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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.
Basic anarcho-tyranny. They want maximum leeway to use the legal system for things they like and against people they don't like (charging a white woman with being mean to a rapist), while obtaining maximum freedom for their own people under that legal system (50-time felonious loser with knife should be handled by therapists, not cops). There's no mystery here, it is what it says on the tin.
They like criminals and dislike people who resist/arrest criminals. Speech is violence and violence is speech, depending on who is speaking/stabbing. Kto-kogo. There is no internal contradiction. This has always been the plan, this has always been the strategy, for over a century.
Who is "they"? The specific individuals named in the posts? Leftists? A particular leftist element? All Democrats?
The OP just got banned because the post was not much more than "Look at what THEY did this week!" Your post is no better- worse, actually.
I told you last time that you have taken all the slack we can give you and you still can't help yourself. It's frankly amazing how many warnings you have been given, compared to how few actual timeouts you have been given.
But if you are going to say "they" like crime, "they" have a strategy, etc., you need to talk about specific groups, not big nebulous groups like "the left." Unless you want to defend the proposition that literally everyone on "the left" likes criminals and dislikes people who arrest criminals. In which case, go ahead and make that case. But you won't, because while you may tell yourself you actually believe that, you know that it is in fact ridiculous and unsupportable, but rather than admitting that such absurd generalizations about leftists are in fact absurd, you'd much rather get the dopamine hit of ranting about how evil "they" (all of them) are.
You (and posters like you) are the exact mirror of the worst people on reddit, the people who have turned reddit to shit, the people who have made X and Bluesky hellholes (with different polarities): rather than grapple with opposing beliefs with a modicum of nuance, rather than recognizing that people believe things and do things for reasons other than being evil for the sake of evil, it's just so much more fun, more delicious, more pleasurable, to sneer and snarl and bark and get a good Two Minute Hate going with your fellow haters about how very much you hate Those People.
The Motte is not supposed to be that kind of place. I mod people like you not because my left-of-center sentiments are offended, but because I look at all the places where my mostly left-of-center friends post- Facebook, reddit, elsewhere- and see how casually, unthinkingly, and without opposition they post exactly the sort of thing you do except about you, comfortable in the knowledge that they can say you and people like you are murderous fascists who hate truth and beauty and desire only to cause harm because you love evil for the sake spite, and no one there will ever challenge them, let alone mod them. No one there will ever say "Hey, are you sure about that, do you really think they are literally golems of evil who do things for no other reason than unthinking hatred and spite and ignorance?" (Because you'll get dogpiled at best, banned at worst.)
And you want this place to be like that.
Banned for three days. Think about whether you really want a rightist reddit. If you do, stay away.
Would you allow that? Because it doesn't seem hard.
There might be violent criminals that no one's going to accuse the Left of liking, such as the Olympic Park bomber (although.... There are definitely 'criminals' like Dexter Taylor that none of the institutional and anti-racist left cares about, no matter how grossly unreasonable their charges or sentence. The steelman is the same argument with asterisks and fancier words. If you want to be charitable to a fault you can give a paean to criminal justice reform and trying to fight recidivism in the dumbest way possible when anyone notices the constant and consistent low-ball numbers going left-ward, and when people notice the harsh punishments going one direction wave your hands about anti-racism and sentencing disparities.
But then I'll point to Matthew Dolloff again.
If I were to tell you there was a vehicular homicide attack this week, and that the murderer had a long history of past association with violent crime before this event but was left off with a slap on the wrist in the one case he was convicted over, what do you think the odds would be for political alignment? Because a 7B LLM can tell you, and that single fact distinguishes the case from the counterexamples someone like MKC's going to try and reach for. Hell, if I scratch out vehicular homicide, there was a mass shooting, too, and guess what?
Because there's a connecting thread, here, even as Tuscon Arizona and Germany are geographically and politically quite far from each other.
And the trivial disclaimer that would cover even the most self-aggrandizing defense progressives bring up doesn’t seem likely to actually solve your Reddit complaint.
The asterisks and handwaves are pretty naked. Yes, there's a tiny number of people who are leftist or liberal and Actually Committed To The Bit, and a larger number that pretend at it when it doesn't cost them anything. We have numbers, here: at most one-in-seven Democratic voters thought this wonderful array of comments weren't okay, and that's assuming that none of Jay Jone's many other scandals persuaded a single person. Is the requirement here sated if the OP had stuck "A strong majority of the progressive movement and almost all of its major advocates and leadership" in place of the first "They"?
Ten months ago, in response to the Kirk shooting, I gave you a list of varied bad actors ranging from federal Congress down to my own literal recreational social environments, predicting that none of them would be punished in the immediate aftermath. None of them were, and the only arguable examples in the following ten months was James getting suspended for other unrelated conduct, and TheSchism -- the 'we absolutely don't allow dehumanizing our political enemies place' -- have its eventual retrospective include "Kirk should not be dead. But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing." go unmoderated.
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