This amused me:
Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Minneapolis has a “very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality,” according to a New York Post story posted Friday as the city this week approaches the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by police.
O’Hara said he became accustomed to a very Democratic city when he worked in Newark, N.J., but that nothing had prepared him for the “ultra-liberal orthodoxy,” as the Post put it, that he found in Minneapolis. O’Hara was Newark’s public safety director.
“Here it’s very, very ideological and a lot of times it’s like reality and facts can’t get through the filter. It’s a very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality … It’s bizarre," he is quoted as saying to the Post, a tabloid generally considered to be a conservative publication.
Yeah, but you're not supposed to talk about it, Chief O'Hara. I would have thought Commissioner Gordon would have told you that.
Unsurprisingly, our betters were not amused:
O’Hara’s comments irritated some Minneapolis City Council members. Council President Elliott Payne said progressives in Minneapolis are not a monolith, which he said is hard for some “to wrap your head around, especially for people new to our city’s political ecosystem.”
“Some people come into their politics through a more academic process, others through solidarity, others through lived experience,” Payne said. “No matter how people develop their core values, one should have a deeper understanding of the diverse perspectives of our community before engaging in conversations with New York tabloids.”
Translation - you're not supposed to tell them we're a great herd of independent minds, capisce?
The irritated members of the Minneapolis City Council are all grifters. They talk about "lived experience" and "solidarity," but that's all a ruse. They get rich from milking the taxpayers and it's a pretty good gig. Devotion to one's rice bowl is a perfectly understandable incentive - the vanguard guards the avant garde and being called bourgeois is an intolerable insult, especially when the audience is likely simps from Staten Island. Why should Payne have to explain his activities to anyone so utterly lacking in nuance? The sniffing is audible.
What remains a mystery is what Donk voters get out of the deal. I have lived in the Twin Cities for more than 30 years and I lived in Chicago before that, and most people in both places recognize that their rulers are scoundrels, but they continually return them to office anyway. I used a Batman reference early on; speaking of cartoonish individuals, Tim Walz and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker are Rocky and Bullwinkle villains, but they win almost by acclimation. And if you try to ask the question in polite circles, you are cast into the outer darkness.
Do you spot the real issue with O'Hara's remarks? The mentality in question isn't detached. It's unhinged.
