Inside the not OK corral

Last week we had the “Shootout from George Floyd Square” broadcast live from Minneapolis. The video looks like a scene from a dark comedy. I think of it as the shootout at the not OK corral. It was in any event the perfect way to commemorate the anarchy and lawlessness Minneapolis has experienced in the year since George Floyd’s death.

Patrick Coolican was a reporter who wrote (with Stephen Montemayor) the Star Tribune Tribune’s most-read story of 2019, on Ilhan Omar. Anyone with the sense of Joe Biden in his dotage could deduce from the story that Omar is a fraudster and liar — and I mean of an ilk previously unseen in American politics — who has perfected the art of victimhood.

Patrick left the Star Tribune to preside over the Minnesota Reformer, a site whose politics are further to the left than the Star Tribune. In my dealings with him I have found Patrick to be a straightforward journalist who knows good reporting when he sees it. Last week he published Deena Winter’s report on the poor souls living inside the not OK corral. Winter writes:

A year after the murder of George Floyd, some residents who live near the four-block area now graced by his name want the people running the autonomous zone to remove the barricades and leave. They say people in the neighborhood have been shot at, robbed, carjacked, threatened with deadly weapons and sexually harassed.

“This is our home. It does not belong to the world. It does not belong to anyone,” Amina Harper said on Instagram. “We live here and we deserve to be safe while we live here because most of us cannot afford to live anywhere else.”

Winter’s story is “Neighbors, feeling bullied, want activists to leave George Floyd Square.” George Floyd Square, not coincidentally, is an “autonomous zone.” Law enforcement is not on hand. George Floyd Square is in the hands of thugs and bullies.

The Minneapolis mayor and police chief promised that regular order would be restored once the verdict in the Chauvin case was handed down. From the Governor and Attorney General to the mayor and city council, it’s Democrats all the way down. George Floyd Square and environs have yet to be retaken. It’s a story that tells you everything you need to know about the state of play in Minneapolis and that has gone largely uncovered.

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