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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Two culture war bombs in the upper midwest this week

In May 2025, a woman in Rochester Minnesota uttered the N-word at a child who tried to steal from her, and then again at an adult who confronted her about it while recording with his phone. Both the child and adult are Somali. The video, uploaded to Youtube, went massively viral.

The woman was charged with three counts of disorderly conduct. One of the charges was dropped, the other two just went to trial. After a four day trial and 10 hours of deliberation, the jury found a guilty verdict for one of the charges.

The defendant's lawyer is claiming misconduct by the court and intends to appeal.

Our nation's few remaining principled free speech advocates do not approve of this. This verdict will likely be appealed and may, at minimum, result in Minnesota's disorderly conduct statute being nullified with regard to offenses that are limited to speech and no other disruptive behavior.

In a somewhat ironic twist, apparently the guy who recorded the viral youtube video at the center of all this, was arrested for gang raping a child in 2022, and had those charges dropped "in the interests of justice" by the same prosecutor's office that this year thought it was in the interests of justice to throw the book at somebody for saying a naughty word. What a funny world we live in.

Bomb number two: Police in Madison, WI, responding to reports that someone was casing vehicles to break into, confronted a suspect, who fled, resisted arrest, and finally attacked one officer with a knife, causing that officer to respond with lethal force.

Activists are very clearly trying to turn this into a reprise of the George Floyd moment, including transporting the raised fist monument from Minneapolis' "George Floyd Square" to Madison. The area around the shooting has been barricaded by activists. Activists stormed a police press conference, seizing the podium to deliver a rant about Zionism.

State representative and gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong has thrown her lot fully in with the activists. Whether this helps or hurts her electoral chances will remain to be seen.

Madison's "Independent Police Monitor", who has also thrown her lot in with the activists, is confused about why the Madison Police Department are not involving her in their investigation of the incident.

Attorney Ben Crump, whose list of cases is a who's who of law-enforcement-related racial grievances, is representing the family of the deceased.

And the deceased? Over 40 arrests, multiple felony convictions, including a history of assaults on police officers. (No way to link directly to this, but go here and search for Corey Ruiz).

It never ceases to amaze me how the left is so consistently able to mobilize itself in the defense of the worst people in the world.

gang raping a child

From the article:

Investigators say the two men had sex in January 2022 with an underage female who had run away from her foster care placement. Court documents state when the victim was examined by a nurse, she was sleep deprived, dehydrated, and had nothing to eat recently.

This reads more to me like men having consensual sex with a runaway teenager (in exchange for housing and drugs?), not gang rape. Still should be clearly worse from a legal standpoint than saying the n-word, but gang rape seems like it obscures more than it describes.

A minor whom they did not bother giving food or water? Yeah, that sounds to me more like "sex slave" than "consensual sex with two adults where nobody was coerced and there were no strings attached".

Can't believe I'm turning into "to the right of Attila the Hun" when it comes to recent court cases cited on here, but it's something I really would like to know the fine details of why these charges were dropped in "the interests of justice". Probably because "well we can't prove that she didn't consent to fucking the two adult men, after all she did agree to go home with the first guy":

Sharmake Beyle Omar, 29, and Mohamed Hussein Omer, 41, are both facing felony charges of third- and fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct in Olmsted County District Court.

Both men are accused of raping and sexually assaulting a 16-year-old female in a Rochester trailer home.

According to their criminal complaints:

The juvenile told a man who she had previously been in foster care with that she had been sexually assaulted multiple times by Omar and Omer over the course of two days in Rochester. The man reported the assaults to the Rochester Police Department shortly after taking the juvenile to Children's Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis for a sexual assault nurse examination.

The man reported that the juvenile called him Jan. 20, 2022, and asked him to pick her up at a gas station.

The juvenile told the man she had run away from her foster home in Farmington and had hitched rides heading south until she met Omer at a gas station where he offered to let her stay at his Rochester residence.

During that time period, there was a call for service at the gas station involving the juvenile as a missing person. When officers arrived at the gas station, she was gone.

Once the juvenile arrived at the trailer home, both men raped and sexually assaulted the teenager, the juvenile told an investigator with RPD.

Omer had tried to ply the juvenile with alcohol before asking the teenager to perform sexual acts saying that "she needed to take care of him because he was taking care of her."

Omar arrived a short while later, and the juvenile was told by Omer to "take care of" Omar since Omer was doing things for her.

Both men were identified by the juvenile in a photo line up.

During a search warrant, law enforcement found the juvenile's glasses in one of the men's vehicles and a towel at the Rochester residence that had been used by the juvenile.

Along with the sexual trauma, the juvenile reported she had foot pain because she left the trailer in rain boots that did not fit because the men took her shoes so she could not run away.

This has nothing to do with calling people "niggers", by the way, and a grown woman who yells insults like that at a child should be getting disciplined for that.

Oddly, she wasn't convicted for yelling at the kid, presumably because the fighting words doctrine would be especially inapt there.