“The 2 most common elements in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”
–The Tao Of Frank.
I am sick and tired of writing about Minnesota. It is such an awful State, next to Canada, colder than imaginable in Winter, and hot and overrun with mosquitos in the Summer.
In 1970, actress Mary Tyler Moore starred in a sitcom–The Mary Tyler Moore Show–set in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She played Mary Richards, a news director for a local television station.
Now I really enjoyed Mary Tyler Moore when she played Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was set in New York. But from the very beginning I hated The Mary Tyler Moore Show, largely because it was set in Minneapolis. At the young age of 10, I knew–KNEW–that Minnesota was a miserable place. And this is before the Democrats obtained total control over the State government, and made it into a less attractive version of Canada.
Many, many years later, I was faced with attending court in Minneapolis on behalf of a large client of my firm. I put it off as long as possible, and successfully resolved the matter without having to actually appear in Minnesota. I was so happy to have dodged that bullet.
So–at least for now–I am done with writing about the goings on in Minnesota. The Democrat controlled government is in full blown insurrection against the federal government. It is easily the greatest rebellion since the Nullification Crisis in 1832, leaving aside The Late Unpleasantness, which was not a “rebellion”, but a secession. The Democrats are willing to let their own citizens die, if they can do it in service of a criminal alien class. It makes no sense. But I am now bored with the whole “resistance” movement up North. Blah, blah, blah.
So, today we are Minnesota free. Below are 2 articles. The 1st article addresses the lunacy of what the Left calls the exercise of their First Amendment rights. The 2nd article debunks the Leftist claptrap about the United States being an authoritarian State, and President Trump being a dictator. Please enjoy this respite from our neighbors up North.
Sorry, AOC — Protest Culture Is Un-American
BY: David Harsanyi, The New York Post (January 25, 2026).
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez likes to argue that the “whole point” of protesting is to make people “uncomfortable.”
In this as in so much else, the Democratic darling is incorrect.
Debate, dissent, running highly misleading political ads on TV: These are all part of our great tradition of political discourse.
Taking to the streets to disrupt the lives of average citizens is a leftist ideal, not an American one.
It’s antithetical to the highest virtue of republicanism, namely minding your own business.
But decades ago American leftists began conflating “activism” with patriotism, and millions of young people were convinced that protesting is an expression of good citizenry.
These days, caring is often given more reverence than wisdom, knowledge or achievement, let alone patriotic activities like working, getting married and raising kids.
An equally intolerable and parallel notion has also sprung up: It says the rest of us have a patriotic duty to admire anyone who’s “making a difference” or engaged in “participatory democracy,” no matter how insufferable or wrong they are.
And protesters are almost always insufferable and wrong.
Every loudmouth ignoramus with an opinion has a First Amendment right. You’re not special.
Yet modern left-wing protesters believe their passion and anger imbue them with moral license to demand things and speak over their fellow citizens.
Just watch the video of those self-righteous “activists” disrupting church services in St. Paul the other day, or global-warming cultists shutting down traffic in major cities, or college students using their heckler’s veto to disrupt speeches and debates.
As we’ve seen with two recent shootings in Minneapolis, protest culture can have deadly consequences.
Then again, most of these efforts aren’t organic or spontaneous expressions of political anger anymore.
They are well-funded and well-managed by organizations that see political benefit in creating chaos and turning our country into a revolutionary battleground.
From Lenin to Alinsky, forced confrontation has been a tactic of Marxist activism.
Every bully, of course, sees themselves as the embodiment of MLK Jr., though most of them lack dignity and a worthy cause.
It’s amusing hearing these self-aggrandizing activists treat protests as great acts of bravery.
But wake up: You’re not actually living in a fascist state.
Those marching against the clerics in Iran risk their lives.
Bottom of Form
As did those who marched in Tiananmen Square in 1989, who rose up against the Communists during the Prague Spring of 1968, or who engaged in civil disobedience against the Stamp Act in 1765.
You can be as passionate as you like here in these United States, but our laws governing the border and immigration, and ICE itself, were all democratically instituted.
You’re free to vote in the next election.
Failing to get your preferred legislation passed isn’t repression, and you’re not Gandhi.
Though it’s heartening for the rest of us to know that most protests are merely performative acts with little political consequence.
Demonstrations are rarely a barometer of public sentiment.
In the left’s hagiographic rendering of the 1960s, peace-loving demonstrators took to the streets and ended the Vietnam War.
In the real world Richard Nixon, who won a historic landslide victory in 1972 against peacenik George McGovern, ended the conflict.
Anti-war protesters couldn’t stop the Iraq War, either. Or any American war, for that matter.
Tea Partiers couldn’t stop Obamacare.
“Occupy Wall Street” was unable to overturn the laws governing basic economics.
Pussyhat marchers embarrassed themselves, but they didn’t stop Donald Trump from occupying the White House — any more than Jan. 6 marchers and rioters did Joe Biden.
And the anti-ICE nuts disrupting church services who accuse parishioners of being “white supremacists” will likely have similar luck.
That’s good news.
The “right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” is our inheritance.
It guarantees anyone can march without worrying about punishment or reprisals from the state.
Though it shouldn’t escape our attention that many of the same progressives who treat public demonstration as the purest form of “democracy” advocate for censoring views they find dangerous — and regularly conflate speech with “violence.”
Democratic socialists nearly always shed the adjective as soon as they gain power.
Let’s face it, though, most unhinged activists you see ranting and raving act like children.
And children have trouble comprehending the distinction between things you can do and things you should do.
You can cosplay as Islamic revolutionaries on campus.
What you should do is read some books about the Middle East.
But nothing in a free country compels the rest of us to celebrate spoiled adults making a spectacle of themselves — or to treat them as anything but nuisances.
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What Would Life Really Look Like Under a Totalitarian Regime?
BY: Ward Clark (January 26, 2026).
The Left just loves to claim that President Trump is some sort of dictator. They love to claim he sits at the head of a totalitarian government. That’s poppycock, of course. The notion is easily dispelled by pointing out that, were President Trump a totalitarian dictator, one wouldn’t be allowed to call him a totalitarian dictator.
Dictatorships, from Rome to the present day, are notoriously short on respect for free speech.
Let’s be real about this: If any totalitarian system does come to power here in this nation, it won’t be coming from the Republican Party. It’s the Left – always the Left – that does these things. It’s the Left that is always calling for more government control. It’s always the Left that wants to throttle dissent by calling it “hate speech.” It’s always the Left that wants to disarm us, to intimidate us, to control us, and to sweep us aside if we oppose them. They can’t; in the United States, it’s just not that easy.
Let’s do a thought exercise. What might an actual totalitarian regime look like if one came to power here? As I see it, and as shown by examples from history, there would be three broad phases.
First: The takeover. However, a totalitarian government comes to power, whether it be by vote, by coup, or some other means. What happens when they assume control? The likely move would be to take control of all of the federal government. Congress is dissolved, and all but a few confirmed fellow-traveler members of Congress are arrested. The Supreme Court is disbanded, and again, the members are arrested. Opposing state governors are arrested – if the takeover comes from the left, that means that the new regime will try to arrest the governors and key officials of states like Texas, Wyoming, Florida, and Alaska. The new regime can’t give in, or the whole thing comes apart. Civil war ensues.
Assuming the new regime wins the likely conflict, what next?
Second: The crackdown. The media, legacy, alternative, and otherwise, is shut down. That especially means alternative media sites like, well, this one. Only state-approved information is disseminated. The internet is heavily filtered, ostensibly to keep out “disinformation” and “hate speech.” We already see this in communist countries today: North Korea, China, and Cuba. Major media figures are arrested. A new system of “news” arises: State-sponsored, state-controlled.
To deal with the old red state, blue state dichotomy, the new regime erases former state lines and redraws the country into districts, or soviets, if you like. These would be drawn to minimize the ability of the more independent-minded among the population to form any kind of effective opposition.
The military is “reformed” and put under the control of hand-selected, regime-friendly generals. The rank and file attend forced “re-education” sessions; anyone who resists is imprisoned. Re-education and labor camps are built all across the country, from Boston to San Diego, from San Antonio to Fargo, and they fill up rapidly.
Third and finally: The purge. Anyone suspected of being a troublemaker is . . . dealt with. This is where the great irony of this sort of thing comes in; all the street-level leftist shouters who, before the takeover, served as useful idiots, working coordinated riots, throwing rocks at cops, and just generally making trouble, are no longer an asset to the regime. They are, instead, known troublemakers. Now they are rounded up. The new regime already has the names of these troublemakers, their locations, and all of their social media traffic. That’s more than enough for show trials, perhaps done by military tribunal, perhaps by set-up show courts. In either case, the known troublemakers, the ones who thought they would be running things in the new regime, are now sent to one of the new camps. That is, if they are lucky. The real high-profile ones, the ones that showed any ability to lead others, are far more likely to end up looking at rifles from the wrong side.
But it won’t be just the useful idiots who are purged. If you regularly read alternative, conservative media, which you’re doing right now, you’re suspect. If you ever voted for a Republican, at any level of government, you’re suspect. If you own guns – and believe me, the new regime will know – those guns will be confiscated, and a few high-profile people will “resist” and be shot down, and the shootings publicized by state media, pour encourager les autres.
The First and Second Amendments are gone. No free speech, ever again. No freedom of conscience. No right to bear arms. All of the Bill of Rights is gone. The Constitution is suspended. Elections are either cancelled or are one-party, one-choice sham elections.
That’s what a dictatorial regime looks like. We have seen this happen, time and again, in Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union, in Mao’s China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in Castro’s Cuba, and in the hereditary dictatorship of the Kims in North Korea. Will it happen here? I don’t think so. The United States would be a tough nut to crack, and if nothing else, any such totalitarian regime would likely never be able to gain control of our rank-and-file military and would lose the civil war mentioned above, probably catastrophically.
This is, however, what it would look like if the United States were taken over by an actual totalitarian regime. This is why it’s so hard to take the Left seriously at times. President Trump, agree with him or not on any given issue, was elected by the constitutional process and is carrying out enforcing laws that were legally enacted by our elected representatives. That’s all. He’s not a dictator. His administration is not a totalitarian regime. And it’s the Left, not the Right, that would be at the source of any attempt to bring about a dictatorship.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 