The Curley Effect is Ravaging California (posted 5/18/26)

As a public service to readers of this site, today I’m doing another installment of “Political Terms Everyone Should Know, with Martin.”  

This idea arose partly because of my well-known, public-spirited, all-around-great-guyness, and partly because I am still learning new things that I would like to share. 

For example, I recently discovered that there have been at least 11 World Wars so far.  Yeah.  Ilhan Omar taught me that.  She also taught me that Somalis played many crucial roles in building this country.

Such as when Ahmed Washington crossed the Delaware to set up some Learing Centers and then immediately start billing the Continental Congress for tutoring services to non-existent little jihadi patriots.  Or when Abdi Revere made his famous midnight ride, to warn the Learing Center fraudsters that ICE and Nick Shirley were headed their way for a surprise raid.       

Okay, it’s Monday morning, so I had to start with a little levity.  But I really have been learning actual, interesting political concepts lately.  On Friday I introduced the concept of “clock setting,” which refers to the idea that the time you choose as the start of a series of political events makes a huge difference.

For example, the Dems who attempted the corrupt gerrymandering of purple-state Virginia’s map to produce a 10-1 deep blue majority would appear to be unethical partisan hacks.  But they set their clock to start when Texas Republicans had gerrymandered their state earlier, which made it seem like the VA Dems were just fairly responding to Texas’ original offense. 

But then I pointed out that in the years leading up to 2026, Democrats all over the country had already gerrymandered blue states very heavily.  Which set the clock back earlier, giving an apparent rhetorical advantage to the GOP. 

In the last several days, I learned another new political term, and it’s one that has answered a very vexing and long-term question I’ve had over the last several decades.  It looks like the Dems have intentionally been destroying the big blue cities they govern, and I couldn’t understand why they’d do that.

They must know that if they don’t prosecute crime, give untouchable teachers’ unions free reign, and raise taxes on the most productive citizens, crime will skyrocket, educational quality will plummet, and the most intelligent and productive citizens will flee the city.  What are they thinking?

I considered that it might be stupidity, or it might be total disdain for the normies who make a city work, both of which are pretty common in single-party Democrat cities.  But the fact that those strategies are clearly degrading public services and quality of life would seem to be suicidal for a bunch of pols who are famously concerned with their own welfare above all else.

But now I have an answer: The Curley Effect!

Named after Boston’s horrible Mayor James Michael Curley (1874-1958), who served four terms as mayor between 1914-1950, the term describes a kind of “politics of exclusion.”  Curley combined class warfare and corrupt patronage schemes to demonize and squeeze money out of the richer and more productive Bostonians so that they would leave the city, while simultaneously redistributing the spoils – in the form of patronage jobs, fake jobs and various welfare benefits – to his poor Irish constituency.

While this caused stagnation, decay and population flight from the city, it made Curley more popular with his supporters.  Each productive citizen who left was one less vote against Curley, and thus a net vote for him.  So the worse things got in Boston, the better things got for Curley.

Curley’s Boston experienced the kind of “urban doom loop” now being seen in Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and New York City. 

And LA.  Good lord, LA!

Statistically speaking, it looks like California voters will probably re-elect Karen Bass as LA Mayor and elect either Xavier Becerra or Tom Steyer as Governor of CA.  This while there are two very reasonable and competent GOP candidates in those races – Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton, respectively.   And being “reasonable and competent” puts any candidate about three standard deviations above any of the hapless Democrats in those races.

But the Curley Effect has been doing its corrosive work in California for decades now, and the state has been bleeding successful, sane and productive citizens – presumptively GOP voters all – while drawing in the opposite. 

The debates have been a humiliating bloodbath for the Dems, so much so that if they were fights, they’d have stopped them, and in a sane world, the Dems would have quit mid-debate and slunk away in shame, never to be heard from again.

But this isn’t a sane world.  It’s California.  So even though every reasonable observer agrees that Hilton and Pratt have been wiping the floor with their opponents, the Curley-adjacent Dems are still at least slight favorites to win. 

I’m so jaded and tech-defective that some of the campaign outings have seemed like AI deep fakes, or Babylon Bee parodies.  I’ll give you two examples.

A week ago, a truly insane ad ran against Spencer Pratt.  When I first saw it I thought it must be a joke.  But no!  It was a real ad, from the AFL-CIO.  It features a parodic, ominous voice-over style we all recognize from sleazy, third-rate attack ads.  (“Congressman Jackson wants to allow Satanists to use your tax dollars to pay for sexual assaults on your house pets.  Vote for Congressman Williams, and tell Congressman Jackson to keep his Satanist buddies’ hands off your schnauzer!”  Paid for by Williams Committee for Stopping Satanist Dog Assaulters.)

This is a real transcript of the ad, which I swear I am not making up.  But I’ve added my own bracketed suggestions of what a typical CA citizen might think, in reaction to each line.

 “Spencer Pratt opposes using taxpayer money to build brand new houses for our unhoused neighbors…”

[What?!  You mean “smelly schizophrenic drug users?” I can’t even afford the sh*tbox I’m renting for $4K per month, and now I’ve gotta buy new houses for smelly schizophrenic dopers?]

“…saying ‘it’s time for the homeless to get help or get out!”

[YES!  I don’t even need the “get help” – just “get out!”  Preach it, Pratt-man!]

“Pratt thinks LA needs thousands more police officers rather than more social workers.”

[You mean actual cops, who might be able to shoot a tatted-up MS-13 member before he cuts my head off with a machete?  Instead of a blue-haired, nose-ringed liberal arts grad who can lecture me on the cultural significance of a Spanish murder-ballad set to jarringly upbeat ranchero music while a tatted-up MS-13 member methodically saws my head off with a machete?!]

“…and he thinks public employee unions should have less power, not more.”

[So maybe Rowdy Randy Weingarten can keep my kid’s schools closed for 7 years instead of 2 years, the next time the sniffles come around?]

“LA is on the right track, and needs to stay the course.”

[On the right track?!  The RIGHT TRACK?!!  If this is the right track, I’d hate to see the wrong track!  Oh, I get it.  The wrong track is Gavin’s $10 trillion super train that should be finished in time for my great grandson’s high school graduation in 2085.  GTFO, Democrats!] 

Good lord.  That’s an actual ad!   Pratt might have a chance after all.

But Karen Bass isn’t content to let the AFL-CIO speak for her.  She’s got her own voice, and her own thoughts.  And boy are they insane!

Here’s Bass on a matter of crucial public interest: the dental appearance of meth users.  Once again, I swear I’m not making this up.

In an interview on May 12th, the actual Karen Bass said these actual words into a microphone, which she knew was on:

“How many people who are unhoused that you meet have no teeth at all?  Why?  Because meth rots your teeth.  You can’t succeed without teeth!  So there needs to be comprehensive health care provided to them.”     

Holy cats.  Where does one begin?

How about here: So you don’t think someone can succeed without teeth, Karen?  Well have you ever heard of a little guy I like to call…George freakin’ WASHINGTON?!  That guy had dentures made of ivory, animal teeth and various cabinet-grade hardwoods, and all he did was lead the best damn country in the world! 

Also, when considering all of the hardships that typically accompany long-term meth fandom, do you really think that unsightly teeth ranks anywhere in the top 10?  Where would you position that, Karen?  Right above “gangrenous open wounds go septic,” two up from “the voices in my head say to punch the MS-13 member with the bloody machete right in the face,” and right below “fruit-fly lifespan?”

Until now, I’ve always thought that the stupidest possible idea involving giving perks to criminals was stocking prisons with complete weight sets, so that when the predatory recidivists get out, they’ll all be prison ripped. 

But that was before I witnessed the wisdom of the Bass-master, and her Mensa-level brainstorm to equip our meth-fueled delusionaries with a full set of choppers.  Because until now, the worst they could do to us was defecate on us, jab us with a dirty syringe loaded with a bouillabaisse of toxic infectiousness, or sic their tragically abused pit bull mixes at us when we’ve let our guard down.

But now they can bite our faces off too, with teeth that we pay for.

Well done, Los Angelenos!

All I can say is that if California voters elect any of these Dems as Governor or LA Mayor, they’ll be doubling down on Curley. 

And if God doesn’t then send a cleansing cavalcade of fires, floods, earthquakes and locusts, He is going to owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.  And possibly Pompei, Hiroshima and Mogadishu, too.

Que Mala/ Crockett, ’28!

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Fair Arguments and Clock Setting (posted 5/15/26)

I don’t know if it’s a placebo effect, but in the week since I found out that my magic body is absorbing a part of a broken spinal disc and I might not have to have surgery after all, I’m feeling better every day.   And with my returning health has come the ability to write more; I’ve already got enough good topics for three columns next week.

First up, though, regular readers know that I have an ongoing, long-term discussion and debate on all things political with a good old lefty friend of mine.  This week he raised the question of the gerrymanders, expressing the opinion that SCOTUS and the Virginia state supreme court wrongly made it easier for the GOP to gerrymander in their favor, and harder for the Democrats to do the same.

Of course I explained – using logic, facts and wit – that he was 180 degrees wrong.  Inexplicably, he has not yet rushed to agree with me.  But after our most recent exchange, I came across a very good piece on gerrymandering on the American Thinker website.  It’s written by Jeremy Egerer, and titled, “The Real Problem with Gerrymandering.” 

My take on the subject has been that it’s a sleazy process, but in the real world, it’s hard to imagine a more moral system replacing it.  Because after every census, districts have to be re-drawn, and the party with a majority of the legislature naturally does the re-drawing.  And it’s more than we can hope for to ask fellow fallen humans to redistrict perfectly fairly, without giving at least some advantage to their party. 

But Egerer makes an impassioned plea to the better angels of our nature, warning that gerrymandering is clearly cheating, and will almost certainly result in a race to the bottom, with increasingly draconian cheating that ends in an even more polarized and low-trust society than we have today.  We’re on that path now, for sure. 

Egerer points out that taking many voting integrity measures – requiring ID, counting only citizens in the Census, getting rid of massive mail-in and ballot harvesting – would help a lot. He also called for each state to create bi-partisan commissions to redistrict in a fair way.  I’m cynical enough to see that as unlikely – I’ve rarely seen a “bipartisan commission” that didn’t devolve into an exercise in blame-shifting or a return to partisan bickering.  On the other hand, the article points out that both CA and VA had recently created just such a commission, and in both cases the results were maps that were much fairer than you’d expect.

Of course, in the last 6 months both of those states blew those maps up, and pushed through a partisan gerrymander that was as abusive and corrupt as you’d expect from hacks like Newsom and Spanberger.  So…yeah.

However, the article also introduced me to a term that I’ve never heard before, but which I’ll probably be using a lot in the future: “clock setting.”  It’s the tendency of most people in arguments to tell the story beginning at the point that makes them look the best.  Example:  Two guys in a bar are arguing about something, and things get heated enough that Guy A insults Guy B’s mother; then Guy B throws his drink in Guy A’s face; then Guy A punches Guy B. 

And yada yada yada, they both end up in the hospital.

Ask Guy A what started the fight, and he says it started when Guy B threw his drink in his face.  Ask Guy B the same thing, and he’ll either say that the fight started when Guy A insulted his mother, or when Guy A punched him.  Each guy “sets the clock” (i.e. starts the story) in a way that makes him look like the aggrieved party, and the good guy.

The same thing happens in arguments about war and politics.  Pro Hamasniks wail that the evil Jews started genociding them on 10/8/23.  (Never mind that that’s utter BS, since the IDF has killed by far the lowest ratio of civilians to combatants in the history of warfare, modern or ancient.) In other words, Hamas fans set their clock right AFTER hundreds of evil Hamas thugs raided into Israel, tortured, raped and slaughtered 1200 unarmed civilians, and took hundreds more as hostages to be brutalized and often killed. 

And THEN the Jews started being mean to Hamas for no reason!  

And when the Jews tell the stories of their battles with the hostile surrounding countries, they similarly start their stories at the point when jihadis attacked them, without all of the preliminaries from the previous years/decades/centuries/millenia.

Similarly, both sides of the gerrymandering debate conveniently set their clock/start their story so as to make themselves the retaliators rather than the instigators.  Even such wise gentlemen as my lefty friend and I (!) did the same thing in our emails. 

He took the Dem line that VA was righteously responding to TX’s prior action (which was hideously unjust), and I gathered the stats from five blue states and five red states to argue that prior to this year, the Dems had much more unfairly gerrymandered than the GOP had, and thus the recent red state gerrymanders were just leveling the playing field against the Dems, who cheated first, and cheated way more (disenfranchising  22% of conservatives on average, compared to the GOP disenfranchising 11% of libs on average). 

Okay, of course I made the better argument, and I’ve got truth, justice and the American Way on my side.  Expectedly!

But I think we can all profit from remembering the concept of clock setting.  It can help us consider an argument in a more full and fair context, and it can also reveal to us the bias and ideological blind spots in our own arguments.  Maybe most crucially, it might also help us recognize that at some point we need to agree to re-set the clock, so that old arguments and grudges can’t continue to poison the present and future. 

For example, I think many of our racial tensions arise from wildly different times to set the clock.  The most vitriolic black activists start the clock during Jim Crow, or before the Civil War, or even – for the most historically illiterate, who can be conned by a huckster like Nikole Hannah-Jones – in 1619.  Most conservatives tend to start the clock around the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, since those ended institutional discrimination, and happened before most Americans living today became adults, if they were even born by then.

Starting the clock too long ago is always going to be a hard sell, and an impediment to society-wide buy-in.  For black activists to ever be paid reparations for slavery, they’re going to have to convince millions of people whose ancestors arrived in America after slavery had already been abolished that they should pay people whose great-great-grandparents came of age after slavery.

Spoiler alert: that is never going to happen.

However, often the best counter-move against someone setting the clock back very far is to set it back even farther.  So when some condescending grievance study major lectures us about how we stole some land on the Eastern seaboard from the Iroquois and must give it back, we can point out that the Iroquois stole it from the Potawatomi, who stole it from the Shawnee, all the way back to the prehistoric Mound Builders. 

So no, Elizabeth Warren, you can’t claim Boston, you phony old cracker! 

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

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Three Instructive Tales (posted 5/11/26)

This will be a column of random observations that I’ve gathered over the last week or so, in between various distractions, including learning that my body is engaged in absorbing a broken-off piece of my own spine. (That sentence will make more sense if you read my short column from yesterday.)

These observations fall under the umbrella of “a lot of mainstream Democrats have apparently lost their minds lately.” Exhibit A would be the way they’ve gotten behind Graham Platner in the Maine race. Sure, he loves Hamas, hates Jews, and is a far-lefty. But that’s par for the course, and is not a problem for too many Dem voters.

The detail about Platner that surprised even me is the extent to which his having a Nazi tattoo has not been a problem for him! After years of falsely claiming that every conservative voter is a Nazi — and getting hysterical about that totally non-existent issue – the Dems chose a guy who actually branded himself as a Nazi. Permanently. On his skin!

And I’m not talking about a Nazi tattoo like the tattoos on Pete Hegseth, which the Left pretended were Nazi tattoos. (Spoiler alert: they were both traditional Christian tattoos, and had as much to do with Nazism as Liz Warren has to do with American Indians.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

No, Platner’s death’s head ink is a specific, famous iconic image worn by the SS (the elite group of Nazi fighters in World War Eleven). And while many of his supporters desperately accepted his weak claim that he had no idea of his tat’s origin, that lie fell apart when several witnesses reported that Platner had proudly invited them to see his “totenkopf,” which is the actual German name for the SS “death’s head” image.

It also didn’t help that Platner kept the tattoo for many years…right up until he decided to run for high office. Which is not something that someone who sincerely regretted getting a tattoo many years ago would do.

The Democrats don’t care. If he could win a Senate seat for their side, they wouldn’t mind if he had “Heil Hitler” tattooed on his neck, like Dewey Crowe on Justified. (Best tv series ever!) They’d just have a PR team remind him to wear button-up collars when he’s on camera.

Whenever I see Platner, I think of the end of Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. After the murderous Nazi Hans Landa has made a deal to betray the Germans in exchange for a kind of witness protection in America, Brad Pitt’s character Aldo Raine takes him into custody.

In Raine’s famous final speech,he makes clear that he “can’t abide” the fact that Landa will take off his Nazi uniform and escape consequences for his past. So Raine says, “I’m gonna give you something that you can’t take off,” and carves a swastika into his forehead.

Am I saying that Platner should have a swastika carved into his forehead? In the words of Que Mala, “We should have that conversation.”

Okay, just kidding. But I also can’t abide that the Dems’ self-serving venality might allow him to escape the consequences of his creepy past.

Can we at least force him to wear an SS cap during debates and public appearances, just so that even the most checked-out voters can be reminded of who he is?

Speaking of creepy Aryan leftists, I loved seeing Liz Warren humiliate herself over the sudden bankruptcy announcement by Spirit Airlines. Of course, she blamed the bankruptcy on Trump.

Unexpectedly!

Higher fuel prices caused by the Iran war certainly didn’t help Spirit. But as usual, history and facts are not Lizzie’s friends. Because Spirit had been on the verge of bankruptcy twice in recent years, before Trump won his first game of Whack-a-Mullah.

Most importantly, Spirit was about to merge with Jet Blue two years ago in a move that could have saved them, when the Biden administration stepped in and stopped the deal. Grandma Squanto was one of the prime cheerleaders for the interference. She called the government’s intervention “a Biden win for flyers,” since the merger “would have led to fewer flights and higher fares.”

Whitey Wampanoag truly speaks with forked tongue. Because you know what REALLY leads to fewer flights? (Kinison filter begin) AN AIRLINE THAT GOES OUT OF BUSINESS! OH!! OHHHHHH!! (Kinison filter end)

But still Warren finds a way to blame Trump for Biden’s decision, which she celebrated.

She’s so shameless, her fake Indian name should be “Running Bare.”

Finally, as regular readers might know, I am a Midwesterner by birth, and I still have a fondness for that part of the country. Most Midwesterners are sensible people; most are conservatives, and blessedly free from the political manias that afflict both coasts. There are still a lot of Democrats there, but they tend to be the old-school types: they might like unions, and they vote blue because their parents and grandparents did. But they don’t think boys can become girls, or that communism is a good thing, or that America is a racist, bigoted hell hole.

Unfortunately, there are exceptions. Plenty of corrupt, crime-ridden blue cities mar the plains (I’m looking at you, Chicago), and plenty of Dem pols still make a living off of exploiting the gullible and dim (I’m looking at you, JumBo Pritzker). And there are some far-left, hate-driven whackos, too.

Because: fallen human nature.

Which brings me to Minocqua Brewing Company, of Minocqua, Wisconsin. It is owned by a malicious leftist named Kirk Bangstad, whose TDS is such that he has posted a long-standing promise to serve free beer on the day that President Trump dies.

The day after yet another violent leftist tried to kill the president at the WH correspondents’ dinner, Bangstad doubled down on evil, posting, “Well, we almost got #freebeerday.” After bemoaning the idea that a member of the “Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship,” he was also open to another explanation common to the mouth-breathing conspiracy theorists, i.e. that Trump had faked an assassination attempt to get positive press coverage.

But either way, he’s not the type given to any moral self-reflection. “Regardless, we stand at the ready to pour free beer the day it happens.”

I don’t think there’s much to say about such a person, other than I hope that all good people shun his execrable business, so that it goes belly-up as soon as possible. And then that he has a dark night of the soul that leads to his remorse and repentance.

Already, though, one useful moral lesson has been taught by the Minocqua Moron. Because a man named Brian Kellar took a new job as a senior vice president for an upper-Midwest health system at the end of March. He apparently found Bangstad’s political wickedness attractive, because he bought one of their “FDT” t-shirts touting the pro-assassination beer giveaway.

And then – because nothing says “senior management material” like moving to an area where most people voted for a president and then proudly publicizing your desire that that president be murdered – he posted pictures of himself wearing it on his social media and Bangstad’s hateful homepage.

Annnnnddddd… Kellar got canned from his new, high-profile job, before he could even get settled in to his fancy office. Thus proving the ancient maxim, “When first thou FA, then shalt thou FO.”

Here endeth today’s lesson.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Personal Update (posted 5/10/26)

I’ll post a regular column tomorrow, but I’ve got a short personal post today. 

Regular readers will remember that I’ve had a really painful pinched nerve in my neck that I’ve been trying to get figured out over the last two months.  After a bunch of tests and physical therapy, I was finally able to get a clean MRI, and then see a surgeon on Friday. 

He told me that a substantial piece of one of my spinal discs has broken off – the one between C6 and C7, for those spinal anatomy fans out there – and was lying against the nerve that travels across the back and down my left arm.  He described the surgical option for removing it, and it was not the worst-case scenario, which would have involved going in from the front through the neck, and fusing two vertebrae.  He said that this chunk could be accessed from the back of my neck, and if the surgery goes well, I wouldn’t need a fusion.

Because he mentioned surgery as an option, I asked him what the other option would be.  He said that because I’ve made a lot of progress with PT – my pain is much less intense and constant than it was in March, and I’ve been able to sleep much better – I could just continue that.  Then he said, “Of course, absorption would continue, and you might be able to avoid surgery.”

My wife and I looked at each other, and I said, “Come again?  Absorption?”

And he explained that my body will break down and absorb the broken-off piece of disc.  As if that’s something that everybody knows.  Like, your blood circulates, your pupils dilate in light, and YOUR BODY CAN EAT YOUR OWN BROKEN SPINE PARTS!  OH! OHHHHHH!!

Sorry.  I can’t help slipping into Sam Kinison mode when I hear something like that. 

I also slipped into a little Forrest Gump, too.  I asked the doctor, “Do you mean I have a magic body?!”  And my wife elbowed me in the ribs, and the doctor patiently explained that that’s something that all human bodies can do. 

Okay, it didn’t happen exactly like that.  And I did chastise the doc that maybe he might want to lead with the news that my body can absorb dysfunctional parts of itself.  But that was the gist of it. 

So I’ve got another appointment six weeks from now with the surgeon.  In the meantime, I’m continuing PT and hopefully continuing my progress, and if all goes well, my magic body will rid me of this troublesome broken spinal disc over the next 6 months or so.  And I won’t have to undergo a spinal surgery that I had not been looking forward to! 

Thanks everybody, for your prayers and questions about how I’ve been doing.  And as long as I’m making a personal post, I should mention that today is my wife’s birthday, on Mother’s Day.

I met her almost 40 years ago, when she was a 21-year-old slip of a girl, and now she looks like she’s 29 or so.  She’s been a great mom and an excellent wife, and she gave birth to two great daughters, which is an amazing magic trick on par with absorbing one’s own defective spine. 

I mean, it’s not a competition or anything.  But I think she’s winning.

As am I!

So happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers who are reading this, and happy birthday to my Scandinavian Smokeshow!  

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More Great News on Other Fronts (posted 5/4/26)

On Friday I wrote about all the good things that have been happening in our courts lately. But several other groups of feel-good stories are happening, the first of which revolve around bad people doing bad things, and reaping what they sow.

For example, three members of an ultra-creepy, bullying family in Minneapolis were behaving like thuggish creeps at an anti-ICE coven meeting — er, protest — last month. Turning Point USA reporter Savanah Hernandez was reporting on the Satanic goings on, so the unholy trio – dad Christopher Ostroushko, mom Deyanna and daughter Paige – attacked her.

The daughter blasted away with a whistle inches from Hernandez’s ears, while a mob began shoving and hitting her, knocking her to the ground and screaming obscenities. Conveniently, video showed all three Ostroushkos at the front of the pack, doing the assaulting.

Or, as the left calls it, “peacefully protesting.”

In past years, these kind of crimes happened in great numbers in lawless blue cities and states – you may remember the months of antifa riots, BLM riots, Michael Brown riots, George Floyd riots, etc. – and the perpetrators were generally given slaps on the wrist, in the rare case that they faced any consequences at all.

But this time, the FBI opened an investigation within hours of the videos surfacing, and last Wednesday a grand jury handed down indictments against all three on a variety of charges. And their reactions were textbook violent lefty cry-bully: they lied their arses off, and whined that they are the real victims.

Dad – a bald guy with a permanent sneer which makes him look like a large, angry thumb — said that he was only defending his wife and daughter, and claimed that Hernandez was the aggressive one that day. You know, the way that a lone, petite woman will often become very aggressive when surrounded by a frothing mob of dozens of screaming leftists. It’s a tale as old as time.

He said, with a straight thumb-face, “We are absolutely not violent people. In fact, we tend to shy away from it.”

Unfortunately for him, the video showed the opposite. So now dad is complaining about the “non-stop backlash” his family has experience since being smeared by that lying video; they’ve gotten hundreds of calls, texts and social media messages every day, and they’ve lost their jobs.

It’s gotten so bad that he says, “It’s a little overwhelming and makes me second-guess even living in this country, to be honest with you.”

To which the only compassionate response has to be, “HA! HA HA! HAHAHAHAHA!!”

I hope his family will stay in this country…for long enough to serve a federal sentence. After which they should definitely get the hell out.

Speaking of terrible people unexpectedly facing accountability, six thugs who were peacefully protesting in LA last year – by trapping cops in a patrol car under an overpass and homicidally raining rocks and bricks down on it – just pled guilty to a raft of federal charges.

They had the stunned and stupid looks on their faces that you’d expect to see on the faces of stupid people who had been watching hundreds of thousands of leftist co-religionists get away with similar crimes for years, and are only now realizing that the Cadaver in Chief has been replaced by the Orange Man.

And Orange-y don’t play.

I imagine the same realization started sinking in for many in the Somali community as a series of coordinated raids were carried out on the Learing Center and dozens of other pirate-adjacent fraud centers throughout Minnesota last week. And for hundreds of others in LA, where dozens of phony hospice-care, Medicaid-draining scams were apparently operating out of every strip mall, store-front, outhouse and dog house within a 50-mile radius.

After years of watching a soul-crushing parade of open, systematic flouting of the law in blue cities from coast to coast, it is SO refreshing to see a wave of accountability starting to sweep across the Augean Stables of corruption that Democrats – and corrupt Republicans too – have set up, and profited from!

The final group of stories that I hope will cheer you up this Monday morning revolve around the theme of dysfunctional, wrong-headed leftist policies collapsing in hugely satisfying ways.

Where better to start than in NYC, where Mamdani is 100 days in, and already his socialist promises are blowing up in his face on a daily basis? First the “warmth of collectivism” resulted in a bunch of homeless people (whom Mamdani had promised to allow to remain on the streets) freezing to death. Then the free buses had to be put on hold, because: duh! Then he announced the first “free” government grocery story will take three years to build, and will cost 10 times what a comparable Whole Foods or other grocery store would cost.

Then he made the creepy ad for tax day – the one where he walked up to the camera, tapped the glass and smirked, saying, “We’re taxing the rich!” and then announced a new tax on rich guys with unoccupied luxury apartments. He specifically called out billionaire investor Ken Griffin, whose apartment he stood in front of, so that the mobs with pitchforks will know where to meet for the lynching.

Annnnddddd… Griffin announced that he might not go ahead with a planned $6 billion NYC building project.

It’s all so stupid! During his time in New York, Griffin has paid the city around $3 billion ($2.3 billion in taxes, and $700 million in charitable giving), with all of the new jobs and downstream spending and tax revenue that goes along with that kind of economic activity. And Griffin had already moved himself and his company to Florida from another failing blue city (Chicago) in 2022.

All of which makes the optics of Mamdani’s gleeful stunt so perversely self-defeating. It’s telling that the smug leftist mantra is, “Tax the rich!” rather than, “Help the poor!” Because they are motivated by envy, and are clearly willing to hurt the poor, if doing so will allow them to hurt the rich.

Ironically, their policies only succeed at the former. Because Griffin – and many other financially successful people – clearly don’t need greedy leftist cities as much as those cities need them. As we can see from the capital and population flight from CA, NY and IL to red states in recent years.

Which brings us to Mamdani’s humiliating press conference last week, where he announced that NYC is in a catastrophic financial crisis. Unexpectedly!

NYC has a 3.88% income tax (added to NY state’s top income tax rate of 10.9%), and a 8.8% sales tax. The city’s budget for 2026 is $119.7 billion – more than the entire state budget of Florida! – and it is STILL not enough. Mamdani’s socialist schemes are going to require billions more from the state – a demand which even Kathy “Wicked Witch of Albany” Hochul is smart enough to greet with, “How about NO!” – as well as billions more in taxes from the richest New Yorkers.

When those people leave – in about 5…4…3… — that money is going to be gouged out of the middle class saps, many of whom voted for Mamdani, thus buying a ticket for FO-ville.

In other words, New York has a metastatic spending problem, which they’ve idiotically misdiagnosed as a revenue problem.

And that condition is similarly afflicting Seattle and their far-left, professional useless person mayor. Katie Wilson speaks like a teenage girl (multiple “likes” riddle every paragraph), and was still being financially supported by her parents when she was elected last November at age 43. She supports government-run grocery stores, and she recently walked picket lines with Starbucks workers and urged people to boycott the company. Coincidentally, Starbucks has been closing stores and shrinking their presence in Seattle, while they just announced a $200 million investment (and 2000 new jobs) in Tennessee.

So naturally, when Wilson was asked last month to respond to the flight of successful people from her city, her answer was AOC-esque: “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if – the ones that leave, like, bye.”

Yes. Two “likes” and one “super” in that deep answer, which was given (to cheers and laughter) at a local university. Because of course it was.

Overall, we have reason to be optimistic. In addition to the short-term edification to be gained from watching these leftist experiments work themselves out – if by “work themselves out” I mean “unravel” (which I do) – longer-term gains should follow.

Whether they’re in New York, LA, Chicago, Seattle or Portland, leftist economic plans don’t work. And they’re not going to start working now…so conservative alternatives should become more attractive as leftist failures compound.

Now if we can just manage to hold onto the House in the mid-terms…

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Great News on Many Fronts! (posted 5/1/26)

The last 48 hours have been full of more good political news than I know what to do with. In fact, so many good things are happening that I’m going to divide them into different categories, just to try to keep them all straight. I already know that I won’t be able to cover them all in this column, so I’m going to have more good news stories again on Monday.

My three categories are good judicial rulings, bad people reaping the consequences of their bad actions, and foolish leftist policies crashing and burning in hilariously entertaining ways.

*Today I’ll focus on the good judicial rulings.

Most of the solid rulings involve gerrymandering, as you might guess. I wrote a column on gerrymandering last week, and if you haven’t seen that one, please check it out. In it, I mentioned that gerrymandering is open to abuse, that both sides do it, and that while it always looks a little fishy, it might be the least unfair way to deal with delineating congressional districts.

Natural population shifts require that House district borders be re-drawn after every census, and the task of adjusting those borders has traditionally been controlled by the party that holds a majority in a state legislature. Asking that any party draw completely neutral borders – and in so doing, give up their legitimate advantage by virtue of their having won a majority –

“elections have consequences” has to be one of the oldest truisms in politics – is unrealistic, to say the least.

I proposed that a rough way to assess how close a party comes to a fair redistricting is to compare the percentage of the presidential vote the minority party got, compared to the percentage of the House seats they hold. I chose 5 red states and 5 blue states to compare, and showed that in the blue states the Dems gave themselves an average advantage of 22%, while in the average red states the GOP gave themselves an average advantage of 11%.

So while both parties give themselves an advantage when they control redistricting, the Dems are twice as bad about that as the GOP. Unexpectedly!

Which is why the Virginia redistricting vote two weeks ago was so obnoxious. About four years ago, purple-state Virginia voters had set up a largely non-partisan body to take redistricting out of one party’s hands, and the result was one of the fairest House district border maps in the country. The state went for Que Mala by about 5%, and their holding 6 out of 11 House seats mirrored that percentage.

Then, of course, after campaigning on a promise not to gerrymander, creepy Abigail Spanberger immediately proposed a ballot measure to gerrymander, and produced a very biased change to 10 Dem House seats to only 1 GOP seat. And then she and Hakeem “Dollar-Store Obama” Jeffries and many other House Dems gloated and taunted the GOP about their underhanded victory.

Annnnndddd…the first great judicial move of the week was made by a VA state judge, who declared the ballot issue unconstitutional. The Democrat VA state Supreme Court immediately took up the case, and in their questioning of the lawyers, seemed to indicate that they will likely reject the new, gerrymandered VA House map.

Sure, it was an obvious and easy call. There were two obvious legal requirements that the Dems violated, involving the timing and the method by which they rammed the matter through. But how many times have we seen partisan leftist judges and courts blatantly disregard the law in order to achieve their desired political outcome?

(Off the top of my head, in Roe v Wade SCOTUS “discovered” a constitutional right to abortion that nobody had seen in the previous 200 hundred years, and did the same thing re: gay marriage in Obergefell. Not to mention the 100 Obama or Biden judges who have ruled that Trump isn’t allowed to make executive decisions just because he’s the Chief Executive, and that

Biden could reverse all of Trump’s previous executive orders, but that Trump can’t reverse any of Biden’s or Obama’s executive orders, etc.)

So if the VA Supreme Court does reject the illegal Democrat gerrymander, they will have proved that a Democrat court can follow the law, even when it goes against the wishes of Democrat politicians. But even better, they will have set the table for Spanberger, Jeffries and the Dems to receive an epic, hilarious, karmic arse-whipping.

Because Ron DeSantis responded by LEGALLY achieving an equally lopsided gerrymander in Florida. But since he’s been the best damn governor in these United States, and has turned Florida from purple to deep red, he had already set the table with GOP majorities dominant enough that he could move quickly to put forward a redestricting bill, have it debated and passed by both houses, and then sign it into law himself.

All completely by the book, and in the span of four days!

Man, I hope that we can someday have that guy as our President!

But wait. There’s more! On Wednesday, SCOTUS handed down a long-awaited judgment on a case involving the Dems’ long-standing perversion of one aspect of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Sidebar: I think my view of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are typical of most conservatives’ views: they were good and necessary pieces of legislation. (They were passed with a higher percentage of GOP votes (80ish percent) than Dem votes (70ish), and only after the GOP could break a 70+ day filibuster by Democrats, by the way.) They ended the racist legal schemes of the Democrats’ Jim Crow laws.

Annndddd…then they were transformed by those same Democrats into an anti-white and anti-Asian discriminatory racial spoils system that inflamed racial tensions, and resulted in Dems winning more House seats than they legitimately would have, had that racial grift not been in place for the last 60 years.

And SCOTUS ended all of that on Wednesday! By ruling that two racially gerrymandered House districts in Louisiana had violated the non-discrimination rules in the Constitution, SCOTUS opened the door to other red states redrawing non-racist district borders. Initial analyses suggests that this ruling could possibly result in the GOP picking up 10-12 House seats.

It’s important to note that these gains would come NOT from the GOP reversing the anti-white racism of the Dems and beating them at their own racist game. The gains would arise from our finally stopping the Dems from cheating, and would thus require that all candidates more fairly and effectively appeal to all voters, regardless of race, if they want to win elections. Which is as it should be.

So of course the shameless Dems who were gloating about their gains from gerrymandering just one week ago, are now protesting about their losses from gerrymandering. Hilariously enough, they have fewer House seats to gain from their own

additional gerrymandering attempts, since they had already drastically gerrymandered CA, IL and other blue states years ago. Sweet, sweet irony!

In other good news, SCOTUS also slapped down a power-abusing Dem state official in deep-blue New Jersey for having illegitimately gone after prolife centers. NJ Attorney General Matthew Platkin had issued subpoenas in 2023 to pregnancy centers, trying to force them to turn over to the state all information about everybody who had ever donated to or supported their efforts – a clear attempt to bully those groups and intimidate and prevent citizens from supporting them.

Shockingly enough, that was too much even for the three leftist SCOTUS justices, and the court unanimously rejected Platkin’s heavy handed tactics!

In purple Pennsylvania, their own state Supreme Court has ruled that devious Dem election officials have to make voting records public.

Observant readers may have noticed that the elite left has been doing everything possible to enable voting fraud, and hinder attempts to uncover it, stop it. and punish those responsible. Whether its through ballot harvesting, massive mail-in voting or fighting all attempts to mandate voter ID, the left loves itself some shady voting practices.

So it should be no surprise that for five years, Democrat officials have been resisting efforts by election integrity groups to get access to the records that document the votes cast in the 2020 election. (You may remember that election as The Most Honest and Legitimate Election in the History of Elections Ever™.)

In Pennsylvania, the state system retains Cast Vote Records (CVR), which are basically the receipts of votes cast at each election location and voting machine. These records would allow citizens to verify the legitimacy of elections. So the PA Democrat machine would prefer that citizens be prevented from seeing those records.

Unexpectedly!

Once again, the court ruling against the Democrats and for transparency (but I repeat myself) was unanimous!

Finally, and at the risk of counting my chickens before they are hatched, there are yet more encouraging signs coming out of SCOTUS, this time during their questioning of lawyers in a group of cases involving leftist lower court judges’ rulings that Trump shouldn’t be allowed to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians.

Theoretically, in such cases a president grants many thousands of foreigners the right to stay in America temporarily, because some natural disaster or dire event in their home countries makes it unsafe for them to remain there. In reality, in such cases a (usually Democrat) president grants many thousands of foreigners who would likely vote Democrat the right to come here “temporarily,” and then repeatedly extends the deadline for them to leave, until they are eventually granted citizenship and become a part of a permanent Democrat voting majority.

And America as we know it ends, with both a bang and a whimper.

In the current cases, Obama granted Haitians TPS in 2010 due to an earthquake, and he granted Syrians TPS in 2012, due to a civil war in Syria. The Haitians were supposed to go back home in 18 months, and the Syrians in a year. If you’ll check your calendar, you’ll find that it is now 2026, and they’re all still here. And a bunch of Democrat lawyers and judges are arguing that it would be a crime against humanity for Trump to end their TPS and force them to do what Obama promised he’d force them to do over a decade ago.

Look, I don’t blame anybody for wanting to come to America, which is the greatest country in the world. (Though I don’t understand why any leftists would want to allow that, since they constantly insist that America is a corrupt and evil fascist state, full of racist and sexist theocratic homophobes and transphobes. How could they subject the poor Haitians and Syrians to that kind of nightmare?!)

But saying that you’re giving someone the chance to stay here temporarily when everybody knows that you intend for them to stay here permanently is a lie. (See: The 10 Commandments.)

Speaking of lies, it’s obvious what the Democratic politicians and judges are doing here. They say that it’s perfectly fine for Obama to unilaterally – without any legislation, or approval from the Congress or the people – grant millions of people “temporary” status with the stroke of a pen. But it would be an unconstitutional crime against our sacred democracy for Trump to revoke that “temporary” status with an identical stroke of his pen.

Those judges and politicians are hypocrites, and it will be another great result if SCOTUS hands them yet one more humiliating defeat.

Have a great weekend, and brace yourself for even more good news on Monday.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Get the Popcorn: The Southern Poverty Law Center is Going Down Like the Hindenburg! (posted 4/29/26)

Before yet another assassination attempt on the president, I had been planning to write about the Southern Poverty Law Center scandal, which is a gift that I had already thought was going to keep on giving for quite some time. But as more details have come out about the latest would-be assassin, it looks like he is yet one more example of a leftist who chose violence after believing the kind of creepy poison put out by the SPLC and its dishonest brethren.

The SPLC is a great example of how deeply corrupt and infuriatingly influential the leftist propaganda ecosystem has become in America. It’s a travesty that such a such a transparently abusive and dishonest operation should have maintained its undeserved “credibility” for as long as it did. Billing itself as a sort of moral and political fact-checker, the SPLC claimed to investigate and identify dangerously hateful groups and individuals.

But somehow, those dangerous groups always seemed to be associated with right-wing conservatism. (Or, as nearly every Dem and MSM talking head calls it, “right-wing extremism.”)

Unexpectedly!

For decades, their lists of dangerous hate mongers have routinely included mainstream, non-violent and non-hateful conservatives groups and individuals – Dr. Ben Carson, various Christian and pro-life groups, respected center-right and conservative media figures, etc. At the same time, they have bent over backwards to studiously ignore and NOT list much more extreme leftist radicals like antifa, pro-trans or anti-white groups.

A record like that is self-refuting on its face. Yet even now, if you use the most common search engines, while you’ll find admissions that the overwhelming majority of SPLC targets are right wing, you’ll also be given the most ridiculous claims to justify that bias.

For example, “This [political imbalance] reflects SPLC’s focus on hate‑based ideologies, which in the U.S. are predominantly right‑wing.” After you do a spit-take from that factoid, you’ll read that, “Hate‑based ideologies in the U.S. historically emerge from white supremacist, nativist, and religious‑nationalist movements—each right‑aligned.” Before you can say, “What about antifa or BLM?” you’ll be lectured that, “Left‑wing movements in the U.S. rarely organize around racial or religious hatred, which is SPLC’s primary criterion for inclusion.”

All of which is obviously a toxic mix of Adam Schiff, horse Schiff and bull Schiff. BLM is chock full of vicious whitey haters, and the jihadi-adjacent members of the Squad and many of the Muslim politicos in Dearborn, Minneapolis and elsewhere hate Jews as much as BLM hates whites and La Raza hates gringos.

And in spite of Marxism/socialism/communism’s nominal atheism, that ideology clearly functions as a religion for those without a traditional religion. So the claim that leftist hate groups don’t “organize around racial or religious hatred” is as baseless as the rest of the SPLC’s silly assertions.

But what the evil grifters at SPLC lack in truth, logic and integrity, they more than make up for in political cunning. Because they’ve always known that the institutional left didn’t want an accurate taxonomy of political hate in our nation. They wanted a biased fact-checker whose phony “reports” they could hide behind and use as justification for stigmatizing and censoring conservatives.

And that’s what they’ve clearly been doing, for decades. Much of the big tech censorship of conservative voices was based on such dishonest reports. Search engines and social media shadow-banned conservative podcasts and news outlets, and stories that were harmful to the left – that the Steele report was a Dem-funded fraud cooked up to hamper Trump’s first term; that the Muller report was going to be full of damning findings that would land Trump in prison; that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian hoax, etc.

As an optimist, I see a huge silver lining in the fact that the SPLC had to manufacture and/or pay for supposed right-wing hate groups and their activities. The left needs cartoon villains on the right, both to justify their own hatreds, and to agitate and fund raise off of their supporters. And because there isn’t enough actual hate and racism in the country to justify their wild claims, they had to make up or exaggerate most of the reported racism.

Recidivist criminals who died in the process of committing multiple crimes — like Michael Brown and George Floyd — had to be reinvented as martyrs to racial injustice. Trayvon Martin had to be re-written from a violent, petty criminal who was bashing a man’s head into concrete when he was justifiably shot, into a saintly figure; his Hispanic would-be victim had to be transformed into a “white-Hispanic” “attacker.” Normal, mainstream conservatives had to be turned into raving fascists, so that the thuggish cosplayers in antifa could valorize their own fascist violence.

In fact, the two most significant attempts in the last decade to re-write history — through a combination of exaggerations, omissions and outright lying – were Charlottesville and January 6th. And the former – deliciously! — turns out to have been largely a creation of the SPLC, and its perverse funding of the KKK in a phony attempt to pretend that a tiny band of fringe whackos was actually a gigantic gathering of an ominous, racist conservative force.

How hilarious is it to consider that a leftist propaganda boiler-room operation named a faux grass-roots gathering “Unite the Right!?” Especially when it featured the Klan – which was always a creation of (and wholly owned subsidiary of) the Democrat left from its inception – and which was funded by the leftists at the SPLC.

Again, when I’ve argued with lefty friends over Charlottesville – they generally bought the SPLC hype about an earth-shaking attack on America by the “greatest threat to democracy” (i.e. “white supremacists”) ever – I’ve pointed out that even after many months of nationwide white nationalist hyping of what was billed as the largest gathering of right-wing bigots in decades, they were only able to draw a few hundred sad sacks.

In a nation of around a third of a billion people!

And that’s before accounting for the fact that at least half of that tiny band was only there because they were being secretly paid to attend by the SPLC!

At the risk of sounding like the lefties who have never heard a Nazi-to-GOP comparison they didn’t love, I did actually think of one authentic National Socialist connection when I first heard that the SLPC had been paying some sad little “Grand Wizard” Klan leaders to rally in Charlottesville.

If you’re not really into World War Eleven history (HA! That Ilhan Omar is a genius, isn’t she?), you might not be familiar with this story. But as a straight white guy over 40, I am contractually obligated to think about WWII – along with the Roman Empire and college and pro football – at least once per day. So I learned about this incident years ago:

On September 1st, 1939, the Nazis officially kicked off WWII by invading Poland. But they didn’t want to look like they were just aggressors invading Poland. So on the last night of August, they fabricated a precipitating cause.

At around two dozen spots along Poland’s border with Germany, small teams of SS operatives “assaulted” small German outposts including a radio station, a forestry station and a customs house. They dressed the bodies of concentration camp victims in Polish uniforms, and left them at the attack sites.

Then, the next morning, German troops rolled across the border, as the official German press announced that they were only responding to the grave threat posed by the Polish aggressors.

Sound familiar?

Hopefully, as the dishonest conniving of the SPLC is brought to light in coming months, many well-intentioned lefties will reluctantly begin to contemplate the same question confronted by some good Germans, as WWII gained momentum:

“Is it possible that we’re the baddies?”

Spoiler alert: YEP!

Am I betting that this will, at long last, cause most lefties to see the light? Sadly, no.

But hope springs eternal, in the breast of a cautious optimist!

And in the meantime, we’ll all get some sweet schadenfreude from watching SPLC con artists squirming through a trial in which they have to explain why they steered their donors’ cash to the Grand Kleagle of the KKK, Local 231.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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The Democrat Elite Hate Democracy (posted 4/24/26)

If you’re like me – and what a great world this would be if everybody was – you were very irritated throughout 2024 by two constantly repeated talking points from Democrats and media talking heads (but I repeat myself): “no one is above the law,” and “we are fighting for democracy!”

Both phrases, of course, were false. Because: elite Democrat talking points.

By “no one is above the law,” Dems meant, “No Republicans – and especially Trump — are above the law.” And by “the law” they meant, “whatever we can falsely claim that the law is.”

On the other hand, the Dems created an immense scaffolding of double standards to exempt themselves and their minions from being subject to our laws. They’ve shamefully done everything possible to ensure that EVERYONE on their side is above the law.

Did Hunter Biden film himself breaking many laws against the use of drugs and prostitutes? Did he also launder millions of dollars from the Chicoms and corrupt Ukranian oligarchs – not to mention from “selling” those execrable paintings of his – in violation of various laws? Did “president” Biden accept at least 10% of those illegal funds? Did various Biden family +

members also illegally profit from their political connections to the Cadaver in Chief?

Obviously, in all cases. And rather than insisting that any of those lawbreakers face legal consequences, Joey Gaffes gave them all pardons on his way out the door. Just to be doubly sure that all of them remained above the law.

Of course the most glaring examples of this creepy double standard is the 15-20 million illegals whom the Biden administration illegally welcomed in! All Dem elites constantly argue that illegals should be above the law. They shouldn’t be held responsible for the crime of sneaking in, of working illegally, of driving illegally, of receiving all forms of welfare (except emergency medical services) illegally, or of committing additional violent crimes.

ALL of them should be above the law, and you’re a xenophobic racist if you disagree.

For a long time, “no one is above the law” was the most infuriating Democrat lie to me. But in recent weeks, the “we are the defenders of democracy” has taken top honors. Or, I guess, top dishonors.

The Democrats are obviously doing their best to routinely thwart the democratically expressed will of the people. How could they not, when they’ve consistently taken the “20” end of so many 80-20 issues?

The vast majority of Americans want biological males to be kept out of female bathrooms and locker rooms, and prevented from competing against females in sports. Similarly large majorities want to require voter IDs in elections, and for our border to be closed, and for all violent illegals to be deported. In all of those cases, though, the Dems have done everything possible to oppose the democratic process.

For decades, the Dems have happily used the courts to give them by judicial dictat what they could not win at the ballot box, from school busing to gay marriage to over-regulation to governmentally-approved racial discrimination against Asians and whites. They’re doing the same thing now, cheering every partisan local judge who tries to stop Trump from carrying out the duties of the executive, on whatever flimsy legal reasoning those hacks can find.

Trump’s stunning second election should have given the Dems pause. He won a lopsided victory in the electoral college, and even won the popular vote. If the left actually revered “democracy,” they wouldn’t have immediately tried to delegitimize his victory and oppose every single Trump action. Yet that is exactly what they’ve done.

But the most outrageously dishonest example of recent Democrat hypocrisy has come from the way they’ve handled the issue of gerrymandering congressional voting districts.

To grant the obvious point, gerrymandering is not illegal, and the practice has been around for centuries. Part of the reward of holding an electoral majority when reapportionment happens is to be able to draw borders that will help your party’s prospects in future elections. But that power is obviously open to abuse, and in our messy democratic system, there has usually been an unwritten, gentleman’s agreement that both parties will not abuse the system completely, giving themselves electoral advantages far out of proportion to the partisan breakdown of their state’s citizenry.

But you may have noticed that there are few gentlemen – or gentle-ladies, or gentle-he-shes – left in congress these days. And thus we find the Democrats in blue states doing everything they can to corruptly gerrymander the GOP voters’ voices out of existence.

Before any lefties in the audience can argue that both parties do it, I’ll point you to some actual facts. I’ve chosen 5 of the most prominent Democrat states, and 5 of the most prominent GOP states (some because they are contemplating gerrymandering now).

Here are the GOP states:

Texas – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 64%-34%; House seat percentages are 66% GOP to 34% Dem

Tennessee – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 64%-34%; House seat percentages are 89% GOP to 11% Dem (8 of 9)

Ohio – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 55%-44%; House seat percentages are 66% GOP to 33% Dem

Missouri – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 59%-40%; House seat percentages are 75% GOP to 25% Dem

Florida – went for Trump over Harris in 2024 by 56%-43%; House seat percentages are 71% GOP to 29% Dem

You can detect the bias toward the party in power by considering how much their opponents’ House seat percentage under-represents the opposition party’s share of the presidential vote. 40% of Missouri voters were Democrats, yet Dems only held 25% of Missouri House seats, a deficit of 15%. In Florida, 43% of voters were Dems, but only 29% of the House seats, a deficit of 14%. Ohio was closer, with a 11% Dem deficit (44% of the voters, but only 33% of the House seats). TN is trickier, because with only 1 of 9 House seats going to Dems, the deficit is 23% (34% of the vote to just 11% of House seats). Texas had actually zero bias, as 34% of both the vote and House seats belonging to Dems.

Here are the Dem states:

NY – went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 54%-43%; House seat percentages are 73% Dem to 27% GOP

IL – went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 55%-43%; House seat percentages are 82% Dem to 18% GOP

CA — went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 62%-38%; House seat percentages are 74% Dem to 26% GOP

MA — went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 61%-36%; House seat percentages are 100% Dem to 0% GOP (9 of 9)

NJ — went for Harris over Trump in 2024 by 52%-46%; House seat percentages are 75% Dem to 25% GOP

Of these 5 Dem states, MA repeats the TN anomaly: with only 9 House seats, the 100% Dem seats creates a 36% GOP deficit. The other four states produce GOP deficits of 16% (NY); 12% (CA); 21% (NJ), and, with the worst bias (25%), Illinois.

The math is clear: the 5 Dem states were around twice as biased against the GOP (averaging 22%) than the GOP states were against the Dems (12%). And that doesn’t count the recent, corrupt CA gerrymander, which added a double-digit increase in the existing GOP representational deficit in CA.

To top that off, the Dems’ ridiculous lies about evil White Witch Spanberger’s gerrymander proposal for Virginia are even clearer, given these numbers. When confronted about the transparent corruption in VA, Dems claimed that they were only redrawing their districts because Texas did their gerrymander – which they called “an illegitimate, partisan power-grab” –first.

But consider the numbers. Before the recent gerrymanders, both Texas and VA had basically evenly matched House seats and presidential vote parity. But when Texas’ gerrymander was done, the TX GOP was expected to gain 2 House seats, for a 5% advantage over the Dems. By contrast, the VA Dems were set to cut the 5 GOP House seats to only 1, creating a 36% advantage over the GOP.

So if gerrymandering for partisan advantage is corrupt, the Virginia Democrats are 7 times as corrupt as the Texas GOP, just as the 5 Dem states are twice as corrupt as the GOP.

The Dems may not get away with their attempted disenfranchising of Virginia voters, since a state judge declared it unconstitutional, citing several illegal aspects of that stunt. Hopefully a few judges in VA will be more honest than the national Democrats are.

But regardless, the gerrymandering debate shows that the Democrats are lying about their respect for democracy as much as they were lying when they pretended to believe that “no one is above the law.”

And it reinforces another constant in Democrat politics:

Whenever Dems are accusing the GOP of some form of corruption, you can bet your last dollar that they are actually more guilty of it themselves.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Don’t Trust Behar or Tucker for Your Theology (posted 4/20/26)

There are some moments in each election cycle when I wonder if I’m not dreaming — or hallucinating – the things that are going on in our country.

One of those moments came the first time I heard that a national political figure was claiming that men could become women. And before I could check whether that was a hilarious Babylon Bee story, hundreds and then thousands of such insane claims were being mainstreamed all over the place.

Male politicians were wearing dresses and demanding to be called “Ma’am” and “Miss” and “Tina Louise.” Lightly closeted Minnesota Jazz-Hands Enthusiasts were putting female hygiene products in boys’ bathrooms. Major corporations were spending (and losing!) millions of dollars on PR campaigns lying about basic biology. Formerly respectable scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson was claiming that sex was “assigned at birth,” like a social security number (except that nobody was stupid enough to claim that you could change your social security number).

Another such moment was when half of our political elite – including the President, VP and head of Homeland Security – were insisting that the border was closed and secure, when hundreds of thousands of people were flooding across the border every month. This went on for years, with powerful elites making these absurd claims while ON A SPLIT-SCREEN TV SHOT with caravans of illegals approaching and then crossing the border!

And who could forget being reassured that the late Joe Biden was a paragon of mental and physical health, while we watched him falling up mobile airport staircases and down over sandbags and off of bicycles, while talking to dead people, and then staring blankly into space, and then pooping on the Pope. (He finally beat Medicaid, people!)

But even after all of those surreal moments, I did not have “we’ll be getting our theological exegesis from Trump, Joy Behar and Tucker Carlson” on my 2026 bingo card.

By now you’ve all seen the “Trump-as-Jesus” meme, and sure, it’s fun to watch people pretend that they’ve never heard of or seen Donald Trump before, and so are shocked – shocked! — that he’d post offensively self-aggrandizing images. But I also understand that people of faith can argue in very good faith that Trump comparing himself favorably to Lincoln or Washington is different than comparing himself to Christ.

And if you accept Trump’s claim that he thought the painting was comparing him to a doctor rather than Jesus, you might have whatever is the opposite of TDS. (Hint: Doctors wear white lab coats rather than robes, and don’t have a halo effect behind them, and heal people with surgical tools and medicine, rather than an angelic light emanating from their hands.)

I don’t have any problem criticizing the Pope when he makes political statements. When he’s implicitly argued against

enforcing our immigration laws, or criticized relatively small numbers of people being unintentionally killed in legitimate military actions but remained silent when the people we’re fighting slaughter tens of thousands of their own people, for example, he’s opened himself to political criticism, IMHO.

Which is not to say that I’ll be going to any Bible studies led by the president.

On the other hand, do you know who makes Trump look like Thomas Aquinas by comparison? The Reverend doctors Joy Behar and Tucker Carlson.

Behar has always been one dim bulb in an extremely dim candelabra at the View. Though she was raised Catholic, Behar now calls herself an agnostic. But don’t worry: she is still happy to share her theological wisdom with you. For example, last week she proclaimed that, “Jesus did not run around calling himself the Messiah.”

This was too much, even for the Mensa members on the View, several of whom immediately jumped in to say that of course He did. Joy’s response made everyone watching dumber: “No he did not! Jesus was not narcissistic like [Trump.]”

Let that sink in for a moment. That’s not some obscure theological claim. It’s kind of important that in the religion that is based on the idea that Christ is God, Christ taught that he was God. (Duh!)

But Joy was not to be deterred, even after Sara Haines pointed out the obvious: “When you’re the Messiah, it’s not narcissism to claim to say it.” Joy stuck to her incredibly stupid guns, pouting, “Yes it is.”

(Shhhhh. Don’t anybody tell her that He also said, “Before Abraham was, I am.”)

Of course Joy was just following in a long tradition of leftist non-Christians simultaneously mocking Christian for their simple-minded religious beliefs, and also lecturing them about how Jesus (and His great teachings) totally contradicts their political beliefs.

But Tucker Carlson, upon hearing the joyless one expounding on religion, said, “Hold my tall, frosty mug of anti-Semitism and watch this.” And he excreted a novel theological theory: Muslims are actually better Christians than conservative Christians!

(Take it from the guy who favors Hitler over Churchill, Putin over Ukrainians, and jihadis over Israel!)

Tucker’s main take-away quote was that “The people in charge don’t want you to know that Muslims love Jesus.” He went on to explain that Islamic teaching “regards Jesus as a major prophet who performed miracles and is expected to return in the future.”

The smarmy, conspiracy-theory tone here is (sadly) typical of Tucker in recent years. You’ll never guess who the perfidious “people in charge” are! Hint: They’re the ones who control the weather, and worldwide banking, and they’ve got space lasers and wear funny hats. And don’t tell Joy Behar, but Jesus is one of them!

Even though those people are known to be super clever, their work was not exactly cut out for them, in terms of how they could keep us Christians from realizing how much Muslims really love us. Because that idea already seems a little far-fetched to us, just because of a few niggling details.

Details like the last 1400 years of Muslim history, during which Islam has been spread by the sword, and wherever Christians have been unable to defend themselves by force of arms, they’ve been preyed upon and killed in great numbers, with the survivors being subjugated or fleeing for their lives. And details like the Islamic present, wherein every country in which Muslims have achieved a governing majority has oppressed Christians (and Jews) like second-class citizens, at best!

Tucker also doesn’t mention that while Muslims might give lip service to Jesus as a prophet, they don’t believe He was the Christ, or that He was resurrected, or that His future return will bring about peace on earth. To the contrary, they teach that He will reject Christianity and usher in a world-wide Islamic caliphate. In that sense, Muslims agree with Joy Behar – never a comforting position to be in! – because they also don’t believe that He ever called Himself the Messiah.

Why, it’s almost like Tucker is wallowing in a Beharian level of ignorance, dishonesty and bad faith.

In conclusion, as is usually the case, I would rather be on our side, with our team – politically, economically, and even theologically – than on theirs.

Politically, I’ll take Lincoln, Coolidge, and Reagan over Wilson, FDR, and Obama. (And Trump over Hillary, Biden and Que Mala!) Economically, I’ll take Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell over Marx, Malthus and Keynes.) And theologically, I’ll take Aquinas, Lewis and Billy Graham over Bin Laden, Hasan Piker and Joy Behar.

And I’ll happily give them the points, and still like our odds!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Swalwell Falls, Mamdani Stumbles, & There are Still Some Bright Spots in our Culture Worth Celebrating (posted 4/17/26)

I enjoyed reading about the successful Artemis II moon mission, partly because it reminded me of one of the most daunting and impressive aspects of past space flights: the incredible precision needed to re-enter the atmosphere at precisely the right angle.  A little too shallow, and the craft will careen back out into space, and everyone dies.  But a little too steep, and the heat and violence of re-entry reaches catastrophic levels, and everyone dies.

When the Artemis II Orion capsule re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, it was falling toward earth at 25,000 miles per hour.

To give you an idea of how fast that is…it was only 10 mph slower than Eric Swalwell’s descent into ignominy over last weekend!   And just like that, his political career has died.

I know: that was a convoluted path to arrive at getting a rib kick in on Mr. Fang-Fang.  But at this point, there is almost no length to which I would not go to take well-deserved shots at that creepy leftist hypocrite! 

His implosion really was impressive in both its speed and devastation.  On Thursday he was in a safe House seat and was a leading candidate for California Governor.  The news hit on Friday, and he tried to resist the original story…and then apologized and withdrew from the Governor’s race…and then agreed to resign from his House seat at the end of the term…and then resigned immediately…and now is facing potential criminal charges. 

You know that you’ve got a really screwed up political career and sexual history when the most wholesome relationship you’ve ever had might be that time you fell for a scandalous honeytrap sexual dalliance with a Chicom spy!

If anything could produce more schadenfreude than watching the fall of Swalwell – remember that time when he assailed Kavanaugh during the transparently bogus attacks on him during his SCOTUS hearings, because if there’s one thing Swalwell can’t stand, it’s men having skeevy sexual relationships with women! – it’s watching the corrupt Democrats falling all over themselves insisting that they had no idea about Swalwell’s sexual exploitation of every woman within groping distance.

Imhotep Pelosi is shocked – shocked, I tells ya! – that Swalwell turns out to be a recidivist sex pest.  Ruben Gallego was Swalwell’s best friend and chaired his short-lived 2020 presidential campaign, and he was clueless too.  In fact no high-profile Dems ever said a peep about the issue.

All of which might be more convincing if the entire world hadn’t known that Swalwell was banging Fang Fang, and the Dems STILL kept him on the intelligence committee.

Make your own jokes about “intelligence” and “Swalwell” – that’s a slow pitch over the middle of the plate for sure.  But intelligence is the committee most involved with foreign relations and security, and it took the GOP winning the House to forcibly pry Swalwell’s groping hands off that committee.

And the Dems in congress thought that was horrible.  All of the most egregious Dems – including Hakeem Jeffries, Schiff and Ilhan Omar – protested the injustice of removing such a fine, upstanding fellow as Swalwell.

So they can all suck it, Trebek.

Speaking of entertainingly disastrous leftist efforts plummeting to earth at great speed, have you been following the opening months of Commie Mamdani’s NYC mayoralty?  His latest entirely predictable face-plant involves the first of his promised government grocery stores. 

And no, these won’t be anything like the Soviet or Cuban or Nicaraguan government grocery stores, which typically offered many square feet of filthy, poorly lit empty shelves, containing a total inventory of 2 brown, wilted heads of lettuce dating to the reign of Queen Victoria, a package of horse sausage that was more mold than either horse or sausage, and a pair of mismatched, clunky brown shoes, for some reason. 

No!  These government grocery stores will be crammed full of every food product known to humanity, all of it fresh, and basically free! 

Annnndddd…the first store location and plan has been announced.  It is going to be a small bodega, which is expected to cost $30 million taxpayer dollars, and to be completed in 2029. 

Which means that it will actually cost $97 million, and will open in 2038. 

But let’s look at the bright side.  If it is completed in 2029  (it won’t be), think of the great appetite that all of the leftist dopes who believe in socialism and free lunches will have built up by then!   I’ll bet that some moldy horse sausage and slimy brown lettuce will look pret-ty good to those emaciated morons. 

Say what you will about Mamdani.  (That he’s an arrogant nepo baby imbecile, for example.  Or that he’s a communist and a Jew-hating jihadi.)  But he has certainly put the “bone” in “bon appetite.” 

Let me send you off into the weekend with a couple of feel-good cultural recommendations.

If you haven’t seen Ted Lasso yet, please give that a watch.  I never watched it when it came out, because the subject matter did not sound alluring to me: American football coach goes to England to coach a soccer team.  (Nope!)

But one of my old friends recommended it to me, and said that I reminded him of the title character.  Which turned out to be one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten, once I started watching the show.   It’s a really sweet, well-written and funny show, and I now understand what the fuss was all about when it first came out.

In a similarly heartening and wholesome vein, I just stumbled across a YouTube channel called Jack Aynsley Travel.  It features a young, married British couple who travel all over America for about six months, recording the encounters they have with normal, everyday Americans.  

In his introduction, the host mentions that the press often presents a negative picture of America and Americans, but he finds the opposite. At the beginning of the first episode he references “an America you never see in the headlines.  A kind of warmth and pride and honesty that you just can’t fake.” 

The only episode I’ve watched covers the south, and everyone everywhere is really generous with the couple, glad to see them, and happy to show them the local food and sites.  They are treated to some skeet shooting, and are invited to ride in boats, on ATVs and on horses.  They tailgate in Tuscaloosa and watch an Alabama football game (sure, it’s not a Gator game, but still pretty cool), and sample amazing food and drinks and hospitality along the way. 

It’s nice to be reminded that the internet isn’t all porn and conspiracies and lowest-common-denominator bad behavior.

So if you’re feeling a little down, as if the whole country is full of sleazy politicians, violent lefty protesters, Somali scammers and unhinged Tucker Carlsons, check out Jack Aynsley Travel, and tell me what you think.     

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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