Minnesota Conservatives' Year In Review

I cast about for something to say in summary fashion, as is the custom, for year end think pieces. Then I realized that I had said everything about the year just expiring in this space. Consequently, I review highlights of what I've written and decide whether those posts remain accurate or wide of the mark, along with some current observations.

January

At the start of the year I wrote "The Coming of Governor Tina Flint Smith." At the end of the year, she's still coming, carefully shielded from any MN Sure disaster fallout by Gov. Dayton and the media. Sen. Tom Bakk could pose a challenge to her if he's able to marshall to his side the issues that gave Trump a win in 78 out of 89 counties. Others have and will announce for the DFL endorsement but I don't see them as first tier candidates, with the possible exception of Attorney General Lori Swanson.

That post can be read by clicking here.

February

There was no more important story this month than the loss of Justice Antonin Scalia. His death put in stark relief the stakes at issue in this election. Loathsome Never Trumpers would never mention the Supreme Court was in the balance. To be fair, this was February, lots of time for the national version of Minnesota republicans to shove into the meat grinder of Hillary Clinton someone unexceptional.

I wrote about the loss of Scalia here.

March

The republican presidential debate that month should have been all the warning the cosseted, insular GOPe set should have needed to know that things were very different this election cycle. But they were cosseted and insular and remained so. Just like the MNGOPe only less so.

"The End of the Republican Party As We Know It" was my take.

That post can be read by clicking here. 

April

One of the most important things I wrote in 2016 was: "Do Minnesota Republicans Believe In Anything?"

I concluded: not much or all the wrong things. Take your pick. Nothing has changed since then, believe me.

I wrote about it here. 

May

That month I looked at Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek's appearance before the Minnesota Republican Party State Convention in my piece "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Stanek." Stanek, I ventured to say, could run for governor and win. 

Since that time, I've concluded he might be the only republican who can. 

My post can be read by clicking here.

June

Brexit was the only story worldwide in June and with good reason. I tried to apply its lessons to republican politics locally when I wrote "How Much Zeitgeist Can Minnesota Republicans Ignore?"

Turns out in the time since then, a great deal, which continues to this moment. 

My post can be read by clicking here.

July

Donald Trump accepted the republican nomination in Cleveland, Ohio that month. Virtually all conventional wisdom had said, time and again, such would never happened. Only it did. 

I wrote "Minnesota Republicans in the Age of Trump" as my sole blog post that month and for good reason: I had nothing else to say. 

My post can be read by clicking here.

August

Donald Trump held a private fundraiser that month in downtown Minneapolis. Upon leaving, his peaceful supporters were viciously attacked by fascist thugs on the left. I didn't attend the event but helped man the Twitter ramparts to get the news out. The story went nationwide in less than a day yet the then chair of the RPM didn't see fit to speak about it until three days later. Local media were more disgraceful than usual in covering it up or papering it over, with one newspaper headline claiming Trump supporters were "taunted." No one deserved to lose the presidential election more than media.

"Minneapolis Disgraces Itself: State Sanctioned Violence Against Peaceful Trump Supporters" would turn out to be my most read article. 

It can be read by clicking here.

September

I wrote nothing that month because I had nothing to say. More should follow the practice but I don't tell people how to blog or tweet. Perhaps I was getting ready for my trip to Athens, Greece the next month, when seemingly the bottom fell out of the Trump campaign.

October

Upon my return, I wrote about the release of the infamous, eleven year old "Access Hollywood" video and republican reaction to it in "The Stupid Party Outdoes Itself." It really did. Only Trump's furious counter-attack and excellent performance in the subsequent debate staunched the bleeding. 

It can be read by clicking here.

November

Donald Trump became president-elect that month, the 45th President of the United States. It was astonishing, thrilling and glorious all at the same time. What was said could never happen, happened, with worldwide consequences. 

I wrote "President Trump & The End of the MNGOPe" and followed it up with "Trump: The Transformation of Minnesota Politics." If I do say so myself, both are worth a reread at year's end.

The first can be read by clicking here. 

The second by clicking here.

December

I ended this fantastic year by writing "What I Saw At Pete Hegeth's Christmas Party" and it seems an unusually apt note upon which to end. My concern was that the Minnesota republicans in attendance had no idea how to capitalize on Trump winning 78 out of Minnesota's 87 counties. In the few weeks that have elapsed since, I'm convinced at this point they manifestly do not. New thinking doesn't come easily, usually at all, to these types. 

My post can be read by clicking here.

2017

I'd like to thank my readers for slogging through this extraordinary year with me.  

My best wishes to you for a happy & healthy New Year. It's going to be huge.

What I Saw At Pete Hegseth's Christmas Party

"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within. I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them." Leonard Cohen

Last Wednesday I attended the only political holiday party that was of interest to me and to which I really didn't need an invitation, as I don't get many of those these days. Sad! I went with no expectations and left feeling like I'd taken an acid bath.

It was Facebook come to life. At one point I half wanted Dolores from "Westworld" to appear and start shooting us all in the back of the head. Or anywhere, really. Just get it done.

I say this not because it was an entirely dour affair, it wasn't. I was genuinely glad to see a wide range of elected officials, activists, staffers, donors and miscellaneous hangers-on that I hadn't in some time. One wag later tweeted that it was a rare "shabbosgoy sighting," @shabbosgoy being my handle on Twitter. Not quite as valuable as a rare Pepe meme (the diamond Pepe appears only when does the savior of Western Civilization, which happened) but still appreciated because it involved humor, something sorely lacking amongst republicans of all stripes.

Hegseth is to be commended for hosting the event and casting his invitation with a wide net in a party fractured by ideological incoherence and petty personal political rivalries. I managed a few words with his wife, Samantha, before being cornered not three feet into the donor room. I met several interesting people I wouldn't otherwise have but this initial experience was but a taste of what was to come. When Pete sought me out we had a few moments, it was fun, but he was dragged away by the event organizer in order to speak on time. The organizer, a friend, was Barbara Malzacher, who ran a flawless event.

I was pleased to speak with Sen. David Hann, who single handedly brought republicans their majority in the senate while losing his own race. Sometimes you know when you're in the presence of a genuine human being and so it was when we talked. I apologized to him for getting that scandal a few years ago quite, quite wrong. The opportunity to make that apology was the motivating reason for my attendance and I should have left once I was ahead.

* * * * 

I was surprised at the number of Never Trump people who showed their face without qualm, as if they had been aboard for some time. "Shameless," apparently, is more than an unwatchable television show. Jack & Annette Meeks in the donor room embodied this best. There were others, of course.

I pointedly said hello to a few of them. I'm only human and it was irresistible. Mostly, though, we ignored each other, as though one of us hadn't been right for months, and paid the price, and the others were not and did not. So it goes and the clueless interest me only to the extent they'll fumble the opportunities afforded republicans in Minnesota by Trump winning 78 out of 87 counties. Neither Norm Coleman or Vin Weber were in attendance but plenty of people dependent upon their largesse were. You start to see the problem; think of fossils in amber.

* * * * 

Hegseth gave a fine speech, emphasizing the positive of a Trump presidency to a room largely filled with those who not only didn't support him but hope he lost. Everyone played along while I took notes. 

Congressman-elect Jason Lewis, perhaps sensing this and providing counter-point, gave a short but optimistic speech about the present and the immediate future. He rightly emphasized that name calling didn't cut it in this last election, something he shared first hand with Trump. He told the crowd to get ready for the first 100 days of President Trump. They weren't sure what to make of that, them being swamp creatures writ small. 

Sen. David Hann spoke and got a good round of applause, suggesting to me that even the guilty can still have a conscience. After the fact, of course.

Republican Party Chair Keith Downey said that Pete Hegseth brought the Minnesota republican party together, a remarkable and demonstrably false proposition. The crowd didn't gasp--that would be too overt for this group--but it fell flat with an audible thud. His, ours, is a political party torn asunder by one dimensional chess moves by those whose only principles are self interest and self enrichment, electoral, to say nothing of ideological, success coming in a distant second, unless they mesh of course.

Downey suggested more than once that Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment united republicans, hence Trump's victory. Someone wasn't paying attention to the fallout from the Access Hollywood video or thought anything could be said, red meat-like, and the audience would applaud. It couldn't and they didn't. 

When we later engaged by accident, he congratulated me on becoming a regular contributor to The Hill, the news of which had broken earlier that week. I haven't written about it here because I don't write about myself here; I am myself here.

Downey was exceedingly gracious and I appreciated his comments. This was something I regularly encountered: The Hill imprimatur. Many others that night gave congratulations and I unexpectedly found myself behind the curve, only concerning me. That was different, mostly weird. 

I'll take it and am grateful for the new platform and audience but I was struck by how important ersatz credentials are to these people. It's not like I'm going to say anything new or different there than here. 

* * * * 

The Hegseth Christmas gathering showed me a political party unsure of itself, vaguely happy that the orange guy won but quick to add qualifications and caveats designed to make certain members deep enough thinkers to release flatulence into the Almanac couch as well as onto the airwaves. 

The people who attended this event did so because, however begrudgingly, they recognized there was no better show in town and so there they were. Or their surrogates, furtively texting their bosses about the large crowd.

But mere attendance can't paper over the divisions in this party, starting but not ending with the outright, and deep, animosity between senate republicans and house republicans. That's a story worth reporting but in keeping with their legendary laziness, I saw not a single reporter from our DFL-centric local media. 

* * * * 

The 2016 election was the last one and we were on to the new one, by which, of course, I mean the 2018 gubernatorial race. Everyone, or so it seemed, had an agenda to push and I was frequently on the receiving end of it, willingly or not.

This, I thought in real time, was odd, given what I know about what most of those people think of me.

But they were undeterred and I was mostly a captive audience until I could manage to squirm away. Plus I was now a contributor to The Hill, something, like Trump, that they didn't see coming and so now must be dealt with.

It was an evening of exigencies, including for me, to be honest. 

The usual candidates were discussed: Minnesota Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt, Hennepin County Commissioner and 2014 republican gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson, Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek--the metaphorical elephant in a room full of political ones--as well as Scott Honour, Sen. Michelle Benson, and many others. 

One was Mike McFadden, who I saw slip into the event halfway through the speakers portion of the night. He looked through me even more thoroughly than had the Meeks earlier in the donor room, which took some doing. I returned the favor with my by now practiced wan smile. It's a Minnesota republican form of madness that he thinks himself viable in 2018. 

I learned it was much worse than I already thought when a former staffer on McFadden's misbegotten run for Senate against Al Franken called me aside and jokingly berated me for not noticing him. I was dancing as fast as I could and told him so, nothing personal. He shared with me that he encountered heated discussions, recriminations actually, about the Marty Seifert/Tom Emmer split from the 2010 endorsement battle. I really should have left earlier. That was topped by another political hand saying he'd run into disputes about the Brian Sullivan/Tim Pawlenty endorsement contest. The word irredeemable came to mind. 

A party and its activist base that still can't get beyond those old battles is not one well positioned for the future, especially given how Donald Trump has scrambled old assumptions, political techniques and electoral strategies. This would be true even if a conventional, establishment candidate had somehow won against Hillary Clinton. It's all the worse given the political transformation the president-elect has wrought.

I was routinely teased, often mocked outright, on Twitter for suggesting a political realignment was coming but come it has, even including Minnesota. I asked everyone who talked to me as though I mattered, what we were going to do to capitalize on Trump's showing here? I got blank looks, or faux thoughtful pauses, before the individual plunged back into a narrative that showed no sign of noticing what we all just experienced. By this time I was reaching my limit of how many out of body experiences I could endure in a single evening. 

* * * * 

I run the risk of appearing naïve by recounting honestly my attendance at this Christmas party. It's a risk I'll take because the stakes are so high. The evening should have been a genuine celebration but the event celebrated came about largely despite, and not because of, so many who were there. Consequently the night was like a bad family reunion: no one really liking the others and attendance forced by circumstances that were inescapable.

That was the impermeable barrier I kept encountering despite being something of a standout because I attend so few of these events. My merely showing up was noticed and that discomforted me. I was more interested in knowing what we Minnesota republicans were going to do next. 

The answers to that query left me adrift. It was as though nothing extraordinary had happened. But it has and how we "lean forward" into it spells the difference between success--and keeping Minnesota from becoming a one party state--and failure, which ensures its advance. 

I have no dog in the gubernatorial fight. I want the candidate that can defeat who I think will be the DFL nominee: Tina Flint Smith or Sen. Tom Bakk. I don't think St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman can overcome the metro establishment support of the former but I've never worried overly much about being wrong. That way lies paralysis. 

Minnesota republicans have to heal themselves. If those old political wounds that were on display last Wednesday night still rankle, I don't know how they do so. Maybe, as I always have, talking about them in the open will help.

We owe that much to our voters, who happen to be real, live people. They voted for a flawed and a brilliant man for president, one whose personal shortcomings, much like their own, they saw past to a different and better future. 

How republicans make that future come about for the average Minnesotan is the abiding question of the next two years.

The Islamization of Minnesota Media

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a terrorist linked group that has turned into the go to source for much of American media. In this, Minnesota media are not different, only worse. Much worse. I've watched as media outlets in the state, primarily the Twin Cities, increasingly refracted each and every story about muslims generally, and Minnesota ones specifically, through the prism of a CAIR press release or it's invidious agenda. No outlet has been more mindless, or undeservedly morally superior, in this regard than Minnesota Public Radio.

The usual caveats to MPR always apply: taxpayer funded promulgator of liberal narratives, comfort zone of the intellectually incurious and cheerfully dishonest disseminator of falsehoods whenever circumstances warrant, which this election cycle was essentially 24/7.

Still, I was appalled when I learned that one of it's better known reporters, Tom Weber, agreed to serve as Master of Ceremonies for CAIR's 9th Annual Banquet. I realize people in media function in a variety of roles outside their platform but in doing so Weber, and explicitly MPR, gave its imprimatur to a group long considered beyond the pale. He did so on top of his employer having given its listeners and readers no real understanding of what the group is or how reasonable people and organizations have a very different understanding of it.

A good summary of CAIR's terrorist links, and it's retribution against critics, "CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment," can be found by clicking here.

Members of the Minnesota media would do well to read that piece if they care at all for informed reporting.

MPR made a big deal when it recently hired Mukhtar Ibrahim. When he tweeted something that specifically mentioned CAIR, I responded that the group was terrorist linked. He blocked me faster than Keith Ellison. No agenda here with this reporter.

Nothing objectionable to the CAIR perspective can be found in MPR's coverage of Islam and muslims in America. I've concluded reporters on this beat themselves don't know much. Which non-muslim Twin Cities reporters could tell you, off the top of their heads, the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam? None, I venture to say.

I'm hardly an Islamic scholar or historian but you don't need to be in order to be decently informed; you just won't become so relying on Minnesota media. Instead you'll get a warped version of what's actually happening in Minnesota and in that big scary world outside this xenophobic state's borders.

The CAIR contagion has spread to the Star Tribune, apparently in an effort to keep up with politically correct virtue signaling. Again, the same intellectual impoverishment exists there and the most anodyne stories devoid of anything approaching substance are routinely churned out. The embarrassing saturation coverage over a young muslim woman competing in a beauty pageant, burkini-clad, is but the latest example.

By contrast, anything that reflects badly on the favored group is reported once, if at all, and never again. Somali, how shall we say, overrepresentation in day care fraud is the best example. Why new immigrants incredibly fortunate to be in this country would seek to take criminal advantage of it is something not to be explored further because CAIR narrative.

One local television reporter had a bit about Somali elders which featured all men. Really? Where's the backstory on this episode of misogyny? All people deserve respect and equality; all cultures manifestly do not. It's possible, indeed a moral imperative, to separate the two but this is a synapse that hasn't yet fired in the brains of Minnesota media.

* * * * 

The default local media position seems to be that coverage of these important issues is best served by using the stale civil rights struggle in which it's always Selma 1965. As a matter of their legendary laziness, I understand this approach but then they ought to congratulate themselves less on Twitter in so being. Real reporting can be done here but they collectively not only lack the will but seem to be positively terrified at the prospect. As a result, their audience is impoverished or, worse, reinforced in their ignorance. Remember, media think themselves truth tellers. 

* * * * 

Scott Johnson, of Powerline, and Preya Samsundar, of Alpha News, have done real and serious reporting that local media refuse to touch, or do so only if forced by events. Liberals and the usual republican Twitter suck-ups-to-reporters routinely disparage both but never, of course, on the merits of their reporting. That's an honesty bridge too far. 

The case of Rep. Keith Ellison is both instructive and typical.

The Morning Hot Dish newsletter, the Star Tribune's attempt to encroach on the far superior Morning Take, provides a recent example. Full disclosure: I'm friends with the purveyor of the latter but that wouldn't stop me from critiquing it should I find it appropriate. As a friend of mine once said, the only real downside in being my friend is to find yourself called out by name from time to time in this space. So it goes: Minnesota nice is poison.

Hot Dish, in keeping with local media's attempt to first ignore, then downplay, the odious Keith Ellison and his anti-semitism, his Islamist links and his Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam membership, recently asked about the accumulated evidence: "The point is, what else is out there?" The point is that isn't the point.

Imagine if the links to such groups, and such conduct and words, were on the far right. The "take" would be rather different. But as Johnson long ago pointed out, Minnesota media willingly carried Ellison's water and one supposes there's no reason to think they'd change now. It's all in keeping with a media both ignorant, and afraid to report on, what's actually going on within the muslim community in America. Keith Ellison's tight connection to CAIR can be read about by clicking here.

* * * * 

* * * * 

Ask yourself if you've ever read any local coverage of Irshad Manji, Tarek Fatah, Maajid Nawaz or even the world famous Ayaan Hirsi Ali (herself a Somali, talk about a local angle)? You haven't but the real question is why?

It's because these muslim reformers have no place in the CAIR narrative. To cover them is to explode the construct that CAIR speaks for all muslims and is somehow a leading voice. It is not the former but if it has become somehow the latter, it is because of a supine, not particularly knowledgeable and intimidated, virtue signaling media. Truth to power and all that J-school rubbish.

Manji recently married her girlfriend, something you'd think the local professional homosexual lobby (in and out of media) would applaud. But no. So great is the Islamist myopia in this town advanced by the Servants of CAIR™ that not even this is sufficient to garner her attention, let alone praise. Fatah is a tour de force in discussing honestly the problems of religion-based terrorist Pakistan and Nawaz himself left militant Islam for a better path. All of them are on Twitter. All of them can be learned about by using the magical powers of Google.

Keith Ellison's Minneapolis based imam recently said things that would bring the press here down on him in an instant had they been said by a white, straight, male, evangelical Christian. But he isn't and so they don't. 

This is the real tragedy of the Islamization of Minnesota media: through it's CAIR centered coverage it advances the most extreme advocates of a certain idea of Islam, while abandoning altogether those brave muslim men and women who seek to reconcile the seventh century with modernity while retaining the best of their faith. 

You might call it true Islamophobia.










Image credit: CAIR Minnesota, click to enlarge.