Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Fall of Minneapolis
I just watched this video on Rumble. There was nothing really surprising about it. I had long suspected the actual facts in the case, but had nothing other than a lot of experience dealing with budding criminals to know that there was a lot more to what was being told about George Floyd than what the media had said. It went a long way in clarifying the issue.
I heard about the video on a recent episode of the “Megyn Kelly Show” in which she interviewed the producer. Megyn said it was a must-see, and having watched it, I cannot but totally agree. The events that followed the death of Floyd are horrendous to witness, but the trial itself and the complete miscarriage of justice is even worse, because it has very likely destroyed a major American city.
The unbelievable corruption of the state and city governments of Minnesota and Minneapolis is appalling. But worst of all is the incredible injustice done to four fine police officers who were simply doing their job and the long-term effects that is going to have on police everywhere in this country.
Please take the time to watch the video, offered free on Rumble. Here is the link:
https://rumble.com/v3vyvzv-the-fall-of-minneapolis.html
(For some reason, I couldn’t copy and paste this, so you will have to copy and paste the above link into your browser window. Apologies for that.)
Published in General
This link will take you straight to the video.
https://rumble.com/v3vyvzv-the-fall-of-minneapolis.html
Ricochet recognizes YouTube links and parses them so that the video will embed. Rumble hasn’t been popular enough long enough, I guess.
Check out Powerline. Minnesota lawyer blog that has been documenting the decline of that city for years. Only question is which city will hit the sewer first: Minneapolis, San Fran, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore or Chicago. My money is on San Fran. Fewer murders but more car breaks ins and poop on the street. Until Xi comes back.
The fact that Floyd was complaining of being unable to breathe before he was on the ground combined with the traces of fentanyl in his system by itself constituted reasonable doubt. It was weird watching the trial, where the cop and his lawyer didn’t even look like they were trying to win. I think the cop realized that going to prison was a better option than what would have happened to him if he’d been acquitted. The image of him kneeling on Floyd was a priceless asset of the SJW movement at that point and they would have done anything to prevent it from being debunked and to avenge anyone who was successful in doing so.
For sure he would have had to go into some kind of Witness Protection but under the circumstances he probably would have been exposed rather quickly.
Casual progressives online are finally beginning to notice how bad the problem is, but they are in complete and utter denial over the causes of it all; they post comments about how horrible the situation is in response to news segments, and then respond with ‘its due to the quarantine’ or ‘we didn’t vote for this’ every time conservatives explain the obvious. Sometimes they’ll even concede that the (Democrat) politicians have failed them, but never that they failed precisely because they implemented the policies they campaigned on (Republicans should be so fortunate).
And then there are the hardcore progressives online, who insist that everything is fine and carjackings and public trains full of nodding methheads are just, y’know, normal city things. They are, to judge from the local subreddit, car-hating misanthropic cyclists with perpetual dislike for the normies who somehow tricked their way into having a house and a stable life. Yay socialism and kill the TERFS! The real reason for crime is engrained systemic racism, poverty, generational trauma, capitalism, Ronald Reagan’s decision to burn down the asylums, punitive haters who want to rebuild the asylums, inadequate public transportation, killer cops, solar flares, underfunded educational funding, and uncaring MAGA Minnesota that surrounds the city and takes away its resources to coddle the legions of rural meth-heads. The fact that the city has been run for decades by liberals is irrelevant, because this just shows that the liberals are milquetoasters who lack the spine for root-and-branch revolutionary change, and capitalism & white supremacy – but I repeat myself – are too firmly entrenched to allow incremental progress.
Serious question for the longtime resident of Mary Tyler Mooreville: What do the people of this city really want?
As an outsider, it sure looks all the world like they want it to be a post-apocalyptic hell hole. I don’t even hear anybody talking about it getting better.
I suspect that different people want different things. If I’m wrong about that I’ll want to avoid the city and will plan alternate routes for upcoming travel.
I say the following with great sadness as San Francisco was for a very long time one of our favorite spots on the face of the earth, but hasn’t it already won that contest? Any city which has its own “find the poop” app would be hard to beat in the downward spiral sweepstakes.
And how disgracefully in-your-face corrupt is it to in effect tell your own citizens – taxpayers- you simply have no way of doing anything about the filth and needles and homeless and smells and lunacy and danger and wildly out of control medieval conditions and then do that very thing overnight for one of the most brutal tyrants in the world?
Not the magnificent jewel of a city with limitless vistas, little cable cars, some of the world’s greatest restaurants, sourdough bread along the waterfront, Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista, art galleries seemingly every few doors downtown, Union Square feeding the pigeons, charm and charisma around every corner we remember. It’s like talking about the death of a dear friend and we did, in fact, make some of our longest lasting friendships with life long natives of that memorable place- they have died, just like the city they loved.
I have never been much on conspiracy theories, but this video really makes me question what is going on in our country. The manner in which government folded like a cheap suit, and allowed rioters to destroy a city, attack its cops, and then use the causitive event as an excuse to empower a bogus group of race hustlers who then extorted vast amounts of money from lily-livered liberals and corporations just looks too well planned and executed. Combined with the Covid nonsense they nearly destroyed the greatest country ever in human history. This was all too well engineered to be happenstance. This was revolution, and we need a counter revolution to restore sanity to the country. What that involves may end up looking “racist” since to a large extent blacks have been used as sock puppets to destablize the government, but watching the video all I could see was people empowered well beyond ordinary citizens being allowed to loot and destroy property without any consequences while the rest of us got tickets for going 5 MPH over the speed limit, or got Jaywalking tickets, or paid accountants large sums of money to insure that the IRS didn’t drag us in for audits if we failed to report tips, etc. That insanity continues. Our stores have to lock up merchandise so that shopping is far more inconvenient, some major companies have closed branches in neighborhoods where they were too vulnerable making it much worse for the decent people who lived there, and, meanwhile, cops are afraid to act, understandably. How long do we have to put up with this?
What they want, I don’t know. What they’ll get is Mogadishu on the Mississippi. And Chicago is going to be West Detroit.
My policy of always being in a red county in a red state looks more solid every day.
Officer Friendly wants to remind everyone that Christmas is just around the corner so get your Christmas shoplifting done early before all the good stuff is gone.
A return to pre-2020 safety and public decorum – no carjackings, no maniacs on the streets and highways, no stickups in their part of town.
They have no idea how to accomplish this, except to quietly wish for more police. Oh and big societal change accomplished by wand-waving that eliminates all the isms and injustice.
It’s certainly better than 2020. I’m downtown every day and have never had any problems or seen anything close to the drug-user / homeless encampments of SF, LA, Portland et al. It’s not a dangerous vibe at all. The burned-out areas are rebuilt, mostly; downtown is full of cranes for new apartment towers.
Down with Ismism!
I can get behind that.
How is North 2nd Street? Back at the time of the riots I took a look on StreetView and think I located the meat processing plant where I had a part-time job in the late 60s. The building seemed to still be there, anyway.
@jameslileks
Again, speaking as an outsider who has always thought highly of the city of Minneapolis, I’m not understanding this.
The Minneapolis city government clearly colluded with BLM, Antifa, and the Democrat Party, to create a nation-wide race war under President Trump’s watch. Damage to the city has been assessed as $350 million, which is just a little under $1000.00 per resident. But it’s probably several times that if you include reduced property values, businesses leaving, smart people leaving, graft, and so forth.
The very premise of all this, that an officer of a racist police department killed a black man during an arrest, doesn’t even make sense; the officer clearly didn’t use a weapon or lethal force, and if the police department is racist that’s the fault of the police department and the guy who runs it, who was appointed by the mayor who was elected by the people.
But further craziness is apparent when you consider that the Minneapolis police chief was a black guy, Medaria Arradondo, who was appointed by the mayor to replace Janeé Harteau, heralded as the city’s first woman and first homosexual police chief, who was fired after black Somali police officer Muhammad Noor murdered a white woman, Justine Ruszczyk.
None of this makes any sense at all. Which makes the title of this film especially appropriate.
In a Democracy, the citizens get what they vote for. Good and hard. Which is why I asked what the citizens of Minneapolis really want.
My post, Saving Our Cities (Part 2), seems to offer an explanation which is consistent with what we’re seeing in Minneapolis and other major US cities. Does it apply here? I don’t know. To this outsider, it appears to. But if so, it offers a potential solution.
I think I would have begun avoiding Minneapolis some time ago.
I wouldn’t avoid the city. It’s a great place and mostly safe. But don’t come in the winter.
Many places seem to do that, and then they stay empty for a variety of reasons. Including cost. How many people will be able to afford to live in those new apartments?
Maybe they will pull a New York City and fill them with illegals, at taxpayer expense.
I keep asking my wife, “Don’t you want to make a trip in the winter for old times’ sake?” For some reason it doesn’t have much nostalgia value for her.
Speaking of nostalgia, when we were dating in college, she was living in a small apartment building on Lexington Avenue next to I-94 (in the city of which Mpls is a suburb). Concordia College had bought it to handle an expanding enrollment and called it Berger Hall. Berger girls had a reputation for being fast walkers, which behavior was learned on the cold winter walks to the campus on the other side of St Paul Central high school, along the I-94 wind tunnel at a time when the classroom dress code called for skirts and no slacks. Below-zero temperatures and high wind can be a strong motivator. Once the Berger girls got in the habit there was no slowing them down even in warm weather.
It was hard to keep up with her in those days. She has slowed down greatly since then, and now keeps a cane handy. But one day in Europe this fall, probably in Strasbourg where we did a lot of walking, usually at a pace too slow for my little sister who accompanied us, I found it hard to keep up with her. I remarked on it, but she didn’t have an explanation. It reminded me of the days when she was a Berger girl, and then I had to explain the concept of Berger girls to my sister. I finally came up with the theory that a pain pill she had taken that day for something unrelated had made her able to walk unhindered by the usual aches and pains. She wasn’t sure, but decided it was plausible. It lasted only for the one day, but it brought back old memories.
Now that my parents are gone, we usually go to MN around the 4th of July, but that didn’t work this year. My wife still said no to winter, but agreed to take a chance on Thanksgiving. I usually prefer to drive through on I-94 rather than take I-694 around the top, but it depends on traffic conditions. It’s a time to get a glance at old places we used to know. And on rarer occasion, we even stop to visit some of them. Summer is a better time for that.
The truth is that most people are only slightly inconvenienced by crime and in ways that are not obvious to them. So a few stores and restaurants close…there are others. A car-jacking in neighborhood X? That’s too bad, but it wasn’t me. How about we go to the show in neighborhood Y. This is especially true for the well-to-do who can adjust their habits and entertainment with a bit more cost. Isn’t that just the price of living in the city?
My wife and I (south suburban dwellers) have been considering a short weekend getaway, and while downtown Minneapolis would have been high on our list a few years ago, it was ruled out quickly this time. We now only visit Minneapolis in quick hit-and-runs for shows and concerts. In short, we are angry with the city.
On the other hand, my three girls and two of their girl friends (23 – 29 yrs old) went bar-hopping last night in the Minneapolis Warehouse District and seemed to have no compunction in doing it. All went well.
All often does go well, until suddenly and unpredictably it doesn’t.
I didn’t even watch the video yet, but I’ve thought all along that the conviction of Derek Chauvin and the others was one of the greatest miscarriages of justice I have seen in my lifetime. I watched “the other videos” of the famous death scene, the ones taken by the officers themselves (it showed way more than the limited famous video taken by a bystander), and I saw nothing at all improper. Not to mention that the jury completely ignored the fact that Floyd had a level of Fentanyl in his system 20% higher than the average lethal dose, another recreational drug whose name I don’t remember, had arterial blockage of the four main arteries to his enlarged heart of 75%, 75%, 75%, and 90%, had unusually enlarged lungs from some sort of condition, and had Covid all at the same time. The idiot pathologist from Australia who petitioned the prosecutors to testify for them, said on the stand that every one of those maladies had absolutely nothing to do with Floyd’s death, which is just bloody ludicrous.
I hope someday Chauvin and the others will be exonerated.
I was not surprised to learn at the time of the trial that Keith Ellison bullied the coroner into adding some ambiguity to findings that clearly exonerated Chauvin. Ellison/Keith X has always been scum. What was shocking was the gutlessness of the police leadership. They lied about the hold used (the American Spectator article three years ago had links to the exact page in the manual) and delivered one of their own as an offering to the mob.
The truth is that it was not George Floyd’s death that caused riots but the lie about the cause of his death that did it. The remaining cops in that town are either incredibly loyal to their town or suckers who could be sacrificed in a flash if it were expedient.
And Mayor Frey’s crocodile tears kneeling by the casket was perhaps the most vomitous scene in the flick.
The lie was just the Reichstag Fire, the people who instigated the riots had everything planned ahead and were simply waiting for an opportunity; this time, they were successful in laying the propaganda groundwork, much like a lesser version of what took place in early 1930s Germany or early 1990s Rwanda.
I don’t think the citizens are any better off, really.
Fast women are the spice of life.
Same.
If they’d just shoved him into the patrol car no one would have said anything if/when Floyd died. It would have been attributed (rightly) to the drugs. But no, Chauvin let Floyd have his way and was stuck preventing him from escaping while trying to keep him alive until the ambulance came.
The left won’t be happy until every major city become Detroit