And not just “pure righteousness,” Devin Hogan declared last week and confirmed on Monday, but also “a genuine revolutionary moment” for Minneapolis. The chair of the city’s Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party defended those comments about the riots, posting on Facebook that “the truth hurts.”

Hogan’s initial essay deserves a thorough fisking, as it resembles the barely coherent thoughts of a freshman after his first exposure to Marx. That would take too long, and besides, most if not all of it is unconscious parody. We can cut to the chase, starting with Hogan’s masturbatory framing:

As party chair I often think, What Would an Elected Official Do? People are going to be devastated, heated and grieving. Per usual. To me, the only way to even try to keep things on the rails meant showing up on the streets, getting spit on and sworn at by constituents whose friends, family and neighbors were killed by public employees. Accepting responsibility for the role, genuinely listening and showing humility – and meaning it – could go a long way.

He’s a giver! This, however, is what Hogan thought a responsible elected official would do — provide cover for looting and rioting, which Hogan blames on the police “showing off”:

At the Fourth Precinct in 2015, it took four days of occupation and several orders to disperse late in the evening before the MPD started teargassing people. In 2020, the MPD started shooting “less lethals” at the angry teenagers and other crowds who had gathered at the Third Precinct on the first afternoon. It was unprovoked and at random. Our Boys in Blue were showing off.

The youth of Minneapolis have grown up seeing the police murder people who look like them without consequences. They are out of f**ks to give. Deliberately antagonizing them was a cruel excuse to give an opportunity to knock heads. Everything that followed was a proportional response.

Everything that followed? The Minneapolis riots destroyed or seriously damaged 1500 businesses, set fire to over 150 buildings, and resulted in at least $550 million in damage. Much of that damage, if not most of it, was at the expense of small businesses, many of them owned and/or operated by blacks and Hispanics.

A few larger businesses also got looted and attacked. Hogan explains that they got what was coming to them:

The Target across the street wouldn’t let protesters into the store to purchase posterboard and markers to make signs. It got looted. Brand new flatscreen TVs and other detritus were used to build more barricades.

The city’s DFL chair then gets to the crux of his argument, such as it is:

At this point the world was paying attention. Friends and family were reaching out. How come words won’t satiate people? Why Minneapolis? The cops started it, I replied. They killed George Floyd and took every opportunity to escalate, agitate and make things worse. The cops are rioting and the people are responding.

Like it or not, setting the Third Precinct on fire was a genuine revolutionary moment. An act of pure righteousness to open new worlds of understanding. The people declared themselves ungovernable and unilaterally took their power back. The largest international human rights movement in modern history had begun. The youth of Minneapolis carried all of this. The cops started it.

It’s at this point that we should remind ourselves that Hogan chairs the DFL in the city, the Minnesota version of the Democratic Party. The DFL has run the Twin Cities for decades, including the police departments of both cities. The last Republican to sit on the Minneapolis city council departed when disco was still ascendant. The DFL has also been in control of state government for the past decade or more.

If this was a “genuine revolutionary moment,” against what and whom were the rioters rebelling? Did Hogan even consider the implications of his argument? If “the people are ungovernable” in Minneapolis, who made them that way? It sure wasn’t the GOP, of that we can be certain.  And if it was the police, then what has the DFL been doing with its responsibility to govern the city’s police force?

The truth is that the progressives in the DFL have spent the last few decades pushing their nihilist vision in the Twin Cities, fostering divisions through victimology, and then celebrating the results in the same manner infants do with their dirty diapers. Does the truth hurt? The Washington Free Beacon tried getting an answer from the state party, which refused to comment.

Hogan reaffirmed his stance in his brief Facebook post:

Fetishizing decorum over substance is a hallmark of white supremacy. If antiracism offends your sensibilities then please use this moment to examine the role you play in maintaining and upholding these systems. Which side are you on?

Not on the side that uses arson, looting, and mayhem for political purposes while fomenting a “revolution” against a city controlled by the Left for decades. If the DFL and Democratic Party want to choose that side, then they can leave Hogan firmly in place in his position in Minneapolis.  We’ll see which side they choose.

Update: We should also ask what side the Star Tribune will take. Despite using Hogan as a go-to source for comment in DFL matters in the past year, they have yet to report on Hogan’s cheerleading for the riots and the “revolution.” Shouldn’t the main print news outlet in a city cover that kind of development?