Somalis, Minnesota & The Cathedral

Last Thursday the New York Times, an essential element of the Cathedral (defined and explained in my post immediately below), published a story designed to silence Minnesotans from voicing legitimate concerns about the forced importation of Somalis into this state. The only officially approved narrative on this topic is one of unalloyed joy and gratitude despite, on balance and by every objective measure, being an ongoing, quite expensive, socially corrosive, failure.

Somalis in Minnesota do very little to adjust and assimilate into America. They are encouraged by the Regressive Left, here and nationally, aided by the Cathedral, not to do so. Instead, quite perversely, Minnesotans are demanded to do all the adjusting. This is exactly backwards but is precisely our current circumstances.

The New York Times story--one could predict its content and narrative arc without reading it--is designed to assist local efforts in Minnesota to silence objections and dissent. The mere act of noticing is not allowed. "Political correctness is a war on noticing," Steve Sailer once wrote.

Reduced to its essentials, the storyline posits that backwards, racist, xenophobic (a word used in the title) Minnesotans are the scum of the earth, while portraying Somalis as helpless victims, here only to benefit us, instead of to take from us, which is the more accurate reality. That nonsense about diversity making us stronger again. It doesn't, of course, but saying so will soon be a capital offense.

* * * * 

Before examining the hit job of a story, I want to recall what I wrote almost two years ago to the day when Sen. Tom Cotton was the featured speaker at the annual dinner of the Center of the American Experiment. Quite literally, I was the only one present who actually conveyed in writing what the Senator said. The Cathedral works by intimidation, among other methods, and the reaction to the New York Times story is revealing proof of it.

Here's what I wrote for Alpha News about the substance of Sen. Cotton's remarks concerning Somalis & Minnesota:

"Cotton proceeded to talk in honest, real terms about Somalia and Somali immigration. I swear I could hear jaws clench. This crowd either supported open borders or was (mostly) too cowardly to speak about its downsides. Not Tom.

He detailed the enormous financial generosity of America toward the failed state of Somalia, including both humanitarian aid as well as military efforts, the latter at the cost of lives. “Blackhawk Down” and all that.

Turning to the realities of Somali immigration, he informed the audience that Minnesota spends more than 120 million dollars annually on that community. He noted that more than 80% of them do not speak English at home. He pointed out the obvious and ongoing problem of Somalis joining terrorist groups both here and abroad. He truthfully said that there is little cultural integration of them nor any particularly noteworthy contributions to wider society from them.

He mocked Gov. Mark Dayton for saying to those who had “real and legitimate” concerns about such a troubling situation that they “should find a different state.” He made plain that the Governor had it backwards, had it manifestly wrong and that American citizens have every right to question the consequences of immigration decisions from which they are largely excluded but are forced to live with.

Simple, candid common sense was the order of Cotton’s day and saying these things out loud made the Center’s audience deeply uncomfortable. Citizens have every right to question the settlement of those who don’t share our values or seek to change our culture into the backward one from which they came. Female genital mutilation comes to mind. That questioning can, and should, be done without rancor or unkindness but this crowd was largely made up of those who faint dead away at the thought of being called bigoted or racist."

All this is truer today than it was two years ago. The discussion along these lines amongst Minnesotans is precisely what the Times' story is designed to shut down. Local media was failing at the task. Ask yourself: why else would the New York Times take an interest in Saint Cloud, Minnesota? Why now? These stories don't appear for no reason. 

* * * * 

The story itself was badly written, notable for the falsehoods it contained as well as for salient facts it left out. This is how most "journalism" operates in the service of the Cathedral's agenda.

To begin, the reading material of one subject is categorically labeled xenophobic and conspiratorial, with no evidence provided for the claim, naturally. Robert Spencer's "JihadWatch.org" was included in those characterizations. Spencer is a scrupulously factual, leading authority on Islam, Islamism, the terrorism that naturally accompanies mass Muslim migration to the West and the author of "The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS." Buy this book.

The story went on to deride white demographic replacement, something minorities and the Democrats boast about, as a "racist conspiracy theory." Except that white replacement is an obvious, demonstrable fact, here in America and across Western Europe.

Whites are a minority in London. The very day this hit piece appeared, the Texas Tribune ran the story "Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident last year." No Texas, no republican president ever again. But "a racist conspiracy" according to the author of the New York Times story.

All of this is in the service to intimidate you into not noticing in the first place, and in the second, to remain silent if you do. Whites can object once they're minorities and lose electoral power.

The Minnesota chapter of CAIR is kowtowed to without mentioning its terrorist links, something the New York Times has in common with local media. The pretense it speaks for all Muslims is laughable but that's the only narrative you'll find in the press.

What did the story leave out about Somalis in Minnesota? Welfare dependency to the tune of 120 million dollars annually, lack of assimilation by Somalis into American culture, daycare fraud, home health services fraud, members of the Bloomington terrorist mosque Dar Al Farooq leaving to join the terrorist group Al- Shabab, an imam at that same mosque whose homilies instruct Muslims that it is their religious duty to kill Jews, and another terrorist attack at the Mall of America on top of that of Crossroads Mall.

Gee, why would people who had no say in the imposition of all this cultural enrichment have the least hesitation about such developments?

A friend more astute than I am noticed the Times' story flipped the demographic numbers: Saint Cloud went from 2% non-white to 33%. But, she observed, another way of saying this is that in 30 years it went from 98% white to 67% white. You're supposed to neither notice nor object. Diversity, weirdly, only affects white people. Why is that?

As one person on Twitter said: "Note the preposterous inversion of who the offending party is here, as if it's entirely natural for people from thousands of miles away to be settled en masse in a small city in the interior of this continent. But somehow it's the locals who must explain themselves!"

Another: "Amusing to see the obvious alliance between the East Coast media & refugee NGO's to facilitate ramrodding 3rd world migrants into white towns & the few remaining majority white cities. 'Accept this next wave of migrants or we'll stamp you as media-certified bigots or Hate Agents.'"

Yet another put it in succinct deadly terms: "Their desire to not be replaced is proof they deserve replacement."

* * * * 

Astead W. Herndon is the reporter commissioned by the Times for this hit job. "In his free time, he enjoys basketball, musical theater, “Atlanta” (his favorite TV show), Kanye West and is a die-hard supporter of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, a soccer team in North London," reads his bio in part. 

A black, gay, affirmative action hire, previously at the D.C. bureau of The Boston Globe, Herndon's Saint Cloud piece is actually the second installment of his cultural jihad against what he terms "white identity politics."

Wait a minute: isn't identity politics all the rage? Why, yes it is. Does every other ethnic group in America now engage in it constantly? Regrettably, yes. Why, then, should anyone object when whites do it?

Because it's racist. I'm not being facetious, that's the literal, and continuous, answer you will get to that obvious question. Such is the alarm in the Cathedral that whites will attain a racial, ethnic identity before the demographic transformation of America is complete that this non sequitur is deployed viciously and incessantly against them. Alas, it's effective: you don't want to be called a waycist bigot, do you white boy? It helps, of course, when there are a lot of white Leftists shouting this. 

His first article in what can only be presumed to be a tedious narrative tasked Herndon by his white overlords at the Times is titled "How Trump’s Brand of Grievance Politics Roiled a Pennsylvania Campaign." Herndon references an alleged push-pull among republicans "who have wrestled with how to deal with such overt appeals to white identity."

When all others are explicitly appealed to daily on the basis of those identities, why can't whites be? Because they're still in the voting majority, which gives the game away. 

Do you think Herndon will write on how blacks in America, who constitute 13% of the population, are responsible for more than 50% of violent crime? Never. Wrong narrative. 

This accounts for why you never see stories about the state of race relations among minorities. How are blacks and hispanics getting along? Asians and blacks? Blacks and Somalis? Africans new to America and blacks? Once you take out the white element, the narrative is grim. 

The cohesion of the coalition of the fringes depends upon the white boogeyman. Left to themselves they resemble "The Lord of the Flies." 

Based upon my review of Herndon's articles and social media postings, I've concluded he's a black national supremacist. Two can play that game and far more of us on the Right should. Turns out it's quite easy. 

Why don't we? Oh right, the name calling. The Cathedral's power is as strong as it is because currently it only has to start the job of non-personing and too many on the Right will do the rest of the work for it in order not to be next. Belatedly, they learn they are always next; it's only a matter of time, a matter of sequencing. 

With the Saint Cloud calumny, Herndon got a twofer: racist white people and Muslim haters. The reaction, however, in Minnesota has been less than spectacular to his libel-by-the-numbers job, something of a thud, as a friend of mine might say. Sure the local newspaper wrung its hands and the usual white haters in the Twin Cities media and political circles clucked but, beyond that, not much of an impact. 

No one lost their job, for example, always a goal with these stories to provide sufficient warning to others engaged in Wrong Think. Herndon's own tweeting of the story went decidedly non-viral and many of the replies, satisfyingly, were evidence that this narrative is losing strength.

The objects of the hit job hit back.

* * * * 

Objecting to your own demographic replacement without any say, as well as to the forced importation of Islam on a significant scale, which importation has already destroyed the United Kingdom and ruined much of Western Europe, is both appropriate and necessary. Cultural Janissaries, hired by corporate media, will be deployed to bolster attempts by local media to stop efforts of the citizenry from being effective in, well, resisting.

“Islam is not a race … Islam is simply a set of beliefs, and it is not ‘Islamophobic’ to say Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the world's most famous and accomplished Somali, has rightly said. Why don't you see her celebrated in Minnesota media instead of the national embarrassment Ilhan Omar? Indeed, why is there a media blackout on Hirsi Ali in this state? 

The Cathedral is the short answer.

Why no extensive coverage as to the cost of Somali migration here, the fraud, the criminal gang violence, the extent of female genital mutilation, the lack of genuine assimilation as opposed to the gaming of the system and exploitation of their status as pets of the Regressive Left, or of the pathologies of that ghetto known as Cedar Riverside?

Again, the Cathedral. 

This framework explains a great deal, if not in fact most, of our politics and culture, tightly intertwined as they have become. Once understood, you'll never see anything the same way again.

* * * * 

There are, of course, better and worse ways of approaching these topics. Without exception, every person interviewed in Herndon's story who was concerned about these forced developments failed to realize what was really going on, failed to realize the hit job in the process of being written, failed to understand the Cathedral and, above all, failed to take my oft repeated advice: never talk to the media. No good, and much ill, will only come from it.

Stop cooperating with people who hate you.

Islam's rank, self-professed, incompatibility with America as founded should always be the locus of concern, not an individual Mohammedan. That person deserves to be treated with respect and the protection of the full panoply of legal rights afforded any American, even as Islam exploits what Hirsi Ali says is democracies soft underbellies, our religious freedoms. Tricky business. 

Propagandists and Islamofascist supremacists like Ilhan Omar are fair game for strong, consistent criticism. But should I meet her in real life, I'd treat her with all the usual courtesies which South Dakotans were raised to treat others. Macro, stopping the Islamization of America, not micro, an individual adherent, should be the object of our warranted attention.

When we do so, when those brave individuals in Saint Cloud and elsewhere in Minnesota who have awakened to the threat, who don't want their state & country to go the way of the U.K., who say no and seek to educate others, we will find, to our satisfaction, that the Cathedral strikes back.

This is why, despite all appearances to the contrary, the New York Times story is a sign of the Cathedral's panic. 

Untouchable Ilhan Omar

As long as you remember that if you get involved in politics, you have to be very careful that your leader is for Allah. You don’t get involved in politics because it’s the American thing to do. You get involved in politics because politics are a weapon to use in the cause of Islam. —Siraj Wahhaj

Ilhan Omar, "a symbol of America’s failed immigration system if there ever was one, someone who hates this country coming here at public expense," as the indispensable Tucker Carlson recently described her, continues to make the worst possible sort of news. Jew hater? Check. America hater? Check. Hater of white people who built not only this country but Western Civilization and without whom she'd still be in a refugee camp in Kenya? Double check.

Islamofascist supremacist? Uber check, because that identity is her raison d'état.

To miss this last bit is to miss the real Ilhan Omar entirely.

I'm the guy who unearthed her "Israel has hypnotized the world" tweet. She didn't appreciate her true views being made known, literally worldwide. (I'm bad at this game or else I would have monetized it, something Turning Point, USA would not have failed to do if they had come across the tweet. I can see Alyssa Ahlgren modeling tee shirts with it even now to be sold to Boomers)

In response to bringing her tweet to light, Omar called me a "hateful, sad man." Or a "sad, hateful man." Who can recall, it's Twitter. You get the drift and I put one of those iterations in my Twitter bio with relish.

My name was caught up in the firestorm of attention to this tweet so it was probably inevitable that I would get an inquiry from corporate media and indeed I did, although the source was surprising. Last November, I received an DM on Twitter (my DMs are open because fear is paralysis) from a reporter with Deutsche Welle, one of the world's premiere corporate news reporting organizations. German, in case Deutsche didn't register with you.

Said one Tessa Walther, in the Washington, D.C. bureau, to me: "I am working on a story about Ilhan Omar. I would like to talk to you about what she called you. Would you have time for a short statement?" Her contact information followed but would never be republished here.

Do you see what's going on? Ilhan Omar reveals her true colors but I'm somehow going to be the story because of what she called me? My reaction to her name calling is either the story or somehow fits into it? I don't think so. I'm already on a list of Wrong Thinkers as generated by the Minnesota chapter of that terrorist linked, Hamas front group known as CAIR.

I didn't respond and Tessa Walther's "story" never ran. Believe me, I've searched for any story by this reporter on the Islamist Barbie Doll.™ Nothing comes up in any search.

The obvious point is to never, as in ever, talk to the media.

* * * * 

I'm not interested here in reciting the litany of transgressions by Omar because they accrue weekly. It's who she is, who her male handlers are. If you think Ilhan Omar has any moral agency than you don't understand Islam, especially as it tries to infect America as it has, to a distressingly successful degree, in Europe. See Douglas Murray's "The Strange Death of Europe." 

The world's most famous and accomplished Somali woman is Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Minnesota media have a blackout on the woman. Why is that?

Omar is tight friends with the rancid Linda Sarsour, who publicly urges Muslims not to assimilate and to obey only "Allah's" law, in other words, sharia. These Islamofascist haters of America are neither shy nor subtle. Again, you won't read a single story about Sarsour in Minnesota media. If you object, you'll be called a bigot. I should know.

But the secret to being called names is, once you let them bounce off you, the name callers have no power. None. It's terrifying to them and it's only because too many of us are cowed by name calling that they have the cultural power they do.

Stop caring about what your political and cultural enemies think of you. Get off the sidelines because the civil war you didn't ask for is upon us. 

* * * *

I haven't blogged since December 3, 2018, after I quit Alpha News, where I had been solicited to write based upon the blog you're reading now. Thank you, Cole Mathisen. I enjoyed my eighteen months there because I made people uncomfortable by writing about uncomfortable topics. Minnesotans are deeply dishonest, something I'll never understand even while they preen about how great a state this is. Me? I once wrote "Does Minnesota Suck?"

I had kept my then editor in chief Christine Bauman informed about my impending departure because the direction the platform was taking concerned me: a People's magazine of politics? (honk), or more articles on Joe Mauer (what?), or stories no longer than 300 words (was the target audience retarded or suffering from ADD?), per owner Bob Cummins and his side kick. Alpha News, unfortunately, is now mostly a platform for useless Boomer Bait, written by perky female millennials devoid of intellectual gravitas or seriousness. "Bartender, a round of pocket Constitutions for all my friends!"

I was in Mother India at the time I quit, Varanasi specifically, Hinduism's holiest city (you know, where the dead bodies are cremated in the open). Ich bin Hindu nationalist. 

After texting, I sent Christine my resignation email and went for a walk in the early morning light along the Ganges, smoking a Marlboro red and looking for my favorite chai walla. 

I'm not sure my anti-smoking friend Dario Anselmo will ever understand the evanescence.

* * * * 

So we're left with Ilhan Omar and a system that imports low IQ people who hate us into our own country. Did you know that Somalis in Minnesota get (at least) 120 million dollars in welfare every year? Probably not because I only learned of this figure from Sen. Tom Cotton two years ago when he was the speaker at the annual dinner for the Center of the American Boomer™. Except for me, no one reported on this. Not John Hinderaker. Not Scott Johnson. And they were both there. Draw your own conclusions. 

Have you heard of the term "controlled opposition?" You should because you live in it. And you fall for it: the Freedom Club, Rough Riders, the Center of the American Experiment. All useless because they won't confront demographic replacement. More or less, they're in it for the money, yours. Occam's razor and all that. 

I cringe at the demands for Omar to be thrown off the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Sign this petition to stop her (insert various offenses here). The usual nonsense from people who, bless them, think we live in normal political times. We don't. None of this will happen.

The poison that is Ilahn Omar is here to stay. Look for the usual suspects to promote her cause, especially secular Jews, weirdly enough. They hope to be eaten last but it hasn't worked out so well for them in Europe. Think Malmo, Sweden, think Birmingham, England. Hell, think Western Europe generally. They're undaunted but you should be as well. Especially if you're white.

* * * *

Ilhan Omar is untouchable, despite any crimes she has committed or how much she hates America or the white people who created it and modernity itself. She's jealous, really. What has Somali culture given the world? Not much and nothing good, which is why they fail wherever they have been forcefully injected into any modern country. The national average IQ in Somalia is 68. Google it.

You know it, I know it, we all know it. But why is that? How to account for such things, how we have gotten here? How has the greatest country on earth been flooded with those who are not worthy to be here and seek to destroy us from within?

The "Cathedral" is the short answer. I tried to explain that concept when I guest hosted for my friend Sue Jeffers last weekend. Mencius Moldbug, a pen name for Curtis Yarvin, came up with the idea. He says:

"The great power center . . . . is the Cathedral. The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It’s as simple as a punch in the mouth."

You'll notice that democracy and the quaint notion of self governance nowhere appear in this definition and for good reason. The Cathedral is above us, all around us, we exist within it. Moldbug goes on:

"Today’s Cathedral is not a personality cult. It is not a political party. It is something far more elegant and evolved. It is not even an organization in the conventional, hierarchical sense of the word—it has no Leader, no Central Committee, no nothing. It is a true peer-to-peer network, which makes it extraordinarily resilient. To even understand why it is so unanimous, why Harvard always agrees with Yale which is always on the same page as Berkeley which never picks any sort of a fight with the New York Times, except of course to argue that it is not progressive enough, takes quite a bit of thinking."

You can listen to the first hour of my show here and the second hour here. And you should.

* * * * 

Tumors on the body politic like Ilhan Omar are part of a design to "fundamentally transform" America as founded into a more or less Third World basket case. Think Brazil North. Islam has no place in Western Civilization and none in America. Don't let anyone bully you out of that realization. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has repeatedly said that Islam attacks us through the soft underbelly of democracies, its religious freedoms.

Consequently, you simply aren't up to speed if you think the normal checks on conduct will apply to the Cathedral's favorite pets. Just the opposite: they are cosseted, flattered, held out as manifestly better than you and are the subject of puff pieces that are intended to force you to look away from the damaging consequences of importing a totalitarian ideology wrapped in the guise of religion.

This is why, in part, Minnesotans get stories like "Little Abdi, not your white child, may get the USA to Mars." Or fawning coverage over a woman dressed to repress on Sports Illustrated. It's called Clown World and by their honks ye shall know it.

It's also why criminal activity by Somali youth in Minnesota is rarely covered or, if forced to, given the once over lightly treatment. Somali gangs in the Twin Cities? They're thriving but you wouldn't know it from local media coverage. Only Crime Watch Minneapolis, on Facebook and on Twitter, covers crime like it should be, regardless of who is committing it.

Ilhan Omar being untouchable is proof positive that you're losing your country. We haven't lost it entirely yet but it surely hangs in the balance. Stop pretending the usual blandishments will work because they won't. The Cathedral has seen to this. 

The Minnesota Republican Senate Disgraces Itself

Female genital mutilation (FGM) has come to Minnesota and the silence from the Regressive Left could not be louder. Blowhards like Rep. Melisa Franzen (DFL), local media darling, are silent, as are the usual raft of Minnesota "feminists," including that special brand of cucks, Minnesota men on Twitter who have feminist in their pathetic bios. Local media have reported in their trademark fashion of "once and done" with not a single Minnesota newspaper running an editorial against this horrific, backward, misogyny-incarnate practice.

Remember, when President Trump called out fake media as the enemy of the American people (not media per se) local media responded by tweeting that they were all brave Daniel Pearls. No, seriously.

In the Minnesota House, Rep. Mary Franson (R) has introduced legislation that rightly characterizes this as child abuse and allows victim children to be permanently removed from the monsters who call themselves parents that allow it. Senator Karin Housley (R) has introduced parallel legislation in the Senate. Franson's bill has passed all committees and is scheduled for a floor vote on Monday, May 15th. Housley's bill hasn't received so much as a single committee hearing.

What on earth is wrong with the Minnesota Republican Senate? Speaker Kurt Daudt and others in the House have shown true & genuine leadership and are to be commended for fast tracking the Franson bill so that a floor vote may be had by the end of session.

* * * * 

FGM is not the same as male circumcision, in which the foreskin is cut from a perfectly intact penis shortly after birth. CAIR, the terrorist affiliated group that presumes to speak for all Muslims (see my prior piece here: "The Islamization of Minnesota Media") attempts to conflate the two by calling FGM "female circumcision."

No. 

In order for FGM to be the equivalent of circumcision, the head of the penis would have to be chopped off. Has that got your attention? Can someone clue in the dude from Nisswa?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a heroine for the world in our time and herself a victim, has delineated several types of FGM: 1. The Nick 2. "Female Circumcision" 3. Intermediate Infibulation 4. Total Infibulation 5. Vaginal Fusion

Ayaan is the world's most famous Somali but Minnesota media ignore her entirely. They are Servants Of CAIR™. You can read her full article here.

All this in the happy clappy, relentlessly insecure, mindlessly progressive state of Minnesota. Take a bow, cultural enrichment, corrosive diversity types. Most of all, stay silent.

Enter the cowards of the Minnesota Republican Senate.

* * * * 

It's possible that the Senate prefers the Franson bill to pass on the House floor and have it included in an omnibus bill that Governor Dayton won't veto. So far legislative republicans have made a hash of this session, negotiating amongst themselves while moving ever closer to Dayton's budget marks while he stands pat. What's galling is that they think they're doing a fine job.

Even so, that's no excuse for the lack of any hearing on the Housely bill nor for Senate leadership being silent on the matter of female genital mutilation. And to be fair, there may be senators who want this matter addressed and about which I don't know. In fact, that's likely and here's to them, even if we won't know those names publicly.

The end result of Senate inaction is to lessen the chances of protecting vulnerable girls in this state who come from backward, misogynist cultures. That's not who we are but you wouldn't know it from the failure of the Minnesota Republican Senate.

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.

Muslims & Minnesota Media: First in a Series

I hadn't planned on launching this series of blog posts quite yet but recent events left me no choice. Indeed, they define the very reason such a series is needed. Consequently this initial post will be shorter than those to come.

Scott Johnson of Powerline recently reported astounding news that, by rights, should be front page news in Minnesota, as well as covered extensively on television and on radio. He found evidence that makes it appear highly likely that Ilhan Omar, who recently defeated a long term Jewish DFL incumbent in the House, married her brother, thereby committing immigration fraud as well as bigamy.

His explosive reporting can be read by clicking here.

Shamefully, not a single Minnesota media outlet as of this writing has carried his story. Other social media accounts have done so and there's reason to believe some national outlets might get around to covering this.

But Minnesota media? Nothing so far and they have a very high regard for themselves as some sort of truth tellers and the like.

Johnson tweeted earlier today at Tom Hauser, who hosts the stale and banal weekend political talk show "At Issue," whether he'd be reporting the story he broke. (Hauser is not the problem with the show, its producers are.)

At any rate no response from him to Johnson's request for coverage. I asked on Twitter a variety of other reporters from various "news" outlets the same question. No response.

Hauser shouldn't be picked out from the pack, in my view. The rest of the (mostly Twin Cities based) Minnesota media likewise are ignoring the story. That they consider themselves to have any integrity or credibility is a sign of group psychosis.

I'll be launching Minnesota Media Monitor: Accountability Starts Here™ later in the year but I needed to post on this subject immediately.

I've been struck for some time how limited local media's understanding of all things Islamic and Muslim is. They approach the topic(s) as another non-white victimology story, of which they are accomplished dissemblers.

But where is their coverage of reform Muslims? Do they know of Tarek Fatah? Irshad Manjii? Maajid Nawaz? Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Probably they've heard of the last one but only to ignore what it is she is about.

White, guilty, liberal and lazy is the best summary I can give of Twin Cities media. These past few days shows them complicit in dishonesty because such advances their political ideology.

When Johnson approached the Omar campaign with his questions, he heard back not from it but a criminal defense lawyer. As he rightly said: "Yet the response was also newsworthy for what it said, or rather didn’t say. It didn’t deny any relevant fact. Rather, it falsely disparaged my motives as bigoted. I find that disgusting."

Scott Johnson deserves some kind of an award and Minnesota Media Monitor™ is precisely the organization who may give it to him. Or we may just name an ongoing award in his name. Either way, it will stand for honesty and courage in the face of media corruption.




Photo: The world's most famous Somali, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

© 2016 John Hugh Gilmore & Minnesota Media Monitor™ All rights reserved.