Declaring The Causes That Impel Us, 2024 Edition

The below is an update of a piece I first wrote almost four years ago. It was at that moment about the time when people – smart people, anyway – were starting to realize that Covid wasn’t the new Bubonic Plague, that the sky was not falling, and that whatever “model” Governor Klink was reading that was predicting 70,000 deaths in Minnesota alone by mid-July of 2020, and 20,000 dead as a best case if they shut the state down completely, was perhaps…wrong.

I was looking at the gutting of civil and religious freedom that Minnesotans had countenanced – perhaps more or less voluntarily in March,

Over this past weekend, Big Left went through what’s become an annual orgy of celebrating what’s become their secular holiday, January 6.

Governor Klink took a break from his regimen of selfies of him being fed donuts by Co-Governor Flanagan to have his social media intern blurt this out:

The DFL, likewise:

So – a year and a half after Governor Klink reluctantly gave up his “emergency powers”, and after three years of Joe Biden serving as the doddering mouthpiece for Barack Obama’s third term as the greatest stealth authoritarian since Woodrow Wilson, let’s take stock of the state of “democracy”, in Minnesota and nationwide.

One of the obligations of a free people – and especially of a free people that wants to stay that way – is to push back when government overreaches. Not just in emergencies (although that was the initial subject of the original post), but always, on every facet of liberty. Conservatism holds that order and liberty exist in a constant state of tension; without order (or health) prosperity is impossible; without health, freedom is academic (subsistence farmers don’t have time to petition for redress of grievances); without freedom, order is onerous and, let’s be honest, prosperity is most likely concentrated among those keeping the order.

Three years ago, I said that Government power is like a handgun – sometimes, a necessary tool in extreme circumstances, under terms that are as strictly circumscribed as any rule on justifiable use of lethal force. And like any necessary tool, free people need to make sure that the newbie isn’t sweeping people at the firing range with her hand on the trigger, and that government isn’t getting drunk and profligate with its use, or abuse of power.

Of course, three years later, it’s clear that the Biden and Walz regimes great government power less like a handgun on the nightstand, and more like a Reaper drone, orbiting loudly above everything, ready to strike arbitrarily and without a whole lot of reason or respect for the niceties of constitutional law.

Just as Governor Piglet’s administration used Covid as a pretext for seizing unprecedented arbitrary power, Democrats nationwide are waving “January 6” around like a bloody shirt, to try to justify their ravaging of the spirit and letter of AMerican democracy.

So lets list the outrages. Let me know what I’ve missed; I intend for this list to live on as long as needed:

Life and Liberty

  • The emergence of the crypto-Maoist “Democratic Socialists of America” as the most powerful bloc in the Democrat party nationwide, and even moreso of the DFL – as both parties arrogate more power, wealth (transferred from taxpayers)
  • The multi-pronged bringing to heel of the education system, from pre-school through the post-doctoral level, is “the long game” in attacking not just liberty, but the entire underpinning of Western Civilization. Creating a generation of ignorant droogs who think “freedom” is just material satiety is both a key goal of those who’d gut the American experiment and, seemingly, a long way toward being accomplished.

The Pursuit of Prosperity

Here, the DFL’s disdain for business and private property rears its head, above and beyond any actual response to the epidemic.

  • The DFL “Trifecta” burned through nearly $18 Billion worth of “surprlus”, every dime of which came from a taxpayer of some kind or another. That’s nearly $3,000 for every man, woman and child in Minnesota – nearly $12,000 for a typical family of four. In one year. And they raised taxes enough to cover that and a whole lot more. And given that the state is inevitably falling into deficit while the Democrats control the Legislature, it’s going to get much worse. That money would, in fact, be better employed by the people.
  • As Governor Klink established during Covid, the right to transact business is clearly subject to arbitrary, and in some cases seemingly capricious, interference. Small businesses are shut down (as big ones, and business with more, better lobbyists remain open), in many cases without regard to the business’ actual susceptibility to the virus (lawn services? nd smoke shops aren’t. It’s best that your vices not be politically unfashionable.
  • Looking a back at the concept of “Essential” and “Non-Essential” workers – designations determined almost entirely via the political expediency of the designations, and their importance to the lifestyle of the “Laptop class” workers who make up the political class – feels like staring into the soul of Orwell’s universe, even three years later.
  • The government started by barring all evictions and foreclosures, and halting student loan payments. The Twin Cities governments have moved on to rent control – furthering the road to gutting the affordable rental market, and completely foreclosing the existence of the small landlords that used to provide most of the metro’s “affordable housing” – while the Biden regime tried to unilaterally wipe out personal obligations to private student loan lenders.

Government Transparency

  • The DFL created a “Hate Speech Registry”. What’s in it? What’s it for? How do we see what, and who, is in it? For what purposes will it be used? The registry’s supporters couldn’t and wouldn’t answer questions. They just jammed it down.
  • The Governor’s “Covid Snitch Line” showed us not only the DFL’s ability for setting up a Stasi-like network of informants, but how much they genuinely enjoy it.
  • School boards around the state are gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, being turned into rubber-stamps for district administrators and the state department of Education.
  • For years, people complained, legitimately, that most of the legislature’s big decisions were made by the Governor, the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, operating behind closed doors. That was intolerable and stupid when there were opposing parties involved in those negotiations. Now that they’re all with the same party? While elections have consequences, this is pure authoritarianism.
  • Covid-era restrictions on meetings have morphed, post-pandemic, into a glib disregard for state open meeting laws, which serve more as suggestions these days.

First Amendment

  • The collaboration of Big Government, Big Tech, Big Media and the Big Left’s non-profit/industrial complex completely gutted free speech in time for the 2020 election. The vituperation of their response to Elon Musk buying Twitter tips the hand; the Axis of Authority really, really wants “free speech” to be more about crappy art than actually holding government accountable.
  • And as Big Left endlessly drones on about the “Threat” of “endemic white supremacist terrorism” that we’ve been told for 15 years is everywhere, honest, one of these days now – the threat of being swatted, of crowds of professional protesters and rioters making your free exercise of too much inconvenient speech potentially dangerous is always there. The March 4, 2017 “Anti”-Fa attack on a Republican gathering at the MN Capitol rotunda (and the fact that Ramsey County’s “criminal justice” system did everything but take the “protesters” out for dinner to apologize for the inconvenience of being arrested) was a warning; shut up, or you just might get cut up. Democrats and the DFL are very aware of this, because that malevolent mass of wannabe thugs are their children, nephews, classmates.

Second Amendment

  • While the Second Amendment community remains strong, and with the departure of Wayne LaPierre may get some of its teeth re-sharpened at the national level, the attacks on the law-abiding gun owner in Blue jurisdictions are increasing, unconscionable, and not consistent with “protecting democracy”. More below.

Fourth Amendment

  • The surveillance state has gotten steadily worse.
  • The presence of anonymous “snitch lines” – and especially “hate crime” lines, may not have led to any Fourth Amendment perversions of probable cause yet – but don’t bet against it.
  • “Red Flag” laws have largely trashed the Fourth Amendment (more below).

Fifth Amendment

  • With the courts pretty much closed your right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury is pretty much toast for the duration.
  • Let’s not forget how the state gutted the justice system – including the rights of defendants to speedy drials, to face their accusers, and of their attorneys to effectively prepare cases – under the pretext of “public emergency restrictions”.

Privacy

  • Among the many other depredations of Minnesota’s “red flag” law – “Mental Health” professionals are in fact now deputized to participate in the abuse of those laws. I’d say “consider the unintended consequences”, but I don’t think there’s anything “unintended” about them.
  • Government used your cell data to track the effectiveness of social distancing. Think that genie’s going back in the bottle?

When Democrats refer to Republicans as “fascists”, it’s a Berg’s Seventh Law case. .

Tiers Of Tyranny

Earlier this week, the Facebook page of the Scott County GOP compared Governor Walz and the DFL’s legislative majority to to Hitler and Stalin.

Silly Republicans. Only Democrats get to make specious, scabrous, historically-void comparisons to dictators.

Now, as someone who studies history – especially the history of tyranny – very seriously, I’d like to make two points:

  1. I hate willy-nilly dictator references. Calling people “Hitler” or “Stalin” is lazy. The only thing I hate nearly as much is…
  2. Dismissing legitimate claims of tyrannical behavior as if the claim itself, rather than the aptitude of the facts presented, is the joke.

Because it’s not like tyrannies generally drop in on society unannounced.

Tyranny, like cancer, has four stages. There is no stage five.

(Definition of terms: “Regime” is used in the original French sense of the term; it means the person, people or parties running the government).

StageCharacteristicsExamples
Stage IRegime uses populist means to expand government power to the detriment of citizens individual rights. Key institutions – media, education, the bureaucracy – find it in their interest to scratch the regime’s back, politically and socially. ???
Stage IIThe regime is part of an open coalition with the state’s bureaucracy, news media and social institutions, and are weaponized against the opposition. Opponents are actively targeted by the media, law enforcement, education and academia. Opposition parties and uncoopted institutions are actively harassed, either legally (via a legal system whose interests largely coincide with those of the regime) or via direct action groups “secretly” affiliated with the regime – who are able to operate fairly openly. Peaceful change of power is subject to a process controlled by the regime; being an opposition politician frequently results in harassment.Orban, Erdogan
Stage IIIAll institutions of the state are more or less openly and directly controlled by the regime. Opposition is harassed to the point where it largely or completely exists underground. Opponents are eliminated in ones and twos, using a co-opted version of the judicial process or, sometimes, direct action; the direct action groups are either tightly affiliated with the state, or are actually stage agents (the police). Peaceful change of power depends on the good will of the regime (as with post-Franco Spain); being an opposition politicians runs a very high risk of exile, prison, disappearance or death. .Franco, Mussolini
Stage IVThe Regime, it’s power and society as a whole are indistinguishable. All institutions are subsumed by the regime, which has an absolute monopoly on information and force. Opponents – or those perceived as opponents, or scapegoats – are eliminated in boxcar lots, sometimes literally; being “underground” is profoundly dangerous. Change of power is a lethal matter; the regime recognizes no power but itself. Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Un.

I’d say the Walz administration is a solid stage 1.

Thoughts?

Urban Progressive Privilege: Our Vacuous Overlords

I’ve listened to a lot of vapid, trite radio in my life.

Janeane Garofalo’s attempt at a talk show. Most any “audio essay” by David Sedaris. Just about every local show on AM950, from Nick Coleman and Wendy Wilde and Two Putt Tommy and Steve Timmer through Bart McNeil or whatever his name is. Lots of dreadful stuff.

But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything quite this stomach-pumpingly vacuous as this two year old episode of “Radiolab”, an NPR podcast [1] which combines an oppressive amount of cutesy sound editing with a programming lineup that captures all of the lows of “This American Life” with none of TAL’s occasional highs.

it’s a rebroadcast [2] from a couple of years ago, when the Covid pandemic had come and gone for most of America, but was still leaving the world a Camusian hellscape for the organically-fed fashionably angsty member of the Laptop Class that work for and listen to National Public Radio.

And in it, the plush-bottom yoohoos in the studio seem to be straining to make the case that 2020 and 2021 is a candidate to be horrible years in history, as compared to…

…536AD. When something, a bunch of volcanoes or comet dust or something blotted out much of the sunlight for years, causing a chain reaction of crop failures, famines, plagues (as hungry rats invaded granaries) and wars that led to the death of perhaps 20% of the people on the planet at the time.

But Covid’s pretty bad, too!

Here’s the neat (if nauseous) trick: Listen to it, and you can almost feel like you’re sitting in a “breakfast place” on Eat Street listening to a bunch of non-profiteers bitching about how lack of rent control is genocide.

NPR should really be funding itself.

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Kind Of A Drag

Let’s talk about drag shows.   Not the current hot-button politics of the whole genre today.  Just the “art form” itself.  

I don’t care for them.

No, not because it involves men cross-dressing. Guys wearing dresses and wigs to play a role? Mitch, please. All the female parts in Shakespeare’s day were played by cross-dressing men. Monty Python and Kids in the Hall were cross-dressing decades ago, and at least on the surface they did it for the same exact reason as drag shows do; Entertainment.

Which is the crux of why I don’t care for drag; it’s entertainment – and it’s just not entertaining.

To me, anyway.

Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve had friends who say “give it a chance!”. And I did. And I just…don’t…care.

Part of the problem is it appropriates [1] “burlesque”. And burlesque, as a genre, bores me stiff – especially the modern version of it. It’s not that I “can’t relate” – one of the points of art is to learn to relate to things that aren’t part of your life, or to get better insights on things that are *or* aren’t parts of your life. Art should challenge you, and I actively seek out art that is different from my personal status quo. I’ve learned a lot, and grown as a person, for the effort.

Just not from burlesque. Or drag, for that matter.

As far as drag shows showing school children a window to that culture? Fair enough. We have a lot of cultures; some involve snake-handling, debutantes, monster truck rallies, soccer, “Real Housewives”, ultimate fighting, eating ghost peppers off the vine, and drag racing. I personally can tolerate, even respect several of those cultures without feeling any need to learn more about them than I do, but this isn’t about me; in the interest of raising well-rounded children, shouldn’t we also let them participate in in-church 24 hour prayer vigils, three-gun shooting competitions and Turning Point USA rallies? Give them a view into lots and lots of cultures? Have your people call my people.

I mean, as far as culture goes, in for a penny, in for a dollar.

Of course, the current fracas isn’t about exposing kids to different cultures; it’s about undercutting the dominant culture.

Of course, drag has existed for well over 100 years; it’s a political subject to day, because none of its current hot-point status is about “exposing children to culture” for its own sake.

Just for purposes of argument, let’s forget for a moment that drag, like the burlesque of which it is a minstrel-show version, is inherently sexual in nature; all of the tropes of burlesque were ways to play peek-a-boo with the sexual mores of the Victorian era, and Drag is an “ironic” homage to that era, around the claim that men with “alternative lifestyles” today have to be as sly and coded about their preferences as the straight world did 150 years ago. Which, given the near supremacy of “alternative lifestyles” in today’s dominant culture is itself just a tad preposterous [2]. Saying it’s not a primarily sexual art form is like saying burlesque is nice and chaste; it’s preposterous, and would get you laughed out of any room not controlled by lunatics manifesting a social agenda.

Don’t be a moron.

But I set out to write about a genre, not a political fracas, and it’s to there I’ll return; you wanna dress up and sing? Go to it! No need to save me a seat.

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When The Breakdown Hit At Midnight There Was Nothing Left To Say

Backstreets magazine, which has been covering all things Springsteen and setting the standard for high-music fanzines since 1980, is going out for a ride and not coming back.

Like so much in modern music, it’s Ticketmaster’s fault:

If you read the editorial Backstreets published last summer in the aftermath of the U.S. ticket sales, you have a sense of where our heads and hearts have been: dispirited, downhearted, and, yes, disillusioned. It’s not a feeling we’re at all accustomed to while anticipating a new Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour. If you haven’t yet read that editorial (“Freeze-out,” July 24, 2022), or the crux of Springsteen’s response to Rolling Stone in November, we encourage you to do so; we don’t want to rehash those issues, but we stand behind our positions and points.

We’re not alone in struggling with the sea change. Judging by the letters we’ve received over recent months, the friends and longtimers we’ve been checking in with, and the response to our editorial, disappointment is a common feeling among hardcore fans in the Backstreets community.

Side note: loath as I am to either commend Senator Klobuchar for, well, anything, or to recommend anything from WNYC’s generally loathsome On The Media, this past week’s episode breaks down the history of Ticketmaster’s toxic impact on music. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s worth a listen:

As to Springsteen?

I’ve seen him probably half a dozen times over the years. I’m not sorry to say some of those shows were pivotal moments in my life – in some ways, I wouldn’t be who or where I am today if I hadn’t been there.

While my interest in his music has waxed and waned over the years – his first two and 2-3 most recent albums are very good, most of his stuff since about 2005 sailed right past me, the records from his break from the E-Street Band (Human Touch, Lucky Town and Ghost of Tom Joad) were a swing and a miss, and the “Holy Trinity” (Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River), Nebraska, Tunnel of Love and The Rising are as good as popular music gets, and in comparison Born in the USA is merely great – underneath it all i’ve been fascinating to watch how Springsteen has kept himself and his fans in a state of creative churn trying not to turn into a nostalgia act dragging a troupe of nostalgia act fans around the world. And even though I might go ten years without enjoying (or buying) one of his records, for that, I’m grateful.

So I’m not going to say I’m not going to keep an eye peeled for a much, much better price for next month’s shows at the X, for old times sake. He won’t be touring forever.

But the extent to which even Bruce – who, 40 years ago, was gutting Big Scalper before there was a Pearl Jam – has been assimilated is…

…well, Backstreets‘s op-ed calls it ‘disappointing”, and I can’t disagree. Bruce sounds a lot like a politician in explaining his position, stuck between the most loyal fan base in music and Ticketmaster and Live Nation…

…who are no less greedy and soulless a bunch of “bosses” as the musachioed villains in the Pete Seeger songs Bruce memorialized (checks notes) 17 years ago.

Disappointing. I’ll stick with that.

(Note: Don’t like Bruce? Take it up elsewhere. Bruce hate will be culled without mercy or comment. Take it up with JB Doubtless – if you can find him. As the sage said, I’m still here, he’s all gone).

I Saw The World Change In The Blink Of An Eye

It finally happened; I’m at an age when I get to spend time correcting younger people about the misconceptions some older people are giving them about “my” time.

Maybe it’s just me – but I’ve been noting a little surge of questions – and revisionist answers – about the 1980s, lately.

I’ll stick with the question:

I’ll take a run at that.

No, Mr. McGeoch and anyone else with the question – they were even better than most people today credit them for.

Do yourself a favor and watch the movie the movie “Miracle”; the opening montage *brilliantly* shows how depressing US life was in the ’70s.

Here it is.

If you are of a certain age, you can almost feel the depression of that era – the malaise that plagued us for that miserable decade – creeping over you.

We know how the movie – and the game whose story it related – ended; a two hour movie about a one hour game boiling down to one of the most memorable minutes in the history of television:

The decade took a little longer, and was a lot more suspenseful.

It wasn’t just that we bounced back from the economic malaise of the ’70s, and the ’82 recession (as bad as 2008) in a way that seems *miraculous* today. Although to a guy getting out into the world at the time, that was pretty good timing.

No – it was much bigger.

In the ’70s, Communism – the bloodiest dictatorships in history – was at its peak. And while the success of Ronald Reagan’s goal of extincting the USSR has a thousand fathers today, in 1980 literally nobody thought they were going away.

People today think of the Cold War as a cultural punch line – but it was no joke, kids.

I grew up in missile country, during the height of the cold war, between two SAC bases. I grew up very aware the world could get incinerated in minutes if some colonel in Moscow or Colorado Springs had a bad day.

I was *never* going to have kids in a world like that. This was something I knew when I graduated from college. Why bring someone into the world, just to have them die with you, and the rest of civilization? What was the point?

And over the course of that decade, the USSR – the most murderous regime in history – went from being the “other” superpower to…gone.

The threat hanging over all of us and everything we did…

..vanished.

In 1980, the entire American intelligentsia said the Communist world was here to stay. Anyone who says that they didn’t think so is lying.

And yet:

Even his own staff thought it was too reckless. The Democrats? Forget about it.

And even though I was living in the middle of it at the time, I didn’t quite believe it. Even as the Berlin Wall fell…:

…I couldn’t quite believe it.

I’ve cited Miracle; I’m going to drop the other pop culture bomb. Things still hadn’t sunk in for me when I was working at at Top 40 station. This song came out:

It’s “Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones. They’re a trite, flash in the pan British post-new-wave band. But it was the only song (other than the Scorptions Wind of Change) about that bit of history. I can’t think of a whole lot of pop culture artifacts about “watching the world wake up from history”.

It’s a trite bit of new wave pop – and I get a catch in my threat when I listen to it, to this day.

Because it came out about the time that the USAF, which had kept nuclear bombers on alert 24/7 for literally 40 years…stopped. Hundreds of missiles got retired.

And it was like someone lifted a steamer trunk full of bowling balls off my chest. I have no idea how to relate that to someone who wasn’t there.

Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about
You know it feels good to be alive

Other than perhaps to hope one gets the significance that my oldest was born a year later – into a world that was safe enough to think about it. And for all the jabbering about “revolution” that the generation before mine had inflicted on the world, this? This was revolutionary.

All because of what happened in the ’80s.

I saw the decade in, when it seemed the world could change with the blink of an eye.

And it didn’t end there. With the end of the Cold War, a tidal wave of defense effort turned to civilian uses. All that American ingenuity that had spent the ’70s and ’80s helping tanks hit their targets while driving at 40mph, detecting Soviet submarines hundreds of miles away, went into civilian goods. The GPS in your smart phone started out in smart bombs. Your car’s airbag’s origin story was in the fire detector in M1 Abrams tanks. This blog comes to you via ancient Department of Defense project eventually called the Internet.

It was the “peace dividend”. Bill Clinton (with the invaluable assistance of the last actually conservative GOP Congress forcing him to the right) got to cash it. The economy went on the longest boom in history.

It would not have happened without the events of the 1980s.

That’s the fun, nostalgic part. I spent my late teens and early 20s watching the world wake up from history.

But as another song put it, nothing good ever lasts: Mr. McGeoch’s entire generation grew up knowing little about the era but what they’ve been told by the people who write the memes, who shoot the TikTok videos, write the cultural punch lines – while at the same time benefitting from its results as no previous generation in human history. Two generations have grown up thinking that the world that started in 1989 was the natural order – or, simultaneously better and worse, not having to think about it all that hard.

It’s not. Mankind’s natural state is for the strong to dominate the weak; for those with the will to power to control those without. The moral arc of history is long, but almost always – but for this past 200-odd years – bends toward tyranny and barbarism.

And it can all go away like *that*.

I saw the world change in the blink of an eye” when I was 26.

I’m seeing it change back in a long, slow, masochistic drip drip drip.

Like the seventies – only much more serious, this time. Perhaps because I’m old enough and well-read enough to know the consequences. Perhaps because the people driving us toward what appears to be an even deeper, grayer nadir are not comic book villains in tanks, but people in our own country, with PhDs and blue checkmarks.

It’s game-time…

…against ourselves.

Hope that answers the question.

Carry On Wayward Renegade, All Along The Watchtower

It’s not something I think about that much, but I do from time to time — why do Classic Rock stations sound the same, year after year? I wrote about this on my moribund blog a number of years ago and, based on recent listening to market-dominant KQRS, this list of faves hasn’t changed a bit:

In thinking about this list, a few things are worth noting:

  • The majority of the songs on this list are written in a minor key. If rock and roll is supposed to be uplifting, this group of songs isn’t it.
  • Of the bands listed here, the happiest band appears to be ZZ Top, who made their name initially as a bare-bones Texas blues trio, until they made their fortune hawking classic cars and leggy models. Make of that what you will.
  • Think back to any of the years listed here. Would you have had any interest in listening to songs that were recorded as long ago from that moment as these songs are from today? I didn’t hear much of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys or the Andrews Sisters in 1983, for example, nor do I recall seeking such things out. In fact, I’m more likely to seek out Bob Wills today than most of the songs listed here, right or wrong.
  • In my youth I was reliably informed that rock and roll was supposed to be about rebellious youth and revolution. While their politics were dodgy at best, the Clash was right about this much — you grow up and you calm down; you start wearing blue and brown. And so has the music of our youth.

Gil Scott-Heron, who doesn’t get much airplay these days, argued back then that the revolution will not be televised. But rest assured it will be monetized.

Critical Marksmanship Theory

SCENE: The year is 2028. Mitch BERG has just been sworn in as governor of Minnesota, via a series of happenstances too bizarre to go into. He is speaking to a press conference.

BERG: As the first phase of my plan, as promised, I’m directing the state Department of Education to begin mandatory instruction in grades K-12, and in state post-secondary schools, of “Critical Marksmanship Theory”.

“CMT” teaches a few tenets that are vital for a child’s moral and social development:

  1. It teaches them the essentials of the Second Amendment – how it deters tyranny.
  2. Children will learn, as part of that, that throughout American history, from the Revolution through the Civil Rights movement to the “Anti”-Fa War of 2026, those with firearms have been the ones able to defend their, and their neighbors’, freedom.
  3. Kids will learn that, throughout our history, the right to keep and bear arms has been a bellwether for the state of liberty, and a key defining line between citizenship and subjection.
  4. It teaches that societies that exalt and propagate marksmanship are superior, more free, more prosperous and more inclusive than those that don’t.
  5. It teaches kids the essentials firearm safety, which should slash the number of accidental shootings of children.
  6. Finallly, it teaches kids – all kids, from all backgrounds, races, creeds, genders – how to shoot, enabling them to participate in shooting sports, self-defense, and of course the main intent of the Second Amendment, deterring tyranny.

This will begin in the second semester of this school year, which starts (checks watch) tomorrow.

Questions?

MYLYSSA SILBERMAN (Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats): Yes, Mr. Berg…

BERG: Governor.

SILBERMAN (Winces): Right. Governor Berg. What if parents object to teaching kids how to shoot, and all this history about guns?

BERG: Teachers know better than parents. Next…you.

LEAKY THE BEAGLE (A dog, writing under a pseudonym for the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“.  ) Govenah Burrrgk – vot is ze sense of forcink…

BERG: Was ist den mit deine fürchtbare Deutsche accent?

LEAKY THE BEAGLE: Huh?

BERG: That’s what I thought. Security!

(Security guards push LEAKY THE BEAGLE to the ground, stomp him into incoherence, throw him out).

Next.

CAT SCAT: (The designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, she is the office manager at a small phrenology practice. ) Why would you teach children…

BERG: Because parents in half of Metro households don’t actually teach their kids the reality of history – that unarmed people are basically meat on the hoof for dictators. We want our children to learn that history. Some people don’t. We have the power, so we don’t really care what they think. Yes, you?

MATT MCNEIL: (Rises,, face flushed, hands shaking. As a wet spot stains the front of his chinos, he runs fron the building.

BERG: Huh. OK. You.

Betty Rae TORSTENGAARDSEN (A writer at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“.  She was Lac Qui Parle County Dairy Princess in 1987, and voted “most likely to end up as a freelance political writer” by her sorority at U of M Morris in 1992.): Yes, Governor Berg. “Critical Marksmanship Theory” seems like a massive incursion into parental rights.

BERG: You’ve seen the handout, right?

TORSTENGAARDSEN: Er…no?

BERG: Then it’s not CRM. We’re just teaching kids to shoot, as far as you know.

TORSTENGAARDSEN: What about parents who object to their kids being indoctrinated in the Second Amendment?

BERG: So you’re saying there are parents who want their kids to be ignorant of history, and ripe for the picking by criminals, tyrants and perverts?

TORSTENGAARDSEN: I’m not sure…

BERG. They sound like terrible, negligent parents to me.

TORSTENGAARDSEN: Uh…

BERG: But again, we’re not teaching kids about guns right this minute, as we stand here, so quit your whining.

(TORSTENGAARDSEN, SCAT and SILBERMAN confer, briefly).

SILBERMAN: He’s right. He’s got us there.

BERG: Good. Onward…

And SCENE

Delp and Goudreau

This is a CD I’ve been meaning to get around to for a long time, and finally checked off that box. It features two members of Boston, Brad Delp and Barry Goudreau. It was recorded in Goudreau’s home studio and released in 2003. The cover and reverse photos were taken on the beach near Goudreau’s home.


Delp was the clear, high, strong voice of Boston, and while Goudreau (on guitar) was sometimes overshadowed by Tom Scholz, he was part of the founding of Boston and, pun intended, instrumental in the sound of the first two Boston albums that together have sold over 30 million copies.

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Expertise

SCENE: Mitch BERG is having a glass of wine at the bar in Whole Foods in Saint Paujl, after a day of vigorous shopping. Lost in the reverie, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has walked in.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, shhhhhuuuure enough, it’s Avery. Long time no see. What’s u..

LIBRELLE: Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson a stupid, badgering question at her confirmation hearing to be the best Supreme Court justice ever.

BERG: Best?

LIBRELLE: She is the most qualified jurist in history! The Washington Post showed it! Pictures, being science, never lie!

BERG: Well, not so much.

LIBRELLE: I never read National Review.

BERG: Clearly. So why do you think it was a “stupid, badgering question”?

LIBRELLE: It’s purely politicized, and she’ll never have to rule on that. “What’s a woman?” Mitch, please.

BERG: First: SCOTUS hearings, politicized? Bring that up when Robert Bork, Janice Rogers Brown, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are up for confirmation.

LIBRELLE: Those people were all in the past…

BERG: Exactly. As to never having to rule on that? Perhaps. But answering “what is a woman?”

LIBRELLE: It was an unfair question for which she had no time to prepare.

BERG: (looking at watch). A woman is an adult human with two “X” chromosomes. Three seconds. No prep time. And I didn’t even go to Harvard Law School.

LIBRELLE: She will never have to rule on what a woman is.

BERG: Perhaps. But she’ll be asked to rule on questions where much of the population does know what the answer is; the fact she’s willing to equivocate on something this comical, to keep the “progressive” wing of her party happy, is a very bad sign.

LIBRELLE: There are no such quesitons in the law! Its science!

BERG: When does human life being?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

BERG: When do community standards violate free association?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not the community.

BERG: Huh. When does the right to free speech interfere with private property rights?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a professor of rhetoric.

BERG: Huh. What does the phrase “Right of the People” mean?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a law professor.

BERG: A SCOTUS justice will be ruling on any or all of those things, including in the next term.

LIBRELLE: I don’t care. It was still a stupid question.

BERG: Nah. It fixed the front lines in the culture war – the issue beneath all the other issues in the upcoming mid-terms. And it showed which side are the metaphorical Russians, and which are the figurative Ukrainians.

LIBRELLE: Bla bla bla. So where are the avocados?

BERG: I don’t know. I’m not a grocer.

(And SCENE)

The First Of Many Wavings Of The Bloody Shirt

I don’t disagree with any of the particulars of the National Review’s editorial about January 6:

There is no defense for what the mob did that day. None. The people have a right to form loud, angry crowds to petition and protest their government. They need not do so in ways that are pleasant or polite. The “Stop the Steal” protesters who listened to the speeches and went home were exercising their rights as citizens.

But ours is a government of laws, not of men. A rule-of-law system has no place for physical intimidation or mobs obstructing the peaceful, constitutional transfer of power. The Founding Fathers feared few things more than mob rule. They created a federal district to avoid a repeat of a 1783 riot around the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

Donald Trump, his lieutenants (especially Sidney Powell and the tragically-fallen Rudy Giuliani), and Trump’s personality cult, did something that doesn’t, and can’t, play well with small-“d” democracy: it put the person ahead of the process:

There is also no defense of what Donald Trump did to summon the crowd, tell it that there remained any option but counting Biden’s electoral victory, and urge the assemblage to march on the Capitol because “if we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country . . . you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump’s recklessness disgraced the office of the presidency.

Additionally, there is no defense of Trump’s pressuring Pence to take unilateral, unlawful action against the counting of electoral votes, then telling the crowd that Pence might do so, knowing full well that they would discover when they reached the Capitol that Pence would not. Some of them, entering the Capitol, chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” It was Trump who led them to believe that his own vice president was allowing their country to be stolen.

Let’s be honest about what that explosion of personality cult over process actually did:

What happened at the Capitol that day is best understood as a riot that was particularly dangerous because of its setting and context. It was not a purely peaceful protest, or a cartoonish costume party with a little bit of trespassing. The Secret Service had to rush Pence to safety. Members of Congress emptied the chamber and fled for cover. The vote-counting process was interrupted for five and a half hours. The Capitol itself was wreathed in smoke. This is the stuff of a banana republic.

When the subject of banana republics pop up, Democrats perk their ears up, being wannabe Generalissimos in their own ways. Republicans, even Trump supporters, are correct in pointing out that Democrats were trashing the democratic process since before Donald Trump was a reality TV star, much less President:

For two decades, prominent Democrats have attacked the legitimacy of American elections. They claimed that the 2000 election was stolen from Al Gore. They indulged ridiculous fantasies about Ohio being stolen in 2004, resulting in dozens of Democratic members of Congress objecting to counting its electoral votes. Many of those Democrats are now powerful committee chairs, including the chair of the committee investigating January 6. Violent protests marred Trump’s inauguration, and leading Democrats denounced him as illegitimate. Polls showed that supermajorities of Democratic voters believed that Russian hackers stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, and she has given every indication that she shares that view. In 2018, Stacey Abrams was anointed a hero by her party for refusing to accept the legitimacy of her loss of a governor’s race. It would have been wrong for Trump to emulate this behavior; but he went well beyond what even the most reckless Democrat has done in contesting an election.

Left-wing mobs have targeted the workings of government, for example overwhelming the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011 to protest Scott Walker’s union-dues bill. Republican legislators had to be evacuated by police, as Democratic legislators egged on the mob. In 2018, protesters repeatedly disrupted the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, chased Republican senators down hallways and into elevators, accosted them in restaurants, and broke through Capitol barricades, resulting in hundreds of arrests. Law enforcement was unduly lax in punishing these offenses against democratic self-government.

It’s true. But it’s no excuse – any more than January 6 will be a legitimate excuse for more Democrat violence and tyranny-mongering. That is, in fact, something that Republicans of good conscience need to stomp on, hard. Because it dismisses nothing to note that January 6 was an attack on the Constitutional process different from others only in its perps:

The New York Times editorializes that “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now,” and one of its columnists argues that Democrats should “Wave the ‘Bloody Shirt’ of Jan. 6” as Republicans did against Democrats after the Civil War — as if this compares to a four-year war in which 3 million Americans served and 750,000 died. Other opportunists (including Joe Bidencall the riot the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” or say it is comparable to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. CNN and other cable news obsessives plan wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary in order to inflate its importance and help Democrats wave that bloody shirt.

This is a loss of perspective. In 1915, a former Harvard professor set off a bomb at the Capitol and shot J. P. Morgan. In 1954, five congressmen were shot by Puerto Rican nationalists in the House chamber. In the early 1970s, the left-wing Weather Underground set off bombs at the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department. In 1983–84, the Communist group M19 bombed the Capitol, an FBI office, and Fort McNair and the Navy Yard in D.C. In 2001, 3,000 people died on 9/11, air travel was grounded across the country, the president was shuttled to a secure location, and a wing of the Pentagon was destroyed. In 2017, a gun-toting Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to massacre Republican congressmen at a baseball practice, gravely wounding Steve Scalise, the Republican House whip.

I say “Republicans of good conscience” because there are Republicans who have joined the personality cult, and many who’ve prospered, politically and financially, greatly from it.

And some Republicans have reacted by washing their hands of the GOP – some for reasons I can respect (Ed Morrissey), others I can not (the Lincoln Project), many in between. Some “Never-Trumpers” yip and bark at the party like bitter ex-spouses.

Others presume the GOP’s reckoning rates a generation in the minority – as Kevin Williamson says in his otherwise worthy piece on the subject, again, I agree with in most particulars – except for its conclusion:

It is my view that none of the Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 results should ever hold office again, and that no candidate who is unwilling to forthrightly condemn both the violence of January 6 and the lies that inspired that violence ought to enjoy the support of any conservative, any organ of the Republican Party, or, indeed, any American who calls himself a patriot. No candidate who cannot give a simple yes or no answer — and give the correct one — to the question of whether the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump ought to hold office. If that puts the Republican Party into the minority for a generation, then the Republican Party deserves it, having become a menace not only to the conservative principles and governance it purports to cherish but to the political structure of the nation and the Constitution itself. Those who have no use for caudillos and mobs, and who hope to see our constitutional order endure, should seriously consider separating themselves from the Republican Party unless and until it proves capable of reforming itself.

“Reforming itself”

Like, magically?

Well, no. The party “reforms itself” when those who show up decide it shall be reformed.

Our democracy – and the Constitutional process Williamson rightly extols elsewhere – won’t survive a generation of one-party government by today’s Democrat party. The Democrat party of the Watergate era, led by Ernie Hollings and Scoop Jackson and Daniel Inouye, people who believe in America whatever their political differences, didn’t see power as the means to the end. They weren’t the generation of “progressives” that gave us San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Minneapolis, or for that matter California and Illinois, as they are today; those are the inevitable consequences of one-party rule, at least by this Democrat party at this time in its history.

Packed courts.

Centralized elections.

A packed Senate.

More promotion of the administrative state to circumvent the legislative and judicial processes that can’t be won in elections.

Those are the consequences of a “generation of minority status” for the opposition.

That’s not acceptable.

The GOP will have to “reform itself” by good people showing up and reforming it.

Not by sitting splendidly above it all listening to Bulwark podcasts and heckling.

Not by waiting for some third-party to spring into place.

Not by waiting for the Reform Fairy.

Not, for that matter, by waiting for someone else to reform it. With all due respect to those who stormed out in a cloud of principled righteousness in 2015, 2017 and 2020, starting next month, your opinions are duly noted, and will no longer be of any relevance.

No. It happens by reforming the GOP.

More on that next week.

What’s Swedish For Omertá?

When people can’t trust the “Justice” system, they create their own.

From Irish cops to legends of The Godfather and Goodfellas and The Sopranos to the various warlords and cartels of Central America (and what is a cartel but a warlord with a product people want to buy?), the long legacy of people, even in a place that’s prided itself on this justice system, who find themselves needing to turn to their own communities (read: the elements of their communities with the fewest scruples about applying force to gain power) to get, if not “justice”, at least a order they as a group can live with, albeit at a cost.

The trick? Get the locals to fear you, and the erstwhile authorities at least to give you some room out of mutual convenience, if not outright getting on your payroll. And/or both.

So – can we, the people, trust our institutions?

  • Our “elite” media is a joke. They are nothing but propaganda shills, and they only pay lip service to the contrary to gull the gullible.
  • The FBI and the Justice Department are thoroughly politicized.
  • So are academia and education and the bureaucracy.
  • While lefist groups get the run of major cities without even the formality of a slap on the wrist, those perceived as “right of center” come in for, let’s not mince words, oppression.

And when the Normals color inside the lines, as we did during the Tea Party, we get both sides sliming us; when they learn the lesson and elect a candidate who doesn’t play by the K Street rules, they get slandered as a group. Oh, yeah – and told they’re defectives who are wired to hate from birth, and are just waiting to blow up.

It seems like Big Left is a bully kicking sand in the Normals’ faces, trying to provoke a fight.

Am I the only one who can’t possibly think it’s a coincidence?

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.

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.

Declaring The Causes That Impel Us

We’re into month two of the “State of Emergency” in Minnesota.

Let’s stipulate in advance – government does have emergency powers, and should have them, at least as a broad concept. One of government’s few genuinely legitimate roles is to exert its power to react to things that are beyond the power of the individual, or (rarely, at least in theory) subsidiary levels of government; invasions, natural disasters and, yeah, epidemics. We can argue the “should government have emergency power” question if you’d like, but it’s pretty much the status quo.

One of the obligations of a free people – and especially of a free people that wants to stay that way – is to push back when government overreaches. Not just in emergencies (although that’s the subject today), but always, on every facet of liberty. Conservatism holds that order and liberty exist in a constant state of tension; without order (or health) prosperity is impossible; without health, freedom is academic (subsistence farmers don’t have time to petition for redress of grievances); without freedom, order is onerous and, let’s be honest, prosperity is most likely concentrated among those keeping the order.

Government power, like a handgun, is a necessary tool in extreme circumstances. And like any necessary tool, free people need to make sure that the newbie isn’t sweeping people at the firing range with her hand on the trigger, and that goverment isn’t getting drunk and profligate with its use, or abuse of power.

And I think we can make a pretty solid case that Governor Walz’s emergency declaration does exactly that.

First – Covid clearly is an emergency. There is a valid public health reason to treat it as more than just the flu. But the record shows different states taking very different approaches to the emergency, and with very different results; New York State went full-on Mussolini, but between having one of the most densely populated cities in the country and being run by bungling clowns like Bill DiBlasio, it didn’t work; California also went full-on tyrant, but it seems to be working. Other states went the other way; in the Dakotas and the rural west, it seems to be working out fairly well, while in Louisiana and Florida, the libertarian approach (combined with a lot of ill-advised, Italian-style revelry in the face of the threat) didn’t pan out so well.

Minnesota has trended more authoritarian. I get the rationale. But let’s be honest – even if you ignore the ham-handedness of the administration’s management of information (of which more later in the week), it’s fair to say the Governor and his Administration have clobbered civil liberties while reacting to the crisis – in many cases, wrongly.

So lets put together a list of the usurpations:

Life and Liberty

  • While the movement restrictions in Minnesota are fairly benign so far – serving more as a muted threat than an active clampdown – the idea of telling people not to go to their lake cabin (i.e., trying to prevent people from moving temporarily from a place of high desnsity and greater vulnerability to someplace safer) is an intrusion. And Mayor Frey’s active use of the police to curtail traffic isn’t just a muted threat.
  • The ability to visit family, especially in hospitals and nursing homes. To be fair, in many cases this is a private response to the epidemic – it’s why I can’t see my mother, notwithstanding the fact that her husband of nearly 30 years just died – but it’s driven by the response to government regulations and the litigiousness that government regulators have promoted.
  • We’re paying for a lot of government “services” of dubious value in the best of times, that we’re not getting at all today.

The Pursuit of Prosperity

Here, the DFL’s disdain for business and private property rears its head, above and beyond any actual response to the epidemic.

  • The right to transact business is clearly subject to arbitrary, and in some cases seemingly capricious, interference. Small businesses are shut down (as big ones, and business with more, better lobbyists remain open), in many cases without regard to the business’ actual susceptibility to the virus (lawn services? Landscapers? They’re pretty socially distant to begin with). Arbitrarily shutting down businesses regardless of their own instincts for self-preservation, ingenuity and ability to achieve some resiliency against the epidemic (like all the small grocery stores turning their lanes into one-way thorofares) qualifies as a taking in my book. Classic example – liquor stores are “essential”, but vape and smoke shops aren’t. It’s best that your vices not be politically unfashionable.
  • The assignment of “essential” status was clearly utterly politicized.
  • While it seems an act of charity, and might even be justifiable, barring all evictions and foreclosures is certainly an arbitrary taking without some sort of compensation. The idea that
  • Contracts are pretty much irrelevant – business are foreclosed by decree, in many cases, from fulfilling them, and the courts are closed for purposes of arbitrating the results.

Government Transparency

  • The Administration is making huge, life-altering decisions about the economy based on a model that seems to be giving very different results than most other models, and whose proprietors are keeping secret for the most paternalistic of reasons: “On Friday, [State health economist Stefan] Gildemeister said he had concerns that models that let anyone use them might be “irresponsible” because “it allows folks to make assumptions that aren’t very realistic ones.” While “transparency” isn’t necessarily a constitutional issue, the idea that state bureaucrats treat the math and code that they created on our dime like something they have to prorect from a bunch of drooling savages should make every freedom-loving citizen hot under the collar, and ready to vote a whole lot of scoundrels out of office in seven months or so.
  • The legislature, already prone as it is to operating as a “star chamber” with the Governor, Speaker, and the two Majority Leaders, has gotten even less transparent than before; online gatherings (kept just below legal “quorum” status) have been substituting for public committee meetings; policy is being made completely absent public scrutiny.
  • The governor’s “press only” press conference Friday – if that doesn’t bother you, what does?

First Amendment

  • The banning of group gatherings of all kinds – as opposed to pushing for voluntary enforcement of containment and distancing – pretty much forswears all protest against government overreach.
  • The enforced closing of places of worship – as opposed to strongly suggesting people wear masks, stay at home if sick, and observe spacing between family groups in services – is a clear violation of freedom of religion.
  • While closing places of worship by decree is onerous, many churches – including my own – closed voluntarily. But there are aspects to faith – Sacraments like Last Rites, Baptism and Confession, for Catholics, and there are many others in other faiths – that must be done in person, and where remote exercise is banned as a matter of doctrine. I’ve been informed of cases where priests have been barred from hospitals; no avenues left open for the administration of such Sacraments, whether through prudent adaptations (priests in masks and PPE, isolation rooms, whatever) or not. One administrative size fits all, whether talking about an ad agency or a church. This – not just the closing down, but the forbidding of any adaptation – has to be a clear violation of the First Amendment.
  • Freedom of assembly? Do I even need to say it?
  • Along with that – the right to petition for the redress of grievances, private or public, is pretty much toast until the courts decide to start meeting again.

Second Amendment

  • Many counties are curtailing the ability to apply for, or renew, carry and purchase permits.
  • The operation of the ranges necessary for taking permit training is pretty much shut down.
  • Thanks to a law passed by a bipartisan majority in 2015, government in Minnesota can’t confiscate guns, or shut down gun stores unless literally every other business in the state is closed, due to a state of emergency. This was an admirable bit of foresight – it doesn’t take a vivid imagination to see Jacob Frey, Melvin Carter and Kim Norton (frothing anti-gun ninny mayor of Rochester) sending their cops door to door in times like this. More on this later.

Fourth Amendment

Fifth Amendment

  • With the courts pretty much closed your right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury is pretty much toast for the duration.
  • And the closing down of the Judicial Branch offices give defense attorneys – who, unlike prosecutors, have no online access to Judicial Branch records – a serious disadvantage in prepping for cases for when they can get to trial.

Privacy

  • Government is using your cell data to track the effectiveness of social distancing. While we’re assured that government and the big cell providers they’re in bed with aren’t mis-using that data, we all know that’s only as safe as the government’s least ethical employee.

Got more (specific to Minnesota, for now)? Leave ’em in the comments, please.


I gave the example of Minnesota’s gun rights movement’s successful drive to foreclose government’s ability to confiscate firearms and abrogate the 2nd Amendment during crises. Gun Rights groups in Minnesota are big, well-organized, and badly funded (you can sure help out) but make up for it in volunteer action and the justice of our cause.

The lesson, though? Minnesotans need to get together in the same way to put stronger guard rails on the other excesses of government emergency power we’re seeing.

Crowd Psychology

Imagine this:

It’s the middle of June, 1940. Germany has just conquered all of Europe. The British have just withdrawn their army from the continent, in a miraculous evacuation that was the only redeeming note in a catastrophic defeat.

The army had left virtually all of its equipment – just about everything heavier than a rifle – in France; it would pretty much have to be re-equipped from scratch. The Royal Navy had been badly bloodied. The Royal Air Force, likewise, leaving itself under strength to face the German Air Force in the upcoming campaign to try to bomb the UK either to the negotiating table or into a state ready to be invaded. German U-boats were ravaging the merchant shipping on which Britain depended for not only all of its industrial raw materials and oil, but virtually all of its food.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill went on the radio and gave a speech after the last of the British Expeditionary Force arrived home.

What speech did he give?

He could’ve given a realistic speech – pointing out the sobering facts of the situation, and readying the British people for what was likely going to be at best a disheartening and economy-gutting armistice that left them sitting alone on their island, and at worst complete conquest in the face of an invasion that would certainly follow, if the Navy and Air Force failed.

But no.

Churchill gave a speech that was, if all you cared about was the facts on the ground, utterly unrealistic; he told Britain, and the world, that the United Kingdom would fight to the last inch of ground, and if Britain fell the Commonwealth would carry on the fight forever, until Europe was free again.

It was a little like that poster of a mouse holding up a middle finger at a diving eagle; “the last great act of defiance“ was the caption.

And it was one of the greatest bits oratory in the history of the English language.

And it was completely unrealistic.

But it was leadership.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan had already proved he was the best president of my adult lifetime. His leadership had brought America back from the worst case of emotional depression it had ever suffered, and from an economic downturn every bit as nasty as 2008, but much more short-lived. And after running for office on a stridently anti-Communist message, he had already sent the message that Soviet expansionism was off the agenda, and made it stick.

He was scheduled to give a speech at the Brandenburg Gate – the very symbol of divided Germany, and the high watermark of communism in the west.. It was a time when most political and academic “experts“ in the west expected the Soviet union – the “second world“ – was here to stay; well five years later everyone said the USSR was eventually going to collapse, nobody that anybody was paying attention to was saying it in 1987. They had the worlds largest military, the worlds largest nuclear arsenal, and they controlled a good chunk of Europe and Asia.

Reagan’s advisers urged him to take a moderate, conciliatory tone toward the east Germans, the Soviets, their new (or at least newish) leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and the wall he was standing in front of.

To give a “realistic” speech.

 instead, he gave a speech that electrified the resistance in Eastern Europe, that galvanized support for democracy among the downtrodden, and did its part, along with much of the rest of Reagan’s policy, in the downfall of the Soviet union that had a thousand fathers by 1995, but was very nearly an orphan before Ronald Reagan was elected.

It wasn’t “realistic“ to the conventional wisdom of the day. It was leadership.

Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill, and he’s no Ronald Reagan.

This week, he said that he wants America to be “back to work“ by the Easter weekend.

Is this realistic? Maybe not. The experts say it’s unlikely. The legions of not very funny late night comics and blue-checked droogs say the idea itself is risible.. And the whole business of declaring America open or closed is mostly the responsibility of the state governments, and the free market itself. I, myself, plan on working from home (although I am working, knock wood).

But America is a restless, endlessly creative, impatient nation, overstocked with people who are not going to sit on their hands and wait for things to get better; it’s a nation full of people who are descended from people who came from all over the world, uprooting everything they knew, to make things better.

Trump could have echoed the words of the scientists and experts gathered around him. He could’ve lectured the nation like a hectoring schoolmarm, or like Barack Obama. But he’s got a stage full of experts, including his vice president, and more importantly 50 state governors, already doing exactly that.

Trump urging America to “go back to work“ Easter weekend is not the Dunkirk speech, and it’s not the Brandenburg gate speech.

It’s not eloquent, and it’s not going to go down in history.

But it’s leadership..

The economy runs as much on psychology as it does on money, analysis and marketing. It’s trends depend as much on how people are feeling as objective fact. Don’t believe it? Have you checked the toilet paper aisle lately?

The nation’s psyche needs a boost. Trump is setting a tone; the United States is not going to be on sick leave forever. He’s telling a nation with cabin fever that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. When? Maybe Easter, maybe memorial day, but it’s coming.

It was brilliant. It wasn’t scientific. It may not of even been all that well advised.

But it’s what America wants to think, and wants to hear. We’re not stupid, we’ll hash out the details later..

Little Straw Men

A few weeks ago, I saw the new film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott “Little Women“. I’m told there are seven different versions on film out there – I’ve only seen parts of the 1933 version with Katherine Hepburn, and of course the 1994 version with Winona Ryder (of which the less said, the better).

I liked it. A lot. Yes, it’s a“Chick flick“, and I don’t care, because all I really care about is “is it a good movie“.

Around the same time, I saw a new statistic; a solid majority of doctors under the age of 35 or women.

That’s after a couple of decades in which the share of undergraduate degrees going to women has reached three out of five, on its way to an estimated two out of three in the next decade or two. This, as the education system becomes more and more dogmatically feminized, with the attendant treating of “boyhood“ as a pathology to be medicated into submission , and as the media seems to be incapable of showing males above a certain age as anything but loutish buffoons.

So I could see, perhaps, men staying home from yet another film that shows men as expendable cads (which, by the way, “Little Women“ doesn’t); It’s not like men don’t get a steady diet of that anyway.

But here’s an experiment for you: read this article – not a review – from the utterly underwhelming Kristy Eldridge  whom the Times helpfully notes, is “a writer”, entitled “Men are Dismissing “Little Women““. The article points out that the movie finished third in its opening week, behind two tent post blockbusters (Star Wars and the new Jumanji), and throws in a lot of pro forma “men just don’t care about female writers/artists/films“ whingeing.

One thing it doesn’t do is quote any men who don’t actually like the movie, or show any demographic evidence that men are shunning it any more (or less) than any other “chick flick“. Given that the film would seem to be at least a modest success (especially compared to the boat anchor 1994 version, which played like a high school production), that’d seem to be a little impossible if all those female viewers weren’t hauling their boyfriends/husbands along with.

The article promises male rage. It delivers Little Straw Men.

I have to suspect the article was written long before the movie opened

Hollywood Polishes The Cannonball

Some stories shouldn’t need Hollywood to go all, well, Hollywood on them to make them riveting utterly compelling.

But they do it anyway. And it’s almost always a massive drag.

It’s not a new phenomenon; The Battle of the Bulge was utterly atrocious, seemingly feeling the need to dumb World War 2 down to a cowboys ‘n indians movie – for an audience that had in huge numbers actually been there. Even as a kid, the Hollywoodisms (“They’re sending tanks! Send the artillery and infantry to the rear!”) annoyed me to no end.

The effect wasn’t always catastrophic: the Great Escape didn’t completely bastardize the subject, the greatest POW camp break in history – although adding Americans to the cast was an audience-grabbing anachronism (all Americans had been sent to different camps shortly before the escape’s famous tunnels were started).

But Hollywood’s wall of shame exerts a powerful vortex.

Stories that don’t need the Hollywood treatment get it anyway. 12 Strong – the dramatization of the events of the fall of 2001, where 85 Green Berets – count ’em, 85 – led an insurgency that drove the Taliban from the battlefield. What “improvement” does a story like that need? Well, it got little from the movie – which was watchable, but traded CGI for story all too often.

And the Tuskeegee Airmen’s story needs not even a whiff of gussying up; is there a bigger underdog war movie of all time? (There could be – if Hollywood ever produces Brothers in Arms, the story of an all-black tank battalion that became one of Patton’s best, written by none other than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). But gussying up it got, with Red Tails, a George Lucas labor of love that substituted P51 Mustangs for X-wings, Germans for Stormtroopers, and white bigots for Emperor Palpatine.

Now, when I saw that there was a remake of Midway in the works, I thought “at last, someone can improve on the turgid but accurate-ish 1976 historical epic. Then I saw the most dreaded six words in movies: “From the maker of Independence Day” (a movie, it needs to be said, that I detest with a cordial passion) and gave up all hope. Roland Emmerich would seem to have turned the all-in total-stakes back-against-the-wall fight by the battered American fleet against an undefeated Japanese Navy that outnumbered it by a prohibitive margin and had aims on closing the trap around Hawaii into a video game – and made an even worse movie than the 1976 version.

Worse still? If there’s a story in American history that’s begging to just be told, it’s Harriet Tubman. Her story is both pretty universally known and completely misunderstood; a gun-toting freedom fighter who defied the entire institution of slavery while running runaways to the North (or, more often, Canada) and returned to run a huge, effective spy ring during the Civil War? One hardly needs a screenplay.

But a screenplay we get – and it’s abominanble:

Set in 1849 Maryland, full of danger, rescues, superstition, frivolous gunplay, and pop-politics, Harriet demonstrates the current exploitation of African-American history, through historical revision, simply to sell tickets while aggravating political identity, tribal separation, and perpetual grievance — the same way that politicians manipulate voters.
Ever since Harvey Weinstein confirmed Hollywood’s Obama Effect, film culture has sought various ways of appeasing racial anxiety through movies about black victimization and white guilt. It’s the new diversity, as one of Harriet’s progressives summarizes: “Civil war is our only hope.”
…The difference in approach tells everything about the modern state of Hollywood race consciousness. Dismissing Demme and Morrison’s perception of slavery’s aftermath (its internalized stress and ongoing need for explanation, relief, and catharsis), Harriet looks at Tubman on a first-name basis, as if to standardize her travails into a Slavery Land thrill ride: She suffers spells after a head wound that causes hallucinations (or prophecies) that may indicate either madness or saintliness; she sacrifices her love life to crusading zeal (the film’s only complex moment occurs when her lover laments, “I’d a died for you. If you’d a let me”); and she frequently sings out her discontent in several message-driven musical interludes: “Sorry I have to leave” and “Lord, why you let me live?”

Even NPR took a pass on it.

Why, it’s almost as if Hollywood doesn’t trust moviegoers to make the right conclusions.

One Place That Ain’t Looking Through Me

About a decade back, I heard an interview on All Things Considered with Sarfraz Manzoor, who’d just come out with his book Greetings from Bury Park – his memoir about growing up as a British-Pakistani in Luton, in the Midlands, and getting immersed in Bruce Springsteen’s music. And I think I sat in the garage for a solid half hour, catching the whole fascinating story; someone who couldn’t have come from a more different culture than me, getting pulled on the same musical and personal odyssey by the same bunch of records.

If you’ve read this blog at all, you can see the grab. Right? I don’t think I need to restate the obvious.

I caught the show the other night.

First things first: This isn’t Mama Mia with Springsteen music. While there is the requisite act of the movie where Manzoor’s fictionalized version of himself, “Javed”, gets the same burst of recogniton while listening to “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, the musical epiphany only opens the door to all sorts of conflict in real life – which, in turn, illuminates all sorts of the musical themes.

Any description of “musical epiphanies” from ones’ teenage years is bound to swerve into the cloying and mawkish at times. Teenagers are cloying and mawkish, and it doesn’t matter what culture they’re from. And so the movie’s occasional short-cuts through plot points, via lyric drops or the occasional borderline production number that might – hell, probably will – come across as cringingly sentimental to the non-belever comes across as cringingly autobiographical to those who’ve (raises hand) been there.

So – did I enjoy the movie? Yes, but that wasn’t my main takeaway. It’s more accurate to say I felt a lot of it in the pit of my stomach. The movie took me back to a lot of things from my teens and twenties, in pretty much the same way Manzoor remembers them. That’s a good thing.

Mostly.

And – no spoilers, here – the music isn’t necessarily the most important point of the movie. There’ll be another post about that before too long.

Cons? Yep, there were a few.

It’d be impossible to do a movie about eighties Britain, especially as a Pakistani, without throwing in some of the politics of the era. And Manzoor’s memories of the era include a lot of the prattle of the anti-Thatcher left – which sounded at the time every bit as intolerent and libelous as Big Left’s cant against conservatives (to say nothing of Trumpkins) today. The infantlism of today’s campus “progressive” seems modeled on the prate and gabble of European lefties of the era. That, and the occasional bout of Thatcher-bashing were to be expected. That wasn’t unexpected, or especially dishonest. On the other hand, the rest of the movie – which imparted a lot of humanity on Manzoor’s very traditional Pakistani family and most of the movie’s other, very disparate characters – had me expecting much better of one of the side-conflicts; when “Javed” met his (inevitably left-wing) love interest’s (inevitably) Tory parents, they were portrayed with all the nuanced humanity of a Joe Piscopo sketch on SNL. It was a throwaway – and the movie would have been better had it been thrown away.

So do I recommend it? If you’re not a Springsteen fan, you may not “get” it. Or then maybe you will. Who knows?

If you are? It’d be interesting to see what you think.

ASIDE: By the way – the movie reminded me that my theory – Springsteen is America’s best conservative songwriter – has been completely vindicated this past year. I suspect this would be to the chagrin of a former regular commenter – but alas we’ll never know.

More coming in the next week.

One Day In The Star/Tribunes “Morgue”

SCENE: It’s the “Morgue” at the Star-Tribune’s “Morgue” – a room full of file cabinets, deep underground, where no light has penetrated since the Kennedy administration.

The door opens, and the MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY, wherein mismanagement under two DFL administrations led to hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, including credible allegations of welfare money being transferred to terrorists – is tossed into the room, which is crowded with other news stories.

ILHAN OMAR’S APPARENTLY FRAUDULENT-MARRIAGE STORY: Hello.

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: Hi. Where am I?

WELL-CONNECTED DEMOCRAT KIDS GET OFF WITH A WARNING FOR MASS AGGRAVATED ASSAULT AND HATE CRIMES AGAINST REPUBLICANS STORY: This is the Star-Tribune’s “morgue” file.

STEVE SIMON IS STONEWALLING THREE COURT ORDERS DEMANDING HE RELEASE INFORMATION ABOUT VOTING IRREGULARITIES STORY: It’s where news stories that the DFL establishment doesn’t want covered go to…

KEITH ELLISON’S HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM STORY: …for a nice long break.

(The other stories chuckle)

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: So when do we get out of here?

(The question is met with a few guffaws)

ILHAN OMAR’S ANTISEMITISM STORY: When the Strib reports about Minnesota having “paradoxically” liberal gun laws and the lowest crime rate in the nation for a state with a major metro area in it.

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: So – a long time?

KEITH ELLISON’S HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM STORY: You have no idea.

(And SCENE)

When You Think It’s Got To Be “Babylon Bee”…

But it’s not:

The head of politics at Cambridge University has called for children as young as six to be given the vote in an attempt to tackle the age bias in modern democracy.

Prof David Runciman said the ageing population meant young people were now “massively outnumbered”, creating a democratic crisis and an inbuilt bias against governments that plan for the future.

In the latest episode of his podcast, Talking Politics, he said lowering the voting age to 16 was not radical enough to address the problem.

But then again… maybe it is?

“What’s the worst that could happen? At least it would be exciting, it would make elections more fun. It is never going to happen in a million years but as a way of capturing just how structurally unbalanced our democracies have become, seriously, why not? Why not six-year-olds?

On the one hand, it seems like a terrible idea.

On the other hand, the rhetoric of campaigns like those from “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” wouldn’t need to be especially rewritten.

Why I’m A Second Amendment Voter

I detest litmus tests.

I always have.  They’ve always struck me as a way to avoid needing to think too hard about things, especially politics; as a way to avoid having to deal with the nuances that are inevitable with a realistic appreciation of the world around you.

But over the last year years, Second Amendment voting has become, if not a litmus test, at least a key indicator about a politician’s, or group’s, or person’s attitude about the most important political question of all.

We’ll come back to that.

There are a lot of reasons I support the right to keep and bear arms, and am an activist on the issue.  But there’s only one reason that it’s a litmus test to me.

Line Of Defense:  Self-defense?  Well, it’s important.  The idea that people should be forced to rely on the attention span of the state for their safety is fantasy at best, a toxic delusion at worst.

The police are under no obligation to protect you, and even when they knock themselves out to try, it’s a fact – when seconds count, the cops are minutes away.

Them? Or you? You get to decide this.

But self-defense isn’t why this is a litmus test issue to me.

Value:  And even if they were obligated to protect you at all costs in all situations?

As Jeffrey Snyder asked 25  years ago in A Nation of Cowards – do you really think that your life is of immeasurable worth, but that of the cop we call when things get ugly is worth $50K (or whatever we pay a cop these days)?  No – if your life is truly of immeasurable worth, then it’s truly your job to protect it – right?

If you truly believe that your life is of infinite value, while that of someone who risks their life for your is worth merely a salary and a life insurance settlement, I have to question your moral order.   Not here, of course.

The real question is, is it morally right to demand, and expect, that someone risk their life to save yiours, even with aunion contract?

Deterrence:  There is no rational doubt that armed citizens deter crime.

The number of crimes deterred in a year is hard to estimate, since most – including mine – are never reported.   The FBI used to say 80,000/year; Kleck estimated two million a year in the early ’90s, 98% of them without a shot being fired.

Whichever is right, each of those is a victory of good over…evil?  Decay?  Collapse?  Of right versus wrong.   Each of those victories, morally, is of incalculable good.

But that’s not the reason either.

A Good Guy With A Gun:  You know how you know that “a good guy with a gun” is an inherently good thing?

Jeanne Assam was a good gal with a gun when she saved countless lives at the New Life Christian Center in Colorado Springs on 12/9/07. She shot and wounded Matt Murray – who, reverie broken, backed off and shot himself.

Because Big Gun Control spends so much time and effort trying to attack the idea.  Not with facts – or at least, not by presenting facts in a way that can  be debated (and, inevitably, debunked).  “Shut up”, they explain.

There is a reason that mass shootings happen in places (schools, government buildings, posted property) or cities (New York, Chicago, San Francisco) or states (California) and not at NRA conventions or in Bozeman, Montana. Good citizens with the capacity to resist are a deterrent.

And as we’ve seen in a few mass shootings, when a good guy (or gal) with a gun interrupts the narcissistic fantasy, the fantasy implodes; the bad guy with the gun usually gives up, or kills himself.   Exactly as law enforcement says – move in on the shooter to break their reverie -although they don’t generally circulate that for public consumption.

Nick Meli was a regular schnook with a Glock on 12/11/2011 when Jacob Robert walked into the Clackamas Mall in Portland, OR with a rifle and a couple hundred rounds. He killed two – and then saw Meli pointing his permitted Glock at him. He retreated into a store, and shot himself moments later. Two died. Only God knows how many didn’t.

But no – that’s not the reason that the Second Amendment is my litmus test.

Fun Fun Fun (Til The Democrats Take The Garand Away):  Let’s be frank, here – shooting is fun.   No – it’s fun!

The focus and concentration are a poor man’s Zen meditation.  A day of busting caps out on the range is about as much fun as one can have, by oneself, legally.

And for someone who always wanted to be one of those guys that could hot-rod a car, but never had the money or the mechanical aptitude?  Modern guns, being the modular creations they are, lend themselves to extensive hot-rodding; a plain-Jane AR15, or even AK or SKS, is within reach of a whole lot of people, an outlet for mechanical creativity that’s do-able even for people of fairly unimpressive mechanical skills.  Even Glocks have gotten “democratized”; it’s possible to buy aftermarket lower frames that allow one to soup up a humble Glock 19.

A vital policy point?  No, but certainly a factor, if only personally .

So while I’ll throw it on the “yea” side of the scale,  it’s hardly the reason the 2nd Amendment is a litmus test.

Being Necessary For The Security Of A Free State:  Of course, none of the above were the proximate reason for the 2nd Amendment – which was to allow The People to defend their lives, families, property and communities against encroaching tyranny.

The protection of property and the preservation of order; Koreans on the second day of the LA riots, after the police pulled out.

“What?  You’re going to try to fight a tank with a gun?   If government becomes tyrannical, you’ll have no chance!” the usual response goes – which strikes me as a bad attitude for a citizen of a free society to have even while they’re still “free”.  But we’ll come back to that.

There are two answers to that old chestnut:

  1. Nobody fights tanks with rifles.  You fight the truck that hauls the food, fuel and ammo to the tank.
  2. But think about it: what do we know about the average American serviceperfson?  That they are the children of people with two masters degrees in Political Science from Carlton, who shop at Whole Foods and listen to NPR and have “Coesist” bumper stickers on their cars and voted for Hillary?  No!  They are overwhelmingly the children of the blue-collar and middle-to-lower-middle class people that own the guns today.  If government, for whatever reason, decided to go door to door seizing guns, they’d be beating down the doors of the parents, brothers and sisters of people in the service.   How do you suppose that’d work?

The right to keep and bear arms helps ensure that an attack on freedom will be an attack on the standing army.   Which may be one of the best guarantors against the depredations of the “standing army” that our founding fathers so feared.

But important as that is, that’s not the reason, either.

Words Have Meanings:  No, the reason is this:   without the right to defend one’s home, family, property, community and freedom from both crime and tyranny, then “citizenship” is meaningless.

The word “citizen”, going back to its Latin roots, means someone who has the ability to govern oneself; one who is him/herself a microcosm of government – someone who has the means at hand to govern themselves, and to participate in and consent in their own government.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights spell out the things that a citizen of a free society is endowed with by their creator; the right to participate and consent in their government via speaking, publishing, assembling, petitioning and voting; the right to not having their status as a citizen spuriously removed without due process, via jury trials, right to representation, freedom from unreasonable searches;  the right to be fairly secure that their property won’t be arbitrarily seized…

…the  right, means and power to defend one’s life, family, property, community and freedom.  Just like the government in which one participates.

Words Have Opposites, Too:  So being a “citizen” means having the ability to see to one’s own self-government – by oneself, as part of a small community, or a larger body that governns by consernt of the self-governing citizens.  

And if you take away any of the means by which a “citizen” governs, what happens?

Are they  a slightly lesser citizen?  No – it’s like taking away a hydrogen atom and wondering why you don’t still have water.

When a citizen can’t govern him/her self, then they’re no longer a citizen.  They are a subject of whomever took those rights away.

Observing the Second Amendment is one of the key differences between being a citizen – a consenting party to one’s own governance – and a subject, one whose life, liberty and property exist by the good graces of their ruler (or ceases to by the ruler’s bad graces, often enough).

And knowing that is why I will no more vote for someone who stands for abridging the Second Amendment than I will for someone who believes in speech rationing, or no-knock warrantless searches of people without meaningful due process, for that matter.

All three are non-negotiable.  All three are essential.  All three are reasons to go to the barricades.  I will no more vote for someone who promises to abridge my role as a citizen – by turning me into a subject  – than I’ll vote for someone who vows to send Jews to camps in Idaho.

Details:  “What – you think citizens should own cannon?  Tanks?  Nuclear weapons?”

They’re kind of expensive, and I dont’ wanna think about what it’d cost to practice with any of ’em.  But since we’re arguing out in loopdieland, I’ll bite.  Sure – show me why I shouldn’t, in logical terms – meaning terms other than “It doesn’t seem right to me”.

Put another way:  I’m a law-abiding citizen.  I’ve never stolen so much as a candy bar in my life.,  If you put a gun in my hand, I’m still the same guy.  I’m not overwhelmed by the urge to harm others.  How is that different if you put a machine gun, cannon, flamethrower, tank, or submarine in my figurative hand?  It’s not.

It’s also a pointless deflection.  Very few people are pushing to buy tanks – and I don’t think the criminal market for them is especially big either.

Many people are pushing, constantly and with great ardor, to abridge my right to defend my life, family, property, community and freedom, though.

Unpacking The Invisible NPR Tote Bag

“White Privilege” has been all over the news this last couple of years.

 It’s been there because the Big Left has ordained that it should be.  My theory;  in a nation full of “privilege” – class, racial, academic, social and, let’s be honest, the privilege of being born here rather than Russia or Nigeria or Burma – Big Left needed to focus on racial, “white” privilege to whip up black votes for Hillary Clinton, a geriatric white plutocrat.  As a result, all discussion of other “privilege” is off the table.

Terms, Terms, Everywhere Are Terms: White privilege exists, of course.  It goes hand in hand with the idea of “we-ism” – the idea that everyone on earth is more comfortable around, and accomodating of, people more like them than less.

Beyond that?  In my more sardonic and less cautious days, I defined it as being a descendant of a society from a harsh, lethally inhospitable place that had zero words for “hakuna matata” but more words for “stab him!” than Eskimos have for “snow”; a dour, patriarchal warrior culture that killed everyone that had designs on enslaving them.  As a result, my culture has no commonly-held concept of being enslaved.  We  operate from the standpoint of people who’ve been free (or at least subjects of generally benign monarchs) as far back as our cultural memory goes.  On behalf of all my cultural cousins, I am sorry for those of you who are descended from matriarchal hunter gatherer societies that couldn’t effectively resist the slave merchants, but I can’t change history any more than you can.  Just the present – a present I and my cultural cousins have been trying to change for 240-odd years, now.

More soberly, and after interviewing a representative of Black Lives Matter on my show, I arrived at the idea that “white privilege” is the ability to walk into a room and not have everyone wondering if you’re “one of the good ones”.   It was a little after that that I first encountered the academic paper in which the term “white privilege” was coined, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh.   It supplied fifty definitions of white (also male) privilege.

Every one of which, by the way ,translates to “freedom”, “justice” and “being accorded the dignity of being treated as an autonomous individual rather than a member of a group” – all of which are supposed to be values near and dear to our Republic and Western Civilization itself, and all of them things we should be working tirelessly to spread to everyone.

And when some mindless Social Justice Warrior jabbers about “smashing white/male privilege”, the proper response is “so – you want to smash freedom, justice and individual dignity?  See you at the barricades”.

Discussion of all other privileges – academic, social, class – were drowned out.  As they were intended to be.

But with the complete subsumation of the left by identity politics, it’s time to return the favor Peggy McIntosh did us; it’s time to define Urban Progressive Privilege.

Unpacking The Invisible NPR Tote Bag:  I’m going to borrow McIntosh’s format – which I suspect was actually tacitly borrowed from Jeff Foxworthy – of the simple list of attributes of Urban Progressive Privilege.

To wit:


Urban Progressive Privilege; Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag

Mitch Berg

“You were taught to see Urban Progressive Privilege as a bit of talk show rhetoric – not in terms of a very vislble system conferring dominance on my group via a meritless meritocracy”.   

As an urban progressive, you have been taught about “privilege” by others who have that privilege.  Being able to caterwaul about privilege is a prerogative of the privileged.

Like the concept of “white privilege” (which, conventional wisdom tells us, that “whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege”), the first rule of Urban Progressive Privilege is “I don’t believe there is such a thing”; it’s the water in which the Urban Progressive swims.  So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have Urban Progressive Privilege. I have come to seeUrban Progressive Privilege as an invisible and group package of unearned assets that I can count on using daily, but about which it’s hard to be anything but oblivious.

Urban Progressive Privilege is like an invisible weightless NPR tote bag of special permissions, immunities, secret handshakes, Whole Foods gift cards, a virtual echo chamber accompanying everyone who has that privilege, filtering out almost all cognitive dissonance about political, social or moral questions, and a virtual “cone of silence” immunizing them from liability for anything they say or do that contradicts the group’s stated principles.  As we in Human studies work to reveal Urban Progressive Privilege and ask urban progressives to become aware of their power, so one who writes about havingUrban Progressive Privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

So – when assessing Urban  Progressive Privilege, can you say any of the following?:

  1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people who believe exactly as I do about politics, society, philosophy, morality and the like, all or nearly all of the time.
  2. I was educated from my earliest years through post-secondary education by people whose political and social beliefs mirrored mine, and who didn’t challenge any of mypolitical, social, philosophical and moral beliefs.
  3. My progressive beliefs were never challenged through four or more years of higher education – indeed, they were reinforced, while competing views were shamed and shouted down.
  4. When I went into the working world, my politics, social background or philosophy were never adversarially questioned.
  5. I work, very likely, in an environment staffed with people who agree with and never challenge my political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions.
  6. My social life is made up of people who share, pretty much to a fault, my political, social, philosophical and moral assumptins.
  7. I can avoid, during my daily life, spending time around anyone who will challenge my political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions.
  8. My neighbors – the people in my physical community in which I live – share, almost without exception, my political, social, philosophical and moral beliefs.
  9. If someone in  my social or professional life does express a point of view discordant with my and my group’s political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions intrudes into my sphere, I can count on overwhelming support from the rest of my personal, social, professional circles to defend me.  Those who don’t share our beliefs thus either keep quiet, or are shamed into silence.  Thus, their beliefs have no impact in my life. .
  10. My informational world – my news media, my online social circle, my institutional associations (churches/synagogues, my social groups – will not contradict my political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions.
  11. I can count on the news media I listen to – my community’s newspapers, TV stations, as well as stereotypical outlets like NPR, PBS and the like – to reinforce my political and social assumptions.
  12. I can count on as the entertainment media not to contradict my political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions.
  13. I can count on the education system in my community not to undercut the political, social, philosophical and moral I’ve tried to pass on to my family.
  14. My kids’ schools give them textbooks, lectures and other materials that reinforce, never undercut, my political, social, philosophical and moral worldview and that which I’ve tried to teach them.
  15. I can be fairly certain that when I go to my kids’ school, the principle will not condescend to me based on my perceived academic or social background.
  16. I have never had anyone laugh at the accent or vocabulary of my native spoken English.
  17. I can rest fairly certain that no “well-meaning” pundit or scholar will ever paternalistically castigate me for “voting against my interests” (as determined by the pundit’s / scholar’s political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions) for voting in accordance with my political, social, philosophical and moral beliefs.
  18. I can choose to ignore the parts of our society outside the East Coast, West Coast, and selected “progressive” archipelagos in between, and express not only ignorance but mockery of the rest of the country, without being seen, shamed, and scorned as a provincialist.
  19. I can express scorn for individuals, groups, religions and social classes that don’t share my political, social, philosophical and moral beliefs, accents and worldviews, entirely based on those beliefs, and not be shamed and labeled as a bigot.
  20. I can make racist, sexist and classist statements about people who do not share my community’s political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions, and rest assured I will not be castigated for violating community standards.
  21. I have never been treated as a foreign culture in my own country; I have never had journalists, academics or pundits dispatch a special group to research, analyze and report on why my social circle believes and votes as they do – because the media, academics and punditry are from my class, and share my political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions; the more aware ones would be offended by being subjected to such a condescending, patriarchal bit of cultural chauvinism.
  22. My children and family are safe, almost entirely, from the economic, social and criminological  consequences of my political, social, philosophical and moral beliefs; indeed, I personally am almost entirely insulated from them.
  23. I can simultaneously say “I believe in science, and have a fact-based worldview” – while never being corrected, much less called out or scorned, for expressing beliefs that have no scientific basis (belief that there are no evolutionary differences between men and women, believe a human isn’t a human until it emerges from the birth canal, believe that there’s scientific evidence that homosexuality is genetic).
  24. I can simultaneously eschew racism and racists, even as I gang up with others like me to oppress black, latino, asian and females who disagree with my political, social, philosophical and moral assumptions.  I can say things like “That’s not a real, authentic (Black, Latino, Asian) person!” and not get scorned as a racist and patriarch.
  25. I can exhibit ghastly contradictions in my world view and be reasonable sure that nobody in my regular social circle is going to say or do anything about it; if I call someone I disagree with a “fascist” or “patriarch” or “1 percenter” while displaying Che Guevara memorabilia or studiously intoning approval for “Chavezism”, nobody in my social or professional life is going to castigate me for it.
  26. I tut-tut about the virtues of Western civilization and praise Multiculturalism – but do so entirely from a perspective that could not exist outside of Western civilization.  Nobody in my personal or profession or social circles ever brings this up, because they all believe the same thing.

I’m looking for more examples.  Keep ’em generic – not related to any specific issue.   .

Open Letter To Those Who Just Don’t Get It Yet

To:  Some Of You Trump Opponents Out There
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re:  Terminology

Dear Hollywood and New York Showbiz and Media “Elites”

As we come up on inauguration day, some of you are still sore about Donald Trump.  I get it.  I mean, I didn’t vote for him, either.

You’d like to pretend he’s not your president.  Yadda yadda.  Whatever.  Gotcha.  It’s a free country (and will stay that way, so quit  your whining), so you can say what you want, and I can mock you for it.  But relax; I’m not mocking you for that.  Not now.

No, this is worse.

It’s come to my attention that some of you Hollywood types are calling yourselves “the Resistance”.

Stop.  Now.

You are among the wealthiest, most privileged, most untouchable residents in one of hte wealthiest, most privileged parts of the wealthiest and free-est society in the world.   You lost an election.  In four years, you’ll get a rematch (although the way you all are going at this point, most of you will stroke out by mid-terms).  And you will get the rematch; there’ll be no dictatorships, no camps, no nothing.  Why, I bet a President Trump won’t even jabber about siccing the Federal Elections on your blogs, or turn a politicized IRS and DHS loose on your political movements, the way Obama did for eight years.  Our democratic process, imperfect as it is, will go on, and if you don’t go full-blown Joan Crawford on us, you might have a shot, again, someday, God help us all.

So stop using – I believe the term these days is “Appropriating” – the term “Resistance”.  That’s a term used by people who had actual skin in the game; the Jews who, as disarmed as you want us all to be, fought back against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto; the Norwegians who overcame the impossible and destroyed the Nazi nuke program; the Polish fighters who rose and took Warsaw, only to be betrayed by one dictator and hunted down like rats by another; the Danes who, the risk of a summary execution hanging over their heads, snuck their nation’s Jews out to safety; people who, with all hope extinguished, still pulled together and rose up and, mostly, died, but gave their tormentors and murders and bloody nose and, in a few cases, against higher odds than Michael Moore winning the NYC Marathon, survived the war to witness against their captors.

Real people, who left behind whatever hadn’t been taken from them, and fought a real enemy who promised to kill them and their families if they failed.

Not overpaid, plushbottom Hollywood prima-donnas upset that they can’t install their choice of president by coup now that the hoi polloi have rejected their candidate.

Here’s my promise to you; call yourselves “the resistance” to my face, and I will spit in yours.

That is all.