Fighting Through the Pain Meds to Laugh at Lefties (posted 3/6/26)

Since my last column four days ago, I’ve spent 3 months suffering from this pinched nerve thing.

Apparently there is a nerve that goes from the base of your skull, down your neck, across your left shoulder and down into your left hand, and if something goes wrong with it, you experience a pain cocktail made up of equal parts deep, throbbing ache, and sudden, stabbing agony.

Also nausea, and a left arm so numb it could be confused with the skull of AOC.

My wife has been great, driving me to a meeting with my primary care doc and to a CT scan, while I was laid out across the back seat biting down hard on a leather belt. Because that’s the way they did it in old Westerns when some gunfighter dug a bullet out of your side with a bowie knife that had been heated up over an open flame.

I helpfully explained to her that the pain was just like what she felt when giving birth to our daughters, only a hundred times worse. It seemed like she almost lost a little bit of respect for me for a minute there, but that was probably just the Oxycodone playing tricks on me.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I’m taking Oxycodone? Along with muscle relaxers, steroids, and that stuff they tranquilize horses with?

Before you ask, yes I realize that it’s not good to combine booze with a fistful of narcotics, so I haven’t touched any Knob Creek 9 since this affliction befell me.

Because it sounds way better to say, “I’ve given up bourbon for lent,” than to say, “I’ve taken up Oxy for lent.”

Anyway, enough about me, and the soul-testing trials that I am too stoic to yammer on about. Here are a few comments about events in the news that I’ve observed, between trips to urgent care and the pharmacy:

So far the much-deserved and long-delayed beating we’re giving to the Iranian mullahcracy seems to be proceeding nicely. Trump clearly has no interest in long, drawn-out foreign adventures in nation building, and we should all be wishing him godspeed in Iran.

Of course, the first Democrat shrieking about a “forever war” and a “quagmire” has already started. And that was on Monday!

Remember how Obama started a bombing campaign in Libya without asking for permission from congress, Reverend Wright or Michelle, and it went on for 7 months, and no Democrat so much as muttered, “no war for oil” in a wee, small voice?

But when there’s a GOP president, “forever war” equals “three-day weekend.”

After the IDF took out the Ayatollah and 40 of his best friends at the breakfast bar last Saturday, I thought it would be very hard to top that achievement. But then on Monday, the second string gathered together to elect the new top dog. (Which is a huge insult to dogs, obviously.)

Annnnddddd… apparently the Israelis had been following those weirdos on Linked in, and knew where and when the meeting would be taking place. Because just as the votes were being tallied, some warheads arrived and dropped the entire building onto the assembled Ayatolli in the first ever celebration of a new Jewish holiday I’m calling… wait for it… Squash Hashanah.

You’re welcome. I’m here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.

My second favorite detail of that story – after squash hashanah – is that those dopes called themselves the “Council of Experts,” which sounds like something a third-rate screenwriter would come up with when the coke has just run out and the studio is demanding a completed draft by tomorrow morning.

Apparently “Council of Incompetents” and “Council of the Clueless” were already taken.

It’s getting so you can’t tell the leadership in Iran without a scorecard, and every score card looks like everybody’s March Madness brackets after a couple of 16 seeds somehow make it into the Final Four. Most of the first string was taken out in the 12 Days War. Then the Ayatollah and most of the second string was taken out last Saturday.

Then the third string learned a lesson about voting: The good news is that at least they didn’t have to deal with any hanging chads when examining the ballots. The bad news?

Exploding chads.

So then I’m scrolling through my feed last night, and I see a story about how many of the IRCG and Iranian police aren’t showing up for work.

Unexpectedly!

One other feel-good story was that we’ve apparently sunk most of the Iranian navy already. We sent the most recent frigate to the bottom via a torpedo from a submarine. The story about that mentioned that it was the first such sinking since WWII, which doesn’t really make sense to me.

I know that we mostly use subs as a means of launching missiles nowadays, but what’s wrong with an old-school torpedo? I mean, our subs are obviously still carrying them right? So torpedoes aren’t broken.

I might be just an old softie, but I’d like to think that some day in the near future I’ll open my laptop and read about how our navy has taken out a Somali pirate ship with a good, old-fashioned torpedo.

Am I saying that I hope it turns out that that pirate ship will have been carrying Ilhan Omar and her brother-cousin-husband, and the entire faculty of the Somali Learing Center?


I’m not NOT saying that.

In other news, Kristi Noem is out and Markwayne Mullin is in at DHS, and I think that is for the best. Trump’s staffing picks have definitely been stronger in his second term than they had been in his first term. His only weak picks this time around have been Bondi and Noem, and Bondi has been more inconsistent than terrible.

And to be fair to them, they were each at least three standard deviations better than Biden’s choices of Mayor Pete, Que Mala, Alejandro “The Border is Secure” Mayorakas, or his two confused cross dressing appointees, to name just a few. (You know things are bad when the best defense of Richard/Rachel Levine is, “Sure, he is a disordered gender-dysmorphia-sufferer, but at least he’s not a recidivist luggage thief, too.”)

From all I’ve seen, Mullin looks great: serious, focused and disciplined. The only strike against him is the way that he violates Simpson’s Rule of Eccentric Names. “Mark” and “Wayne” are both fine names, but putting them together gives famous three-name killer echoes (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wayne Gacey). And you can’t just jam two names together to make one first name.

Finally, in Texas, Jasmine Crockett got stomped in her Dem primary, and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at that. Someone needs to put together a video montage of her lowlights, and it needs to end with her reaction on election night, when she made her pouty little concession snarl.

Sorry, I meant “concession speech.”

Or did I?

Her tone-deafness was perfect. After literally years of her party throwing tantrums and insisting that anyone who questioned the integrity of elections was an insurrectionist threat to democracy, Crockett questioned the integrity of her election.

Because of course she did.

She somehow managed to blame her loss in a Democrat primary – where the voters were 100% Democrats – on… Republicans! (You thought I was going to say “racism,” didn’t you?)

She claimed that the GOP made sure that the voting hours were the previously scheduled voting hours. So that the Democrats voting for her opponent were able to vote, but her voters were prevented from voting for her.

Because: voting hours?

“Unfortunately, this is what Republicans like to do,” Crockett said. (And by “this,” she meant, “tricking Democrats into voting for Democrat candidates during the previously scheduled voting hours.”) (I just read that last sentence out loud, and now Cassie the Wonder Dog is staring at me with her head comically cocked at a 38-degree angle to one side.)

“And, so,” continued the race-baiting, low-IQ gal whom we won’t have to kick around any more, “they specifically targeted Dallas County, and I think we all know why. I can tell you now that people have been disenfranchised.”

We’re going to miss you, Jazzy.

Or, to put it in words I know you’ll understand, “Don’t axe for whom the bell tolls. That b***h be tollin’ for ya’ll, girl!”

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Pain Meds, the SOTU, and Operation Epic Fury (posted 3/2/26)

I’ve missed writing this last week, since running into some health problems last Wednesday, but I’m on the mend, and hope to return to form in a couple of days.

I started having some bad pain in the left side of my neck and upper back, which then moved down my left shoulder and arm, creating alternating numbness and strangely migrating pain, and tingling in my fingers. Then came four urgent-care and ER visits, and yada yada yada, I’ve got a pinched nerve situation that a doc described as having “sciatia in the neck.” (It’s affecting the C6 neural pathway, for any medical nerds in the audience.)

Since nothing is more boring than hearing the details of someone else’s medical travails, I’ll just touch lightly on the high points:

I’d describe the pain as being forced to listen to Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib caterwauling their way through a SOTU for four days.

So yes, it likely would have killed a lesser man.

But I have the strength of 10 men, because my heart is pure. And between that and the support of my smokeshow wife and empathetic Wonder Dog — and anti-inflammatory and pain-killing drugs (sweet, sweet, pain-killing drugs!) — I hope to get past this pretty quickly.

In the meantime, I have a few random thoughts, which I’ll try to jot down before my fingertips go completely numb or the Percocet makes me goofier than AOC on her best day.

The SOTU clearly demonstrated the difference between the parties. Trump was at his Trumpiest, and gave his supporters many reasons to cheer, and his detractors many reasons to detract.

Highlights were the multiple traps Trump laid before the Dems, by taking the 90 side of various 90-10 issues, and having their most obnoxious Rashida Tlaib-types enthusiastically jump onto the “10” side. (And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the only time you’ll ever see “Rashida Tlaib” and “10” mentioned in the same sentence.)

The Dems really showed why their approval ratings are in the toilet, even as they are still probably favored to flip the House in November. Half of them didn’t show up, and the half who did made everybody wish they hadn’t.

It was only a few presidential cycles ago when, in the middle of an Obama SOTU speech, a GOP House member pointed out that he was lying by calling out, “You lie!” That violation of protocol was the subject of breathless MSM Jeremiads about the end of democracy for weeks.

Flash forward to the last few years, and you’ve got Imhotep Pelosi dramatically tearing up Trump’s speech right behind him; MTG and Boebert yelling at Biden in ways that might really have affected his concentration, if he hadn’t already died in the late spring of 2019; and last year’s army of identically dressed Dems carrying ping pong paddles with moronic slogans printed on them.

This time Omar and Tlaib heckled and gibbered through half the speech, while Al Green got himself kicked out. Again! This time while carrying a sign making the confusing argument that black people aren’t apes.

I say confusing because nobody was arguing that point in the first place. Plus, it was disorienting to see someone making a reference to other animals, when he so clearly resembles a werewolf halfway through the transformation, and you can’t tell which direction. (I’m guessing that he’s heading from man to wolf, but the reverse could just as likely be true.)

The other big news of the week is obviously the strikes on Iran, which quickly made the SOTU seem like very old news. (Or that could just be me, feeling the effects of a couple of sleepless nights and cursing of the C6 neural pathway that separated the SOTU from the BOTWB.) (Blasting of the Weird Beards. Duh.)

So far I’m impressed by the intelligence and coordination that allowed us and the IDF to hit so many of the top Iranians at a breakfast meeting, repeating the success last year in simultaneous strikes on the top of military and political chains of command.

When I saw an article listing the guys taken out at the waffle station by the kosher kaboom on Saturday, I noticed that their resumes had one thing in common. Most of them had assumed their current position around six months ago, right after their predecessors suffered a highly contagious bout of SOMD. (“Sudden-Onset Molecular Disassembly” Duh.)

I also appreciate a good name for a military operation. “Operation Midnight Hammer” last year was pretty sweet, but it’s tough to top “Operation Epic Fury.”

(Especially when you try to imagine the names that Dems would come up with for their feckless military bungles, such as pointless strikes on empty desert, or botched abandonment of Afghanistan. “Operation Futile Gesture?” “Operation Dyspeptic Half-Measure?”)

In the immediate aftermath, the Dems — and Tucker…sigh… — managed to jump onto what I hope will continue to be the 10 side of yet another 90-10 issue. While jubilant Iranians celebrated in the streets in Iran and around the world, the Dems were outraged at the fall of another tyrant, and at the Orange Menace who keeps knocking them off.

I’m praying for our and our allies’ militaries, and for those people in Iran who were never willing parts of the mullahcracy that has caused so much damage all over the Middle East.

Finally, because some of you have been asking, I recently spoke with CO, and I am cautiously optimistic that we’ll be re-launching a new Facebook page in the near future. I appreciate your patience, and will update you about that as soon as I can.

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The Worst Leftist Judge Ever (posted 2/25/26)

I’m writing this before the SOTU, on a topic that I’ve previously written about: the way that misdirected empathy influences leftists’ attitude toward crime and criminals.

Blue states pass laws with much more lenient sentences, and leftist prosecutors and DAs prosecute less, and offer easy plea bargains.  Hence the many stories of horrific crimes committed by recidivists with decades-long rap sheets in dysfunctional blue cities.

Red states usually take the opposite approach.  They support their police, prosecute criminals under stricter laws, and put them away for longer.  The more conservative the state, the more it encourages armed citizens to defend themselves and their homes.  The more liberal the state, the more it restricts citizens’ ability to defend themselves, and the more benefit of the doubt it gives to criminals who attack over citizens who defend. 

If the worst impulses of the elite left could be distilled down into one person and one case, that one person would be leftist judge Tracy Davis, and that one case would be the criminal sentencing of Christopher Thompson, which took place on February 2nd in Kentucky.

Thompson (24) had already been convicted by a jury of robbery, kidnapping, sodomy and sexual abuse in a series of what Louisville police called “heinous offenses.”  The jury had recommended a sentence of 65 years in prison, which was at the stronger end of the legal guidelines.

Because: red state!

Enter Judge Davis, who was determined to give Thompson a much lighter sentence.  Davis stated that Thompson “fell through the cracks and [first] ended up before this court as an 18 year old.”  She said that she “does not believe that Mr. Thompson, if given the [proper] resources is beyond rehabilitating.” 

She also mentioned that he was “an African-American young man…who had to experience this society,” apparently alluding to the vicious racism of American society as a mitigating factor in multiple violent, sexual crimes.  [Both the judge and the criminal are black, which shouldn’t matter in this context, but all too often does.]

I know what you’re thinking: This gullible judge probably fell for a slick defense attorney’s tactic of presenting his client as an angelic victim.   Thompson probably stood before her in a nice suit, feigning remorse while apologizing and begging for mercy.

But no!  Thompson sat in the courtroom in prison orange, glowering at the judge and looking exactly like the evil thug that he is.  When the judge began by saying, “Before we [start], I’m gonna need you to be respectful,” Thompson cut her off by snarling, “I ain’t doin’ nuttin’.  Eat my d**k.”

He really said that.  In front of a judge who held decades of his life in her hands!

What followed was the saddest performance of a judge I’ve ever seen or heard of.  Instead of the logical response to Thompson’s opening insult – “Fine.  You can start your 65 years right now.  Get this creature out of my sight.” – the judge displayed a caricature of woke stupidity in the face of evil. 

And I swear I’m not making any of these quotes up:

Judge: Well, it’s fine.  Okay?

Thug: [grunt]

Judge: That’s fine.

Thug: If I could spit on you I would.

Judge: At the end of the day, I’m the one with the pen. 

Thug: I don’t care.

Judge: I know you don’t.  And it’s a sad, sad scenario.

Then Thompson called her several sexual slurs, while the judge was undeterred, and repeatedly tried to explain that she was going to be reducing Thompson’s sentence.

But he kept interrupting her, saying, “I don’t have sympathy for nobody.  I don’t have sympathy for you, the victim, the victim’s family.  I don’t care.  Boo hoo.”

Again, those are direct quotes.  He actually, sarcastically said, “boo hoo.”   

And after he showed a complete lack of remorse and demonstrated that he is a danger to everyone, that delusional judge cut his sentence by more than half, reducing it to 30 years!

That idiotic decision caused a lot of outrage, as well it should have.  The state Attorney General immediately appealed it to the state Supreme Court, and local citizens and politicians are furious, though I couldn’t find any mention of attempts to impeach the judge. 

Thankfully, there aren’t many judges as stupid as Tracy Davis, and most criminals are not much smarter than Christopher Thompson. 

I’ve read that many cops and prosecutors had gotten very worried when the Miranda ruling came down in 1966, because they thought it would mean the end of criminals incriminating themselves when they were first caught.  And you can see why they thought so.

Because who would be stupid enough to listen to a cop say, “You don’t have to talk to me, we’ll pay for a lawyer who will help you get away with your criminal acts.  And by the way, I can and will use anything you do say against you in court.  So…would you like to really screw yourself over by talking to me now?”

But the cops and prosecutors underestimated the stupidity of the average criminal, because morons listen to that warning every day in America, and then go on to incriminate the hell out of themselves!

The same is true for prison phones.  Prisoners awaiting trial are notified that prison phones are monitored, and there are big signs ABOVE EACH PHONE in prison saying the same thing. 

And still, if you watch any kind of legal tv shows you’ve heard hundreds of cases where the bad guy calls his mom, or his baby mama, or his thug relatives and buddies and fellow criminals, and says all kinds of incriminating things. 

While on the prison phone. 

Right in front of the sign that says, “Your call is being monitored, dumbass!”

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

I applaud Christopher Thompson’s honesty.  He may be an evil, violent, unrepentant scumbag who deserves to die in prison.  But he’s no hypocrite.

And I deplore the leftist judges and politicians who bend over backwards to excuse and show leniency to criminals, at the expense of their victims.  Unlike Christopher Thompson, they are also hypocrites.  Because while they routinely let actual criminals off the hook, they fabricate crimes as a pretext to prosecute their political opponents.

Or, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said, “A Communist system can be recognized by the fact that it spares the criminals and criminalizes the political opponent.”

Sound familiar?

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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The Ladies of the View & New Yorkers Get What They Deserve (posted 2/20/26)

Okay, today is officially Schadenfreude Friday.  (Because “Schaden-Friday” was just a little too cute.)  That’s when I only cover stories in the news that give me joy from the well-deserved karmic arse-whoopings received by bad actors in our society.

First up is Whoopi Goldberg and the round table of ten-cent heads at the View.  That televised Mensa Meeting had a field day last year, when Trump’s name turned up many times in the Epstein files.  While many people’s names appeared because they were sleazebags who were chummy with Epstein for many years and implicated in his bad behavior, many were there in non-incriminating contexts.

For example, while Trump was photographed with Epstein numerous times before Epstein’s crimes had gone public and he was charged, he also kicked Epstein out of Mar-A-Lago, called the cops on him, and eventually arrested him.  Also, something like a thousand of the references to Trump were from Epstein, who hated him and constantly badmouthed him. 

Legal and PR tip: If your name ends up in a criminal sleazebag’s files, you don’t want it to be in the context of what a great guy and a close friend you were.

Anyway, the gals of the View had a lot of theories about why Trump was in the files, and all of them were in the “What does he have to hide?” and “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” vein of innuendo.  If Trump’s name was there, it proved that he was guilty of very bad things.

Annnndddd…a few weeks ago one tranche of the Epstein files included Whoopsie Goldberg’s name 21 times.

Unexpectedly!

Now I’m not going to act like them and say that Whoopi is automatically guilty.  But at best, she’s a colossal hypocrite.  The only reference to her I’ve seen quoted is a perfect distillation of lefty privilege, as she requested the use of one of Epstein’s private jets: “Whoopi Goldberg needs a plane to get to Monaco.  John Lennon’s charity is paying for it.  They don’t want to charter so they are looking for private owners.” 

Before you can ask, no, Goldberg wouldn’t think of flying commercial, not even in first class.  And no, a chartered plane wouldn’t be acceptable either.  She needed to go private, and at no cost to her Predator-looking arse.  Because: Leftist Woman of the People!

When the news of her appearances on the list first came out, Whoopi tried the ol’ Leftist 101 response: She denied it.  “There is a fake list.  And I’m on it.”  She went on to lie-splain that there are a lot of “satire sites” out there, and “that people don’t realize that they can be harmful.”

When that explanation collapsed like a chair that Whoopi or Ana Navarro sat in, she revisited the issue this week: “In the name of transparency, my name is in the files.”

Transparency!   Once you get caught lying and then admit what can no longer be denied, that’s apparently being “transparent” now.

Joy-less Behar tried to help Goldberg, pointing out that “anybody can be on this list.”  Gee, that’s not what you harpies said when Trump’s name was reportedly on the list, was it?

But Whoopi couldn’t leave bad enough alone, because she couldn’t even stop lying once she was obviously caught.  She made it sound like Epstein tried to trick her into taking his plane – “So they’re trying to get me on a plane to get to this thing for Julian Lennon” – instead of HER asking HIM for use of the plane. 

“And no,” she continues, “I didn’t get on the plane because you know what I would have to do to get on the plane.”

Actually, it appears that Epstein turned her down, because she was never offered the use of his plane.  I guess Epstein didn’t want his reputation to be sullied by being associated with Whoopsie.

Oh, and one more thing: Trump kicked Epstein out and called the cops on him before he was charged and pled guilty in 2008.  And Whoopi asked to fly on Epstein’s plane in 2013, five years after he was a convicted felon.   

Perfect!

Next up is New York City, where Dem voters are getting a taste of that sweet Mamdani-mania that the commie jihadist promised.  Or is he a jihadi communist? 

Either way, the schadenfreude sandwich with a schadenfreude salad is being served, and the gullible leftist voters are already having second thoughts. 

First, it turned out that the “warmth of collectivism” actually results in homeless Dem voters freezing to death.  (Oh, the irony.)  On inauguration day Zohran nixed the practice of forcing mentally ill addicts inside during winter.

Annnnddddd…six weeks and 16 deceased meth-sicles later, Mamdani sheepishly reversed course.

Unfortunately, when another one of his promises – blowing out the city’s already profligate spending – proved to be equally stupid and painful, Mamdani stayed the course, at least so far. 

His first choice was to add yet another ruinous tax on the richest New Yorkers to pay for free buses, driving out the Jews, giving illegals benefits, and seizing the means of production. 

But NY Governor Hochul is apparently smarter than she looks, because she quickly said no bueno to “taxing for the sake of taxing.”  (Could she be the rare lefty who realizes that rich people who are already paying the lion’s share of taxes can always move, rather than staying and being victimized by greedy Dem politicians?)

So Zohran slapped on his Marxist blinders and declared that there is only one other possible choice: raising already high property taxes on all New Yorkers by another 9.5%   As he put it, “[T]he city will be forced down a second, more harmful path.  Faced with no other choice…we would have to raise property taxes.” 

Yes.  They would be forced.  There’s no other choice.  They couldn’t possibly cut any current spending – say, the estimated $5 billion they’ve been spending on illegals – or cut back on any of their bold, new, cash-incinerating programs.  Nope.  They must raise the mortgage and rent payments of every single New Yorker…so that they can make things more affordable.

If only there was a certain Free State, with the Best Damn Governor in America™, to give them a few pointers. 

Oh wait.  There is.

Within a few hours after Zohran gave his dire budget warning, Ron DeSantis released a few helpful facts.  To wit, Florida has over 23 million residents, and the budget for the entire state is $117 billion this year. By comparison, NYC has 8 million people, and Mamdani just proposed a budget of $127 billion. 

So if Zohran gets his way, he’ll spend more than 3 times as much per resident as Florida is spending.  And for that money, New Yorkers get frozen homeless, millions of rats, bad roads, worse schools, armies of illegals, high crime, and more bureaucrats with their hands out than there are rats and criminals.

It’s going to be fun watching Zohran sell this plan to his naïve voters. 

Buckle up, Bolsheviks!

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Mom is Gone, but Political Numbskulls Will be with us Always (posted 2/18/26)

I’m back at home after mom’s funeral in Tennessee.  It was a tough long weekend, but at the same time it was great to see family, and mom’s church family too. 

I knew a lot of those folks from when I was up there for the better part of four months when dad was dying in 2014, and the ones who are still with us were as sweet as always.  Those southerners know how to bombard you with love and food, and my sister and her husband have a lot of both to live on for a while!

My sister and I each spoke for a few minutes, and she held up well.  I, on the other hand, had written a tight five minutes – half of which were fond jokes about mom.  And I turned that into a flabby ten minutes, when time for choking up and breaking down were figured in.

But other than my blubbering, it was a fine send off for mom, with many stories about how loving and sweet she was, and how she’ll be missed until we see her again.

Meanwhile, our ridiculous public continued to unfold, in ridiculous ways.  Before we left for TN I’d made a few notes for myself on two stories in particular.

The first one dealt with Reason 12,378,439 why we don’t hate the media enough.  This story came from Canadian “journalist” Mark Slapinski, whom I’d never heard of.  But he clearly needs a very hard slapinski across his lying face.

He posted a tweet headlined, “An autopsy revealed that a Canadian not only DIED in ICE custody, but his death was PREVENTABLE.  Trump must be impeached!” 

The capital letters were his, which you might guess because of how they just scream “theater kid.”  (And by the way, shouldn’t it be, “Trump must be IMPEACHED!” Or at least “Trump MUST be impeached!”)

I know that any readers who just awoke from a decades-long coma – or who are fresh from a CT protocol after falling from a great height onto their head – might think that a noble Canadian wrongly held by ICE who died in their custody from a preventable cause is a gigantic scandal.

But for everyone else, experience has taught us to wait for the real story.

Annndddd… it turns out a correction on X shows the lie: “Johnny Noviello was a convicted drug trafficker that died in federal custody from ingesting Ethylene Glycol prior to his detention, which he did not disclosed to authorities, and is not easily treatable without that information.” 

The only surprising detail is that Johnny was not an illegal; he was a permanent legal resident in the US.  And yet he still used the privilege of being allowed to live in the US to traffic drugs that hurt US citizens.

So yes, committing suicide by drinking anti-freeze is preventable. Other related things that are preventable?  Becoming a low-down dirty drug trafficker.  And deciding to practice your evil drug trafficking in America, instead of just staying home and hurting Canadian citizens by your low-down dirty drug trafficking. 

I told my lefty buddy this a while ago: The next time you start getting riled up over a MSM story about what terrible thing Trump or ICE or conservatives have done now, just take a deep breath, and wait an hour, because that will save you from having to sheepishly backtrack later, when the truth comes out. 

For example:  No, Trump didn’t call white supremacists “fine people on both sides.”  And no, he didn’t pee on Russian hookers.  And no, Hunter’s laptop wasn’t a Russian hoax, and Joe Biden wasn’t sharp as a tack, and Robin Good wasn’t just a mom who was dropping her kid off at daycare when the Gestapo murdered her for no reason.  And Michael Brown wasn’t a gentle giant, and Alex Pretti wasn’t just a good Samaritan nurse whom the Gestapo murdered for no reason.

And that adorable 5 year old kid whom ICE “arrested?”  His POS illegal dad ran off and abandoned him in freezing weather to avoid getting arrested for the crimes he had committed, and ICE didn’t arrest him – they took care of him, much more than his dad did. 

And no, Johnny Noviello wasn’t a blameless Canadian victim, and 86% of arrested illegals have not been saints who have done no wrong upon the earth.      

The second idiotic story also involves our pathetic media.

Unexpectedly!

It focuses on a female Swedish skier named Elis Lundholm, who believes that she is a man.  She skied against actual women, though.  Funny how that works, isn’t it?  Lots of dudes pretending to be women love to compete against actual women, and stomp them.  But no women pretending to be men are real sticklers about competing with actual men.  Which was a good thing for Elis, since the male skiers would have wiped the slopes with her.

Anyway, when some commentators from NBC covered her, they called her “she” several times during her run.  As one does, when talking about a woman.

Unless one is a woke idiot working for NBC news.  Because the Peacock network – not the Peahen network, you juveniles! – was mortified that one of their talking heads acknowledged that the gal is a gal. 

The uh-oh squad immediately leapt into action.  NBC sent out an apology saying that “NBC Sports takes this matter seriously,” before they rhetorically whipped themselves in penance.  “We streamed a feed…[which] misgendered Elis Lundholm.  We apologize to Elis and our viewers, and we have removed the replay of that feed.” 

To add to the absurdity, Lundholm isn’t even one of the dysmorphia sufferers who has done anything to herself in service of her fantasy maleness.  Her team’s representative said that she “does not take any hormonal treatments and has not had any surgeries.”

Good for her. Because if she ever comes to her senses, at least she won’t have to deal with the life-long medical deficits that come from inflicting hormonal or surgical damage on herself.

On the other hand…really?  She can just say she’s a man, do nothing else, and still have NBC yammering on about how they take this matter seriously? 

So if I just said I was a rhinoceros, I wouldn’t have to put on a couple of tons, have a surgical horn implant, and live in a mud puddle in Africa or Southeast Asia?  I could just walk into a local Home Depot, and wait for someone to call me “sir,” so I could throw a fit and launch a “you mis-specied me!” lawsuit?  

NOW you tell me. 

If you’ll excuse me, I need to call my plastic surgeon to cancel my RHIP.  (Rhino Horn Implant Procedure.  Duh.) 

He better not tell me that the deposit I paid is non-refundable! 

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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In Case You are Wondering Whether We Hate the Media Enough…NOPE! (posted 2/13/26)

Because I don’t want to write yet another column about the events in Minnesota right now, I thought I’d hit some of the stories I’ve noticed but haven’t commented on during my deep dive on the legal issues and vigilantism in the frozen north.

Under the heading of, “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough,” three stories jumped out at me.

Two of them came from the same source – Axios – and appeared within 24 hours of each other.   To produce two such transparently biased and dishonest stories in one day is quite an accomplishment, so congrats, you weasels.

The first story is about the SAVE Act, which requires people to prove that they’re citizens when they register to vote, and to present a photo ID to prove their identity when they vote. 

I know: the horror!   

Just for fun, I tried to find another country that doesn’t require their citizens to provide ID when voting, and I couldn’t do it.  Mexico requires voter ID.  So does El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.  So does the Congo.  Every country from Algeria to Zimbabwe requires voter ID.   

Guess who else?  Freaking Somalia! 

That’s right, the nation where the two leading occupations are “Pirate” and “Learing Center Fraudster” requires Voter ID.

But American Democrats say that doing what all other nations do – including those who can’t feed their people or provide a modern sewer system, and who burn dung for warmth – cannot be required in America, because their voters could not handle it. 

Speaking of burning dung, Chuck Schumer.

Oh sorry.  Let me finish that sentence. 

Speaking of burning dung, Chuck Schumer says requiring voter ID would be “Jim Crow 2.0.”  And as one of the leaders of the party who invented “Jim Crow1.0” (they call it “Classic Jim Crow”), Chuckie should know. 

Let’s play a quick round of Adam Carolla’s “Stupid or Liar” game, in which we have to guess whether a politician saying something ridiculous is one or the other.  But for this round, I think we need to modify that to “Racist or Liar.”

Because anybody who claims that black people are such mouth-breathing dullards that they couldn’t secure an ID are either bald-faced liars, or the kind of Democrat racists who would make even the old school Democrat racists in the KKK say, “Damn, them boys are RACIST!”

Full disclosure: I do believe that Joy Reid, Whoopi Goldberg, Jasmine Crockett, Hank Johnson and Ketanji Brown-Jackson might actually be too imbecilic to get an ID for themselves.  But that is because they each have a ten-cent head.  It has nothing to do with the color of their skin.  

Anyway, the Axios story in question adds a big ol’ helping of sexism to the Dems’ usual racism stew, because it argues that it’s not only black people who can’t manage to get an ID.  It’s ladies too.

Axios puts it this way:  If the SAVE Act passes, “millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports” will face extra barriers to voting. 

And that’s why, every time you get on a plane you can always stretch out over several empty seats, because of all those gals who would otherwise be flying here and there, except that they got married several decades ago, and they’ve been trapped at home ever since.  Foiled by the insurmountable task of updating their ID.   

How does Axios try to get away with saying something so outlandishly sexist and racist?  By going to one of the favorite tricks that profs in J-school teach their students: always attribute your own bigotry and propaganda to unnamed experts.

The tagline for the story says, “President Trump’s push to “nationalize” elections including his backing of a bill that could be a “nightmare” for voters, election experts told Axios.      

Yes.  Those dastardly “election experts.”  The entire story is full of them.  They attribute the “women can’t overcome the married-name conundrum” to “researchers.” When they do cite somebody claiming that “21 million Americans lack ready access” to ID, it’s a “Brennan Center analysis.”

If you don’t know them, the Brennan Center is the kind of hard-core leftist advocacy group that puts the “anal” in “analysis.”  Every “finding” by their “analysts” just happens to be one of the talking points of the DNC.

Unexpectedly!  

Immediately after posting the “women and minorities are too incompetent and dumb to get an ID” story, the crack staff at Axios went to work on their next scoop.  This one demonstrated another trick right out of the J-School 101 Playbook: AMCE (Always Misunderstand Cause & Effect).

A famous example of this technique was a story from decades ago claiming that “despite a record number of Americans in prison, crime continues to drop.” 

Axios is reporting on a similarly mysterious drop, and they start out so promisingly: “Violent crime dropped sharply across America’s biggest cities in 2025, according to new data.”  They even show a chart that documents crime rates dropping in many cities between 25 to 58%.

Now you don’t have to be Einstein – or Sherlock Holmes, or me – to deduce a blindingly obvious cause that might explain this effect.  Trump came to office at the beginning of 2025 promising to close our borders and start mass deportation of millions of unvetted illegal aliens.  Over the course of the year, nearly 2 million people either self-deported, were caught and deported, or were caught and detained pending deportation.

Some insightful types might anticipate that removing several million illegal renters from the competition for rental housing might decrease rents.   (Because: supply and demand.)  And that removing many competing illegal workers might cause wages to rise. (Because: ditto.)  And that removing several million criminals might result in a drop in crime.  (Because: duh.)

So a restless nation sat on the edge of their seats, having read the Axios tagline, and having seen their chart documenting the drop in crime over the last year.  The anticipation was killing us!  Would Axios actually stumble into the obviously right conclusion?

Annnndddd…they titled their chart, “Crime plunges in major cities despite Trump’s crackdown rhetoric.”

Despite!   Trump promised a crackdown, then he implemented a crackdown.  But crime went down ANYWAY?!

Good lord.  With brains like these, is it any wonder that they are continually surprised when raising taxes on the rich makes the rich move to a lower-tax state, or when hateful, dimwit celebrities tell their audience that they hate their guts and then 14 people watch the Grammys?

My final item today isn’t about a story written by journalists, but a story about them.  Specifically the fired journalists at the Washington Post.  (“Where Democracy gets beaten to death with tire irons in the Darkness.”) 

Jeff Bezos bought the struggling WAPO a while ago, but he kept nearly all of the same journalists who had been doing the kind of work that resulted in a paper that was struggling. 

Annndddd… it lost nearly 90% of its readers in the past 4 years.  Last year alone it lost $100 million.   

Now most sentient mammals, when confronted those facts, might say something like, “Yikes! This can’t go on!” 

But the lefty genius reporters at WAPO said, “This can go on forever!”

I’m not making that up. One retired journalist said that with all of Bezos’ billions, he could afford to lose $100 mil a year “indefinitely.”  Veteran WAPO writer Sally Quinn was shocked at the layoffs Bezos just announced, reflecting that when Bezos first bought the paper, he was great.  “He was wonderful.  He was smart and funny and kind and interested.  He was joyful.  He was a person of integrity and conscience….And now I don’t know who this person is.” 

I’ll tell you who he is: a guy who has been taking giant financial groin kicks for years.  He bought the paper in 2013 for $250 million, and he’s lost $274 million on it in just the last three years!

You know what’s consistently pretty close to the top of a list of “Things Billionaires Don’t Do With Money?”

Continue to drop $100 Mil Per Annum on a Failing Freaking Business!!  OH! OHHHHHH! (Surprise Billionaire Kinison Insert)

But do you know what the schadenfreude cherry on top of the “learn to code” sundae is?

On Monday, a bunch of WAPO workers threw a tantrum – er, held a protest – at the WAPO building.  Led by a guy in a Where’s Waldo hat, the protest was meant to, “Show management that they can’t trample our rights.”  He said that even though “today is a scary day,” the fired WAPO workers were going to “demonstrate our collective power” and “to show our right to work.”

He finished with a stirring statement that, “Management has locked us out.  Let us show them that they can’t just do that.”

And then, several dozen fired workers walked inside and up to the glass-partitions in the lobby that function like subway turnstiles.  And one by one, each worker slid his or her employee badge over the scanner.

Annnnnddddd…nothing happened.  Each worker swiped, then frowned, then turned dejectedly away.  Followed by another worker, and another worker.  Some of them seemed to be surprised when their badges didn’t work, stepping confidently forward, then swiping the badge several more times.   

Afterwards, Waldo said that the workers deserve to work at the Post and have a right to work at the post.  Then they all went outside and waved at the building, engaged in the saddest little chant I’ve ever heard: “We’ll be back.  We’ll be back.”

Um.  You just “demonstrated your collective power,” and were defeated by a piece of glass.  I don’t think that failing, and then chanting that you’ll be back at some point in the future to fail again, is quite the blood-curdling message that you think it is. 

I know that it’s a tough thing to lose your job, especially when you’re in a grim, declining business like newspapers, where finding a new gig is going to be hard.  And I know that a lot of the workers – especially the non-journalist staff – are suffering because of forces beyond their control. 

But the journalists at WAPO have been lying – continually, consistently, and without remorse – for many decades.  You could fill a book with the many outrageous smears they’ve pushed, from the Russia Hoax to the healthy Biden hoax to the “America is horrible” slanders. 

And when blue collar folks – from the workers on the Keystone Pipeline to farmers to everybody fired because they wouldn’t take the experimental covid vax – lost their jobs, the WAPO elitists sneered, “Learn to code,” and went on to the next attack on conservatives.  

I generally hate to see anybody lose their jobs.

But for the “journalists” at the WAPO, I can make an exception.

I won’t have a column on Monday, because we’re going up to Tennessee this weekend, and my mom’s funeral is Monday.  Have a great weekend, and I’ll be back next week.   

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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The Godfather, Vigilantism, & anti-ICE Protests, Part 2

In the last column I discussed the opening scene of The Godfather, and how leftist protesters wrongly see themselves as the good kind of vigilantes when they are quite the opposite.  But I left two groups out of that category.  Because it’s not just the protesters, but elected politicians and many judges who are also acting as vigilantes, IMO.

Which seems counter-intuitive, to say the least.  How can elected leaders – Mayor Small Frey and Governor Jazz Hands – become vigilantes who rebel against the government when they run the government?  And how can judges – Boasberg and the hundreds of Boasberg clones throughout the nationwide district and (sometimes) appellate courts – be circumventing the laws when they are in charge of upholding the laws?

The answer is simple: the politicians and judges are local officials who are opposed to the federal laws of the land – embodied in our Constitution, our immigration laws, and the sections of the U.S. Code that deal with interfering with federal officers in the performance of their duties, etc.

So yes, elected officials and local judges can be insurrectionist vigilantes in 2026, just as their Democrat forebearers were in the Southern slave states in 1861.

Having said that, I’d like to turn to the potential for right-wing vigilantism, if the current administration isn’t able to stop the lawless anti-ICE protests occurring in various blue states and sanctuary cites around the country.  I hope it doesn’t come to that, because vigilantism is always fraught with dangers for a society. 

But as I discussed in the last column, it can also sometimes be a proper course of action. 

Let’s briefly revisit the Godfather.  The mortician comes to Vito as a patriotic American citizen.  “I believe in America,” he says, in the words that open the movie.  “America’s made my fortune.  And I raised my daughter in the American fashion.”

He is, in other words, the kind of legal immigrant we would like to see.  He appreciates the country and the blessings it’s given him, and he has assimilated.  When his daughter is attacked, he goes through the proper, legal channels (the cops and the courts).  

But it’s significant that his name is “Amerigo Bonasera,” meaning “America, good night.” Because the American government betrayed him in his hour of need.  So now, the proper (though morally problematic) course of action is to go to the Godfather for the justice that the justice system did not provide.

Vito knows that, even though his initial words demonstrate why mob justice (in this case, literally “mob” as in Mafia) was his preferred first choice: “Why did you go to the police?” he asks. “Why didn’t you come to me first?”

The answer is clear for all of us conservative, law-and-order types: Because we SHOULD go to the police.  They’re supposed to protect us from criminals and give us justice.  And in a society in which the justice system is functioning properly, all vigilante action would be disordered and wrong.

But when the government has failed (or even intentionally abandoned) its core function of protecting citizens from criminals – I’m looking at you, Democrat party! – many people see vigilante justice as a viable option. During the dark days of the Biden maladministration, as we watched millions of foreigners lawlessly pouring over our border, day after day for years, many of us on the right and center felt a kind of growing desperation and despair. 

A few states took small steps toward taking the law into their own hands, Texas being one example.  When Governor Abbott pleaded with the feds to enforce the border in his state, he proposed that Texans secure their own border, if the feds wouldn’t.  When Biden forbid Texans from protecting themselves – immorally forcing Texan citizens to suffer the ongoing harm from the flood of illegals – Abbott appealed that to higher courts, while in the meantime defiantly maintaining his own barriers at the border.

Fortunately, there is a sane but narrow majority on SCOTUS that allowed Texas to reinforce their border, even if only on a watered-down technicality, i.e. the barriers that Biden started destroying were on municipal or private land, not federal land. 

But that was a terrifyingly close-run thing.  If Hillary had been able to appoint a couple of SCOTUS judges, or if Trump hadn’t won in 2024, who knows how badly things would be going right now? 

This is why I think conservatives are being ever more tempted to explore dramatic alternatives to resist the cascade of illegitimate power grabs by national Democrats, which are still going on. The left has relentlessly attacked the integrity of our democratic republic in multiple and critical ways. 

• They’ve illegally declared sanctuary territories, in blatant contravention of the Supremacy Clause and other parts of our Constitution.

• They’ve admitted tens of millions of illegals and tried to give them the vote, and thus an insurmountable lock on all future national elections.

• They’ve resisted all attempts to ensure the integrity of our elections (through no ID requirements, unrestricted mail-in voting, vote harvesting, unvetted vote counting, etc.)

• They’ve pursued widespread judicial insurrection, via partisan local judges who transparently rule based on their political priors instead of our laws.

• They’ve allowed massive fraud networks in their states, which steal from all American citizens, since the lion’s share of the stolen funds come from the federal taxes we all pay.

For these reasons and more, we cannot allow the feds to back down, and allow insurrectionist mobs in Minnesota – or Portland, or LA, or anywhere else – to drive them out and get away with it.  That’s what happened when the Democrats started the Civil War.  Just like Small Frey saying, “ICE, get the f**k out of Minneapolis,” they said, “Federals, get the f**k out of the South.”

That time, a Republican president marshalled some forces and went down and militarily disabused them of their insurrectionist notions.  After some false steps with some 19th century versions of RINOS – I’m looking at you, McClellan! – he got himself a future GOP president in the form of bad-ass Grant, and achieved some good old fashioned “peace through strength” by 1865. 

But the Dems didn’t completely get the message.  They formed the KKK, and they passed Jim Crow laws, and after some more decades of their insurrectionist schemes, more Dem governors (the Tampon Tims of their day, except without the effeminate Jazz Hands demeanor) once again defied the feds.  They stood in the doorway of schools and harassed worshippers at churches, until another GOP president sent the National Guard to kick their arses and restore the law and the constitution.

Now we’re in the same position, and we’ve got to make the dishonest hypocritical Dems eat their own words.  For years they’ve demanded that “nobody is above the law” and “insurrection must be punished.”  We agree.  And now they need to find themselves on the pointy end of those particular sticks. 

Otherwise, the eternal call of vigilante justice, as embodied in the Godfather, might one day be listened to by American citizens who are not going to tolerate mobs of violent criminals – foreign AND domestic – taking over their cities with impunity.

Because we don’t want to see Amerigo go silently into that Bonasera. 

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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The Godfather, Vigilantism & anti-ICE Protests, Part 1 (posted 2/9/26)

Last week I was pleasantly surprised by how many readers were interested enough to follow my 3-column series on the illegalities of the anti-ICE protesters’ tactics.  Those pieces were the most widely shared of any of my past columns, so thanks for that.

This week I’ve got another 3-part series, this one discussing the role played by vigilantism in these protests – today on the left, but in the future, potentially, on the right.  This idea came to me when I was thinking about the Godfather – which as a straight man over the age of 40, I naturally do at least once a week.     

I’m going to assume that all of you have seen the Godfather. 

If you haven’t, hang your head in shame, and then immediately remedy that by watching at least the first 10 minutes before you read this column. 

Sidebar: “Diversity is our strength” is one of the most wrong-headed ideas in modern life.  Cultural unity is our strength, and there is a core list of cultural high points with which all Americans should be familiar, among them the Declaration and Constitution; the King James Bible; the heroism of our military and its history; the music of Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, John Prine and Tom Waits; American football, etc.  The Godfather I and II are on that list.  On this point I will tolerate no disagreement!

Okay, so the movie opens on Vito Corleone’s daughter’s wedding day, and there is a tradition that people can ask for favors from the Godfather on that day.  A nervous Italian undertaker tells Vito how his daughter was assaulted by some American boys, and the courts gave them a slap on the wrist – three years in jail, but with a suspended sentence.  “They went free that very day!” the mournful father says.  So he says that he has come to the Godfather for justice, and he asks him to have the criminals killed. 

Vito says, “Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me first?  Let’s be honest.  You never wanted my friendship, and you were afraid to be in my debt.”

The undertaker says, “I didn’t want to get into trouble.”

Vito says, “I understand.  You found paradise in America, had a good trade, made a good living.  The police protected you, and there were courts of law.”  But now, after the justice system failed him, the Godfather offers him a solution grounded in ethnic solidarity and an authentic – though extra-legal – justice.  “If you had come to me in friendship, the scum who ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day.  And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, they would become my enemies. And then they would fear you.”

I taught this scene in a course I designed called “Analyzing Propaganda.”  I used it to introduce the idea of competing political narratives out of which grows most propaganda, and I prefaced the class discussion with the definition of a typically contentious political term, “vigilante.”

We use the term “vigilante” to mean someone who takes the law into his own hands, usually when he thinks a government’s legal system has failed to deliver justice.  The Godfather broadens that idea from a person or small group of people to a network of close relationships grounded in a shared ethnicity or tribal identity. 

We usually think of “vigilante” in negative terms, as a stand-in for mob “justice.”  But the word comes from the same root as “vigilant,” and vigilantism can take two forms, only one of which is negative.  The evil form of vigilantism is when the people are wrongly defying or resisting a legitimate government.  The first example that comes to mind is Democrat lynch mobs in the south, killing blacks out of racial animus, regardless of whether they had committed a crime or not.    

But when a government or legal system has become corrupt, abusive or lawless, people who want real justice are morally justified in taking action against it, including (in some cases) vigilantism and violence.  Examples would be any of the uprisings against communist and other dictatorships, or partisan raids and sabotage against a conquering force. 

Even our own revolution could be seen as partaking in vigilantism – e.g. the Boston Tea Party, or various occasions when Scots-Irish proto-Simpsons retreated into the woods with their Kentucky long rifles and started picking off Redcoats – though our brilliant Founders soon transformed and codified a chaotic uprising into a new legal framework, and the best damn country in the whole freaking world.  (USA!  USA!)   

So what does this have to do with the anti-ICE protests/riots in Minnesota and elsewhere?

The leftists clearly believe that they are the good kind of vigilantes, heroically standing up for real justice against a corrupt and evil government.  Hence all the references to “Nazis” and “Gestapo” and “fascists.”  The protesters see themselves as similar to the partisans who conducted resistance and sabotage missions against the Nazis in occupied Europe. 

They also consider themselves the moral equivalent of the civil rights protesters of the 1960s, which gives them that extra intoxicating frisson of irresistible self-righteousness.  They’re not just heroes fighting for justice.  They’re super-heroes fighting for racial justice!  Hence all the talk of the black and brown people being persecuted for their skin color, rather than being legally detained and deported for their criminal acts.

Unfortunately for them, and as with all leftist racial melodramas, the truth stubbornly contradicts their preferred narrative. (Not to mention their entire political worldview.)  Their two currently prominent martyrs are Robin Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were – so inconveniently! – white.  I mean, not as white as Grandma Squanto Warren.  Because who is?  (#wemustneverstopmockingher) 

But still: very white.

Even worse, the fascist agents of the ominously Nordic Gestapo (i.e. the Border Patrol and ICE) are disproportionately…I’m not making this up… wait for it… Hispanic!  (Cue the sad trombone.)

When I heard that reported, I looked it up.  (As opposed to just making things up, like a MSM “journalist.”) I found that at least 24% of ICE agents (the highest numbers I saw were 30% and “approximately 1/3”) are Hispanic, and more than 50% of Border Patrol agents are also Hispanic!  Since 20% of Americans are Hispanics, these numbers are both disproportionately high. 

It was fun to discover that, because when I confirmed those numbers on several left-leaning, anti-immigration-enforcement websites, their authors scrambled to find any explanations that would confirm their political priors.  One typical flop-sweating leftist admitted that Latinos make up more than half of Border Patrol, but quickly insisted that “it’s not self-hatred that drives them to work for agencies that often target their communities.” 

Um, what community is that, buddy?  The “American citizens of Hispanic descent” community, which the Border Patrol agents belong to?  Because spoiler alert, that’s NOT who Border Patrol targets.  In fact, they don’t “target” anyone, you bad-faith-arguing dope.

They focus on finding, detaining and deporting people who have broken our immigration laws, be they white, black, Asian, Middle-Eastern, Patagonian, Middle-Earthian, Wakandan, or (yes), Hispanic. 

But leave it to Notre Dame political science professor (shame on you, Notre Dame!) David Cortez to put it best. If by “best” you mean, “most dishonestly,” or “most propagandistically.”  Or just “worst.”

Because: political science professor.

Saith the miserable, credentialed hack: “How do Latinos do this to their own people?  Is it self-hatred?  A denial of their ethnic identity?  Or… [to strengthen] their own claim to belonging in America – even to whiteness?”

Ugh.  

Hey Davy, I’ve got one more possible reason why Hispanics might join law enforcement that’s beyond your ability to imagine: Because they are law-abiding Americans who don’t like watching people of any ethnicity breaking our laws and then falsely crying ‘racism’ when they are caught and are held accountable for their own criminal behavior?

But nope.  Davy knows the truth: “For Latino agents, it’s primarily about the money.”

Like all damnable lies, this has one tiny bit of truth in it.  Because of course, everybody who works does so partly for money.  For example, even political science professors who know better will still shamelessly prostitute themselves (via dishonest “research”) to their political co-religionists in return for cash and a generous benefits package. 

Right, Professor Dave?

But Cortez’s creepy conclusion is even creepier if he actually believes the racist politics he espouses.  He claims that Hispanic LEOs have chosen their profession for a reason that he thinks exonerates them for their otherwise unacceptable (to him) choices, i.e. they do it for the money that will allow them to support themselves and their families.   

But his claim actually damns them even more.   If true, it would make them cowardly, treacherous collaborators, betraying their brethren in the service of a corrupt and evil Vichy puppet state for cash. That would make them even more despicable political wh*res than David Cortez himself!    

So while the leftist protesters have been envisioning themselves as the moral kind of vigilantes, fighting for a good cause against a bad government, they are actually the bad guys in this scenario. 

You’d think that they’d have realized that when they found themselves aligned with Somali fraudsters, tattooed antifa thugs calling for murder in the streets, and arrogant creeps who burst into church services to scream at the meek (as in, “blessed are the…”) and terrify children.  Or when they discovered that they’ve been defending people who turn out to be gang bangers, human smugglers, and woman-beaters.  (Or in the case of “Maryland dad” Kilmar Garcia, all three!)

But contemplative self-reflection has never been their strong suit, has it?  

Tomorrow: the potential for future vigilantism on the right, if the left stays on their current, radical path.  

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Part 3: What Laws Have the Anti-ICE Protesters Been Breaking? (posted 2/6/26)

This is the last of three columns of legal analysis of the anti-ICE protests.  I had feared that these would be too dry for most people, but more people have read these than my typical columns… so that’s good, right?

Some of the following info I first came across when I was teaching a Writing for Pre-Law course.  I looked back through my notes to refresh my memory, and then looked at a bunch of legal websites to reinforce and update my knowledge.  There might still be some errors here, and as always, I would appreciate corrections or fuller explanations from any lawyers in the audience.

My goal today is to look at the most common actions of the protesters, and explore what laws they might be violating.

As we know, the First Amendment protects the right to protest, though only peacefully.  To the extent that at least some of the protesters are exercising their free speech rights – castigating ICE officers without interfering with their actions – they’re good.

However, it’s become very clear that most of the protesters have been interfering with ICE officers, so that’s the best place to start.  The most commonly committed infractions would be covered by 18 U.S.C 1501 and 18 U.S.C. 111, which are parts of the US legal code addressing “the crime of interfering with federal officers while they are performing their duties.”  The key language describes action that “obstructs, resists or opposes” officers in that context.

The code “covers both direct physical acts and indirect methods of obstruction.”  Examples of physical acts would include blocking officers’ movements, making physical contact with or using any physical force on them.  The code also mentions “standing in front of an officer to prevent an arrest or shielding another person from apprehension.” 

The above actions probably make up at least half of what happens at many anti-ICE protests.  Protesters routinely surround cops, blocking them in on foot or in vehicles; they also try to get between officers and illegals to prevent their arrest.

This statute also forbids “threatening behavior,” which doesn’t have to be explicitly violent.  The test is whether the behaviors “create a reasonable fear of harm or intimidation,” and the code also mentions “verbal statements, gestures or electronic messages implying danger.”

Good lord!  Wouldn’t that encompass about 90% of the rioters on video in Minneapolis?  If everybody who posted threatening emails to ICE officials, or threatened to dox, injure or kill them were arrested, there’d be more un-F-able jailed leftists in Minnesota than there are fraudulent Somali Learing Centers!

If those weren’t enough, the code also makes clear that interference doesn’t always require direct threats or physical contact.  Activities like creating a diversion, refusing lawful orders and providing false information are also illegal.  Some of those would be charged under other codes.

For example, lying to federal law enforcement during an investigation falls under 19 U.S.C. 1001, and creating a distraction to aid an illegal falls under 1501. 

As a broad group, these offenses can be misdemeanors or felonies, depending on context.  Misdemeanors can be penalized by a year in federal prison and a fine up to $100K; felonies can draw long prison sentences (up to decades) and higher fines.    

More serious actions like use of a deadly or dangerous weapon (not just a gun, but also bricks or other thrown objects, fireworks, or striking with sticks or bats, etc.) or force that results in bodily injury are covered in Section 111.  Those are felonies, and could draw up to 20 years in prison. 

My general sense is that misdemeanors get escalated to felonies when they happen in conjunction with other illegal acts, or are repeated.  (For example, just entering the country illegally is a misdemeanor, but re-entry after being previously deported is a felony.)  But some charges can be surprisingly harsh; just intentionally touching an officer can be charged as a felony, with a penalty of up to 8 years in prison.  (Though I think that is almost never charged for touching alone.)  And spitting on an officer is considered touching/assault, and can be similarly charged.    

One legal summary concluded this way: “In protest settings, the moment someone makes physical contact – shoving, grabbing, pulling an officer, yanking a door, striking a hand/arm, trying to “un-cuff” a detainee – can jump to felony territory.”    

I looked up the constant, near-deafening blowing of whistles, and found mixed interpretations.  In some contexts those can apparently count as permissible (if rowdy) speech, while in others they can constitute harassment/obstruction or even threat of harm (as they can create pain and at least potential longer-term hearing impairment).

I would argue – and I’d like to see this tested in court – that the loud whistling must constitute a form of impeding/obstructing, because its obvious purpose is to harm officers’ ability to carry out their duties.  It prevents them from hearing or giving orders or warnings, and agitates and disorients them, degrading their situational awareness.  As I wrote in a previous column, I’m almost certain that the whistling contributed to Alex Pretti’s death, because the cop who recovered his gun right before Pretti was shot would have yelled out that he had the weapon, as cops are taught to do in that situation.  But the whistling idiots kept that knowledge from the other cops, thus facilitating Pretti’s shooting.  (So great job, whistling idiots!)

In addition to all of those infractions, many protests involve a lot of property damage and trespassing, too.  Property damage can be a misdemeanor (usually if the damage done is under $500 or $1000) or a felony (for larger amounts).

Trespassing is entering government or private property, and also remaining after being told to leave; the former would include ICE or police facilities and courts, while the latter would include hotels or restaurants (which violent leftist dopes often enter and damage because they think ICE agents are staying there or dining there).

Don Lemon and the Morons (worst cover band ever, by the way) are in deep trouble, because they definitely trespassed in that church.  But they’ve been charged with the much more specific and serious FACE act and/or Klan act violations.

Two other crimes are also constantly in play during protests: resisting arrest (for those who are told they are being detained) and disobeying a lawful order (for virtually everyone, when told to get back, or get out of the way, or to stop assaulting our senses with your hideous ugliness).  Of the hundreds of protesters whose arrests I’ve seen on video, I can’t remember more than a small handful who didn’t resist arrest.  (Usually while screaming “I’m not resisting!” over and over, as they wriggle and struggle and fight with the cops.)    

Finally, I researched one legal issue that I haven’t seen discussed much in the media, and that is conspiracy.   The current wave of anti-ICE protests – just like the BLM and Antifa mass riots before them – have been characterized by extensive, sophisticated, coordinated planning.  Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people join various ICE watch groups, use Signal chat to collect intelligence about where ICE are staying, or eating, or carrying out raids and arrests, and then relay that information to a network of co-conspirators who show up and commit all of the crimes listed above.

This is a textbook example of a wide-ranging conspiracy, which one of the legal sources summarized this way: “Conspiracy: the multiplier that turns group activity into felony time.”

If only!  I’m not sure why Homan or anyone else in the Trump administration has not brought this up, but I hope that they start throwing resources at it, pronto.  Because as satisfying and proper as it is to start making mass and individual arrests and prosecutions of the useful idiot foot-soldiers in these protests, the biggest progress will be made when we start hitting the organizers and funders with huge criminal penalties.

Conspiracy violations are covered in a variety of US codes.  Section 372 deals with “conspiracy to impede or injure an officer by force, intimidation or threat,” and carries up to 6 years in prison. 

Section 371 covers coordinating to obstruct lawful government functions.  Examples would include communications such as, “We’re going to meet at X, track vehicles and physically stop transport,” and action such as participating in group chats with coordinated roles, and arranging pre-planned timing and movements.

Section 1071 describes harboring and helping someone evade government officers such as ICE agents (with a possible 1 to 5 years for each act), and Sections 2232 and 1519 deal with destroying property or evidence to prevent seizure, or giving “tip-offs” about ICE activity (up to 5 years) and “destroying/altering records” (up to 20 years).  

Though I’ve been following all of these protests (and the antifa and BLM protests) pretty closely, doing this research has opened my eyes on several issues I’d not realized:

1. The vast majority of the anti-ICE protesters and protest organizers have routinely been committing more crimes than I’d thought, both misdemeanors and felonies.  (There are probably a handful of protestors who have not been violating at least one of the crimes listed above, but they are the exception to the rule, and I’d be shocked if they were more than 1-2% of the protesters.)

2. Virtually all of the leftist talking points about these protests are false: 

  • The First Amendment does NOT permit protests that are not peaceful, and these aren’t.
  • The Supremacy Clause dictates that local politicians and citizens CANNOT legally declare their cities sanctuaries and ban ICE (or any federal agency). 
  • Our legitimate, democratically passed immigration laws clearly state that immigrating here illegally is a crime; there’s no such thing as a non-criminal, “undocumented,” “legal” illegal alien, and ALL illegals are subject to deportation. 
  • Very few asylum claims – and none of them that have been pursued outside of legal channels – are valid.
  • And no American law enforcement agencies or actions are in the same moral universe as the Gestapo, you lying, hypocritical jackasses!

3. I had no idea how many legal weapons there are in our arsenal; we can use any of several dozen laws to charge and convict the protesters and their leaders.

As much as I’d love to see us charge thousands (or tens of thousands?) of protesters with thousands of crimes, and try all of them, that is logistically impractical.  It would take many years and tie up half our legal system, and to the extent that we’d need to depend on some local (and left-biased) judges and juries, we’d likely see a wave of destructive jury nullification verdicts.

We’ll be better off focusing on the leaders, and the worst of the bad actors among the protesters – maybe 100-150 of them – and go after them on federal charges, using the same intensity with which the Democrats pursued every Midwestern grannie who walked through the capitol on January 6th, took a selfie, and peacefully left. 

The reason the Antifa and BLM protests spread and grew into riots in 2020 – and the anti-ICE agitators have metastasized and escalated over the last year – is that almost nobody has been punished.  So we need to send a message, and make an example of these people “pour encourager les autres,” as the French say. 

If we can legally and morally put the worst 150 through what the Democrats illegitimately put the peaceful J6ers (not the brawlers) through – harassing them, bankrupting them, and sending them to jail for at least a few years – that would establish a powerful deterrent.

Especially if we focused on the conspiracy angle. These coordinated groups seem to be perfect targets for a RICO approach, and after the first couple of street-level and then coordinator-level creeps went down, we’d probably be able to flip some to use against the commie Colombos who were the bosses.  (Boom!  Mafia-Leftist alliterative analogies for $1000, Alex.) (We would also have accepted “the bolshevik Bonannos,” or the “leftist Luccheses.”)  

The one thing we can’t do is back off and let the insurrectionist protesters think they’ve won something.  I don’t think Homan will let that happen, but I’m a little concerned that the draw-down of agents from MN might be premature, especially if Small Frey and Jazz Hands start crowing about it.

I understand political realities, and I know that we can’t just go Roman on the protesters, as would be my own arch-conservative desire. 

But if we can’t go Roman, we should still be able to at least go Homan on their arses.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Part 2: The Laws that Determine the Legitimacy of Deporting “Non-Criminal” Illegals (posted 2/5/26)

Yesterday I gave a brief overview of the national laws (the Constitution and our various immigration laws) that should determine issues such as sanctuary jurisdictions and the types of protests that are legal and those that aren’t. 

Today I’m going to delineate the propriety of deporting illegals who have committed no crimes other than immigration-related offenses.

One constant refrain from well-meaning lefties (and not-so-well-meaning ones) is that “undocumented” aliens who commit no crimes unrelated to immigration are not criminals, and that Trump lied when he promised to deport ONLY the “worst of the worst” who commit other, non-immigration related crimes.

Taking the second point first, they are either mistaken or lying.  Because while Trump and many other administration figures have repeatedly said that they are prioritizing and going after the worst first – which is pragmatic and wise – they’ve also repeatedly said that everybody who is here illegally has to go back to their home countries. 

To the extent that other illegals get caught up in raids or arrests that target the doubly-criminal ones, that was not the immediate intent, but it’s also fair and justified.

Which leaves us with the assertion that entering the country illegally is not a crime.  (I think it was the scholar and Mensa member AOC who said that to Tom Homan in a congressional hearing.  And promptly got her juicy booty smacked with facts, rhetorically speaking.) (Also, her words, not mine.)

Of course, coming here illegally – by coming in anywhere but at a designated port of entry, or with fraudulent documents, etc. – is a crime, under 18 U.S.C. 1325.  Specifically, it is a federal misdemeanor, which is punishable by a fine of up to $250 and a maximum sentence of 6 months in jail, followed by deportation.  (In the vast majority of cases, the illegal immigrant has usually just been detained/jailed for long enough to deport him, since that is logistically much easier and quicker.)  If anyone re-enters after having once been deported, their violation is then raised to a felony.

So no, there are no “non-criminal” “undocumented” illegal aliens, no matter how many times a pink-haired zealot screams that at an ICE agent, or on TikTok, or at the sky.

A common refrain is that illegals who get caught and then claim asylum in America are here legally.  This is also untrue in the vast majority of cases.

There is a legal process for claiming asylum.  Although they are supposed to make that claim at a designated port of entry when they arrive, illegals can also make that request (using form I-589) after they’ve come in, though they MUST do so within a year of their illegal entry.  In other words, in the tens of thousands of cases in which an illegal who has been here longer than one year (and in many cases, for decades) gets caught and THEN claims asylum, those claims are illegitimate, and the immigrant is subject to immediate deportation.

The Biden administration, as part of their “Flood the Nation with Illegal Democrat Voters” program, created the CBP One app to allow every illegal in the country to claim asylum.  But the reality is that the vast majority of asylum claims are unsuccessful, since they require that the immigrant was being persecuted in their home country for one of five specific reasons (race, religion, etc.).  Those are very hard to prove, and in fact are almost never successful.

(Biden added an extra layer of slimy duplicity to the system through the CBP One dodge. Instead of the traditional process of meeting with the asylum seeker immediately and then making a decision promptly, Biden routinely gave CBP One users an appointment for anywhere from three to five years or more in the future, and then waved them in. 

Of course the Dems knew that almost no illegals would ever show up for those appointments.  And they didn’t want them to.  They  allowed them to melt into the country and stay for years, after which a future Dem administration (and some spineless RINOs) would weep over the cruelty of deporting people who had been here for years, and then grant a blanket amnesty.  We didn’t hate the Biden administration enough.)    

Ironically, one of the few groups who have a bulletproof case for asylee status in recent years is the small number of white South Africans who applied after suffering a wave of vicious criminal attacks because of the color of their skin.  This has been clearly documented through many recordings of the racist songs (“Kill the Boer!  Kill the [white] farmer!”) at political rallies of the racist majority government, and in the official, written policies of that government.

And boy was it fun to watch the furious apoplexy of the whitey-hating leftist American radicals when those few South Africans were allowed into America!

Back to asylum claims: the reality – which everyone knows but which the left will go to great lengths to avoid admitting – is that the vast majority of asylum claims are invalid.  Because the vast majority of immigrants want to come here because this is a wealthy country that offers many opportunities and benefits, which can be gained by either pursuing your own dreams through hard work and grit, or by living on our suicidally generous welfare benefits, which were never intended to go to foreigners.    

Both are understandable motivations, but neither are legal reasons to receive asylum.

I sympathize with the former group and have no hard feelings toward them, even though they still need to go home, and then apply for legal, vetted entry, which is neither an entitlement nor a guarantee.  But I have contempt for the second group, and would like to see them immediately tossed out of the country like they were low-down four-flushers being tossed out of swinging saloon doors by John Wayne.

Having said all that, the constant claims that “the ‘non-criminal’ ‘undocumented’ have broken no laws except for their illegal entry” are in reality never true.  Because once you come here illegally (again, a misdemeanor that makes you legally deportable by itself), you can’t avoid committing further and repeated crimes.  

In fact, most of the basic aspects of modern life – buying a home, driving, and working – are criminal acts when done by illegals.

Legal foreign residents can own a home in America (as they can’t in most other countries), but quasi-legal or temporarily legal foreigners (such as asylum seekers, green card holders and DACA recipients) have to wait to close on a house or mortgage until their claims are legally granted.  But illegals cannot get a mortgage for a house, and if they attempted to buy with cash, the source of that money would have to be legally vetted by the government. 

In other words, no Kilmars – i.e. “Maryland dads” hoping to buy with cash from their gang activities and human and drug smuggling – can legally buy a home in America.   

If illegals drive (which most do), they are committing multiple other crimes in the process.  What do cops always ask for when they pull you over?  License, registration and proof of insurance.  

In most states you can’t get a driver’s license if you’re here illegally.  Even if you’re in a blue state which shadily gives you a license, most other states don’t recognize it, so you’ll be driving without a license if you drive in any of those states.  (And there are tons of cases of blue states fraudulently giving non-English-speaking illegals drivers licenses and even CDLs, only to have them injure or kill Americans on the highways of all of our states.)

You also can’t legally buy and register a car if you’re here illegally in most states.  And of course if you don’t legally own it and can’t register it, then you can’t insure it either.  So any illegal who drives is almost certainly committing at least 3 additional crimes. Plus, if you’re ever caught speeding, that’s usually just a traffic infraction, but that escalates when you add no license, insurance or registration. 

If illegals work here, they are either working on a stolen or fraudulent social security number (which are crimes), or working under the table.  The latter involves several crimes, including tax evasion, facilitating non-payment of tax by their employers, and violating other legal requirements such as getting proper permits, licensing, submitting to proper inspections regarding safety, cleanliness and etc.

If they don’t work, they are exactly the kind of financial burden on our society that our legal immigration system was designed to exclude.  But they are also almost certainly either committing crimes to make money to survive on, or else illegally collecting various forms of welfare, such as housing benefits, SNAP benefits, Medicaid and/or free health care, (plus cash benefits in many blue states) – all of which are at least misdemeanors, often bumped up to felonies when committed in conjunction with other violations/crimes. 

Some illegals do work by getting an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) in lieu of a social security number (which they cannot legally get). But that is a gray area at best, and widely abused.  The IRS created the ITIN in 1996, without any congressional legislation or executive branch approval, which doesn’t seem proper, considering how much illegal behavior the ITIN facilitates.

It was supposedly intended “to address the need for tax compliance among individuals who do not have a valid Social Security number,” specifically “foreign nationals and other individuals who are not eligible for a SSN.”  I can’t blame the illegals for taking this option, but I can blame our federal government, for setting up a greedy and unfair way to profit from illegals, while creating a magnet to draw more of them here.

Unexpectedly!

The ITIN collects millions in social security-esque taxes from illegals, without giving them any entitlement to social security benefits later.  Lefties often complain about the unfairness of this situation, and as much as it pains me, I have to agree with them, up to a point. 

That point is the part where I say, “If illegals think the ITIN exploits them, there’s an easy way to fix that.  [begin Kinison filter] STOP BREAKING OUR IMMIGRATION LAWS AND GO BACK TO YOUR OWN COUNTRY! OH!  OHHHHHH!!! [end Kinison filter]    

Regardless of the initial reasons for creating the ITIN, it has now become an illegal-enabling disaster and an unethical governmental money grab, and should be drastically reformed. 

There is a legitimate reason for taxing foreigners who are here and working legally, and they should be required to pay the same income, sales and other taxes that citizens pay.  It also makes sense to subject them to an additional tax that would pay for their use of our emergency medical care, educational system etc. – as long as they are here and working her legally. 

But there is NO reason to give ITINs to illegals, thus helping them to circumvent and flout our immigration and employment laws.

Tomorrow in part 3, I’ll analyze the legality (or illegality) of the tactics most commonly employed by anti-ICE protesters.

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