Posted on 06/12/2020 4:42:28 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Minneapolis put a student government in charge and destroyed the city.
Fri Jun 12, 2020
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
If Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender didn’t exist, Portlandia would have had to invent her.
After a degree from UC Berkeley, Bender worked for a New York City bike lobby, then did a stint in San Francisco, before she went back to Minneapolis to work for Minnesota’s DOT on bike lanes while running the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition whose burning passion was putting bike lanes everywhere.
Militant bike activists are the dumbest and most loathed figures in urban civics. No group of people is as entitled, obnoxious, or clueless as a bunch of white hipsters in lycra shorts out to convince city officials that giving them more bike lanes will end wars, eliminate racism, and save the planet. There was only one possible career pathway for Bender in Minneapolis. Urban planning through politics as a DFLer.
Once in office, Bender began transforming entire streets into bike lanes. The plan was to have 60% of the residents of Minneapolis using bikes, walking, or taking the bus by 2030. Nobody bothered drawing up a budget for how much this plan would cost because that would have just rained on the parade.
Or rather snowed on it because Minneapolis gets an average of 100 days of snow.
Last year, Minneapolis bike advocates were whining because the police had been ordering them to stay out of the snow. One complained that he was angry that the cops might have terrified "my fellow cyclists and pedestrians who are less privileged than myself… who may have been much more frightened in these sort of interactions than my cismale, white, straight-presenting self."
The cismale rider was typical of Lisa Bender’s base of upscale hipsters renting condos in the ‘Wedge’.
Meanwhile Lisa Bender was being ticketed for not shoveling snow off her own sidewalk while telling everyone else to do it. In predictable fashion, she blamed the resulting scandal on sexism.
Despite Bender’s ambitions, the bike lanes were largely going unused. And, on top of that, the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition, which had changed its name to Our Streets, opposed traffic enforcement because it was racist. And how do you keep cars out of bike lanes without traffic regulations?
But Lisa Bender and Mayor Jacob Frey, the student government that have become the laughingstocks of a nation and the death of a city, had a bigger vision for Minneapolis. They wanted it to be more like New York City with high urban density, lots of mixed-used buildings with families living on top of businesses, and people living in small cubes and pods, while biking to their favorite artisanal coffee shops.
Actually, maybe Bender and Frey didn’t want Minneapolis to be New York City, just a giant campus.
Minneapolis still isn’t a college campus, but it has the first student council to run a major city. Besides Bender, there’s Keith Ellison’s son, who describes himself as a "visual artist, storyteller, and political organizer", Phillipe Cunningham, whose bio is, "progressive, Black, queer & trans", Lisa Goodman, "activist and dog mom", and assorted other characters who ought to be debating at the student center.
Instead they’re determining the fate of a city and a country without having a clue about anything.
But it was the voters of Minneapolis who voted for DFL Democrats and let them trash their city because promised them a glorious future of bike lanes, diversity, and saving the planet.
Minneapolis had lots of older homes. Preservationists wanted them kept and remodeled. But the student council government running the city wanted them destroyed and replaced with glass boxes. Since there were still too many homes, Bender championed an end to single-family zoning and got her way. Now there was nothing standing in the way of her vision of turning Minneapolis into a campus.
Except reality.
Frey, Bender, and the rest of the aging college gang, were selling Minneapolis the same bill of goods that Buttigieg had sold South Bend, and that numerous other young and eager student council members had sold other declining cities, that with more bikes, glass boxes, and green energy, they would attract dot coms that would build their own versions of Facebook and Amazon in their cities generating billions.
If Bender was a character out of Portlandia, her enablers had sprung straight from South Park.
Nobody involved in this knew how anything worked. They just knew that they wanted young people with degrees from big bicoastal colleges to move back and turn Minneapolis into the future. Also, they wanted diversity, environmentalism, and lots of biking in a city where it snows 100 days of the year.
While Frey and Bender were trying to turn Minneapolis into a millennial sandbox, there were real problems closer to home. Bender’s own neighborhood, Lowry Hill East or the ‘Wedge’, was a white hipster enclave with rising crime. The regular muggings were perpetrated in the ‘Wedge’ by people from outside the neighborhood. The Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association (LHENA) had coped with the problem in the past by getting off-duty MPD cops to patrol the neighborhood and fight crime.
This year, there was a spike in robberies. The rise in crime hit the Wedge, which was at the center of Bender’s vision of an influx of hipsters renting condos, while also attracting muggers and thieves. Once the riots began, things only got worse. Local communities turned vigilante and began blocking off streets while volunteers patrolled retail areas to deter looters.
Even before the Minneapolis student council government decided to defund the police, law enforcement had already been replaced, not because of Bender’s legislation, but because the city’s services had broken down, and it was not replaced by something new, but something very old.
The local militia.
In the aftermath, Bender is championing defunding the police. Just like all her other plans, she has no idea how to do it, but it’s a trendy lefty cause and without those, she would be working at Starbucks.
On social media and CNN, Bender has explained that the only way defunding the police will work is if people check their privilege and refuse to call the police when they’re being robbed or mugged. Some of the condo residents biking in the snow might go along with that, but most people aren’t going to do it. If there are no police, they will set up neighborhood watches and eventually those will be armed.
Minneapolis City Council members have claimed that policing is rooted in white supremacy. That’s the kind of dumb thing a freshman student would say in a social justice class. Law enforcement is how local governments provide security in a lawful manner. Remove the law enforcement and you also take away the law and the security. But there are older laws than those of Minneapolis and the United States.
Defund the police and some people will lose their property to looters while others will fight them. When there is no law enforcement, the only law that will matter is the law of force.
Frey, Bender, and their student council politics are ushering in Minneapolis’ Lord of the Flies. But that’s what happens when you put a student government and its campus politics in charge of a major city.
The good news is that Minneapolis is finally becoming more like New York City. And New York City is becoming more like Minneapolis. Civilization is collapsing in both of those cities in the same way. There will be glass box condos, feminist poetry readings in hipster bars, and lots of bike lanes everywhere. And when you need help, you don’t call the police, you call your neighbors or take matters into your own hands. When you defund the police, the people who lose out are the isolated and the weak. And we all lose because when the only law is that of force then civilization gives way to savagery.
Bike lanes are useless when you can’t leave the house and glass boxes are easy to break into.
Lisa Bender and her colleagues, who have more identity politics credentials than competence, promised to transform Minneapolis into a futuristic utopia of glass boxes, mass transit, bike lanes, environmentalism and diversity. Now, Minneapolis doesn’t need those things, if it ever needed them.
All Minneapolis needs is a way to stop people from killing and robbing each other in its streets.
It’s a good thing then that Bender and the rest of the council are defunding the police.
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All Minneapolis needs is a way to stop people from killing and robbing each other in its streets.
It’s a good thing then that Bender and the rest of the council are defunding the police.
The Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously today to approve a resolution intended to abolish the existing police force and replace it with something else. What exactly that is hasn’t been spelled out yet. Can anyone spell “Sharia”, Sharia Islamic law, or redundantly Sharia law is a religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition. It is derived from the religious precepts of Islam. Christians, Jews and atheists might consider leaving ASAP!!
Attention citizens of MinneapoliStan, SeattleStan, LAStan, NYCStan, and ChicagoStan!
Your new BLM police force is here to help you!
Don't call 911!
We will find you!
Have your weekly public safety donation, in cash and handy in a sealed brown paper lunch bag!
Thank you!
ma'a as-salaama!!!
Remember, don't call us, we will find you when we want to.
Below are pics of some of Obama’s Civilian National Security Force:!
Thanks to DCBryan1 for the photo above!
“Hello, alt-911? A gang is trying to break into my house!!!”
“We know. We’re already there.”
Coming soon to any/all blue cities controlled by insane liberals, who hate cops.
Excellent article.
Please add me to this ping list.
Another big city dies, killed by idiot liberals.
The urban cities with their trendy gentrification are dead towns walking. It’s actually fun to watch these weirdos rationalize their stoopid policies. They’re done and don’t know it.
Please add me to the ping list as well. I didn’t notice there was one, there are only a few I read because of who wrote them. This is definitely one. They also get sent to a lot of friends.
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Time to move out of Minneapolis.
I agree, in spades!
Militant bike activists are the dumbest and most loathed figures in urban civics. No group of people is as entitled, obnoxious, or clueless as a bunch of white hipsters in lycra shorts out to convince city officials that giving them more bike lanes will end wars, eliminate racism, and save the planet.
I guess now they'll have to call it the "wedgie," cuz that's what Minniehaha got.
Daniel is one of the absolute best. He just flayed these losers who are taking Minny out with their commie games.
Bike paths downtown are a joke. There's no gain in bike paths when the first frost is typically around Halloween, and you can often get snow into early April.
And there's no gain in bike paths when you have to stop every block for the lights; when Karen in her SUV doesn't even look for you; and the neighborhoods are unsafe.
Build bike paths in the burbs, out into the rest of the state where the natural beauty is staggering.
I just finished 24 miles this evening on one of those paths. I met a man in his upper 60s who looked maybe 50 or 52; an avid cyclist. He was playing sag wagon for one of his relatives and some of the relative's friends, who started on the Wisconsin border and were going to make it to near South Dakota by the end of the night; on their way to Yellowstone National park over the next week or two.
THAT is what bicycling is for; not hipsters trying to out-pretentious Karen in her Toyota Pious.
But somehow, SmarterThanYou™.
I’ve been thinking about the future these last few days. What are these people going to do “after the love-in” where can they go to escape the humiliation of being found out a complete incompetent, not worthy of notice? It’s not like they can attempt to blend in to humanity, they completely lost that, if they ever had it at all. Who’s going to fund their exploits, like Bob Dylan sang “you’re invisible now , you’ve got no secrets to conceal”. They will forever be known as One Hit Wonders. And when they grow old they will look back on these days of thunder and wish to gawd they hadn’t got struck by the lightning bolt called Karma
I have described Minnecraponus and its inhabitants the same way. Stuck in high school, no concept of reality. Yes, I lived in that area for 10 long years.
Thanks; ping; bump!
All Minneapolis needs is a way to stop people from killing and robbing each other in its streets.
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Mayor-baby Frey’s best idea was to have a big black man (who thinks he is a woman) sing Amazing Grace. Maybe if everybody had color chalk and we colored the sidewalks...
Maybe Lisa et al could use more words. More nice words.
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