Iron Range Republicans have been waiting for an election like Tuesday’s their whole lives. No, really. There hasn’t been one this good for the local GOP since Hoover.
Republican Rob Farnsworth won the open State Senate seat in the central Mesabi Range by a solid seven-point margin. This is the beating heart of the Iron Range, an erstwhile DFL bastion that delivered 40-point margins for John Kerry not that long ago.
Redistricting paired two incumbents in House District 7A, Republican Spencer Igo and DFLer Julie Sandstede. Sandstede was endorsed by the United Steelworkers and the CEO of Cleveland Cliffs, a historically rare combination. Nevertheless, Igo won by a similar seven-point margin.
In the state’s geographically biggest House seat, District 3A, Ely Mayor Roger Skraba defeated incumbent DFLer Rob Ecklund, a former Steelworkers union president, by a mere 15 votes.
Only DFL incumbent Rep. David Lislegard held on in District 7B. Despite being arguably the most pro-mining legislator in the state, Lislegard won by just three points.
And so it’s time to consider that some of this isn’t really about mining. It’s about culture.
Some years ago I fell down a research rabbit hole writing about a campaign to create a new state from the northern portions of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. This new state would be called Superior.
This was before social media, back when people would leave comments on websites. Many of the comments I saw came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where the idea first originated. They rehashed the basic arguments: Local control for regions “forgotten” by their state capitals while keeping mining, logging and tourism revenue.
But then these comments would take a turn. At long last, in the Great State of Superior, Detroit would stop feasting on the hard-earned tax dollars of working people up north.
If you talk to people in northern Wisconsin, they complain the same way about Milwaukee. And we know how northern Minnesotans view the Twin Cities. Just look at the ads and mailers that fueled the Republican shift on the Iron Range. Voters in rural areas outside Minnesota’s big cities and regional centers rejected statewide Democrats by ever-expanding margins.
That’s brought us to the point where we have a senile vegetable in the Oval Office who is being handled by a cabal that’s driven by extreme leftist fringe interests. These people wake up every morning bright and early thinking of new ways to get their puppet president to shred the United States Constitution.
In case you missed it, President LOLEightyonemillion is feeling pretty frisky after last Tuesday. Robert wrote on Friday that Ol’ Gropes has vowed to not change a thing now that the red wave didn’t make it to shore.
That means that his handlers have free rein to continue the executive abuses of power we’ve been suffering under since January of last year. In September I wondered how long the country could survive a rogue Justice Department and an attorney general hell-bent on revenge. Well, boys and girls, we’re about to find out.
It’s not just the Biden administration that’s ready to flex. Ryan has a post about Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts threatening Elon Musk with congressional action because Musk mocked him in a tweet.
BARRY SMOLLETT? Noose Nonsense at Obama Presidential Center. “Definitely a hate crime. I can’t imagine any other reason why a rope would be on a construction site. Also, this is Chicago. It’s not a place known for hate crime hoaxes.”
How this opening scene plays out tells you everything you need to know about the next two-plus hours. Something related to time or turning back to something thought forgotten in the past is going to occur (teshuvah), and that will trigger the need for repentance (kavanagh). There’s also this wrinkle, which gives the game away. When Lydia Tár mentions “kavanagh” in her interview, she quickly adds that “to this audience that word might mean something else.” By this she means that they audience will probably think of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As if on cue, the audience lustily boos.
Regular readers of The Stream know that I have spent the last few years writing about the Kavanaugh battle and my involvement in it that sprang from my friendship with Brett going back to high school. I won’t rehash it here. You can read about it in my forthcoming book. I can only say that it was a bit bizarre to step into a movie theater to see a well-acted drama and hear Mahler’s Ninth Symphony only to be confronted with a hostile New York audience booing my high school buddy, who was falsely accused of sexual assault.
The booing scene instantly made clear what I was about to watch. Tár would be another angry story about what heartless monsters conservatives are.
Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers – dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this*:
Headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, The J. Edgar Hoover Building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., Thursday, March 23, 2017. Construction finished in September 1975, and President Gerald Ford dedicated the structure on September 30, 1975. (AP Photo/NewsBase)
So (continues the conspiracy) probably we suffered some kind of apocalypse a hundred-ish years ago. Our elites are keeping it quiet, and have altered the records, but they haven’t been able to destroy all the buildings of the lost world. Their cover story is that technology and wealth level haven’t regressed or anything, those kinds of buildings have just “gone out of style”.
Well, it’s not as old as you might guess: it was built in 1967.
Here’s its story (and why architectural style is always a choice…)
It’s the great Cloth Hall of Ypres, a town in Belgium, built between 1933 and 1967.
But that doesn’t tell the full story, of course. It’s actually a stone-for-stone reconstruction of the original Cloth Hall, completed in 1304.
* * * * * * * *
Perhaps the most interesting thing about these reconstructions is that they were even possible.
Much modern architecture is wonderful – but, as with any style, much of it isn’t. Nonetheless, we get the impression that other, older styles just aren’t feasible any more.
The Tartarian empire does indeed still live, if you know where to look for it.
* Author’s photo of Google’s HQ building replaced with a photo we have the rights to use.
What happened: FIFA, the international soccer federation, refused to let the Danish national team practice in shirts promoting “human rights for all” at the World Cup, which begins later this month in Qatar.
Seriously? Yes. The chief executive of Denmark’s soccer association said FIFA rejected the team’s request “due to technical reasons.” The seemingly innocuous phrase was presumably deemed too “political” due to the host country’s appalling human rights record and ties to terrorist organizations.
Wait, what? Human rights groups have condemned Qatar for using forced labor to build the infrastructure required to host the World Cup. More than 6,500 migrant workers are believed to have died there since 2020. The country is a longstanding supporter of Hamas, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other Islamic terrorist groups.
So why is Qatar hosting the World Cup? Because FIFA is an irredeemably corrupt organization that represents an irredeemably corrupt sport. A U.S. Justice Department investigation found that Qatar and Russia, site of the 2018 World Cup, secured hosting rights by bribing FIFA officials.
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