Episode 429, The Andrew Parker Show - Law, Order, and the Ballot: Andrew Parker with “Precarious State” Contributor Jim Rubin

Minneapolis is at an inflection point. With off-year municipal elections just days away, Andrew sits down with Minneapolis property owner and community voice Jim Rubin, a featured contributor in the new documentary “Precarious State.” They trace how policy shifts since 2017 and decisions in 2020 reshaped public safety, downtown vitality, and neighborhood life—and what a course correction could look like.

You’ll hear:
• The on-the-ground view from affordable housing in the urban core
• How policing, prosecution, and city policy interact on everyday crime
• Why low-turnout municipal races will set the city’s trajectory for four years
• A practical voter’s frame: common-sense leadership vs. ideological agendas
• Where to watch “Precarious State” (find it on our Resources page)

If you care about Minneapolis—its parks and lakes, small businesses, safety, and future—this conversation is a must-listen. Subscribe on YouTube, follow the show, and share with a neighbor.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Parker Daniels Kibort, True North Private Investments and A La Carte Creative Group.

Transcript

Episode 429, The Adrew Parker Show

Welcome to another episode of the Andrew Parker Show and thank you once again for listening in. We talk politics, Israel and the law every episode. Now over 425 episodes. think this could be 428 or 429. Yeah, I think it is. Definitely in there.

And, ⁓

It is issues of the day that we discuss and we've got an election coming up.

A lot sooner than most of you might think, in fact, off year election in the city of Minneapolis to elect our mayor and council members, those who make decisions about how to run.

the largest city in the state of Minnesota, and one of the most important cities in the Midwest, and a city that has gotten notorious.

coverage nationwide over the last several years. You of course remember how Minnesota was the place that people would come to raise a family. It was what? The cover of Time Magazine with Wendy Anderson. That was the zenith of Minnesota, wasn't it? Best-paced place to live anywhere in the United States. Led by its

North Star City, the city of Minneapolis, right? Well, it didn't appear as such in the summer of 2020. Now then, did it? Billions of dollars of damage, a police precinct building destroyed and given up by the city to those who would openly break the law.

And you know, in the end, we'll, let's see if we can try it again. told you for days in advance that if the university sought to go ahead with that construction, they were going to physically destroy the university. ⁓ why did you negotiate many times negotiate what is to negotiate what is

The university is a public institution. That's right. But the university... of its own community and for the community of Berkeley that live around All of it began the first time some of you who know better and are old enough to know better let young people think that they have the right to choose the laws they would obey as long as they were doing it in the name of social protest. ⁓ yeah. You can obey the laws you wish. You can ignore those and...

Burn out an entire police precinct if you wish because it's social protest. There it is. People dead. Again, billion dollars of property destroyed. Social protest. And from that point forward, have things gotten better? No. No.

And reasonable folks who work and live in the city of Minneapolis are just about ready to take their city back.

Aren't they? Well, that's kind of the question for this episode. Coming up in just a couple of weeks, I think a couple of weeks from Tuesday, ⁓ is an election in Minneapolis, as I said, and it is a very, very important one. Are we going to give our city over to socialists, to those in the name of social

protest are demanding that we ignore the law, we ignore law and order and the rule of law, we ignore safety and security, we ignore economic systems that pull the poor out of poverty, and instead, free for everyone everything. And driving business

out of the city of Minneapolis. Is that what we're going to go for? Or are we going to come back to a Democratic party that is responsible and at one time, we're the adults in the room? We're joined by a very special guest and I'm honored to have him on the show, ⁓ Jim Rubin. ⁓ Jim was, well, who knew it? Coming from

you know, a businessman minding his own business here in the city of Minneapolis to a video, a movie star in one of the most important videos that you could watch. A documentary, it's more than a video, it's a documentary that you could watch because it talks about the downfall of Minneapolis.

and the fact that we still have some hope of saving it, but that hope is dying out quickly. So what are we gonna do? The name of the documentary, Precarious State, includes comments, discussion, background, provided by our guest Jim Rubin. It was put together by ⁓

journalist Rick Cupchella, who you may remember. Who was he? WCCO or? He was a journalist for many years. I knew him well back then. Haven't talked to him for quite some time. We may get Cupchella on the show as well, however. And again, the name of the documentary, Precarious State. You can go to precariousstate.com.

But I would suggest you go to theandruparkershow.com, click on the tab resources, and we have the documentary right there for you. Theandruparkershow.com, you know it well. And when you go there, subscribe, follow us, ⁓ make sure that ⁓ you like the show.

and that you have ease of getting to us through YouTube. Give us your email and ⁓ you will be included immediately when the next episode drops. Again, theandruparkershow.com resources Precarious State. That's the documentary. Jim Rubin, welcome to the Andrew Parker Show. I'm thrilled to have you here. I first wanna ask you,

Give us a little background so our listeners have a sense of from whence you come to where you are. Sure. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. So my story. Well, I grew up close to here in Hastings. My wife grew up in Fridley. I'm a St. Cloud State Husky. My wife's U of gopher. Families have been here for multiple generations. Minnesotans through and through and through.

You know, both of us worked downtown Minneapolis for years. So yeah, we've been here all our lives. Somewhere along the line about 31, 32 years ago, I decided that I wanted more than just a desk job. I was actually a computer programmer and kind of as a hobby, as a part time investment, I bought an apartment building over in the Grand Avenue area of St. Paul. And this was in 1994. And

basically realized when I got into it that I liked it. It was something I was good at, could do, and I saw that I could be successful at it. So one by one over the years, just worked hard, improved the properties, provided good service, and was able to just slowly but surely build it up. And over the first 25, 26, 27 years,

ended up building a fairly large portfolio of apartment buildings here in the Twin Cities. In particular, we were about 10 % St. Paul and 90 % Minneapolis. And so, so a big Minneapolis property owner is now starting to look at, you know, a city that's up and coming, which about a decade ago or or more,

It was really filling in. Yeah, it's actually more recent than that. So from 1994 until 2020, till 2020. OK, every year, year in and year out, the city got better. Both cities, St. Paul and Minneapolis. And what I mean by that is that that if you look at how things were at the beginning of the year and then at the end of the year, they were always better at the end of the year. That could mean neighborhoods improving. It could be in the economy doing better. It could be rents going up. It could be.

variety of things, but year in and year out, every year for that span, we were on a really good run. It was a very good run, right? And so— things good for business are good for the average person on the street. Yeah, that's correct. Because, so my business, my apartments are—they're very inner city. They are—

older buildings. So I don't build new buildings. I buy older buildings. My, my strategy is buy older buildings that were kind of neglected, roll up my sleeves, fix them up, you know, get better tenants, make the city happy, make the community happy. ⁓ So, so yes, we were a successful business, but it's, it's a kind of an ecosystem, if you will, right? The better the neighborhoods are, that's better for my properties, the better my properties are, that's better for the communities, right?

So I was very conscious of that, of making sure that what I was doing was benefiting the neighborhoods so that the neighborhoods getting better. And part of that meant being involved, right? So I'm involved with Minnesota Multi-Housing Association, which is kind of a statewide group of apartment owners that get involved in the industry. ⁓ I would get involved in local politics, knowing my city council members, for example, and working with them if they had questions about our industry or how to craft policy.

So as I'm going through this and getting larger and larger, I'm also just playing a bigger role in the communities and understand that our space is considered NOAA housing or natural occurring affordable housing. So you'll hear people talk a lot about how important affordable housing is. Well, that is the space that I was in. So we were able to purchase properties, make them nice, rent them up, but still our rents were considered very affordable.

We also, through the years, ended up working with a lot of support organizations. For example, Section 8 is the most known, but there are many, many support organizations, and we were happy to work with those. So everybody wins, right? Everybody's winning in this formula, and it was great up all the way into 2020. And then that's when things changed.

And what is it that

What is your sense of what occurred the summer of 2020? Obviously, George Floyd's murder ⁓ was a tipping point, but really didn't it go far beyond that? Yeah, I get this question a lot. And a lot of times people will say the issues we have are because of George Floyd or because of COVID or whatnot. And my response to that is

If you look at the last half a dozen years since 2020 and you compare Minneapolis to other cities, many other cities are doing quite a bit better, better, whether it's growth, office occupancy, ⁓ apartment values, rents, GDP economy, whatever. Minneapolis isn't doing very well compared to the other cities. And those other cities dealt with a lot of the same issues. The key event, there's a couple of things. The actual key event was how

the city leadership decided to deal with the George Floyd event at the time. Could have gone multiple directions, but the direction they chose was to really jump on kind of that anti-law enforcement bandwagon. But you have to understand the story starts a little before then. And this is important to understand is in approximately the year 2016, 2017, a new kind of political platform entered the city.

Right. And a new culture, a new platform, a new set of people got involved. And you'll hear us talk about that as the DSA or Democrats, Socialists of America. Right. So prior to 2016, 2017, again, things have been going really well for a long time. And people like myself and a lot of our industry and other industries didn't pay super close attention to kind of who was getting elected and who's getting the office. We didn't worry about it because it was generally working fine.

What happened is in the 2017 election, you saw a significant change where people ascribing to the DSA platform and ideology made significant inroads into the Minneapolis City Council. What is the DSA platform and ideology? Well, the DSA platform, first of all, DSA stands for Democrat Socialists of America. So a lot of their policies

do align with what people typically consider socialism. so, ⁓ know, kind of anti-capitalist, ⁓ know, lots of regulation, higher taxes, anti-business, you know, a lot of those kinds of policies. And we started to see some of that enter into some of the policies they were passing, you know, after the 2017 election. So, particularly in our industry, people started to pay attention, like, wow, there's some pretty radical

policies coming through, we should get more involved. But what happened is that the set of people who were elected in 2017 were the ones in power in 2020 when we had all the issues. And they, at that time then when the issues happened, they embraced much more emphatically this anti-police policy and that really became a

cornerstone of their platform. So you take their typical platform and their typical kind of socialist ideas and now you add to it an anti-law enforcement component. And that's what we had running our city in the summer of 2020. So it was one thing to deal with ⁓ a policy that was harmful to housing that we wanted to explain and stop. That's what we were doing leading up to 20.

But it's a whole nother thing when that, when your leadership decides they want to move away from having a police department. That's a whole different ball game, a whole different ball game. And that's what really caused the city to enter a tailspin, right? So what happened is, is in 2017, we have the DSA, kind of the far left, take significant control of city council. In 2020, they add to their platform,

Hey, we think law enforcement is a problem. We should get rid of it. All right. Then there was a lot of unrest that summer, of course, but what what ultimately happened is there was a vote in June of 2020 to actually defund the police. mean, the city council got on stage and said, we don't want and we want to get rid of MPD. We'll figure it out. About two months later in August, there was another incident downtown Minneapolis and again, civil unrest. And what happened is the police department really backed off and

particularly downtown Minneapolis was severely damaged. And it was that event that people- And the uptown area, no? In the August event, there was some, it was primarily in downtown. was very, there's broken glass and looting everywhere. And businesses were boarding up their windows and closing early. Yes. So after this event, you started to see a lot more of that boarding up and just leaving.

But it was the citizens, it was the people who lived in the city that watched this and realized, whoa, this is out of control. Like MPD doesn't, like the police force can't handle what's happening here. It's obvious, right? And it was like- And it was something so foreign to Minnesotans. Of course. This isn't Minnesota. No.

the videos of the smashing the windows and the looting and the just complete chaos and out of control. Right. And so, you know, obviously after the George Floyd event, after the funding, there was kind of unrest and violence throughout the city. But the August event was a big explosion and really scared a lot of people. And so what we saw was it was like a light switch going off all of a sudden. All of our tenants who had financial wherewithal left.

They said, wow, I don't want to live here anymore. It's not safe. Minneapolis is not safe. Just look at the news. And so people who had money would leave for cars or family support. Basically, the again, like I said, that the tenants who had the ability left, obviously there a lot of people who don't have the ability to leave. They don't have the finance, they don't have car, whatever. And so.

We saw for us, for my portfolio, which is primarily in Southwest Minneapolis, kind of the broad uptonnary, uptown areas where we are. We saw roughly the top, the top third to half of our tenant base left. Wow. Okay. So what does that do? Well, we all of a sudden had a lot of vacancies. You know, I went from, you know, tracking around a one to 2 % vacancy up to nine or 10%.

But you also are losing, think of a company losing not just a third of their customers, but the best third, the ones that are the easiest to make money off of, the one that, that, you know, followed the rules, the best, the one that the ones that actually help by calling in issues and keeping it out for you, that population left. So yeah, so we had a significantly higher vacancies. had dropping rents and we had a harder and more expensive operational numbers. Now you add to that.

significant uptick in crime, it makes operational numbers even harder, right? Constantly replacing glass, removing graffiti, picking up trash, right? So ⁓ because of the space I'm in, which is very inner city, affordable housing, I tell people we're pretty much on the front line. When issues happen, we feel it first. So an example is let's just say the economy turns and gets rough. Well, my tenants are

lower and get like there live a lot of live paycheck to paycheck. So we they and subsequently we tend to feel that very early. And and we saw that with crime, right? We saw it with crime where we are again inner city and crime is spiking. And so my tenants feel it, my employees feel it, I feel it, my neighborhoods feel it. And so this all kind of the city basically went off the rails in 2020 with, you know, COVID and unrest kind of

kind of like you said, created an environment for this to happen. But it was how the leadership responded and the approach they embraced, which is we're going to get rid of law enforcement. Did you seek help from the city council? So ⁓ good question. So what what's happening is I'm seeing this happen in real time, right? I'm dealing with this. I'm looking at my business all of a sudden imploding, right? Vacancy spike and all these issues happen. And at first, I'm just trying to fight it out. But I realized pretty quickly that. I need to

I need to get on the phone and seek help. I need to get on the phone with city leadership and let them know what's happening on the ground. And so was, I think it was about October of 2020 was the first time I really tried to insert myself into city governance. I had a, at that time it was COVID, right? So I had to do a zoom call with Mayor Fry. And it was great. He was awesome. He took.

It was like an hour long session with me. I had a PowerPoint presented on all statistically how my business was doing and the impacts crime is having. And so that was the first time I really just went right to the top and said, you got to know what's going on and I need your help. Right. And so that really, from that point forward, I started getting involved, talking to city council members, the mayor, the mayor's office, police officers, MPD. It's kind of what you said. I wanted help.

I'm dying, I'm dying here. My business is failing. Your neighborhoods are crumbling. The city is suffering. Crime is eating us alive. Right. And then what happens is you go through months of this. Eventually, we had an election in 2021. Okay, so now we're into 2021. There's an election in November 2021. By this time, I'm heavily engaged. I'm watching what what city leadership is going to

say, you know what, we need law enforcement. We have to build them back up and support them. We have to bring it back to reasonableness. Right. Right. Is there anybody doing it? That's right. That's what I'm looking 2021. Who who's that versus who still gets in front of a microphone and said the police are the problem. We need to defund the police. Right. And if you remember, there was, of course, a big question on the ballot in 2021, which is should Minneapolis abolish the police department? OK.

It's a horrible and it was defeated. It was defeated pretty handily. Thank goodness. But still, it's a terrible conversation to go through. You can imagine if you're a police officer and your city is debating whether to lay you off or not and shut down the whole department. It's pretty hard on the police department. And there were a lot of politicians, a lot of leaders in the city of Minneapolis and the county and the state who said, yes, Minneapolis should get rid of their police department. All right. Fortunately, it was defeated. Thank goodness.

Um, the city actually made a little bit of progress on getting better leadership. Uh, but the S DSA still had a very good foothold in the city council two years later. Again, Dan and the out year in and year out, we're fighting crime. trying to survive 2023, but you go to 2023 and the socials actually make significant inroads. And in the 2023 election after that, the people who were elected in 2023 are currently there now today. All right. And if you look at

what they how they vote, what platform they embrace. Are they do they embrace the DSA platform or do they embrace the moderate Democrat? Let's come let's come back to the current council and the DSA control of the DFL in the city of Minneapolis. You know, some say it is just a small little ineffective group.

of the Democratic Party in the city of Minneapolis. Very few say that because it's just not accurate. It is a controlling group within the city council in the city of Minneapolis. Whether they acknowledge the label DSA, ⁓ the votes track the DSA platform more often than not. But I first want to come back to

this documentary, Precarious State, and again, suggest to all of our listeners to go and get it. The Andrew Parker Show got .com resources, go get it, precariousstate.com. There have been nearly 400,000 downloads of this documentary, and it will discuss in very clear terms

precisely what Jim Rubin is talking about on this episode. Again, our special guest is Jim Rubin, who has a significant portfolio of property, multi-family housing, apartment building property in the city of Minneapolis, in the inner city of Minneapolis, and this is affordable housing. He is providing what these social protest groups

Claim they want and they are destroying his business with their policies and ideas and precarious state talks about how a city a Shining beacon on a hill city at one time the city of Minneapolis can be destroyed By bad policy. We are seeing it before our eyes precarious state

⁓ dot com get the documentary so Jim, how is it that the documentary was made or whose brainchild was it and and Maybe you can describe it a little bit Sure, and and so it's kind of an interesting story on how the producer Rick cella and I come to connect so as I was mentioning after the 23 elections the socialists have now had a vast

basically veto proof majority control of the city council. And so a lot of bad things are happening and what needs to happen isn't happening. So by the way, you can be a Democrat, a lifelong DFL city of Minneapolis Democrat and not vote for these socialists because they are not Democrats. That's the key. That that's the key point here. So what happened was

about a year ago, again, I'm very involved. I'm struggling with my business. I'm doing everything I can talking to everybody and their mother. But about a year ago, I said, okay, 2025, there's an election for all these leaders. And it's an election for the mayor, all 13 city council members, and by the way, and park board, which is also very important. Yes, right. All that that's going to be elected at November 4 of 2025. So in two and half weeks, and

Everybody that's being elected is being elected for a four year term. Okay. So I'm looking at this a year ago thinking, oof, this isn't good. If we don't fix it in November of 2025, we're in big trouble. So I was on, I basically said to myself, how can I help? What can I do? So I did a lot of research, talking to people, really inserting myself into the guts of the local DFL party, all the different people who are involved.

kind of the whole power structure there, and learned what I could and tried to figure out because the puzzle I was trying to solve is how do you take the DFL platform and their ideals, which is probably embraced by maybe 10 % of our population? How do you take that population percentage but yet get a vast majority on a city council? How did they do that? How did they manage that? You said that the DFL ideology, you meant the DSA? Yeah.

So, yeah, so that, yes, if I misspoke. So the DSA has a platform, which again is kind of radical left in particularly the anti-police portion of that. They have this platform. If you understand that DSA platform. And it's about 10 % would support that platform. Maybe, maybe it's 5%, maybe 10, maybe 15, right? A small minority of our population, if they understood the platform, would agree to it. But yet the DSA politicians are people who vote

according to that platform have a significant majority in the city council, right? How do you take, even though they have a minor. Well above their weight. You have a minority of people in the population who agree with your platform, but yet you have a vast majority in city council. How did they do that? So that's what I set out to figure out and understand why I'm working on that. Trying to figure it out. Rick Cupchella is so Rick Cupchella started about two years ago. He said the same thing two years ago. He goes, wait a second. Minneapolis is doing terrible.

Why is that? Who's doing this? Who are the people that are making policy passable? So we were both on the same quest to figure this out. And we somehow randomly came in contact with each other and we spent three hours on a meeting together and realized we were trying to do the same thing and we were complimentary. I'm on the ground trying to provide a public service of affordable housing. He's trying to provide a public service of kind of education and bringing issues to light.

And so, you know, he realized that I could be a good part, you know, I could be a part of his documentary because I am an on the ground example of what's happening and the challenges and the issues. So then he brought me in and, we did a lot of filming, as you saw, we did a lot of filming and interviewing, and that would have been January, February, March timeframe of 2025. So we came together then. And obviously that culminated in his release on October 2nd of Precarious State.

And so if you describe the documentary a little bit, yeah, if you if you look at the documentary, it is titled precarious state. So it does talk about issues statewide. However, within the state, it has a it definitely has a focus on the city of which makes sense. City Minneapolis is the economic engine. It's kind of the biggest, most important city in the state.

So he covered a broad variety of things. But his approach was basically trying to bring to light the issues in the state, in the city, to the general public. And this is very important because what I notice for me personally is I'm in the middle of the city providing housing and I'm struggling. And the reason I'm struggling is because my communities, my neighborhoods are struggling.

And this is happening because crime, mean, crime is off the charts and people with money won't live here anymore. So that means not only do I have problems, but your local coffee shop, your local restaurants are also everybody's struggling. Those on the left claim that the numbers don't show that crime is off the charts. In fact, crime is down, they say. mean, what are people to believe? That's a that's thank you for bringing that up.

So in the city of Minneapolis, again, I'm providing public housing. As the documentary showed, there's some videos of gunshots, multiple gun shootings, right? So the video highlights a particular intersection, 19th and Nicollet, where crime is completely out of control, okay? So that intersection is at 19th and Nicollet has been taken over by

gangs. It's actually an amalgamation of like three gangs got together, decided to share this area. And about five years ago, they set up camp at night to the Nicollet and there's an open air drug market. So anywhere from, you know, two to 30 drug dealers will just stand there all day. It starts around eight in the morning, goes to about midnight, seven days a week all year long. And they openly deal drugs. And so it's like a drive through, right? People know it now and they just come and drive through open air drug market. But it also brings with it.

loitering, trespassing, smoking, drinking, fights, loud noise and the occasional gunfight. That's all happens unfettered. Right. So the police does nothing about it. So I have been trying to work with the city for the last five years. So I talked to city council members. I talked to the mayor, talked to the mayor's office. I talked to all levels of MPD. Ultimately, I culminated the last one of the last key meetings I had was one on one with Chief O'Hare. And I

I got a meeting with him. I explained who I was, introduced myself, my business, and talked about 19th and Nicollet and all the problems. And he looked at me and said, you know, thanks for coming. I appreciate this. You know, we, understand everything. I already know this, Jim. I've been debriefed. I'm fully there, but unfortunately we don't have the tools to take care of this problem. Now you think about that. The city is telling me. There's the city council and the mayor who

provides tools. You're exactly on the right path because you you'd ask, well, why can't he take care of it? Well, when you look at the fund, the staffing levels are very low. They have lost kind of tools of engagement, things they used to be able to kind of approach people on or address they no longer can. know, loitering with the intent to commit a crime or blocking a sidewalk or tit-to-doodle. There's a whole list of tools that have been taken away. In addition. So these are illegal. These are illegal actions, illegal conduct.

by members of the public that the police are told you cannot enforce. Basically, yes. And if you want to enforce something, the kind of the amount of effort and documentation and proof you need is that bar is raised. So now if they want to arrest me for drug dealing, they have to do undercover work, get lots of photos, know it's not marijuana, approach the person after they have proof they're dealing in drugs.

⁓ take him in, you know, book him in the jail, and then they go in front of a judge, but our criminal justice system has changed, right? So that their approaches will we don't want him in jail, so put him right back out. So the chief is, you know, is explaining all this. And I knew this, that it, they don't have the staff, they don't have the tools. And if they try to do something, it's a whole bunch of work and a whole bunch of staff time for nothing, because they're back out on the street the next day. So he's like, we can't so

I tell people when it's so people understand the criminal justice system starts with police on the beat those on the street who identify and find citizenry who is violating the law. But it doesn't end there. You then have the jails and you have all the personnel who hold people in custody. You then have the prosecutor's prosecutor's office.

and the decisions made by the prosecutor's office to not enforce not. You then have the courts and the judges and defense attorneys and prosecutors going in front of judges and judges putting people back out on the street. And you have the rules and laws regarding bail and bail decisions. All of that goes into what you see on 19th and Nick. Correct. You're hitting it. So and that's what's important for people understand.

It's a whole litany of things. It's a whole set of things that are that have changed within policing and the criminal justice system. starts with the policies the city council wants to adopt and does adopt for the criminal justice system to work or not. Exactly. Right. The city council, the mayor and Hennepin County attorney. Right. There's kind of at a local level, there's there's a few different pieces of the puzzle that set the rules of a gauge that that that

kind of dictate how this is going to work. And the socialist platform now keep in mind the socialist platform says, you know, we don't want to, you know, we want to pull money from MPD and we want MPD to do less. We want to take tools from them and we want to try alternative ways of policing and we're going to be soft on crime policy. So you're right. Leadership implements all of this. And so I'm ultimately going to answer your question when people say crime drops. So in

the city of Minneapolis, I tell people there's got two different types of crime. There's 19th and Nicollet, which is completely out of control. It has been, it is now taken over by gangs. They run the neighborhood. So you could imagine how it is running my business in that neighborhood. But then there's another factor here that I want to point out. And that is in a normal functioning society, police do a variety of things. They do a whole breadth of things. Some are very minor. Some are very serious. The lowest level is a cat in a tree.

The highest level is multiple homicides and there's everything in between carjackings, theft, stolen bike, whatever. And what we've seen in the city of Minneapolis is as the staffing levels have fallen, as the rules of engagement has been taken away from them, as, as the kind of the vilification and attacks on MPD by their leadership has caused them to recoil. So all this happened, they're just doing less and less. So they just keep raising the bar what they're going to do. Okay. So now.

When your bike is stolen, you call them, they don't come. When your car is broken into, they don't come. When your storage unit is broken into and stuff is stolen, they don't come. When somebody hits you and does a hit and run and leaves, but you're not hurt, they don't come. all of the trespassing, they don't come. Drug dealing, they don't come. All of these things, they don't come. They don't have the staff to do this. So they just raise the bar and they say, no, we're only going to come for the important things. So when people say crime is dropping, what they're really talking about is that high level crime.

the serious stuff, the homicides, the carjackings, the violent robberies. That's where MPD is focusing their attention, which is correct. They should focus on those things. Given their limited resource, limitability, they should focus on the most important things. And they're doing a spectacular job. Every officer I deal with, all levels of MPD, Chief O'Harris, I believe they're doing a fantastic job given the hand they're dealt. Right? And the problem is graffiti

Broken windows theory is those quote unquote lower level crimes are ones that affect people's lives day to day they they are the ones that you see the ones that are the differentiator between a beautiful city that you want to enjoy and gather as a community

and one that is ravaged by ⁓ all of, not just inconveniences, but damage. And it really makes the difference. So it comes from the policy makers. And it certainly does in Washington, D.C. with Congress and the Senate and the president, and it does at the state legislature, et cetera.

But it does even more affect our day-to-day lives, the individual citizens' day-to-day lives at the city level. Because at the city level, the local level, you can make a huge difference in people's lives by your policy decisions. Now let's talk about it. We've got 13 council members on the Minneapolis City Council. They're up for a vote.

two weeks from Tuesday and everybody needs to go out and vote. This is, you know, a municipal election, who cares? You know, and so for all those years dating back to who? Stenvig. Years and years ago, ⁓ people would say, that's a municipal election. I might go, I might not go. No.

This is huge. It's critical. It will make or break Minnesota and Certainly the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota because the city of Minneapolis does in the end often make or break ⁓ the state of Minnesota And so you've got 13 council members. You have you the park board as well very important But you also have the mayor's race If you live in the city of Minneapolis, you need to vote

And if you are a common sense voter, forget about the labels of Democrat or Republican. I don't want to put those out there. If you're a common sense voter, you're not a socialist. You're not. ⁓ We don't want any police security or safety in our city. mean, lunacy, lunacy it is. We want to drive business out of our city. We want to tax and regulate. So.

No business will be here because they're raping and pillaging the electorate anyway, businesses. Now, if you reject that, you need to go out and vote. And you need to find out who the DSA candidate is, if there is one, and vote for the other guy.

Because these people are coming into our city and changing it for the worse. And it's going to be gutted if they have the right to do that for the next four years. So talk to us about the the wards that we should pay attention to and who people should vote for. Sure. I'm just going to echo something you just said. I think one of the

best statements I've made, which was in the documentary, which is bringing the most true is precarious state. We can't survive another four years, right? We can't serve. We cannot. The city will not survive four more years of this DSA platform. We our neighborhoods where my properties are our neighborhoods are already boarding up building by building business by business. We can't do this for four years. We have to. We have to get the city on track.

And you made another good point. This is not a Democrat Republican thing. This is a moderate Democrat DSA thing. This is a moderate Democrat socialist that that is the contest. Pretty much every just about every ward of the 13 has a moderate Democrat running against a DSA a person who embraces the DSA platform. Yeah, whether they put DSA next to their name or not is not the point. Several of them do.

Some of them don't, but fully embrace the DSA platform, vote with the DSAs next to their name, and it's as if they're a part of it. And Katie Cashman is one of those. Yep, you're exactly correct. In fact, the documentary does a very good job of explaining this. She votes DSA. Yes. Yep. Katie Cashman is one of those who kind of says, I'm just a Democrat. But if you look at her voting record, she almost always votes with the DSA team.

And she represents the area around the lakes, believe. Ward seven. it's uptown west of Hennepin. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's unbelievable. And she is soft on crime. She is driving business out. It's one of the nicest areas in the city of Minneapolis that she represents many, many business owners that she represents. And she keeps voting against their interests.

and to undermine the city of Minneapolis. Yeah, I mean, and the proof is in the results, which is if you look at Upton, you look at her zone, it's a bunch of empty storefronts. Totally. OK. I mean, Upton's been destroyed by her kind of policies. You're going to send her back. Correct. So if we look at the city at the mayoral level, there is only one option, which is Mayor Fry has to win. ⁓ He he has always been particularly on the safety issue.

He's always been on the right side of the issue. He does not embrace the DSA platform. The other candidates do. So Mayor Fry is the only one to vote for for mayor. As it relates to 13 council members, I'm going to make it easy. There is a there is a website. It's all of Minneapolis dot org. It's all of MPLS dot org. A L L O F M P L S dot org.

If you go there, it's on their front page. goes through every ward and said, here, here is the good candidate. So all of mpls.org that lists all of the good candidates for each ward. makes it very simple for you to know who to vote for. listen, you know, many who listen to this podcast and, and, geez, our numbers are going through the roof, which I say thank you once, once again, ⁓ many who listen are.

Centrists are independents and many are conservatives. Strongly conservative. They enjoyed listening to the Ronald Reagan clip that I played at the beginning of this episode because they enjoyed hearing his voice again. Isn't that nice? Boy, is the world different today than it was then. And the city of Minneapolis is. So my point is, if you're an independent, if you're a conservative,

You need to go, and you live in the city of Minneapolis and have the right to vote, you need to go out and vote. And you need to vote for the moderate candidate. You're not gonna be able to vote for a Republican if that's who you are. And if you think you can, it's a wasted vote. You need to vote for sanity. And while Democrats maybe are too liberal and we don't agree with all of their policies, reasonable moderate Democrats,

still have sanity and two party system where we can hold at bay socialist policies is what we need to support and that means voting for the good candidate who can win and defeat socialist policies of the DSA. And I want to add to that this is very important.

This is an off year election. Historically speaking, it's low voter turnout. What you need to understand is in the general population, again, people who like the DSA platform and things are going well is a small minority, five, 10, 15, 20%. But here's the trick. They vote. They will all, everybody who, they're rabid, they're very engaged, right? They're very interested in this. And so they, 100 % of them will vote. We just need enough

normal citizens who want to get back to a great city to show up and vote. This is going to come down to if we can get enough, just normal citizens who care and want things get back on track, we get enough of them to vote, we win period. The socialists, there's not enough of them to win if enough people vote, show up to vote. So this is going to come down to exactly what you're saying is

people need to vote, regardless of your political affiliation. That doesn't matter. It's if you want moderate leadership, you want common sense leadership, you want adults to take back, you want to have law and you want to have a safe city, you have to get out and vote. And the way you do it is to go to right now and before you go to vote, and by the way, early voting is open.

allofminneapolis.org and you will be able to identify through description who the good candidate is and who the DSA candidate is. And by the way, I would be remiss if I did not add the DSA platform in a hidden sort of way and not so hidden is an anti-Semitic platform.

And these DSA candidates support anti-Semitic policies. It's a Mamdani group. you know, if you're Jewish in the city of Minneapolis and you're voting for these folks, as I know there are lot of very liberal Jews in the city of Minneapolis, you're doing it at your own personal risk. It is not good.

for the Jewish community. I'm going to just mention you brought up Mamdani's name running for ⁓ New York City mayor. It's been interesting for me to watch because his platform and even some of the terms he used when he talks, all right, is identical to the DSA platform here. Yes. So ⁓ I hope people in New York City watch the documentary because they'll see what a few years of socialist policies could do to a city.

And it is just a few years. Can you imagine four more? Well, hopefully you won't have to imagine it because you'll get out of your chair and you'll go and you'll vote and you'll vote for the non-DSA candidate, whoever they are, the good candidate, and we will rally behind them, conservative or independent. That's who I am talking to. All of Minneapolis.org, go to all of MPLS, A-L-L-O-

F mpls.org to find out the voting ⁓ list coming up two weeks from Tuesday. And I want to add one positive note if I can. Yes. As bad as things are, I get into a lot of conversations with people who are suffering as bad as things are. I tell people we still have the lakes, we still have the parks, we still have so many good sports teams, we saw so many great things.

If we get good leadership, I think people will be shocked at how fast things can get better in general. No question. No question. We can do it. Absolutely. Jim Rubin, thank you so much for joining us on the Andrew Parker show. For all of you out there, go to theandrewparkershow.com, theandrewparkershow.com and ⁓ follow us, of course, like us.

But follow us subscribe Sign up for getting all of the information we send out by email. Give us your email Go to social media Follow us on social media. We're we're across the board covered

And until next time, and I miss you already, be kind to your neighbor.