Minn. Supreme Court Approves Ballot Question to Eliminate Minneapolis Police Department

 

After weeks of legal challenges and disagreements over the wording to be printed on ballots, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled Thursday evening that votes cast by residents of the state’s largest city on a ballot question — whether the Minneapolis Police Department should be eliminated and replaced with a public safety agency — could be counted. 

Pushed by the group Yes 4 Minneapolis, the ballot question would amend the city’s charter to remove requirements for a police department staffed by a certain number of officers and instead develop “a comprehensive public health approach to safety.”

The question will appear on Minneapolis voters’ ballots as:

Department of Public Safety

Shall the Minneapolis City Charter be amended to remove the Police Department and replace it with a Department of Public Safety that employs a comprehensive public health approach to the delivery of functions by the Department of Public Safety, with those specific functions to be determined by the Mayor and City Council by ordinance; which will not be subject to exclusive mayoral power over its establishment, maintenance, and command; and which could include licensed peace officers (police officers), if necessary, to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety, with the general nature of the amendments being briefly indicated in the explanatory note below, which is made a part of this ballot?

Explanatory Note:

This amendment would create a Department of Public Safety combining public safety functions through a comprehensive public health approach to be determined by the Mayor and Council. The department would be led by a Commissioner nominated by the Mayor and appointed by the Council. The Police Department, and its chief, would be removed from the City Charter. The Public Safety Department could include police officers, but the minimum funding requirement would be eliminated.

On Tuesday, a judge in Hennepin County, Minnesota, sided with those challenging the elimination of police, calling the question’s wording “unreasonable and misleading.” 

“The Court finds that the New Ballot Question does not ensure that voters are able to understand the essential purpose of the proposed amendment,” Judge Jamie Anderson wrote in her decision.

Anderson’s ruling came just three days before early voting began in Minneapolis, triggering a quick appeal by Yes 4 Minneapolis to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Chief Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea issued a short decision Thursday reversing Judge Anderson’s ruling on the grounds that opponents’ legal challenge “does not meet the high standard” to keep votes on the question from being counted. The Chief Justice said a longer explanation would follow, but that the quick reversal was necessary “so as not to impair the orderly process of voting.”

Don Samuels, a Minneapolis resident and former city council member who challenged the ballot question in court, said after the Supreme Court decision that his “was not an attempt to keep the question off the ballot; it was to enlighten the voters by forcing the City Council to clean up the language and be honest about what it will do.”

As early voting gets underway in Minneapolis on Friday, the group All of Mpls released its first ad urging residents to vote “no” on eliminating their city’s police department and instead pursue reform.

“The ad features Teto Wilson, a North Minneapolis resident, barbershop owner, and community leader,” a release from All of Mpls explains. “The ad focuses on the need to reform the police, not eliminate them. If passed, Ballot Question 2 would amend the city charter to eliminate the police department, the position of police chief, the minimum funding and staffing requirement for police, and replace it with a Department of Public Safety with no requirement for police and no defined structure, function, or plan.”

Are Americans Becoming Sovietized?

 

What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?

Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?

Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.

1. There was no escape from ideological indoctrination — anywhere. A job in the bureaucracy or a military assignment hinged not so much on merit, expertise or past achievement. What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.

Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion. Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.

2. The Soviets fused their press with the government. Pravda, or “Truth,” was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Communist Party partners.

In 2017, a Harvard study found that over 90% of the major TV news networks’ coverage of the Trump administration’s first 100 days was negative.

3. The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents.

Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot extremist sentiments. The U.S.  Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

CNN recently alleged that the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security is considering partnering with private surveillance firms to get around government prohibitions on scrutinizing Americans’ online activity.

4. The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought.

Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of diversity, equity and inclusion staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan the admissions, hiring, curriculum and administration at universities. Like good commissars, our diversity czars oversee compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize for and renounce its evil foundations.

5. The Soviet Union was run by a pampered elite, exempt from the ramifications of their own radical ideologies.

Now, woke Silicon Valley billionaires talk socialistically but live royally. Coke and Delta Airlines CEOs who hector Americans about their illiberality make millions of dollars a year.

What unites current woke activists such as Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James Mark Zuckerberg and the Obamas are their huge estates and their multimillion-dollar wealth. Just as the select few of the old Soviet nomenklatura had their Black Sea dachas, America’s loudest top-down revolutionaries prefer living in Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills, Montecito and Malibu.

6. The Soviets mastered Trotskyization, or the rewriting and airbrushing away of history to fabricate present reality.

Are Americans any different when they indulge in a frenzy of name-changing, statue-toppling, monument-defacing, book-banning and cancel-culturing?

7. The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons for rooting out all potential enemies of the people.

Since when did Americans encourage co-workers to turn in others for an ill-considered word in a private conversation? Why do thousands now scour the internet to find any past incorrect expression of a rival? Why are there now new thought criminals supposedly guilty of climate racism, immigration racism or vaccination racism?

8. Soviet prosecutors and courts were weaponized according to ideology.

In America, where and for what reason you riot determines whether you face any legal consequences. Politically correct sanctuary cities defy the law with impunity. Jury members are terrified of being doxxed and hunted down for an incorrect verdict. The CIA and FBI are becoming as ideological as the old KGB.

9. The Soviets doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought.

In modern America, the Pulitzer Prizes and the Emmys, Grammys, Tonys and Oscars don’t necessarily reflect the year’s best work, but often the most politically correct work from the most woke.

10. The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom. Instead, they boasted that they were advocates for equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege — and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased.

Our wokists are similarly defending their thought-control efforts, forced re-education sessions, scripted confessionals, mandatory apologies and cancel culture on the pretense that we need long-overdue “fundamental transformation.”

So if they destroy people in the name of equity, their nihilism is justified.

What Is American Wokeness Really About?

 

Most Americans were as indifferent to the U.S. women’s soccer team’s recent loss to Sweden in the Olympics as they were excited about the team’s World Cup win in 2019. In between was the team’s nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue-signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg, becoming more pinched the more she is tuned out.

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac used her corporate grifting to buy four homes. The one she bought in California’s Topanga Canyon is surrounded by a new $35,000 security fence.

Critical race theory guru Ibram X. Kendi offers virtual, one-hour workshops for $20,000 a pop. He is franchising woke re-education kits — in between bouts of damning capitalism as a catalyst of racism.

The woke movement is a slicker, more sophisticated and far more grandiose version of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson’s shakedowns of the 1990s. Those, at least, were far more honest in leveraging cash with charges of racism — and came without the academic gobbledygook of critical race theory.

Our freeways are jammed. Airports are crammed. Labor is short. Huge pent-up consumer demand for essentials and entertainment outpaces supply. Yet Major League Baseball’s recent All-Star Game saw record low television viewership — about a quarter of the audience of 40 years ago, when there were 100 million fewer Americans.

The Summer Olympic Games are getting anemic TV ratings. The NBA’s crashing TV ratings have followed the downward trajectory of the NFL’s ratings. Woke sports earn the same public disgust as the accusatory and boring Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards.

Cable news networks CNN and MSNBC fueled the story that former President Donald Trump allegedly colluded with Russia. They contextualized (to excuse) the summer looting and rioting of 2020. And they cheered on two impeachments as a prelude to their 24/7 woke drumbeat. Their ratings, too, have now dived.

Never has TV been more politicized. Sitcoms, dramas and commercials are designed more to resonate woke messaging than to entertain. So naturally, dismal TV ratings reflect the expected public boredom that ensues when art serves politics.

How many times will disingenuous Dr. Anthony Fauci swear that he never sent federal money to the Wuhan virology lab for gain-of-function research, or blame his critics for pointing out his gyrating advice on masks, or offer yet another noble lie on herd immunity?

In short, Americans are worn out from elite virtue-signaling and woke performance art from critical race theory capitalists, multimillionaire CEOs, revolving-door Pentagon brass, Malibu celebrities and credentialed elite.

The problem is not just that most of America is exhausted from being smeared as racists, or hearing that a wonderful country — the most free, just, equitable, affluent and leisured in civilization’s history —  must continually pay penance for its past and present. The public is more tired of projectionist hypocrisy. Those who scream the loudest are usually the most guilty of woke crimes.

The woke madness coincides with an epidemic of crises that go largely ignored as a distracted America cannibalizes itself.

The border is being breached at a time of pandemic. Migrants barge in without either COVID-19 testing or vaccinations — during a coronavirus spike that has government officials talking about going door to door to roust out American citizens to get vaccinated.

Whiteness is supposedly the cause of America’s problems. But our inner cities are suffering historic levels of violent crime. Couldn’t our critical race theory accusers take time out from their merchandising to address the soaring violence?

The Biden administration denies that huge deficit spending and generous cash payments to workers fueled inflation. But America hasn’t seen anything like the current price hikes and labor shortages in the last 40 years.

The military, CIA and FBI have lost the confidence of the public — and not just because of their woke politicking. They are perceived as distracted and ignoring their primary missions of winning wars, catching terrorists before they strike, and offering superb intelligence about our enemies.

Wokeness is many things. But increasingly it seems a cover for careerism, profiteering and utter incompetence.

Does America Still Work?

 

For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital and time in an effort to constantly flagellate itself for not being perfect.

Yet America’s resilience and its resources are not infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans.

There are repercussions when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings.

Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest? Once journalists became progressive poodles rather than the watchdogs of government, the Biden administration had no fear of audit. It took for granted that its disasters, from the southern border to the chaos in Afghanistan, would be excused by toady reporters.

Government-engineered “equity” has replaced the goal of equal opportunity. But such utopianism births popular anger when personal initiative, excellence and performance do not count as much as virtue-signaling groupthink.

The United States just suffered a terrible and shameful defeat in Afghanistan. The catastrophe reminds us that the Biden administration had its politicized military and bureaucracy mostly fixate on diversity, equity and inclusion, and to root out supposed internal enemies.

So, our top brass and functionaries talked of redirecting the military to every possible woke agenda — except ensuring military superiority and the safety of the United States.

The result is the horrific mess of a premodern Taliban army routing the most sophisticated military in the history of civilization. We shudder when America begs premodern tribes not to murder our citizens whom we abandoned in full retreat.

Airline CEOs virtue-signal their wokeness by damning voter ID laws — though such identification is required to board their airplanes. The new normal for U.S. airlines is woke delays, woke cancellations, and woke anarchy in the skies.

Some universities now subject their admissions, their hiring and their research to race and gender directives. There is less concern about the collective student debt of $1.7 trillion. College students may graduate woke, but they do so with far less impressive reading and writing skills than their less politically correct predecessors a half-century ago.

Are college administrators really so virtuous when they boast of improving diversity, equity and inclusion? Why, then, do they ignore indebted and poorly educated graduates — veritable serfs who cannot afford homes, put off raising families and prolong their adolescence rather than becoming autonomous citizens?

We know from centuries past which policies ensure public safety and which guarantee crime. All laws must be enforced equally. Yet now, suicidal legal and critical race theories sometimes govern which laws are enforced and which are ignored.

If a state attorney prosecutes crimes — or chooses not to prosecute them — on the basis of ideology and race rather than on questions of impartial law, then who would obey, much less honor any of them?

The police must not just be monitored, but respected and supported. Today they are defamed and defunded. If those who commit crimes do not expect to be arrested and punished, then crime pays. And so we get more of it.

Cries to empty the jails and prisons and pull back on police might sound neat on Twitter. But lots of innocent Americans will suffer the deadly consequences of someone else’s virtue-signaling.

Before a country can conduct cancer research, explore outer space or defeat its enemies thousands of miles away, its citizens must have access to affordable fuel, food and shelter.

But ideologues now restrict irrigation water, gasoline supplies, power generation and timber production. They may seem woke and enlightened to each other, but they are indifferent to the exorbitant cost of living, the growing shortages of necessities, and the hundreds of thousands of homeless living amid filth, excrement and disease on the nation’s urban sidewalks.

Social media fights, the cancel culture wars between celebrities and elites, the virtue-signaling of academics and actors — all of it means nothing if Americans do not have safe roads; viable travel; affordable gas, food and housing; and safety in their homes.

Increasingly, they do not have these things. Woke leaders are losing the ability to do the hard and essential work of civilization, largely because they are obsessed with the dispensable.

We live in a world of cellphones, Skype and Zoom. But high tech has become a mere veneer pasted over medieval urban streets and Depression-era highways. It is more dangerous to walk the nighttime streets of Chicago than those of war-torn Kabul.

Until our officials can ensure a humane and sustainable standard of living, we have no business lecturing others abroad, much less conducting endless witch hunts of our own at home.

There’s a Problem in the Upper Reaches of Our Military

 

It is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream. Joe Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S. strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country.

In the hours after the horrific deaths of 13 service members, we have been reassured by our military that our partnership with the Taliban to provide security for our flights was wise. We were told that the terrorist victors share similar goals to ours in a hasty American retreat from Kabul. We were reminded that Afghan refugees (unlike U.S. soldiers) will not be forced to be vaccinated on arrival. Such statements are either untrue or absurd.

On the very day of the attack that killed American troops, the sergeant major of the U.S. Army reminded us in a tweet that diversity is our strength, commemorating not the dead, but Women’s Equality Day. If so, then is the opposite of diversity — unity — our weakness? Will such wokeness ensure that we do not abandon the Bagram air base in the middle of the night without opposition?

The chief of staff at the Office of Naval Intelligence warned the ONI’s active duty and retired service members that they must not criticize Biden, their commander in chief, over the Afghanistan fiasco. The office correctly cited prohibitions found in the Uniform Code of Military Justice barring any disrespect shown to senior government leadership.

Indeed, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps was relieved of his command for posting a video accurately blaming military and civilian leadership for the Afghanistan nightmare.

Yet until Jan. 20, retired top brass had constantly smeared their elected commander in chief with impunity.

Recently retired Gen. Michael Hayden retweeted a horrific suggestion that unvaccinated Trump supporters should be put on planes back to Afghanistan, where they presumably would be left to die. Hayden earlier had compared Trump’s border facilities to Nazi death camps.

Other retired high-profile military officials variously called their president an emulator of Nazi tactics, a veritable Mussolini, a liar, and deserving of removal from office sooner than later. None of these retired four-stars faced the sort of repercussions that the Office of Naval Intelligence just warned about.

More than 50 former intelligence officials on the eve of the November election signed a letter suggesting that incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s missing laptop might be “Russian disinformation.” They used their stature for political purposes to convince the American people that the story was a lie.

Retired Gen. Joseph Dunford and retired Adm. Mike Mullen recently blasted retired brass who had questioned Biden’s cognitive ability. OK. But they should have issued a similar warning earlier, when the violations of fellow retired officers were even more egregious in election year 2020.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apologized for doing a photo op with Trump, erroneously buying into the narrative that Trump had ordered rioters cleared from Lafayette Square for the staged picture. Worse, he leaked to journalists that he was so angry with Trump that he “considered” resigning.

Think of the irony. If Milley considered a politicized resignation to rebuke Trump over the false charge, then surely he could consider a real resignation after overseeing the worst military disaster of the last half-century in Kabul.

Milley had promised to root out white supremacy from the ranks while recommending that his soldiers read Ibram X. Kendi’s racialist diatribes.

Something is terribly wrong in the ranks of America’s top commanders that reflects something wrong with the country.

The Pentagon needs to stop virtue-signaling about diversity days and culturally sensitive food for Afghan refugees. Instead, can it just explain why the Bagram air base was abandoned by night, or why Taliban terrorists are our supposed “partners” in organizing our surrender and escape?

Which general allowed more than $85 billion in American weapons to fall to the Taliban — a sum equal to the price of seven new U.S. aircraft carriers?

Who turned over to the Taliban the lists of Americans and allied Afghans to be evacuated?

Who left behind biometric devices that the Taliban are now using to hunt down our former Afghan friends?

Somehow our new woke Pentagon is hell-bent on losing the trust of the American people — along with the wars it fights abroad