another coverup.
So why now?
To draw attention away from the utterly damning Hur recordings?
This was recorded shortly after 10/7 – a geopolitical moment when the western world needed a President, not an auto-pen.
It hardly bears saying that if it weren’t for double standards, the DFL would have no standards at all.
But does anyone seriously think that if someone used AI to make and circulate a caricature of Melissa Hortman, Brion Curran or Erin Maye Quade capturing all the “crazy woman” cliches that this one does…
…of Republican rep Krista Knudson, it’d launch an army of femiminsts and “feminists” into paroxysms of rage?
One of the truisms of playing in a bar band (as I do) is that bar bands aren’t musicians. They are beer salesmen.
And if you’re playing an American Legion in Anoka, and you bust out some Parliament or Sonic Youth, or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, you’ll make a few hipsters and fanboys happy – and send the rest of the crowd to the exits, sooner or later,. Mostly sooner. The American Legion in Anoka (or wherever( wants its Creedence Clearwater and Tom Petty and Bad Company and a little classic country probably woudn’t hurt.
We’ll come back to that.
The big splash in local media this past week is KQRS – the classic rock station that used to have literally the highest ratings in the country, the station that was so powerful it could beat back Howard Stern at (or near) his peak – is adjusting its format.
Along with a playlist more heavily steeped in ’90s alternative rock — including a promised bump in Minnesota acts such as Soul Asylum and the Replacements — KQ’s corporate operators Cumulus Media announced the addition of new on-air personalities who will be familiar to listeners of other Twin Cities stations.
Longtime 89.3 the Current midday jockey Jade Tittle and former Cities 97 host and music director Paul Fletcher have joined the remade KQRS staff, a clear attempt by Cumulus to pick up some of those competitors’ audiences.
The classic rock crowd is angry. The 90s alt rock crowd is chanting “it’s about time”.
Me? I’m surprised it took this long.
Here’s why.
Like the (not remotely hypothetical) bar band in my example at the top, radio isn’t about music (or sports, or even conservative talk. Radio is a delivery system for advertising. Nothing more.
Advertising focuses on people who have money – specifically, money to spend on an advertiser’s products. A station’s “format”, whether talk or sports or some genre of music, is pretty tightly associated with a demographic group that is in some way desirable to advertisers, and the products they sell. Whether pitching nightclubs to 20-somethings (KDWB in the ’90s) or lifestyle products to women from 25-40 (KS95) to stuff for harried moms (ChickTalk 107) to mental red meat for men 35+ (conservative talk), you can tell who the station is trying to reach by the products they’re trying to sell.
And it gets to them via the emotions.
One of the little secrets radio programmers know is that people form deep, lifelong, intense emotional bonds with the music that they were exposed to between, roughly, puberty and the time the brain stops growing – usually the mid-to-late 20s. Doesn’t matter what the genre – the music of that part that you associate with that part of life when so much else about peoples personalities get formed, and they start noticing and getting noticed by the opposite sex, has an intense emotional connection for them. More or less intense, maybe, but still, it’s a a powerful hook into a person’s psyche.
“Classic rock“ is music of the baby boom. For the past fifty years, they’ve been the biggest, wealthiest demographic surge in history. And “classic rock” is the music of the people who were born between 1945 and sometime in the early ’60s. Who were entering puberty between the late ’60s and the mid-seventies. And whose brains became more or less fully formed between 1970 and 1980 or so.
And for most of the past 45 years or so, KQRS has prospered by cracking the emotional response of one of the biggest, wealthiest demographic groups in the area – white men (remember – mens and womens brains are different!) whose brains started forming in the mid-sixties, and pretty much switched to emotional, and thus musical, cruise control sometime during the George HW Bush administration.
The baby boom starts turning 80 this year. The younger ones start retiring. They don’t have the money or the clout anymore. Advertisers are moving on. Which is the same reason the last of the Big Band and Beautiful Music stations (KLBB, WLTE, KMFY) left the air 30+ years ago, and why KOOL108 switched from Elvis and Carl Perkins to, well, the stuff KQRS was playing until two weeks ago; because their audiences aged out of the prime advertising years.
It’s not about the music. It’s about business. You gotta sell the beer.
Entire Twin Cities media and left (ptr) last week: “A graduate student, one of America’s best and brightest, was snatched away in the middle of the night by ICE for exercising free speech! They could come come for any of us, citizen or not!”
Waiting period specified in statute passes:
Not sure it ever fails.
Which is why we call ’em “laws”.
It was 21 years ago today that the Northern Alliance Radio Network launched.
Most of you remember the backstory – because a whole lot of you were there for it. I was in the middle of a very difficult year employment-wise, I took the lessons of “Spanky and Our Gang” to heart, and I went to a bunch of local bloggers and said “Hey, gang, let’s put on a show”.
They replied “Sure – get us on a station”.
So I went in to AM1280 – and sure enough, they did.
The cast and the presentation has changed a lot over the years: what started as a three hour cavalcade of blog stars (John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, Chad the Elder, JB Doubltess, King Banaian and Ed Morrissey) gradually morphed into two two-hour programs (HInderaker/Warc/Chad and Ed/King/Me), and then three of them (King joined MIchael Brodkorb for four years).
Gradually, people left for other priorities – and others (Brad Carlson, Jack Tomczak) joined. We’re four fairly conventional one-guy programs today, and I’m just fine with that.
As far as highlights? Hard to even count them all.
`And although I’ve been doing the show for 21 years now, I am if anything more thankful and grateful now than I ever was; if there was ever a time when not having some kind of platform would have driven me up a tree, this is it.
Anyway – thanks to everyone who’s ever been involved:
And of course, the whole audience. Which is still out there, and still suprrises me every so often by telling me how much is means to them that the show is chugging right along.
Thanks!
When I started this blog, 23 years ago this month, I had a few assumptions about politics:
I was wrong about all of them – including at least part of that third bullet: Jeff Bezos, whose Washington Post has for the past 15 years considered Jennifer Rubin “conservative”, frankly shocked me just a tad. Read the whole thing.
Am I cynical enough to wonder what the “but” is? Hell yeah. If Jennifer Rubin was “conservative”, maybe Robert Reich is “pro free market” and Fareed Zakaria is a “personal liberty” guy. Who knows?
But conservative-ish populism seems to be gaining ground in our culture -and maybe, just maybe, dragging some institutions with it.
More later in the week.
I’m old enough to remember when Rolling Stone was vividly counter-culture.
But only barely .
Read this piece on Amy Klobuchar.
Pressed for a message to viewers, the Democratic senator cited her own disenfranchised feelings since the inauguration, saying it’s important, “To not give up, to not look down [and] to not end up in The Container Store like I did for three weekends in a row cause I decided I wanted to bring order to my life.”
Klobuchar added that one interaction in particular at The Container Store made her feel less alone in her frustrations. “This constituent comes up and says, ‘I know why you’re here,’ the senator reccounted. “It’s cause you feel like everything’s out of control and you’re trying to control it.”
Klobuchar told a similar story in a recent podcast interview with The Daily Beast. As the publication notes, the four-term senator “was on the hunt for baskets to organize her coffee and tea collection—and, in retrospect, the broader sense of satisfaction that comes with things being the way they’re supposed to be.”
Am I the only one who thinks is reads like an ad for the Container store woven not-all-that-cleverly into a piece on Klobuchar’s (checks notes) stunnng courageous boss-lady journey over the past month?
Does she need to moisturize, with all the tongue-baths she gets from BIg Media?
…don’t you dare claim there’s intrinsic bias in Twin Cities media:
So many ways to word that: “uphold federal immigraiton law”, “stop abuse of the healthcare system”, “drop non-qualified non-citizens from taxpayer-funded healthcare”, among others.
But they just have to imply malice.
You think you hate the media enough? You…well, you know where this goes, right?
Star-Tribune, 2020: Crippling mass layoffs due to knee-jerk government response to Covid. Economy in the tank. Governor Klink sics his pet Soros Attorney General on dissenters, declares emergency power, sets up a snitch line.
Star Tribune: <Crickets>
Star Tribune, 2025: A pulse:
I keep saying “you don’t hate the media enough”. I’m trying to figure out a way to convey that idea without wearing it out.
Margaret Brennan has emerged in this past few months as the poster girl for all that is stupid and depraved about our “elites”.
But even I didn’t think she’d go here…:
Stupid reporter?
Or a natural progression of the whole “free speech is bad” thing that elites were pushing during a campaign where the Democrats were opposing it?
Why choose?
I’ve spoken with a few Twin Cities journalists about their complete collapse (I’ll be charitable, as to “collapse” there would have needed to be some actual intent to cover the issue) in re the coverage of Tim Walz (not to mention Ilhan Omar) over this past six years and, for that matter, the Legislative DFL over this past week.
Adjectives fail me, of course; disgraceful, pusillanimous. fawning, obsequious, impotent?
An abomination against whatever “Journalism” was supposed to be?
So on the chance that any Twin Cities journos (outside the half dozen or so that do seem to try to do the job) are tuned in – I present this as a lesson on how interviewing a politician is supposed to be done:
Now, this isn’t a journo – its a member of London’s city legislative body.
But when I heard it, I thought “if this is a journalist interviewing politician about an important issue, this is how it’s supposed to be done.
Reporter from the Star-Tribune questions Minneapolis Police Department assistant chief Katie Blackwell about the dozens of MPD cops who swore out affadavits that she perjured herself about Maximum Restraint Technique (MRT) during the Chauvin trial:
Just kidding. It was Liz Collin, from Alpha. A conservative news organization, which does most of the actual “journalism” in this town.
The list of stories the MSM won’t touch until shamed into it by local conservative media, or naitonal/international media, or both, just keeps getting longer.
In fact, it deserves a list of its own.
Stay tuned.
One of the more satisfying stories of this past year was watching the accelerating decay of the mainstream media’s influence over society.
And this was one of my favorite examples:
Watching the orwellian “Joy” campaign get pelted with rhetorical rocks and garbage by the commoners was one of the greatest, er, joys I’ve had, at least politically, in recent years.
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