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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.
I think it goes like this: the left's ability to project power relies on a co-ordinated, hair-trigger response, a sort of Blitzkrieg doctrine. The problem is that a) they aren't fully in control of that response because the coordination relies on nutty Redditors/Tweeters and b) each individual taking a minute to decide whether a specific case deserves this response wrecks the coordination that makes it powerful. So in practice they end up subordinating their decision-making to criminals and slowly weakening the system's power over time as people learn left-wing outrage has really nothing to do with the strength of the case.
I believe the Unions were somewhat like this in the UK, and suffered the same gradual hemorrhaging of support and the majority of normies realised Union outrage had nothing to do with the sympathy of the case.
Yeah, but... every single time, though. Like I can't think of a single one of these left-wing martyrs who didn't make me go "wait a second, this is the guy you want to spend political capital on?"
This is just classic Toxoplasma of Rage thing, though. The most effective way to project your power to get your preferred way over that preferred by your enemies is to have your way even when having your way is clearly unjust, because that shows that your side is so powerful that even having justice on their side doesn't give your enemies enough to defeat you.
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