'The Cops Started It': Head of Minneapolis Democrat Party Praises Rioters Who Burned Down Police Station
The chairman of the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party wrote a column praising the rioters who burned down the Minneapolis Police Department's 3rd Precinct during the collapse of law and order following the murder of George Floyd last year.
As Townhall reported at the time, rioters had surrounded the 3rd Precinct and were trying to break into the building so they could set it on fire with the officers still inside. Mayor Jacob Frey (D) ordered the building to be evacuated instead of providing reinforcements. Once the officers were gone, the mob was able to set the building ablaze.
Once they achieved their long-desired goal, rioters and looters continued their rampage through the city at the expense of business owners and residents.
In a column published last Monday, Devin Hogan wrote all of this was the fault of the city's police department and falsely claimed police attacked protesters without reason on May 26:
"Friends and family were reaching out. How come words won’t satiate people? Why Minneapolis? The cops started it, I replied. They killed George Floyd and took every opportunity to escalate, agitate and make things worse. The cops are rioting and the people are responding. Like it or not, setting the Third Precinct on fire was a genuine revolutionary moment. An act of pure righteousness to open new worlds of understanding. The people declared themselves ungovernable and unilaterally took their power back. The largest international human rights movement in modern history had begun. The youth of Minneapolis carried all of this. The cops started it."
With Hogan's comments gaining attention, he released a statement saying "the truth hurts."
To those upset with my new column in Southside Pride who won’t say anything to my face: the truth hurts. To the TV station writing a story about the mad people: I’ll be writing a column every month. Accurately describing reality is not a call to violence. https://t.co/9xSkizh7A8
— Devin Hogan (@devinforparks) August 7, 2021
He also added on Facebook: "Accurately describing reality is not a call to arms. Explaining the conditions of violent repression with the reasons why and how people react to that oppression is not condoning violence."
"Fetishizing decorum over substance is a hallmark of white supremacy," Hogan continued. "If antiracism offends your sensibilities then please use this moment to examine the role you play in maintaining and upholding these systems. Which side are you on?"
The rioting in Minneapolis and St. Paul last year resulted in at least $550 million worth of damage to over 1,500 property locations, 150 of which were set on fire.
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Now the word CURRY is racist: Food blogger says it’s time to cancel the ‘British colonial’ term for south-Asian food
South Asian American food bloggers have called on people to cancel the word curry because of its ties to British colonialism.
In the latest fallout since the increased scrutiny over the country's imperial history, critics say the word curry is too often used to lump very distinct foods from different regions together.
Chaheti Bansal, 27, who lives in California and shares her home-cooking online, shared a video recipe where she called on people to 'cancel the word curry'.
In the video, which has since been viewed more than 3.6million times after it was shared by Buzzfeed Tasty, Bansal added: 'Not in all cultures but specifically in Indian cuisine because I don't understand what that word means.
'There's a saying that the food in India changes every 100km and yet we're still using this umbrella term popularised by white people who couldn't be bothered to learn the actual names of our dishes. But we can still unlearn.'
The 27-year-old has since told NBC Asian America it's not about 'fully cancelling the word' and said it's just about 'ending its use by people who don't know what it means'.
The outlet reports that South Asian American cooks say they've spent their lives confronting 'misconceptions' about their foods, and now, they just want to celebrate it.
Ms Bansal told NBC: 'Curry shouldn’t be all that you think about when you think about South Asian food.
'You can travel like 100km, and you can get a completely different type of cuisine.
'And it's a completely different language and a different culture. And it just goes to show that there's so much diversity in our food that doesn't get recognized.'
But she also said that the word is used regularly in South Asian countries.
She added: 'My partner is Sri Lankan, I have friends that are Malayali, friends that are Tamil, and yes they use the word curry.
'I enjoy their curry. Even their curry names have very specific traditional names paired with it, or it's referring to something very specific. But you shouldn't just lump all of our foods together under this term.'
While there are many different explanations for where the word curry came from, the most popular is that it was invented by the British who misheard the Tamil word 'kari' which means 'sauce'.
It's first use dates back to the mid-eighteenth century when members of the British East India Trading Company were trading with Tamil merchants in south east India.
Historically, food offered in British curry houses is Indian food cooked to British taste however, there has been an increasing demand for authentic Indian food.
Some of the most popular dishes in the UK, including chicken tikka masala, were inspired by Indian cuisine but adapted for western tastes, and as a result rarely reflect the traditional dishes made in India.
Instagram food blogger Nisha Vedi Pawar, 36, echoed Bansal's sentiment and told NBC: 'It's just like for American food. You wouldn't want everything dipped in like Old Bay right?
'You wouldn't want to put everything with good old American French's mustard. The same way, we don’t put everything in tikka sauce.'
Earlier this year, food delivery giant Just Eat revealed Indian was the third takeaway of choice for Brits during 2020, beaten only by Chinese and Pizza.
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Religious Victory: Judge Blocks Mandate Requiring Doctors to Perform Gender Reassignment Surgery
A federal court in Texas blocked a transgender mandate from President Joe Biden that would require doctors to go against their religious beliefs and perform gender transition surgeries.
Judge Reed O’Connor granted a permanent injunction and said that the doctors are "to be exempt from the government’s requirement to perform abortions and gender-transition procedures."
In a win for religious liberty, Monday's ruling prohibits Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra from requiring the Christian plaintiffs to "perform or provide insurance coverage for gender-transition procedures or abortions, including by denying Federal financial assistance because of their failure to perform or provide insurance coverage for such procedures or by otherwise pursuing, charging, or assessing any penalties, fines, assessments, investigations, or other enforcement actions."
"Today’s ruling is a victory for compassion, conscience, and common sense," said Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. "No doctor should be forced to perform controversial, medically unsupported procedures that are contrary to their conscience and could be deeply harmful to their patients."
In 2016, under the guise of the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination clause, the Obama administration issued a mandate that required doctors and hospitals to provide gender transition operations after receiving a referral from a mental health professional.
Doctors who refused to provide such surgeries would face financial penalties, private lawsuits and other consequences.
More than 19,000 healthcare professionals, several religious organizations and nine states contested the transgender mandate in court.
A North Dakota court shut down the mandate earlier this year, although Biden appealed the decision, and Judge O’Connor blocked it in Texas in 2019, emphasizing that the government "cannot force religious doctors and hospitals to perform gender transition procedures in violation of their conscience and professional medical judgment."
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America's new class divide
By David Brooks
The dispossessed set out early in the mornings. They were the outsiders, the scorned, the voiceless. But weekend after weekend—unbowed and undeterred—they rallied together. They didn’t have much going for them in their great battle against the privileged elite, but they did have one thing—their yachts.
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During the summer and fall of 2020, a series of boat parades—Trumptillas—cruised American waters in support of Donald Trump. The participants gathered rowdily in great clusters. They festooned their boats with flags—American flags, but also message flags: Don’t Tread on Me, No More Bullshit, images of Trump as Rambo.
The women stood on the foredecks in their red, white, and blue bikinis, raising their Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys to salute the patriots in nearby boats. The men stood on the control decks projecting the sort of manly toughness you associate with steelworkers, even though these men were more likely to be real-estate agents. They represent a new social phenomenon: the populist regatta. They are doing pretty well but see themselves as the common people, the regular Joes, the overlooked. They didn’t go to fancy colleges, and they detest the mainstream media. “It’s so encouraging to see so many people just coming together in a spontaneous parade of patriotism,” Bobi Kreumberg, who attended a Trumptilla in Palm Beach, Florida, told a reporter from WPTV.
You can see this phenomenon outside the United States too. In France, the anthropologist Nicolas Chemla calls this social type the “boubours,” the boorish bourgeoisie. If the elite bourgeois bohemians—the bobos—tend to have progressive values and metropolitan tastes, the boubours go out of their way to shock them with nativism, nationalism, and a willful lack of tact. Boubour leaders span the Western world: Trump in the U.S., Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy.
How could people with high-end powerboats possibly think of themselves as the downtrodden? The truth is, they are not totally crazy. The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. We had a clear idea of what class conflict, when it came, would look like—members of the working classes would align with progressive intellectuals to take on the capitalist elite.
But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is. Because of this, the U.S. has polarized into two separate class hierarchies—one red and one blue. Classes struggle not only up and down, against the richer and poorer groups on their own ladder, but against their partisan opposite across the ideological divide.
In June of last year, a Trump regatta was held in Ferrysburg, Michigan. A reporter from WOOD spoke with one of the boaters, a guy in a white T-shirt, a MAGA hat, and a modest fishing boat. “We are always labeled as racists and bigots,” he said. “There’s a lot of Americans that love Donald Trump, but we don’t have the platforms that the Democrats do, including Big Tech. So we have to do this.”
On a bridge overlooking the parade stood an anti-Trump protester, a young man in a black T-shirt carrying an abolish ice sign. “They use inductive reasoning rather than deduction,” he told the reporter, looking out at the pro-Trump boaters. “They only seek information that gives evidence to their presuppositions.” So who’s of a higher social class? The guy in the boat, or the kid with the fancy words?
The Rise of a Countercultural Elite
In 1983, a literary historian named Paul Fussell wrote a book called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Most of the book is a caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers prevalent at the time. After ridiculing every other class, Fussell describes what he called “X people.” These were people just like Fussell: highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural. X people tend to underdress for social occasions, Fussell wrote. They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility. The chapter about X people was insufferably self-regarding, but Fussell was onto something. Every once in a while, in times of transformation, a revolutionary class comes along and disrupts old structures, introduces new values, opens up economic and cultural chasms. In the 19th century, it was the bourgeoisie, the capitalist merchant class. In the latter part of the 20th century, as the information economy revved up and the industrial middle class hollowed out, it was X people.
Seventeen years later, I wrote a book about that same class, Bobos in Paradise. The bobos didn’t necessarily come from money, and they were proud of that; they’d secured their places in selective universities and in the job market through drive and intelligence exhibited from an early age, they believed. X types defined themselves as rebels against the staid elite. They were—as the classic Apple commercial had it—“the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.” But by 2000, the information economy and the tech boom were showering the highly educated with cash. They had to find ways of spending their gobs of money while showing they didn’t care for material things. So they developed an elaborate code of financial correctness to display their superior sensibility. Spending lots of money on any room formerly used by the servants was socially defensible: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. When it came to aesthetics, smoothness was artificial, but texture was authentic. The new elite distressed their furniture, used refurbished factory floorboards in their great rooms, and wore nubby sweaters made by formerly oppressed peoples from Peru.
The bobos have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech.
Two years later, Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class, which lauded the economic and social benefits that the creative class—by which he meant, more or less, the same scientists, engineers, architects, financiers, lawyers, professors, doctors, executives, and other professionals who make up the bobos—produced. Enormous wealth was being generated by these highly educated people, who could turn new ideas into software, entertainment, retail concepts, and more. If you wanted your city to flourish, he argued, you had to attract these people by stocking the streets with art galleries, restaurant rows, and cultural amenities. Florida used a “Gay Index,” based on the supposition that neighborhoods with a lot of gay men are the sort of tolerant, diverse places to which members of the creative class flock.
From the October 2013 issue: Richard Florida on the boom towns of the post–Great Recession economy
Florida was a champion of this class. I looked on them pretty benignly myself. “The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.
The New Elite Consolidates
Over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of the bobos has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The bobos—or X people, or the creative class, or whatever you want to call them—have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.
First, we’ve come to hoard spots in the competitive meritocracy that produced us. As Elizabeth Currid-Halkett reported in her 2017 book, The Sum of Small Things, affluent parents have increased their share of educational spending by nearly 300 percent since 1996. Partly as a result, the test-score gap between high- and low-income students has grown by 40 to 50 percent. The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place. Roughly 72 percent of students at these colleges come from the richest quarter of families, whereas only 3 percent come from the poorest quarter. A 2017 study found that 38 schools—including Princeton, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Colgate, and Middlebury—draw more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.
From the September 2019 issue: Daniel Markovits on how meritocracy harms everyone
Second, we’ve migrated to just a few great wealth-generating metropolises. Fifteen years after The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida published a reconsideration, The New Urban Crisis. Young creative types were indeed clustering in a few zip codes, which produced enormous innovation and wealth along with soaring home values. As Florida noted in that book, from 2007 to 2017, “the population of college-educated young people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four grew three times faster in downtown areas than in the suburbs of America’s fifty largest metro areas.”
Illustration of person wearing pink shirt, red/black vest, blue pants, yellow socks, green slides kneeling behind tripod looking through camera
But this concentration of talent, Florida now argued, meant that a few superstar cities have economically blossomed while everywhere else has languished. The 50 largest metro areas around the world house 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of global wealth. Just six metro areas—the San Francisco Bay Area; New York; Boston; Washington, D.C.; San Diego; and London—attract nearly half the high-tech venture capital in the world.
This has also created gaping inequalities within cities, as high housing prices push middle- and lower-class people out. “Over the past decade and a half,” Florida wrote, “nine in ten US metropolitan areas have seen their middle classes shrink. As the middle has been hollowed out, neighborhoods across America are dividing into large areas of concentrated disadvantage and much smaller areas of concentrated affluence.” The large American metro areas most segregated by occupation, he found, are San Jose, San Francisco, Washington, Austin, L.A., and New York.
From the August 2019 issue: Raj Chetty, the economist who would fix the American dream
Third, we’ve come to dominate left-wing parties around the world that were formerly vehicles for the working class. We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity) while watering down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions. As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave. Around 1990, nearly a third of Labour members of the British Parliament were from working-class backgrounds; from 2010 to 2015, the proportion wasn’t even one in 10. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the 50 most-educated counties in America by an average of 26 points—while losing the 50 least-educated counties by an average of 31 points.
These partisan differences overlay economic differences. In 2020, Joe Biden won just 500 or so counties—but together they account for 71 percent of American economic activity, according to the Brookings Institution. Donald Trump won more than 2,500 counties that together generate only 29 percent of that activity. An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent and getting more so. If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities, it’s because they are.
The creative class has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.
Like any class, the bobos are a collection of varied individuals who tend to share certain taken-for-granted assumptions, schemas, and cultural rules. Members of our class find it natural to leave their hometown to go to college and get a job, whereas people in other classes do not. In study after study, members of our class display more individualistic values, and a more autonomous sense of self, than other classes. Members of the creative class see their career as the defining feature of their identity, and place a high value on intelligence. Usage of the word smart increased fourfold in The New York Times from 1980 to 2000, according to Michael Sandel’s recent book, The Tyranny of Merit—and by 2018 usage had nearly doubled again.
Without even thinking about it, we in the creative class consolidate our class standing through an ingenious code of “openness.” We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic “localist” tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.
Shamus Rahman Khan is a sociologist who attended and then taught at St. Paul, an elite New England prep school. As the meritocratic creative class displaces the old WASPs, he observes, what the school primarily teaches is no longer upper-crust polish or social etiquette, but “ease”—the knowledge of how to act in open environments where the rules are disguised.
A student who possesses ease can walk into any room and be confident that she can handle whatever situation she finds. She knows how to structure relationships with teachers and other professional superiors so that they are treated both as authority figures and as confidants. A student in possession of ease can comfortably engage the cafeteria workers with a distant friendliness that at once respects social hierarchy and pretends it doesn’t exist. A student with ease knows when irony is appropriate, what historical quotations are overused, how to be unselfconscious in a crowd. These practices, as Khan writes in Privilege, his book about St. Paul, can be absorbed only through long experience within elite social circles and institutions.
From the June 2018 issue: The birth of the new American aristocracy
Openness in manners is matched by openness in cultural tastes. Once upon a time, high culture—the opera, the ballet—had more social status than popular culture. Now social prestige goes to the no-brow—the person with so much cultural capital that he moves between genres and styles, highbrow and lowbrow, with ease.
“Culture is a resource used by elites to recognize one another and distribute opportunities on the basis of the display of appropriate attributes,” Kahn argues. Today’s elite culture, he concludes, “is even more insidious than it had been in the past because today, unlike years ago, the standards are argued not to advantage anyone. The winners don’t have the odds stacked in their favor. They simply have what it takes.”
I wrote Bobos in Paradise in the late Clinton era. The end of history had allegedly arrived; the American model had been vindicated by the resolution of the Cold War. Somehow, we imagined, our class would be different from all the other elites in world history. In fact, we have many of the same vices as those who came before us.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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