Speech by Tom Dahlberg, Chairman, Neopopulism Minnesota

Minnesota Neopopulism is an organization which is soon to become a movement. Our mission is to enforce the rule of law whenever and wherever, possible and when there is no rule of law, establish it, even when it takes civil disobedience to do so.

In our time, we live at the pleasure of the modern regulatory state. We have a gigantic bureaucracy, including the legislature, controlled by the bureaucratic elite. And that bureaucratic elite loves its discretionary power. Neopopulism is here it take that discretionary power away.

Our state legislatures, as a matter of moral fact, have become part of the bureaucracy they created. They serve it. They behave like it. They feed it, even when the people abhor it.

Our state legislature, like the bureaucracy as a whole, is running amok, presuming to power the state constitution does not give it. A little bit later in this program, we are going to announce what we, the people, led by Citizens for the Rule of Law, intend to do about this.


Minnesota Neopopulism is an organization that facilitates the rule of law. We help people insist on the rule of law. So when you’ve been subjected to the discretionary power of the bureaucracy, including the MN State Legislature, let us know, and we’ll help you see what can be done about it.

The constant attempt on the part of the elite bureaucratic class to erode the power of the people, is being demonstrated daily. Now we hear that a group of elitists, headed up by a former governor, and other people who are ridiculously confident that they know best, want to eliminate the power of the people to elect their judges. Why? Because, of course, they believe they know best. They want their elite friends to help the governor appoint our judges. They don’t trust the people.

Notice that this elitist initiative follows on the US Supreme Court’s decision just two years ago, to allow our judicial candidates freedom of speech so the people could in fact identify judges who actually believe in what they believe in. This decision, from the US Supreme Court, came along because of the efforts of Mr. Kaardal, among others. It transferred power to the people. Freedom of speech for the judicial candidates means that the people can find out who they really want on the bench. This terrifies the elitists. They know that when the people start getting who they really want on the bench, it’s going to have a very adverse effect on their plans. These will be judges who will not engage in the activist transfer of power to the bureaucratic elite.


This attempt, by these elitists, to reverse our progress, is utterly disgusting to Neopopulists, and if they ever succeed, we should engage in massive civil disobedience, refusing to abide by the orders of judges we didn’t elect.

Notice how this whole idea, about this elite committee appointing our judges for us, is based on all of the silly myths of modernism and the elite class. From a Neopopulist perspective, these myths are part of the intellectual scrap heap of history. The myth of objectivity, as if the elite class is the only class that doesn’t have an axe to grind or doesn’t have any power to preserve and expand. The myth of Utilitarianism, as if the elite class can calculate exactly what’s best for everyone, even when almost everyone disagrees. The myth of expertise, as if experts are non-ideological. Neopopulism urges the people to ignore the experts and FREE THEIR MINDS.

Mr. Erick Kaardal, our general counsel, and a man that I often refer to as the Father of Minnesota Neopopulism, developed one of the foundational principles of Neopopulism years ago as we thought about exactly what kind of political movement we need in America today. That principle is that government should not only respect our rights, it should respect our dignity. The bureaucracy has turned our rights into a technicality using the legislative and judicial processes to constrain them. And in doing so it demonstrates how much it despises the rule of law and craves power. This is the moral mediocrity of the bureaucracy. If government respected our dignity it would not only respect our rights, it would abide by the rule of law. When the government ignores the rule of law, and even more precisely, the rule of natural law of which our rights are a part, it strips everyone of us of our dignity, turning us into subjects as opposed to citizens. The bureaucrats don’t get it. They are morally mediocre. The people will not even have their rights respected until they begin insisting that their dignity be respected.

The defenders of the bureaucrats will protest that they are noble public servants. Well in that case, they should start acting like it by respecting both our rights and our dignity. As Mr. Kaardal has noticed, the "moderates" are just narcissists, imagining that they are superior to the demands of the people.

Neopopulists, like this committee we have with us here to today—People for the Rule of Law – are not going to take it anymore. From the standpoint of the elite bureaucratic class, including this state legislature, they are engaging in civil disobedience simply by virtue of having the pluck to object to the legislature’s violation of the state constitution. They’re supposed to be quiet. They are supposed to just sit back and take it. They are supposed to understand that their betters are doing what they think is best. Well this is the message of Neopopulism: no one is better than the people. We don’t believe in Camelot. We don’t believe in the myth of the “best and the brightest”. And the more ornery the people are the better. The people are no longer interested in being led by elitists. They are going start leading themselves. They will be explaining more about this in a moment.

The main thing that I want to do here today is announce to the people of MN, and to the people of this nation, that Neopopulism is now here to help you fight back. We’ll fight with law suits, we’ll fight with massive surveillance of the bureaucracy, we’ll fight with the alternative media, we’ll fight with education, we’ll fight with civil disobedience and we’ll fight with legislation when we can find legislators who have come to their senses.

It’s time for the people themselves to take control of the state. It’s time for the people not only to directly elect their judges, but also, to directly elect the Commissioner of the DOT, and the Commissioner of the DNR, and any other bureaucrat who otherwise thinks he’s insulated from actually serving the people.

People for the Rule of Law understand that we are now living in political conditions where only the people themselves can enforce the rule of law. These are the true patriots. If you are just listening in to politics and just voting, it’s not good enough. We’re living in a day and age when a good citizen has to do more – he has to start taking real action. If you start to follow what we’re up to in this Neopopulist movement, you’ll learn how to be what the elite class calls a “crank”. You’ll learn that the more disgusted the elites are with you, the better you are, the more effective you are, and the more powerful you are. The elites will

never free their minds, and they have no vested interest in freeing yours. So free your own mind, embrace your orneriness, go ahead and be a crank, and HAVE FUN.