I'm Placing My Bet on the Minneapolis Thing

and the bookmaking window is open for yours

“Tell me how this ends.” I think we’re seeing pretty clear hints about the trajectory.

In a much-noticed development, Minneapolis leftists are so upset by the presence of cruel and dangerous outsiders in their city that they’re setting up, like, boundaries around their neighborhoods to keep them out.

They’re absolutely outraged by borders and the Border Patrol, so they’ve created borders and border checkpoints to keep them out, and they’re, how can I put this, patrolling their borders. My work is done here. I can’t make fun of people who make themselves this obviously a joke. I’ll be spending the rest of the week in the treehouse with my GI Joe dolls and a case of store-brand light beer.

But the zombie apocalypse mindlessness of the moment suggests a radicalism without consciousness or limiting principles. As the mangled semi-quote from Voltaire goes, “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” It becomes pretty hard to avoid noticing that Minneapolis believes the hell out of an endless menu of absurdities. So they aren’t going to stop themselves by the application of normal social braking. You have to be able to think to do that.

Interestingly enough, the Trump administration doesn’t seem inclined to stop them either. The president is hinting at more limits on immigration enforcement, and floating a “softer touch.” He doesn’t seem inclined to kick the Jacobins in the teeth.

So who stops them, and how? What happens to Leftist Checkpoint Minneapolis?

As always, I point at past examples, and say for the fifty-thousandth time that Robespierre died on the guillotine. The Old Bolsheviks who created special troikas to speed the Great Terror were sentenced to death by the tribunals they created. Radical movements turn inward. Mao set the Cultural Revolution in motion, with the limited political intent of creating a street army to purge his own political opposition and consolidate his power. Then he lost control of it, and the Red Guards became a plague of locusts, and Mao shipped them to the collective farms. The Cultural Revolution was implemented by the Red Guards; then the Cultural Revolution crushed the Red Guards to end the third act. We’re going to destroy it all often ends in wait oh crap we destroyed ourselves.

Uncontrolled, batshit-crazy, can’t-hear-myself radicalism usually turns inward. It ends with radicals vs. radicals, with internal purges and purity spirals, and then a faction of the radical movement crushes the radical movement.

There can’t be clear evidence about what happens in the future, but my guess is that leftist Minneapolis consumes leftist Minneapolis, in some manner, and the people on the checkpoints turn on people like Peggy Flanagan and Jacob Frey and what’s-his-name the dipshit in the flannel shirt, who turn on the radicals. Details and timeline unclear, and of course I could be wrong, but I think the project collapses on itself. My bet is that Minneapolis eats its own, while the rest of us pretend to look away. Ain’t nobody got time for that.