Katherine Kersten’s tinfoil hat
Did you ever try to find Katie on the Strib website after Sunday?
To save you the trouble, here’s her offering from last Sunday. The piece may be summarized as follows:
If you thought that you could build a house in West Buttf**k and that the government would build a sewer and a freeway to speed you to your job in downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul, well, think again!
Here’s how Kersten describes it:
The Twin Cities of 2040 will likely be starkly different from the place you live now. People will increasingly live in dense, urban concentrations, even if they’d prefer a house with a yard outside the 494 beltway. [where there aren’t so many black people].
Government planners will have power to steer new jobs into central cities and first-ring suburbs, and to set what amounts to quotas for people of different incomes and races in neighborhoods and schools throughout the metro area. Outside the urban core, highway conditions will deteriorate and congestion — encouraged by government — will get worse.
What Kersten really means is that the West Buttf**kians won’t get to suckle at the central cities’ teat without paying for it.
This is a grift that has been happening for decades, ever since the 50s, or even earlier. Income taxes from income earned in the cities, and sales taxes paid in them, finance state government, and yet legislators like Linda Runbeck and Tom Hackbarth, from the metaphoric Circle Jerk, Minnesota, bleat about the “dependent” cities.
This is painfully direct, I know. But there is no other way to describe it.
Katie’s idyllic exurbs exist only because of the central cities. Places like Grosse Pointe, Michigan are about to discover that. As may, someday, the West Buttf**kians. There is an economic dependence all right, but it runs in a direction exactly opposite to what Linda and Tom think.
Truly, what do these places have to offer to the world? Perhaps someone will write in and tell me. Linda? Tom? Katie? Bueller? Nice places to live for the few people who are there, but that’s it.
But know that Kersten’s dystopian revelation isn’t even her own. It’s a Glenn Beck special about a secret plot by the UN jackboots to seize suburban homes and collectivize everything called Agenda 21. Beck even wrote a novel about it, named, you guessed it, Agenda 21. Kersten may have thought it was a history book.
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