After I wrote “Minneapolis goes Baghdad” in the early morning hours yesterday, Governor Walz called a 10:00 a.m. press conference. With the fires still smoldering in Minneapolis, Walz announced that he had activated our entire National Guard contingent and declared that the curfews in Minneapolis and St. Paul would be enforced yesterday evening (video below). Apparently between 4,000 and 5,000 National Guard soldiers enhanced the law enforcement officers in the unified command deployed throughout the Twin Cities last night.
The curfews appear mostly to have been enforced last night. The crowd assembled at Minneapolis’s Fifth Precinct headquarters was broken up live on local television at about 8:40 p.m. Law enforcement also barred the Minneapolis crowds from moving to St. Paul over either the Lake Street Bridge or the Ford Bridge. Traffic was blocked on Highway 94 between the cities as well. A significant deployment of forces protected the state capitol in St. Paul.
Apparently @GovTimWalz confused antifa with white supremacists #TCNT https://t.co/CNyXocc5mh
— Jon Justice (@JonJustice) May 31, 2020
I am slaphappy from listening to Walz’s torrent of verbiage at these press conferences. As far I can tell, however, Walz’s latest moves are all to the good. Consistent with my own observations, Governor Walz’s remarks called out the object of the operations as domestic terrorists. He and others sought to identify them with “white supremacists” who, to my knowledge, have yet to be sighted — see Jon Justice’s tweet above — but the enhancement of the forces of law enforcement in support of last night’s operations represents a late step in the right direction.
Stephen Montemayor reports in the Star Tribune: “A law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigations of outside agitators acknowledged that people are coming in from out of state to cause problems. But he said he has yet to see any credible evidence linking that behavior to white supremacists.” Montemayor quoted his law enforcement source” “It’s a red herring.” It’a “a red herring” deployed by Governor Walz along with the National Guard soldiers.
UPDATE: I copied and pasted the quotes from Montemayor’s article abvoe. They have now been excised from the article without any note or explanation.
