Versus Hamburg, Germany, 1945.
Big-city crime is up, both violent and property, and nary a peep out of the legacy media. If you’re glued to the conventional lefty media hive, you might be clueless, unless you’ve actually ventured outdoors. What they’re failing to chronicle is an unraveling of civilized order in the hope that it’ll go down the memory hole. The fact is, lefty beliefs produce chaos if translated into policy, as the gang’s leaders devolve into an all-powerful commissariat.
What happened to our cities?
Minneapolis is a case in point. Up until the 1970’s, Minneapolis Republicans were competitive and the city had a Republican mayor (Charles Stenvig), the last one, whose term ended in 1974. Then, the hard-left Senator Paul Wellstone died and the radical left got organized over his corpse and formed “Wellstone Action” and later “Re:Power”. The hard left pushed the Hubert Humphrey types out of the Liberal-Democrat alliance (the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party). Now it’s just the Left with the moniker of Democrat as cover.
They then crystalized around the septuagenarian Bernie Sanders, a leftover from the old days of the unilateral disarmament crowd trying to topple Ronald Reagan. It seems that the Bernie Bros and Sisters are more militant than your conventional Humphrey partisans or members of the AFL-CIO. Heck, the guy is a proud socialist. Most other Democrats are as well, but they attempt to hide it behind bald-faced denials. Who else other than zealots-with-an-edge would rally to a geezer still singing “The Internationale”, the anthem of the doddering Socialist International? Now it’s time to “defund the police” and energize a pogrom for Marcuse’s critical theory and its many ideological offshoots riding under the banners of critical race theory, social equity, just “equity”, Irbam X. Kendi’s anti-racism circus, and the ubiquitous DEI of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (change the order and it’s DIE) .
Re:Power is Minneapolis’s Jacobins and filled with street corner activists – the “community organizers” of Obama fame – who are trained in the arts of gaining power. They are inspired by another leftover aging in the lefty fridge, Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals”. Power is their soul.
Just like the community organizers had to be trained for conquest, so the national movement needs a vast apparatus of trained militants on a much bigger scale than a municipality. There’s no better vehicle to mass produce militants than the schools, K through grad school, by taking over the staffing and curricula. The schools become the left’s boot camp. The radical left has discovered a political Mother Lode: legions to fill the ranks . . . at somebody else’s expense, the taxpayer.
So, parents, get off your duff and take control of your schools from this tightly organized clique of radical political operators. Unless, of course, you like the idea of your offspring torching a police precinct. They’ll be burning more than a police station; they’ll be putting the torch to our republic. Other than that, what’s there to worry about?
RogerG
*Thanks to Kevin D. Willamson in his piece “Minnesota Nasty” in the March 8 issue of National Review.
**Also on my Facebook page.