A longtime friend of the blog emails:

With the impending Derek Chauvin trial, the fortification of the 4th Precinct has begun this morning.

A wall of cement traffic barricades are being set around the perimeter. Back last summer it was reinforced with razor wire.

I am so deeply saddened by what has happened to my city.

Sad. And disgusted.

Kevin Williamson was right. This isn’t decay. This is municipal suicide.

Back before longtime comment-section regular “Dog Gone” got irrevocably banned for life, she evinced a rhetorical pattern that, in recent years, has shown itself to be a bit of a pattern on the left, especially among left wing media, most particularly among the “Fact Check” set.

We saw this behavior in many instances – but the most comical was in 2012-2013, when I wrote my “Bruce Springsteen is America’s Best Conservative Songwriter” series, in which I built an airtight case that, notwithstanding Springsteen’s personal left-of-center politics, his music (at its best – fro 1975-1987, with a brief counter-relapse in 2002) resonates with many conservatives because it constantly iterated themes near and dear to the conservative heart and mind.

For the first dozen or so parts of the series, Ms. Gone’s response, over and over and over and over and over and over and (you get the idea) was “No he’s not!”

And then – as suddenly as a spring shower of logorrheic illogic – in the comment section of the final post, the tune (as it were) changed – to, more or less, exactly the point I’d been making for the previous dozen episodes.

Which is, in and of itself, of no great consequence.

But it does exhibit much of the behavior of the ongoing scam that is BIg Media’s “fact checking” side hustle.

Whose process I’ve broken down as follows:

The most egregious example, of course, was the reporting on Fredo Cuomo’s horrific, politicized, corrupt and incompetent response to Covid. When conservative alt-media reported, utterly accurately, about this last spring and summer, the “fact check” machine sandbagged the conclusion…

…until this past week, when the case suddenly served Big Left’s purposes in getting Cuomo out of the way, when suddenly “depends on context” turned into “this is the living truth”.

Verdict Rendered: And so it’s with great pride I introduce Berg’s 22nd Law of Mandatory Congruency – to wit:

The American media “fact check” industry exists to deflect the narrative caused by accurate reporting to benefit the Left.

As it is written, so shall it be done.

I’m not sure whether this…

…is the greatest parody site since Titania McGrath, or the most depressing thing I’ve ever read.

I’m praying for parody.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is at a local roastery, picking out some bourgeois coffee. Avery LIBRELLE walks in. BERG can’t quite react fast enough.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, f…for crying out loud, it’s been a long time, Avery. What’s…

LIBRELLE: (Interrupting) You say Democrats have trouble with critical thinking…

BERG: (picking a medium roast, ordering a half pound ground for french press) Yup.

LIBRELLE: …and that conservatism takes more mental energy…

BERG: …and it absolutely does, for people in modern society…

LIBRELLE: and that the modern left is hopelessly reductionistic.

BERG: You bet.

LIBRELLE: That is so wrong.

BERG: Nah. Here’s one of the modern left’s intellectual thought leaders at work:

BERG: Boiling a complex argument with lots of real world context down into an evil cover of a nursery rhyme is…

(BERG looks at LIBRELLE – who is happily clapping along and whispering the words)

(BERG silently pays for his order, leaves)

(And SCENE)

(

We had a thorough discussion about Ryan Winkler’s tweet and established
that Democrats have a strong personal belief, perhaps even a moral
conviction, that public safety is a government responsibility.

We had a thorough discussion about a lawsuit against the City and
established that when citizens suffer because government abandoned its
responsibility, the citizens have no recourse against the government
under existing law.

So the obvious question is: Will Ryan Winkler introduce legislation
creating a right for citizens to sue the government for failing its
responsibility to protect them?  And will the new law be retroactive to
cover the riots?

Ryan Winkler talked the talk, but will he walk the walk?

Joe Doakes

There may be no more superficial person in Minnesota politics than Ryan Winkler.

Other than Erin Maye Quade. And Ilhan Omar.

OK, and probably a few others.

But you get the point.

Stipulated: The Star Tribune is a de facto DFL PR firm. That its editorial slant is to the left is no surprise or problem.

Their “journalistic” slant, on the other hand? Democracy can not survive without institutions holding government accountable – and in Minnesota the ones ones you have are…

…(looks around)…

…PowerLine, AlphaNews, Tom Hauser on a good day, and the NARN.

Case in point: in a couple decades of reporting on sex trafficking cases, I do not recall the Star Tribune mentioning the occupations of the accused. Certainly not in the lede.

But now:

Talk about not so much burying the lede as inverting the story.

Is the Strib trying to tie Enbridge 3 – one of the DFL’s betes noire – to sex trafficking?

Given that the pipeline workers’ day jobs are paragraph 10 importance to the story, not headlines, waht do you think?

Rep. Eric Swallwell – “Duke Nuke ’em” of yore, who is trying to be his own honky Squad – may be, along with the Squad, one of the great boons to the GOP in 2022.

This, about Neela Tandon whose Twitter feed got her booted from a cushy appointment as Biden’s budget director:

I dunno, genius – maybe tell them to look at the sitting VP?

And then for a good example, the former governor of South Carolina, former UN ambassador and possible future president, Nikki Haley?

Normally about this point when a Democrat politician or talking head said something this daft, I’d throw in something about them really knowing better, but being able to count on the typical Democrat voter not knowing the difference, and being so bereft of any critical thought after years or decades of “progressive” reductionism that it makes no difference.

But I’m genuinely not sure Swalwell is actually smart enough to qualify for that exception.

Big Karen warned us – those Super Bowl tailgate parties in Tampa were going to lead to the extinction of Florida Man.

Those of us who paid attention in high school science noted that there’s incredibly low correlation between outdoor gatherings and Covid transmission.

“The science says ‘obey or die!'”, Big Karen responds.

Observation indicates – well…

You can almost feel the disappointment wafting out from Big Karen.

When they’re not busy deflecting away from the fact, that is.

Our thorough discussion of Ryan Winkler’s tweet established that
Democrats have a strong personal belief, perhaps even a moral
conviction, that public safety is a government responsibility.

Our thorough discussion of the lawsuit against Minneapolis established
that when citizens suffer because government abandons its
responsibility, the citizens have no recourse under existing law.

You must rely on us; but you can’t rely on us. That’s Catch-22 and it’s
not a joke, it’s official policy.

So the obvious question is: When will Ryan Winkler introduce legislation
creating a right for citizens to sue the government for failing its
responsibility to protect them? And will the new law be retroactive to
cover the riots?

Ryan Winkler talked the talk, but will he walk the walk?

Joe Doakes

No point of Rep. Winkler’s career has been about “walking” any “walk”.

It’s been about pointing at others shortcomings, real or manufactured, and jumping up and down and pointing and flinging poo.

That should clarify things.

One of domestic abusers most insidious forms of brainwashing is telling, and eventually convincing, their partners that the abuse is partly, or all, their own fault. “You provoked me”. “You shouldn’t have said __“. “You’re as much to blame as me. Maybe more”.

We’ll come back to that.

Years ago, I was at an event – political convention, election night coverage, something along those lines [1], in my capacity as a blogger and talk show host. I was hobnobbing with Big Minnesota Media.

As I was walking back from a concession stand, one of the Big Media people, someone who doesn’t have a byline or get seen on camera, walked up to me, and furtively whispered “Hey – PLEASE don’t tell anyone, but I’m a huge fan of you guys’s show. I’m a conservative. But I gotta keep it quiet. Anyway, keep up the good work”.

And then, as suddenly as the exchange began, it ended. The person peeled away and went back to work, making sure not to be seen talking to me. I felt like a Western reporter in East Berlin or Warsaw, in the seventies, getting a furtive, samizdat message from a covert dissident who was on the lookout for the Stasi or ZOMO.

This person – a successful media professional – was worried about being “canceled”. For being a conservative.

This was years ago – long before “Cancel Culture” was a term.

Last week, Erin Maye Quade, a former state rep and Lieutenant Governor candidate, tweeted this:

We covered this last week.

“People who rail against “cancel culture” are actually just upset about a culture of consequences.”
Is this just an isolated example of a person with an invincible sense of Urban Progressive Privilege #progsplaining people (“actually…”) to accept some premise that flies directly in the face of what they see with their own eyes?

Sadly, no.

A few weeks back, “progressive” theology site Patheos posted this article: “No, You’re Not Being Canceled Because You’re Conservative“

The article makes one plausible but misguided point – “conservatives and Christians do it too” – using the examples of John McCain (who got attacked for bucking conservative orthodoxy, and got a political response from people in a political party that has political stances they argue about – seeing a theme, yet?), and the Dixie Chicks (an example they undercut later in the piece). Nothing about non-political people losing non -political jobs, oddly enough.

The other points are worse.

The author posits “Either you’re for the free market or you’re not” – thereby cutting his own “Dixie Chicks” argument off at the knees. And he finishes with a slightly more elegant version of Maye Quade’s bit of #progsplaining – “the stuff you’re being canceled over is neither Christian nor Conservative”, holding that everyone that’s been “canceled” has gotten it because they peddle QAnon theories or are Kloset Klansmen.

And the author doesn’t even address the notion that dishing out consequences to a person’s personal and vocational life over political differences is appropriate “consequences” for any mainstream political view. Indeed, the Patheos article makes the “hear no evil / see no evil / speak no evil” monkey face and ignores the real issue entirely. To this “progressive” Christian author, it’s a non issue.

Which must’ve come as news to the conservative professors, and in the past 20 years teachers and school administrators who’ve been hounded into silence, or out of academia, as a “consequence” of having a considered worldview based on Friedman rather than Alinsky.
Or to the conservative students who are bullied into silence or exile as a “consequence” for dissenting from academia’s oppressive leftist slant.

Or the actors, artists, journalists and other soft-skills professionals and craftspeople who worry, legitimately, about the “consequences” to their career of being “outed”. Like the person in my story at the top of this piece. They worried about being slandered, pilloried and ousted from a decent job in their field, for *being a mainstream Republican and conservative” , albeit not even an activist – something that wasn’t considered “thoughtcrime” 20 years earlier, when that person entered the field.

Or Gina Carano, whose views leading to her defenestration from Disney have been misrepresented by the Left’s noise machine to the point of slander. Carano did *not* say Republicans today were like the Jews of the 1930s. She said – quite correctly – that tyrants succeed by turning neighbor against neighbor. That is Totalitarianism 101 , a point made in fiction by Orwell and in history by Solzhenitzyn, among many others.

Or…me.

I get some flak for my blog and my show – the occasional demented stalker, no big deal. But I’ve also gotten harassed by ex-co-workers who learned about my alter ego life [2]. And there’ve been two jobs in the past ten years where managers with highly progressive views that they were (significantly) unafraid to espouse in the office gave off muted but pointed indications that my contracts were ending because while my work was just fine, even superlative, my views – which they had had to expend some significant effort to find, since not even a whiff of them came out in the office – were not.

So yes – “cancel” culture is about consequences. In most cases, consequences for principled, but not infrequently silent, dissent from a dominant world view.
And the current narrative – from Erin Maye Quade, Patheos, and much of the rest of the dominant culture in media, academia, education and Big Tech – that “you got canceled because you provoked it and have it coming?”

That’s gaslighting. It’s a key tactic of abusers – among many others that have become commonplace weapons in today’s culture war:

Is it any different from the tactics that abusers use to shut their partners up?
Convince me.

Good luck.

[1] I’m profusely concealing this person’s identity, to this day. Don’t even ask.

[2] Which I keep scrupulously out of the workplace – literally, I’ve never mentioned my radio or blog lives once over the past 19 years. In that time, I’ve had two people, both fans, ask me “aren’t you the Mitch Berg that’s on the radio”. And my response, every time, is “There IS a Mitch Berg who does that. But he’d never talk about that on company time”. Every single time.

UPDATE: Jenn at Redhead Ranting has a personal take on the whole thing.

More of this ,faster, please:

Emery keeps bringing up the fact that Trump’s lawyers quit as proof there was no election fraud.

Trumps lawyers quit because they were personally threatened with violence by the mob.
Evidentally, Emery supports mob violence as a tactic to prevent proof of election fraud from seeing the light of day.

Why doesn’t he want it seen?  What is he afraid would be revealed?

And if mob violence against some people is okay, is it okay against everybody?  Or is this another “rules for thee but not for me” situation that seems so common in the Biden Administration?

Joe Doakes

Part of me wants to start updating my “Climate of Hate” page – the ongoing of attacks, shootings, beatings and attempted mass murder by lefties against normals.

But it’s to the point where it’d be a whole blog in its own right.

I’m going to modify Mahatma Gandhi’s classic aphorism on the course of dissident politics.

First they ignore you.

Then they mock you.

Then they pathologize you.

Then they attack you.

Then you win.

The term “whiteness” has become a key term in the word salad of modern progressive duckspeak.

It it feels like the terms is a narrative “MacGuffin”, designed to be a little bit of everything as well as just nothing enough to be flexible?

You’d be right:

 To anyone not predisposed to conversion, the gospel of whiteness obfuscates more than it reveals about the American experience. To begin with, we never really know exactly what whiteness is. This promiscuous concept sometimes appears as just another word for racist ideas, while other times it connotes power, material benefit, social opportunity, or just about anything else its adherents desire. In his book’s introduction alone, Roediger defines whiteness as a “racial identity,” an “ethnicity,” “status and privileges conferred by race,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of work discipline.” This grab bag of meanings suggests that whiteness is little more than a deus ex machina lowered onto the historical stage to wondrously resolve a tangle of problems. Too wondrously.

Moreover, we seldom see how whiteness actually works in the real world. This reified concept hovers above lived experience, mysteriously bending the arc of history. The underlying problem is a paucity, or distortion, of supporting facts, which leaves Saxton and Roediger pounding many evidentiary square pegs into explanatory round holes. For example, Saxton excoriates the Whig Party in the 1830s and 1840s for its combination of capitalist bias and elitist racism, but cites as his main example John Quincy Adams, one of America’s staunchest opponents of slavery. Roediger misleads similarly with his jaundiced analysis of “freeman.” This term and its partner, “free labor,” indeed took on a racialized meaning in antebellum America that contrasted with the bound labor of African-American slaves. But it also became the central feature of the anti-slavery movement as it fueled growing denunciations of slave labor, prompted opposition to its expansion into the western territories, and inspired the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in the 1850s.

Both historians suffer the same blind spot. They portray a 19th-century America in which citizens either embraced black freedom and equality without reservation or embraced whiteness. This produces not a gathering of information and fair-minded analysis that leads to a measured judgment, the historian’s task, but a process where evidence is cherry-picked or twisted to buttress a predetermined conclusion. It oversimplifies the messy, tangled, multifaceted development of the American republic, replete with ambiguous motivations and unintended consequences, and replaces it with a simplistic morality play where all whites are racists outright, or racist dupes. The monocausal steamroller of whiteness history, lumbering about amid historical complexity, simply flattens the American past.

Last week, one of Ben Shapiro’s podcasts pointed out that among the modern left’s greatest sins is its reductionism – the need it has to try, not to boil down and condense this complicated world, but to just oversimplify it, to turn all problems, causes and solutions into absurdly oversimplified bromides – suitable more for sorting the world into believers and heretics than actually addressing anything.

Beyond that? “Whiteness” is to today’s woke mob what “Counterrevolutionary” was to the NKVD: a malleable, one-charge-fits-all that could mean whatever the inquisitor wanted it to mean to justify a verdict that had been decided in advance.

When everything is about “whiteness” (or any misbegotten “-ness”) and “privilege”, then nothing really is.

And it’s because the progressive movement has it’s knee on the city’s neck.

Kevin Williamson explains, in a piece that’s too perfect to pullquote.

In Ben Shapiro’s Sunday interview with Gina Carano that I linked yesterday, there were several passages that resonated.

One in particular:

I would go to a barbecue on the beach in California, and all these people would go [switches to sotto voce] “Hey, I agree with you. Messed up, isn’t it?”.

And I’d be…’This is your house. Why are you whispering?'”

It reminded me of another episode.

I was talking with a couple of reps from a metro media organization – TV, newspaper, it matters not. And when one of the representatives and I had a moment without the others around, that person swiveled their head around to make sure nobody was listening, and whispered to me “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I love [the NARN]. I’m on you guys side. I just have to keep quiet about it”. I felt a little like a reporting working in East Berlin or Warsaw in 1974, getting a furtive, samizdat note from a local that the Stasi or ZOMO wouldn’t be able to trace.

This was over a decade ago.

I think of this because it is now in vogue for lefties to tell people “there is no such thing as cancel culture. There’s just consequences for actions”.

Right. And that “action” is “dissenting from the progressive worldview in public”. No more.

President Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial.

Republican Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine,
Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of
Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania joined every
single Democrat in voting guilty.

No word on whether Democrats and turncoat RINOs will commence a third
impeachment attempt against the man who left office January 20th, or
whether they will instead seek to impeach a different Republican former
President such as Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover or
Abraham Lincoln.

Joe Doakes

Will the Dems try for three?

Depends on:

a) How badly Biden continues to bungle Covid, and

b) How quickly the Ted Cruz deflection peters out.

“People tell me ‘I see what’s happening, and I”m so afraid’. And I tell them ‘you should feel more afraid that they’re making yiou feel afraid'”.

Get the truth about Gina Carano, because God knows the media won’t give it to you.

It’s from Sunday’s Ben Shapiro podcast. And while Carano isn’t a highly polished radio guest, her story – then and now – is utterly fascinating.

Big Left has been ideologically cleansing academia for decades. They’ve largely consolidating their control of the educational-industrial complex. They’re consolidating Hollywood and Big Tech now. Along with that, they – and a Big Sort – are doing the same with major metro areas.

And conservatives have in many cases obliged by moving on to greener/redder pastures.

But just as Eden Prairie is following Edina into the moldy blue camp as conservatives concede the battlefield, the culture war is coming for you, wherever you are.

At some point, the good guys and gals have to draw their lines in the sand.

And to think people say the media has gone all soft now that there’s a Democrat in the White House.

Pish-tush.

Berg’s 21st Law is the governing statute:

Liberals insist their beliefs are the only acceptable beliefs and anybody who thinks differently is insane, their children should be taken away and sent to Re-education Camps, and the parents should be ‘cleansed’ from America.

Assume Liberals are not lying this time and actually go through with it.  If you knew that today was your last day of freedom before the authorities broke down your door to put you on the train heading Way Up North where you’ll spend a life sentence in a gulag counting the birches as a political prisoner, how would you spend your day?

I sat at my computer updating work instructions and form templates for the person who will replace me.  The work won’t go away, only I will go away.  But I’m leaving good notes and a clean desk instead of taking the day to goof off and leaving a mess for the new person. 

In the Bad Old Days, that’s what was known as ‘being a White Man about it.’  You made your bed.  You picked up your stuff.  You chopped wood for the next camper.  You returned the borrowed car full of gas, the lawn mower washed.  You told the grocery clerk when she undercharged you and paid the difference so her till would balance.  You did things that nobody else noticed and you wouldn’t have been punished for failing to do because . . . it was the right thing to do. 

Nowadays, of course, it’s hateful and racist and sexist to expect people to act like responsible adults, so they don’t; they burn police stations and occupy hotels and form communes called Autonomous Zones.  I’m not convinced the new way is better which is why I’ll be on the train, soon.  Best of luck to you all.  Spend your last days wisely.

Joe Doakes

The conventions that made Western Civilization – which is dependent not on skin color, but on a set of ideals commonly observed – is the enemy these days, and they don’t care what they have to do or who they have to step over to destroy them.

Whatever you do, don’t you dare suggest public schools have become leftist indoctrination factories:

According to whistleblower documents and a source within the school, a fifth-grade teacher at the inner-city William D. Kelley School designed a social studies curriculum to celebrate Davis, praising the “black communist” for her fight against “injustice and inequality.” As part of the lesson, the teacher asked students to “describe Davis’ early life,” reflect on her vision of social change, and “define communist”—presumably in favorable terms.

At the conclusion of the unit, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-old students into the school auditorium to “simulate” a Black Power rally to “free Angela Davis” from prison, where she had once been held while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. The students marched on the stage, holding signs that read “Black Power,” “Jail Trump,” “Free Angela,” and “Black Power Matters.” They chanted about Africa and ancestral power, then shouted “Free Angela! Free Angela!” as they stood at the front of the stage.

Apologists may respond “this is an anomaly! Not all public schools try to get away with this kind of thing!”

No. Just the ones in districts so blue that there will be no consequences – serving both to socialize (heh heh) the concept with other teachers, and to lower the bar of what’s “acceptable” elsewhere; “Oh, fer gosh sakes, Edina doesn’t have them chant “Free Angela” and talk about black “ancestral power”. No, perish the thought. We just study why Angela Davis is a hero (omitting all context about her crimes and communism itself, naturally), and why “whiteness” is a social cancer. Totally different things!”

Remember – Berg’s 21st Law is pretty clear on this: “When it comes to “progressive” policy, yesterday’s absurd joke is today’s serious proposal and tomorrow’s potential law”

Don’t be surprised.

Truth is a trigger, apparently.

A far-left progressive representative relates the “emotional toll” of having black female politicians’ “violent” rhetoric (if we’re using Trump’s rhetoric on January as the standard) in Trump’s defense:

“The defense council put a lot of videos out in their defense, playing clip after clip of Black women talking about fighting for a cause or an issue or a policy. It was not lost on me as so many of them were people of color, and women, Black women. Black women like myself who are sick and tired of being sick and tired for our children. Your children,” Plaskett said.

Earlier in the day on Friday, Trump’s defense attorneys spent a great deal of their closing arguments accusing Democrats of hypocrisy over their support of last summer’s protests for racial justice. In doing so, his team played video footage from the summer protests, zeroing in on the relatively rare instances of violence and looting that occurred during the demonstrations.

TL:dr – Orange Man Bad, for the children.

So either using the term “fight” is aggressive rhetoric, or it’s “incitement”. End of story.

Pick one.

Keep your triggers off my – our, Western Civilization’s – logic, laws and reasoning.

A Michigan ammo company vows not to sell ammunition to Biden voters…

…and puts its marketing where its mouth is:

“Are you really willing to walk away from a paying customer simply because they voted for Joe Biden?” the company asked rhetorically. “Yes, yes we are. We’re dead serious.”

“We don’t want your money, and you shouldn’t want us to have it because we’re going to use it to make more ammo, sell it to the citizenry, and do everything in our power to prevent Joe Biden’s administration from usurping the rights of Americans,” the company wrote.

Not just its marketing, but its sales portal:

As a way to weed out the unwanted customers, the company reportedly inserted a questionnaire into its purchasing process that asks whether prospective customers voted for Biden in the 2020 presidential election. If they did, it’s no sale for them.

Some “progressive” companies led the way with partisan-based marketing after Trump’s election – Penzey’s very publicly told conservatives (not just Trump voters) to stop patronizing them (a request I could not comply with, as I’ve never shopped there before, either – which makes sense; I suspect their demographics, well-to-do white urbanites with lots of disposable income, overlaps with GOP voters only incidentally).

TL:dr – The good news: fighting cancel culture is a good thing, and I applaud Feniks.

The bad-ish news? Feniks is just as sold out of all stock as every other ammo shop.

This is interesting

Another stunning example of the ‘rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me’ attitude
which is fast becoming a Biden administration hallmark.

My question is: who paid the 10% to The Big Guy, for allowing this claim
to go forward instead of having the FBI arrest them for sedition? 
Haven’t tracked that down, yet.

Joe Doakes

I think we’re talking a four year freeze on all accountability for, well, most things.

All is proceeding exactly as Joel Kotkin predicted.

At least a decade and half ago, urbanist Kotkin predicted…the present. Even then, urban growth patterns were trending away from the core-city/bedroom suburb model of the 1950s-1980s; most real growth was occuring on the fringes of the cities, and in medium-sized cities at the periphery. Most immigration was to the suburbs, not the fabled tenements of now-unaffordable major coastal cities. Indeed, cities were returning to their historical roots; European cities like London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, and even New York City and Boston, are mazes of smaller neighborhoods, built around settlement patterns, markets and industries (“Steinway”, in Queens, was a piano-building company town), rather than a general agglomeration of businesses.

Kotkin’s thesis – that eventually, today’s cities will become three concentric patterns:

1. An inner core of incredible wealth, as the 1% enjoys easy access to big-industry offices and core amenities.
2. A middle donut of intense poverty, a convenient place for Social Services to warehouse people on assistance.
3. An outer, exurban ring blending into the hinterlands, where most of the actual people and growth are happening.

The pandemic, and the explosive acceptance of remote white and pink-collar work, is accelerating this.

The whole piece is worth a read. This pullquote in particular grabbed me:

Referring to the internet as an “information superhighway” is retro in the most cringeworthy way. But here, the metaphor seems apt. Decades after the construction of the U.S. highway system allowed high-income families to move from downtowns to the distant suburbs, Zoom might do the same. Remote work could do to America’s residential geography in the 2020s what the highway did in the 1950s and ’60s: spread it out.

Today, the term supercommuting is often used to describe the punishment inflicted on lower-income workers who have to live far from their job because of the scarcity of affordable housing. But the remote-work revolution could spawn the rise of something a little different: the affluent supercommuter who chooses to move to a big exurban house with the expectation that she’ll make fewer, longer commutes to the office.

“Historically, people who work from home don’t commute less overall, because they just drive longer distances,” Autor told me, referring to a Federal Reserve study from 2019. One shouldn’t put too much stock in a survey of pre-pandemic behavior. But the logic of fewer-but-longer commutes should lead to small towns and suburbs experiencing the fastest price growth. And, lo and behold, that’s exactly the story the online rental data are already telling us.

I left rural America for a reason; there were things about urban life that could not be found out in the hinterland. And I’m in a career where it genuinely helps to be where the work is. Will either of those factors change when – if – this pandemic ever sunsets?

No idea.

The big winners so far are Zoom, and Joel Kotkin.