Masked Goon Uses St. Paul City Council Meeting to Call for Abolition of Private Property

A guy in a mask stands up at a St. Paul city council meeting and announces that private property should be abolished. Not zoning reform, not rent control, not some tweak to the housing code. The whole concept of owning things. And the strange part is how routine this has become at the local level, where DSA chapters have spent years treating city council meetings like a stage for ideas that used to stay confined to a dorm room debate at 2 a.m.

The mask matters more than people want to admit. If you believe abolishing private property is a righteous cause, why hide your face while saying it out loud in a public meeting? That's not civil disobedience, that's someone who understands perfectly well how radical and unpopular the idea sounds outside the group chat, and wants the applause without the accountability.

St. Paul has real problems. Potholes, crime, a budget that doesn't balance itself. None of that gets fixed by a lecture on seizing the means of production during public comment. But local government meetings have become an easy venue for this stuff precisely because turnout is low and nobody's paying close attention until a clip like this goes viral. That's the actual lesson here, not that one masked activist said something absurd, but that these meetings are increasingly where fringe politics tests the waters before trying to go mainstream.

Property rights aren't some relic. They're the reason people can build something, pass it down, and not have it taken by whoever shouts loudest at a podium. Laughing this off as a one-off internet moment misses that the people saying it mean it, and they're patient about where they say it next.