May 2024 – Martin Simpson

Our New England Trip, plus Biden Agrees to Debate and Butker Kicks Butt at Graduation (posted 5/20/24)

I’m back from our trip to New England, and a good time was had by all. We got to spend some time in Providence and Newport, RI, then in Cape Cod, and then in Amherst for my daughter’s graduation with a Master’s in Nursing.

The latter was a strange experience for an oldster like me, because she earned most of the degree online while working as a pediatric nurse in Denver, which doesn’t make sense to me. (The last semester involved a practicum at another Denver hospital which has a relationship with U Mass.) So when we got to town on Thursday afternoon, we all saw the campus for the first time.

We took some pics of my daughter and her husband in front of the College of Nursing building (which she’d never been in), and in front of other scenic spots on campus (which she’d never been to).

The next morning, as we arrived for the ceremony, I summoned up a fake tear and hugged my daughter, saying, “Where has the time gone? It seems like just yesterday when we drove you to campus for the first time.”

Because I’m a dad, and we tell dad jokes.

I had hoped that while we were in Massachusetts we might run into Grandma Squanto Warren, so I could do the tomahawk chop and hop around in a circle in an extremely authentic rain dance that I’ve been working on, but no such luck. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

However, we did witness the next best thing, when the liberal white lady Dean of something or other started the graduation ceremony with a land acknowledgment.

If you’re lucky enough to not have experienced this leftist ritual, it’s when a very righteous liberal begins an event by paying lip service to the various indigenous people who once “owned” the land beneath the venue where the event is taking place.

It’s a quintessential lefty gesture, allowing them to stroke themselves and signal their virtue without actually doing anything substantive. Because I’ve noticed that these “acknowledgements” never end with, “…and so, we’re hereby donating the campus, its multi-billion-dollar endowment, and my own personal mansion to the Hekawi tribe.

“We hope this gesture makes up for the fact that our ancestors had smallpox and repeating rifles, while your ancestors were standing around with stone weapons and no immunity, like idiots.”

This particular lady said, “We are gathered here today on land that has been taken from the Pequot, the Wampanoag, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.” Or words to that effect. I wasn’t paying very close attention after I realized what she was doing.

I must have had a certain look on my face though, because my wife put her hand on my knee and inflicted a five-fingernail death-grip that would have brought a lesser man to tears. The look in her eyes said, “Don’t you dare boo, or make an arse of yourself. Our in-laws are here.”

So I leaned toward her, turned my head toward the big shot on stage, and so softly that only my wife could hear, said, “Boo! Boo, you hypocritical white lady phony land-acknowledging beeyotch! Boo!”

Because sometimes a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. But I still need two functioning legs.

Anyway, it was a good trip, but it’s also good to be home. And while I was gone, I missed most of the news.

Except that Joe Biden shocked me by offering to debate Trump twice. I had been sure that he would never agree to a debate, on account of him presiding over an indefensibly terrible presidency, and also being deceased.

Pundits said that his taking the risky step – especially since Trump had given him an easy out by refusing to debate in the primaries – is a sign that the Biden team recognizes that he is losing. Which sounds plausible.

But his embalmers were smart to insist on a set of conditions that will help him: debating on one of the corrupt, in-the-bag MSM outlets that will do everything they can to protect him; allowing no live audience who would cheer or laugh at Trump’s jokes, and gasp and flee when Biden trips over a sandbag or loses control of his bowels; keeping RFK Jr. out so that there will be no non-senile Democrat alternative on stage.

I think Trump had boxed himself into a corner by saying that he’d debate Biden anytime and anywhere, so he couldn’t then negotiate any conditions without looking hesitant. But I hate to see us once again granting the ridiculously biased MSM control over yet another round of debates.

But the thing I’m most annoyed by is letting Biden pick an unprecedentedly early debate in June, two months before the Dem convention. I’ve said it before: having Biden on the ticket is our best chance to win, and we need to do whatever we can to keep him there. But if he does terribly in June, I expect the Dems to try to push him aside and sub in another candidate at their convention.

My favorite political event of the week is the left’s outrage at Harrison Butker’s speech at Benedictine College’s graduation, because of what it tells us about them.

Over the last decade or more, the NFL’s top brass and woke media commentators have shown us that it takes a lot to make them mad. NFL players can beat their girlfriends and be deadbeat fathers to children by baby-mamas all over the country, and the NFL can’t be bothered. Mediocre, racist QBs like Kapernick can slander America, white folks and football fans, and he’s beloved on the left.

A sapphic soccer “star” can denigrate the country, straight folks and God – then play terribly and tear an ACL in a light breeze – and she’s still a media darling. Obnoxious male narcissists can beat the tar out of female athletes and break female records, and the normally male-hating leftist establishment gushes over what brave “women” they are.

But Butker said a bunch of commonsense things – abortion is abortion, Pride Month is ridiculous, covid lockdowns were a mistake, DEI stinks – and a bunch of Catholic talk, at a Catholic school, to Catholics.

And THAT is what finally made the left furious.

As a wise man once said, on his daughter’s first (and last) day at her alma mater, “Boo! Boo, you hypocritical, phony beeyotches! Boo!”

Hamas delenda est!

Whiny Hunger Strikers, & Hillary’s Play Bombs (posted 5/13/24)

By the time you read this, I will be flying to Massachusetts with my wife and youngest daughter, to spend the better part of a week sightseeing with my oldest and her husband, culminating in watching her receive her Masters in nursing at Amherst. This will likely mean a cold and Simpson-less Friday (i.e. no column that day), but I trust that you all will soldier on.

In the meantime, there are too many things for me to talk about, so I’ll do the best I can.

First, I love me a good hunger strike. In fact, I have been known to participate in a few of my own. When I was ages three through about six, for example, I regularly conducted hunger strikes.

Most often on meatloaf night.

I would begin by advancing my argument, which ran something like this: “C’mon, meatloaf again? This has to violate the Geneva Conventions! You can’t even tell me what kind of ‘meat’ this is. It’s literally a loaf of undifferentiated meat!” (I had a precocious vocabulary at age 3.)

My dad would respond with tales about being born in the depression, and being offered rock soup with a dandelion salad, and all of it sprinkled with coal dust from the mines where grandpa worked 18 hours a day. And all 8 Simpson kids were glad to have it, and would sometimes even fight over who could have a second bowl of rock soup.

I would propose a compromise wherein I would give the dog my meatloaf, and I would have a bowl of Captain Crunch.

Eventually, dad would arrive at his final offer. “There are two choices for supper tonight: take it, or leave it.”

Check and mate.

Fast forward to now, and students at Princeton are less mature than I was at 3. Thus the young hunger-striking woman who is now being roundly mocked for her dramatic reading – from text on her phone – of her complaint:

“This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving.” [Sweetheart, it’s a HUNGER strike. Are you really complaining about being hungry during your self-imposed hunger strike?!] “We are physically exhausted, I am quite literally shaking right now, as you can see.”

Have you ever seen video of the police interrogating a sociopath after a horrific crime? The sociopath will often pretend to cry, looking down, covering her eyes, asking for a tissue, and using it to wipe away non-existent tears?

This was like that. And you know how I also know that her supposed shaking wasn’t genuine?

Because SHE READ IT OFF A PRE-WRITTEN SCRIPT ON HER PHONE! OH! OHHHHHH! (That’s right, I slipped a little Sam Kinison in on you.)

The only way her bad acting could have been more transparent would be if she were to “pull a Biden,” i.e. inadvertently read her stage directions aloud: “I’m literally shaking, as you can see. Shake now. Pause. Continue reading.”

Next, she actually said these lines: “We are both cold and hot at the same time. We are all immuno-compromised.”

Yes, if by “immuno-compromised” you mean “riddled with STDs and a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder.”

And “hot and cold at the same time?” That’s not a thing. I mean, if you’re kicking heroin cold turkey, you might have alternating chills and fever. But not at the same time. And not because you skipped a few meals.

By the way, did you see those “hunger strikers?” Some of them would tip the scale in the gray area between Whoopi Goldberg and Lizzo, so I don’t think going on a diet of water and (I’m guessing) surreptitiously gobbled protein bars is going to be life-threatening for them.

The moral of the story? When I was three, stomping off to bed without eating meatloaf never forced my parents to bring a big bag of Fritos and a bowl of chocolate ice cream to my room.

And a bunch of crybully Ivy League brats pretending to dab at fake tears with their keffiyehs ($29.99 at Amazon, made in China) and faux-fainting is not going to result in the murder of all the Jews in Israel. Sorry kids.

Hilarious hunger striking aside, the weekend was full of widespread interruptions of graduations. Some ceremonies were cancelled entirely; others were disrupted by stupid chanting and walk-outs. Jerry Seinfeld was the graduation speaker at Duke, and that event was interrupted by a bunch of selfish jerks getting up and chanting and waving a “Palestinian” flag as they marched out.

Because I’m a cautious optimist, I can see two very silver linings on this pro-terrorist cloud:

1. The shenanigans are mostly affecting leftist colleges with leftist administrations in leftist-run towns, which means that the majority of the inconvenience and disruption is being suffered by those who tolerate and even support it. So they can suck it, Trebek.

2. The antics of these morons – wrapping a George Washington statue in terrorist headgear, blocking traffic, burning American flags, violating various vandalism, harassment and trespassing laws – are infuriating to normal people. They’re making more people hate them every day, and they’re creating a widening rift within the Democrat party.

So keep it up, numbskulls! If we can’t have you dispersed, chased and charred by a pack of flamethrower robot dogs – and tragically, we apparently cannot – the second-best outcome is for you to identify yourselves to the rest of us, and build a huge backlash against your political goals.

(By the way, I was hoping to put my new flamethrower in a checked bag for the trip to MA, but my killjoy wife nixed the idea. So if some Hamas-lovers disrupt my daughter’s graduation and are allowed to escape burn-free, she’s going to hear a lot of, “I told you so” next weekend!)

In other news, Hillary Clinton has produced a Broadway play called, “Suffs.” It is nearly three hours long, and tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement a century ago. It also features an “entirely female and non-binary cast,” including a gal who plays President Woodrow Wilson.

And it is bombing.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

The show’s promotional material notes that “Suffs boldly explores the victories and failures of a struggle for equality that’s far from over.”

Um, the suffrage movement was about getting women the right to vote. They won that in 1920, which my abacus tells me is more than a century ago. So no, the “struggle” is not “far from over.”

Judging by the box office, neither is Suffs. In fact, I’d guess that it’s very close to over.

By the way, as I was about to post this column, I saw an update on the Princeton hunger strike, which I swear I am not making up.

The day after the “literally shaking” gal gave her brave speech from the edge of the grave, the original 13 hunger strikers ended their strike. Because they were very hungry. Unexpectedly!

But never fear, because as their nightmarish bout of peckishness ended (just in time!) seven new strikers took up the cause. Or, as their press statement describes it, “In the tradition of rotary hunger strikes, 7 new strikers are indefinitely fasting for a free Palestine.”

Is that not brilliant? A “rotary hunger strike!” It’s like hunger striking, but then when your stomach starts growling, you pass the baton to another Jew hater who is willing to skip brunch.

Only instead of a baton, it’s a footlong sub sandwich. Which you then mow through like a woodchipper, because you haven’t eaten in several hours.

Which gives me an idea. I propose that all of us in CO nation begin a rotary hunger strike, and we keep it up until all of our demands are met. Or at least our first three demands:

1. All student pro-Hamas protestors be arrested and expelled.

2. All non-student pro-Hamas protestors be arrested and deported to Gaza, even if they are American citizens.

3. The $80 billion appropriated to hire more IRS agents be redirected to the manufacture and purchase of a giant army of flamethrower robot dogs, half of which are to be immediately sent to American college campuses, and the other half to the southern border.

If we all sign up to skip just one meal, we can keep this rotary hunger strike going on definitely! Who’s with me?

I’ll go first. I hereby volunteer to skip supper on Meatloaf Mondays.

Hamas delenda est!

Schadenfreude, Painted Protestors & Sterile Mosquitoes (posted 5/10/24)

Let’s visit Schadenfreude Corner today.

First up we’ve got Andrew Dudum, the CEO of something called “Hims and Hers Health Inc.” Last week, after watching pro-Hamas idiots defiling our campuses, Andrew thought he’d do a little virtue signaling online.

So he released a public message saying, “If you’re currently protesting against the genocide (sic) of the Palestinian (sic) people & for your university’s divestment from Israel, keep going. It’s working. There are plenty of companies and CEOs eager to hire you, regardless of university discipline.” He included a link to apply for a job with his company.

Annnnddddd… his stock dropped 8% and he reportedly lost $210 million.

Unexpectedly!

The next day another entrepreneur reported that when he logged on to Hims and Hers to cancel his order, the customer service queue was deluged with people doing the same.

So the brave CEO did what smart leaders always do: posted a long, meandering non-apology apology. I’ll just quote the first three sentences, because they establish the tone:

“The last few days have been a disheartening reflection of just how divisive a time we live in.”

Ah yes, those damned divisive times! Breaking into your social media account and posting stupid comments encouraging anti-Semitic boneheads to keep protesting a genocide that doesn’t exist, on behalf of those who are quite philo-genocidal. What havoc will those divisive times cause next?

“I’d like to clarify a few things because my words have been misconstrued by some.” Translation: I’d like to obfuscate the clear meaning of my earlier words, which have been accurately construed by people who know how to read.

“I in no way condone nor support acts or threats of violence, antisemitism, or intimidation …[blah blah blah].”

Got that? He doesn’t condone or support all the bad stuff the Hamasniks have been doing on campus.

But he’ll gladly hire you if YOU do.

This is a great reminder that we should all be pulling our support from companies who hate us and are working against our interests. Bud Light was the best example, but we should also take advantage of the information these colleges are giving us.

Now all of us know that we should never send our kids to any of the schools who have allowed these protests to drag on, negotiated with the protesters, and then gave them no consequences once they did arrest them.

If you’re hiring people, do extra vetting of anyone who graduated from any of these schools. If you are donating to any of these schools, stop it. If you are an alumni, contact them and let them know that you’ll never give them another dime, and that you’ll be bad mouthing them to anyone even considering donating or sending their kids there.

Along those lines, I was glad to see a story in the Free Beacon about a letter that 13 federal judges have sent to Columbia, announcing that none of them will be hiring any more Columbia law grads as law clerks, unless and until the school takes concrete steps to increase penalties on anti-Semitic faculty and students who illegally discriminate, and to support viewpoint diversity in the faculty and administration.

Yes! More please.

I had never heard of Andrew Dudum’s company, so I didn’t think I had ever bought any of his stuff. But I looked it up, and found that he ships all kinds of medications that you can order online. Their info specifically mentions ED meds.

Which makes sense. And I now have greater respect for Dudum as a businessman.

Because if he’s trying to market to the low-T crowd whose idea of a mating ritual involves draping a terrorist tablecloth over your shoulders and screaming horrific Jew-hating poetry while surrounded by a herd of blocky gender-studies majors who believe in neither deodorant nor personal grooming, he has nailed his target demographic!

Plus it’s a win-win for him, because even if his customers’ downstairs plumbing worked well under normal conditions, a quad full of their female comrades would go a long way toward creating an erection-free zone, even for the healthiest among us.

If I had to put myself in their Birkenstocks (and please don’t make me do that), I’d guess that I’d need a set of beer telescopes (beer goggles would not be strong enough) and a supply of little blue pills to buzz-saw my way through like Michael Moore with a comically over-sized bowl of M&Ms if I were to have any chance of surviving an encounter with any of those scowling harpies.

But we should also be doing the inverse of boycotting, i.e. buying stuff from companies who side with us. Since all of the Hamasholes are pushing to have their schools divest from Israel, we should look for products made in Israel.

Since I’m not Jewish, that’s a little tough for me. I don’t wear a yarmulke, and never had a dreidel, but this is almost enough to get me to buy the latter. (And those cynics among you can just save your warnings about how Big Dreidel has been colluding with Big Torah to control the market in all kinds of Judaica. I’m not buying it!)

But I’m a fan of the second amendment, so perhaps I will check out a future Uzi or a Desert Eagle purchase. Because Christmas (and Hanukkah) is coming. And come to think of it, I would LOVE to have a mini Iron Dome over my house.

Man, I’ve already got a flamethrower, so if I pick up an Uzi and an Iron Dome, I will be ready for the future invasion of Florida by the zombified Biden voters who I assume will be heading here when their disastrous politics cause the final collapse of Chicago, NYC, Baltimore, Philly et al.

My favorite campus protestor story of the last several days comes to us from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. A bunch of mouth-breathers there had painted pro-terror graffiti on a wall, and the school hired some painters to come in and paint over it.

Apparently the protestors heard about this, and a small group of them stood in front of the wall to prevent their hateful messages from being painted over. It was a classic, “blue-collar vs worthless-d-bag” standoff.

Of course the best response would have been the timeless classic: deploy the flamethrower robot dogs!

But because no university administrators have the guts to implement some strategic thermal discipline, we had to settle for the second-best outcome: the blue-collar guys spray-painted right over the protestors!

Unfortunately, some accomplices gave the others plastic face shields just in time, so nobody ended up with a dramatic, culturally-appropriating white-face. But they all received a nice coat of paint from head to toe. I can only hope that the painters were using an epoxy, or at least an oil-based paint.

I’ll close with yet another story of the great things happening at the University of Florida, where researchers have helped develop an innovative strategy for fighting mosquitos, which was recently pilot-tested in Los Angeles. The strategy involves irradiating lab-raised mosquitos, and releasing tens of thousands of them into a targeted area.

According to the story, “These mosquitoes are all male and have been sterilized by the radiation, so the hope is that they will find wild female mates and impregnate them with dead-end sperm, rendering the resulting eggs worthless.”

And today’s column comes full circle, by applying the lessons we’ve learned from the pro-Hamas campus protests to the world of insects. Because we are looking at the same basic story as that of the protestors and young leftists generally: lots of aggressive (and aggressively unpleasant) females, and lots of sterile males.

Even before I read this story, when I watched video of the non-peaceful protestors disrupting schools and ruining graduations, I swear that the phrases “dead-end sperm” and “worthless eggs” spontaneously ran through my mind.

Though to be fair to the sterile, irradiated male mosquitoes, they are probably not stupid enough to think that they can become female mosquitoes. Or that Liz Warren is anything but a very, very white lady. (#wemustneverstopmockingher) (also, #sterilemalemosquitoforMAsenator.)

So at least the sterile male mosquitoes have that going for them.

Hamas delenda est!

Two Emblematic Pro-Hamas Protestors: Rich Kid & Slutsky (posted 5/6/24)

I’m sure everyone has just about had it up to here with the campus protest stories, and I feel your pain on that point. But I caught a few details over the weekend that I’d missed, and I think they’re worth some comment.

First, I think it’s hilarious that the one moment of unity between the hateful pro-Hamas side and the pro-Israel/the West/America side came at the University of Alabama, when both sides came together to chant, “F**k Joe Biden!” It was the kind of bipartisan reaching across the aisle that for a moment gave me hope that we all might get along.

Annnddd… it turns out that the Hamasholes are mad at Joe Biden because they think he’s not being submissive ENOUGH to the Jew-hating genocide enthusiasts in Gaza.

So I guess this is an example of that old folk saying, “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.” Or, in the Arabic version from Gaza, “even a blind sheik finds a gay guy to toss off a roof once in a while.”

It loses a little in translation though, doesn’t it?

Second, over the weekend I learned more about two of the protestors whom I think are emblematic of the problem we’re facing.

I was probably one of the last to learn that one of the violent Columbia protestors arrested after breaking into a campus building was James “Cody” Carlson, 40, a wealthy heir to an advertising fortune. This guy is straight out of central casting, if you’re casting someone to play a leftist d-bag in a forthcoming straight-to-video Rob Reiner agitprop bomb.

In his late 20s, he got his first criminal charge (that we know of), when as part of a group of self-styled “anarchists” he was involved in a violent “protest.” Though he was charged with a raft of felonies, including battering a cop and aggravated assault on a cop with a deadly weapon, those charges were dropped two years later. (I’m guessing that daddy’s money had something to do with that.)

He’s also got two kids, one with a “baby mama” who is a model. I’m assuming that his ability to impregnate a model also had something to do with daddy’s money, an assumption backed up by what I think is dispositive evidence:

In his mug shot, he doesn’t look like a fella who normally has to fight off supermodels with both hands. In fact, he’s got a SFPI (Simpson Face Punchability Index) of 86 out of 100.

For comparison purposes, when I was in my mid 20s, with discernable abs and a firm jawline, I had an impressive SFPI of only 7, and yet surprisingly few models ever engineered elaborate schemes to trick me into impregnating them. On the rare occasions when that did happen – and I always managed to outwit the wily vixens – my friends never taunted me that the women were only after me because of my dad’s gas-company-heavy-equipment-operator’s money.

Anyway, Carlson is also the kind of 40-year-old who has enough time on his hands to spend many weeks agitating at a college he has no connection to, and leading a bunch of gullible morons in various criminal acts. In fact, his accomplishments so far in 2024 demonstrate his emotional maturity.

In January he was one of the Jew-hating idiots who caused chaos in NYC by blocking traffic on several bridges. Because he wasn’t run over by some heroic driver, he was still around in April, when he was at another protest, and this time grabbed an Israeli flag from a 22-year-old and hit him in the face with a rock, and then set the flag on fire.

He should have ended up in an intensive care burn unit, in terrible pain and wrapped up like Imhotep Pelosi, but due to the inexplicable absence of NYPD flamethrower robot dogs, he was still roaming free when he broke into Hamilton Hall at Columbia.

The guy apparently got a law degree years ago, but his only connection to the law seems to be in finding various ways to break it. As a Blaze story put it, “sources have stated that Carlson is a menace and an attorney by profession.”

A menace AND an attorney, you say? Don’t tell Que Mala, but that makes for a Venn diagram with a hell of a lot of overlap in it!

His own family aren’t big fans, either. When a NY Post reporter called his sister’s house, the woman who answered said, “We don’t talk to him. Leave us alone. He is out of our lives for so many years.”

I like the cut of her jib.

After his arrest at Hamilton Hall, Carlson got five charges: burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy, and criminal trespassing. When he was put in a holding cell at the jail, he destroyed a camera there, and got another criminal mischief charge. He was also later charged with a hate crime, assault and petit larceny for the April Israeli flag incident.

All of which could be big trouble for him. Except that he’s still got some of his daddy’s money left, and he’s in NYC, where only orange guys are pursued by “law enforcement,” such as it is. Still, he is a rich white guy, so maybe his super-punchable face will earn some karmic attention.

I heard about the next protestor when she was being roundly mocked for demanding that the school provide food and water for the protestors. The keffiyeh-wearing Columbia grad student in question ridiculously warned that if the school doesn’t give in to their demands, the protestors might be facing “[dying] of dehydration and starvation.”

Her name is Johanna King-Slutzky, and she’s writing a dissertation for an English PhD (d’oh!) focused on interpreting poetry from 1760-1860 “through a Marxian lens.” Which answers the age-old question, “How do I communicate that I’m totally unemployable without saying the words, ‘I’m totally unemployable’?”

Also, it’s probably just the lingering effect of the raunchy sex comedies of my youth – this was several years before I was fending off models drawn by the allure of my pop’s gas company cash – but when I hear that there’s a poetry professor named “Slutzky,” certain expectations are created.

Expectations that were completely dashed when Ms. King-Slutzky stepped before the cameras to warn about the impending starvation of the brave Groucho Marxians cosplaying their way through the Ivy league. (Let’s just say that Van Halen would not make a “Hot For Teacher” video about this specific academic.)

But the most incomprehensible part of her story is a detail that I haven’t heard anybody comment on. Everybody got some cheap laughs from her last name. But that last name is hyphenated, which means that she could have just stuck with “King,” and made her husband/wife/your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine drop the “Slutzky.”

But no. She steered into the Slutzky skid.

And then she wrapped herself in a terrorist tablecloth and marched out to face the cameras, and earn herself a spot in the annals of self-satirizing woke imbeciles.

Well done, Columbia!

Hamas delenda est!

Lunacy on Campus, a Scottish Leader Falls, Tucker Carlson Disappoints, but Biden’s Terribleness Abides (posted 5/3/24)

Charles Dickens really was a genius. (I know: breaking news from the 19^th century!)

A Christmas Carol will always be my favorite of his works, but it’s hard to beat A Tale of Two Cities. His famous opening line sets up a comparison of opposites: the best of times and the worst; an age of wisdom and one of foolishness; a season of light and one of darkness, and the spring of hope and the winter of despair, among others.

I think of those lines often, because they seem to be ripped from today’s headlines.

For example, the current upheavals at our colleges are a mix of the worst behavior of feckless administrators and imbecilic students, and the best examples of the opposite.

When you see students across the country pulling down the American flag and putting up a Palestinian one, and protesting on behalf of genocidal terrorists who would happily murder them if they could, it’s nauseating. They violate a raft of laws and school codes, take over buildings, and wrap a statue of Washington in a terrorist doo-rag, and I can’t help but think of the obvious answer:

A phalanx of flamethrower robot dogs rolling across the quad, lighting up Soros tents, white-kid dreadlocks and keffiyehs by the dozen! Followed by me, strolling along shirtless and wearing an air cav hat like Duvall in Apocalypse Now, taking it all in serenely. (“I love the smell of singed terrorist cosplayer during finals week. Smells like… victory!”)

And while that’s just a fantasy – and not just the shirtlessness (you’re welcome, ladies) – the reality has at times been just as good.

As when a bunch of frat guys in North Carolina scared off the soy boys (and soy-he/shes, and soy-she/hes, I guess) and took down the Palestinian flag and raised the Stars and Stripes again. Or when a protest leader beclowned herself by demanding that the university she despises provide her fellow “revolutionaries” with food and water, lest they (literally) die of starvation or thirst. In their first 36 hours of “occupation”!

Or when some smart counter-protestors at UCLA installed a huge screen beside an encampment of pro-Hamas dopes, and then showed video of the various Hamas atrocities that those dopes insisted had never happened.

And the scenes when administrators in Florida and Texas gave the protestors the bum rush immediately, and the ones when the NYPD was finally allowed to knock down Camp Plywood and roll a few entitled whiners down a set of stone steps?

Why, that was just wholesome family entertainment, if you ask me.

And in a time when it seems like powerful politicians are never held accountable for their actions, we get a breath of fresh air from Scotland, home of the awful first minister Hamza Yousaf.

If you read my April 17th column (which you can find at Martinsimpsonwriting.com, if you are interested), you’ll remember that he was the guy who went off on a tirade about how many white people there are in Scotland’s government: “The chief constable, white! Every high court judge, white! Elizabeth Warren, super white!”

(See what I did there? #wemustneverstopmockingher)

When Yousaf championed a “hate speech” law (i.e. a law to quash government-unapproved speech) that went into effect on April first, he was immediately (and hilariously!) the subject of thousands of complaints citing HIS hateful and racist speech. The uproar that followed when the Scots stood up for their rights (unexpectedly!) led to his resignation only 28 days later.

The only way his tenure could have gone any worse would have been if he had written a memoir about how he took his family’s Dalmation puppy (mostly white!) to a gravel pit and shot it in the face because it was a lousy hunting dog.

In his exit speech, he demonstrated that he’d learned nothing, playing the identity politics card immediately: “People who looked like me were not in positions of political influence…when I was younger….”

By the way, the two leading candidates to replace Yousaf are John Swinney (white!) and Kate Forbes (white!) HA!

Thus falls Clan Yousaf, hopefully never to rise again!

There has also been some best of times/worst of times oddness regarding a couple of prominent American political figures.

On the left, John Fetterman has transformed from a badly dressed, mentally compromised leftist numbskull into a badly dressed, mostly coherent person. He’s called out Bob Menendez’s obvious corruption, slammed the influx of illegals, and staunchly supported Israel. And yes, calling him the best Democrat Senator is damning with faint praise, but it’s still praise, and I’m happily surprised by his recent behavior.

On the conservative side, though, I’ve been really disappointed to see the way Tucker Carlson has gone off the rails lately. I’ve never agreed with him 100%, but he always seemed like a thoughtful, decent and brave iconoclast, willing to take on RINOs and their mushy positions.

But recently he’s embraced some bad people, and attacked some good ones. He did a softball interview with the misogynistic creep (and literal pimp) Andrew Tate, during which he couldn’t bring himself to push back on any of Tate’s gross talking points. Then he acted like a modern-day Walter Duranty in an embarrassing tongue bath of Putin, praising what he saw on his tightly controlled visit to a Potemkin subway station and grocery store in Moscow. (Everything is so clean, and the store shelves are stocked with a great variety of cheap but top-quality products!)

He’s also taken an anti-Semitic position (IMHO) regarding conservatives’ support of Israel against the Hamas terror attacks, including smearing Ben Shapiro with what is effectively worse than the old dual-loyalties canard, explicitly saying that Shapiro doesn’t love America!

To top that off, his recent sit-down with Joe Rogan – whom I generally like – featured several leftist tropes of America hatred, including lambasting us for dropping nukes on Japan in WWII. He ridiculed the idea that there could ever have been any justification for dropping the bombs that killed around 200,000 Japanese.

Never mind the logical assessment that not dropping the bombs would have meant either a conventional invasion of the home islands – reasonably predicted to cost the lives of at least 250,000 American soldiers, and way more Japanese deaths – or a naval blockade of the islands, which would have starved millions of Japanese to death.

That’s the kind of simple-minded argument I’d expect from some MSM talking heads or MSNBC guests, but not from Tucker! I don’t know what’s happened to him, but I hope he comes back to his senses.

In all of these stories, we are whipsawed back and forth between depressing dark clouds and heartening silver linings. But there is one constant, one lode star, one bit of bedrock that we can always count on, even in the midst of our topsy turvy politics: the essential and instinctual awfulness of Joe Biden.

The guy cannot do anything right! He can’t walk without falling, he can’t talk without slurring, and he reads a teleprompter like it’s a series of Rohrschach ink blots telling the story of Corn Pop murdering Dr. Jill with a lead pipe in the conservatory.

He’s getting beaten up by both sides for his handling of the Hamas/Israel war. His tepid mutterings of weak support for Israel enrage the pro-Hamas factions in the Democrat base. And his pressuring Israel to not finish off Hamas enrages everyone else.

So what does he do for an encore? He proposes bringing Gazans to America as refugees. Because that could never go wrong!

By now it’s pretty obvious that the vast majority of Americans don’t want cosplaying, angry white-kid pseudo-Gazans on our campuses. So why would we want authentically angry actual Gazans in our country? It’s not like there is a shortage of America-hating anti-Semites around here, Joe!

He’s even angered the Papua New Guineans with his offensive fairy tale about Ol’ Uncle Appetizer.

I’m just hoping that his handlers, his doctors and his taxidermist can keep him in this race for six more months. Because while those months may be the worst of times, we can look forward to the best of times if we can just get this guy out of the White House.

Hamas delenda est!

Two Local Stories: How to Handle Protestors, & Foolish Criminals (posted 5/1/24)

Today I’ve got two quick stories for you, both from my hometown. The first offers a case study in how to respond to law-breaking campus protestors, and the second one fits in two of my regular column categories: “Stupid Criminals” stories, and “You Don’t Hate the Media Enough” stories.

One of the many reasons that it’s great to be a Florida Gator is that our governing officials don’t suffer from CCRIS (Congenital Cranial-Rectal Inversion Syndrome), a condition tragically affecting many university administrations across the country.

(For your generous gift of only $10 per month, our team of dedicated, caring surgeons can give Claudine Gay and other Ivy League college administrators the desperately needed operations to remove their heads from their arses, before it’s too late. Won’t you please think of the children? The gullible, low-IQ, Jew-hating children? Our operators are standing by.)

In recent weeks, as many universities spiraled into paroxysms of pro-Hamas idiocy, UF issued clear guidelines delineating free speech on the one hand, and various forms of unacceptable and illegal a-holery on the other.

Among the latter, they identified “protests inside buildings… blocking egress, camping, building structures,” and they warned that student violators would face “a 3-year trespass and suspension,” and that non-compliant employees “will be trespassed and separated from employment.”

When 9 knuckleheads tested those rules a few days ago, they were all quickly arrested. You can see pictures of them online, and they are exactly what you’d expect. The breakdown: 3 males and 6 females; 5 are UF students; 2 have multiple hair colors not found in nature, and all 9 are absolutely un-“friend”-able, if you get my meaning.

All are charged with multiple misdemeanors, and one – Allen Frasheri – got an additional battery-on-an-officer charge for spitting on a cop. (Rumors that he has been tested for rabies so that the officer doesn’t have to go through a preventative series of painful shots have not been confirmed.) And surprise! He was the president of a student chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America in 2022.

So I’d advise that officer to take the shots, just to be on the safe side.

My favorite part of the info about the protestors is that the UF students are listed as “expecting to graduate” in 2025 or 2026. But given the three-year suspension mentioned above, I wouldn’t count on that now, kiddos!

After the arrests, UF spokesman Steve Orlando put out a statement that should be carved into a stone tablet and placed in front of the statues of the three UF Heisman trophy winners (Spurrier, Wuerffel and Tebow), so that parents who care about the important things in life can bring their children there, and train them well.

The statement began, “This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”

Sweetness and light!

Unlike at USC and many other schools, UF’s graduation is going to go on this Saturday, as scheduled. NOT unexpectedly!

My second local story is very different. It involves the death of four black males between the ages of 14 and 16 in a terrible car crash two days ago.

Most media reports had headlines that varied only slightly from this one: “Four Teenage Boys Dead after High-Speed Chase with Florida Highway Patrol, Who Performed Pit Maneuver to Stop Them.”

Most of the stories concentrated on how young the boys were, and the fact that one was a football star at a local high school, before providing a few details. A cop had initially pulled them over, but then they sped away, reaching speeds of over 100 mph, before a trooper intervened. It’s not clear how fast they were going when he pitted them (i.e. bumped the rear of their car to one side, in order to make it spin out). But the car ran into a cement pole, killing everyone inside.

If I were one to trust MSM crime stories, I would have been intrigued. At first I might think that maybe they were speeding because they were late for Bible Study. (I hate it when you get in there late, and you missed the first prayer and the reading of the Gospel text!) But a few paragraphs in, the story mentioned that the SUV they were in had been reported stolen.

So okay, they weren’t making great choices. But still, I’m sure that at the tender age of 16, these were just dumb kids, out for a harmless joyride.

Because who amongst us hasn’t driven a little too fast, and possibly slid our dad’s 1972 Gran Torino (white with a blue stripe, and that super-cool hood scoop on it) into a ditch off of a gravel road about half a mile north of El Paso, Illinois?

I mean, just speaking hypothetically, and not at all from personal experience.

Anyway, I’m sure these high-spirited rascals were just—

What’s that? Two of the four of them were wearing ankle monitors? And at least some of them were wearing ski masks? In Florida, on a 72-degree night, as one does?

Well, maybe they’ve got one of those really strict youth pastors, who makes you wear an ankle monitor if you’ve showed up late to at least two Bible Study sessions in the past. Those guys can get pretty Old Testament with—

What? Three of the four of them had active warrants? C’mon, man!

What do you have to do to have active warrants and an ankle monitor when you’re 14 or 16 years old?! And if someone in law enforcement is actually monitoring the ankle monitors, did they not find it strange that two of their ankle monitors were flying through east Gainesville at 110 miles per hour?

It’s obviously a tragic story, if only because the kids were so young, and may have had the chance to overcome their CCRIS if they’d survived their stupidity for a little longer.

And even though I’ve never had a warrant – active or otherwise – and never needed an ankle monitor, I do know that a 1972 Torino’s speedometer goes up to 120 mph, and what it feels like to bury the needle on a two-lane Illinois country road.

Nothing but the grace of God can explain why most of us males are still here at all.

And I wish those boys would have had fathers who put the fear of God in them before they ever got to the ankle-monitor and fleeing-in-a-stolen-car stage.

Hamas delenda est!

I Get a Personal Flamethrower, & Disney and Newsom Continue to Blunder (posted 4/29/24

Everyone here knows that I am not one to brag.

Sure, I may have mentioned in passing that my oldest daughter is busy saving the lives of children in a pediatric hospital, or that my youngest daughter is a budding astrophysicist whose mentoring professor just submitted an article with her on which she’s going to be first author.

And yes, if you held a gun to my head, I’d confess that when Sheila Jackson Lee once saw my wife, she said, “I thought that the sun was a powerful heat, but THIS woman is HOT!” And that my Aussie shepherd Cassie (“the Wonder Dog” is an honorific, but I can’t really type her name without it) is the apotheosis of canine cool.

But yesterday I was able to check off another bucket list item. Because I am now the proud owner of a… wait for it…flamethrower!

No, tragically, it is not a flamethrowing robot dog. (My wife somehow doesn’t agree that that would be the best $10,000 [with shipping] that we ever spent. Because she’s apparently not the financial visionary that I am.) (See my Friday column at Martinsimpsonwriting.com for background.)

This is a small, personal flamethrower to be used for burning weeds or grass, among other things. And by “other things,” I don’t mean pro-Hamas protestors’ tents, because in Florida, we don’t have any of those on our campuses. Because we are not governed by terrorist sympathizers or sniveling cowards.

But I do already have a few other “flame-thrower-target” ideas. I’m going to see what happens if I turn her on the first “Co-exist” bumper sticker I see, and there’s a house a few blocks over with one of those, “In this house we believe… chromosomes don’t exist, etc.” yard signs that intrigue me…

If you have any suggestions about other possible uses for Sparky (yes, I’ve already given her a name, and yes, it’s a name that works for a personal flamethrower OR the electric chair that we used on Ted Bundy) (Because: Florida!), please leave them in the comments.

And yes, Sparky’s pronouns are she/her. Because guys always think of their favorite physical possessions as female. I refer you to sailors always calling their ships “her,” and to every Beach Boys song about a beloved car. (“She’s real fine, my 409.” “She’s my little deuce coupe, you don’t know what I got.” Etc.)

Not to mention the fact that when the Japanese fooled around with us at Pearl Harbor, they “found out” on the receiving end of a big ol’ fissile middle finger dropped from a plane that was named after the pilot’s mom, the Enola Gay.

And if by some freak coincidence, I should pass away in a flame-thrower-related accident this week (my wife is not totally discounting the possibility), I am asking here and now that the great and powerful CO will give my eulogy, at a service to which I trust you will all travel to attend.

And the only requests I have are that “I’ll Fly Away” be played, that the flag at the CO Compound be flown at half-mast for a respectful interval, and that CO’s first sentence be, “The world without Martin Simpson is now a dark and dismal place, but we can all be comforted knowing that he died doing what he loved: throwing flames.”

Yes, I have been hitting the celebratory bourbon this evening, thanks for asking. Because did I mention that today I received my own personal FLAMETHROWER!?

Now where was I?

Oh yeah, Disney is still reeling after having been beaten like a rented mule by Ron DeSantis; campus protestors are continuing to illustrate their own idiocy AND the difference between how blue states and red states react to said idiocy; and Gavin Newsom continues to step on rakes.

You’d think that Disney would be busily engaged in trying to win back their audience and staunch the flow of red ink they’ve been experiencing lately. But nope!

Their latest blunder happened last month, when a family of four were staying at a Disney Resort at Disney World, and during a meal, paid an extra fee for a visit from a character, the Evil Queen from Snow White and the 7 Dwarves (currently Snow Brown, One Dwarf and Six Normally Proportioned People).

And they did get an “evil queen,” sort of. It was a dude in a costume and make-up!

“This is some Bibbidi Bobbidi Bullschiff right here!” said the dad.

Well, I don’t know if he said that. But he should have. He did say that his whole family have been huge Disney fans before this. He also said that he spent $8000 on his current trip.

Obviously the family were bait-and-switched. It would be like paying to meet a living president at the Hall of Presidents, and getting the mortal remains of the late Joe Biden. Or paying to meet Geronimo or Sitting Bull, and getting Grandma Squanto (#wemustneverstopmockingher). Or paying to meet Universal Studio’s classic movie monster the Mummy, and getting Imhotep Pelosi.

Okay, that last one would be getting exactly what you paid for. But I think the other examples make my point.

I can’t believe Disney is still pulling stuff like this, and I feel this guy’s pain. But if this guy was going to drop $8K on entertainment, he could have just come up with another $2 large and got himself a FRD instead! (“Flamethrowing Robot Dog,” of course).

And then, if he’s ever confronted with a hulking dude in a robe and tiara, it’s Evil Queen versus Flamethrowing Robot Dog! And that has pay-per-view written ALL over it! C’mon, man.

Meanwhile, pro-Hamas asshats continue to illustrate why you should never send your kid to a college run by leftist wokesters. On one campus after another, they continued to set up squatter camps and then virtue signal and “negotiate” with feckless administrators.

But I see several silver linings coming out of this mortifying debacle:

1.The GOP should be cutting ads of these idiots to run – interspersed with border chaos scenes – 24/7 in October and early November. (Though I’ve got a feeling that we’ll already have plenty of great footage from the Dem convention in Chicago in August. I’m going to have a 50-gallon drum of popcorn delivered to my house for that!)

2. The contrast we’re seeing between red state campuses and blue state ones are both educational and edifying. Texas troopers immediately arresting lawbreakers on their campuses are just one example.

At Florida State, 5 minutes after protestors started setting up tents on the quad, campus officials made them pack it up. When protestors’ chants got boisterous, a number of university grounds people suddenly appeared on loud riding mowers to keep the campus tidy. Then sprinklers mysteriously went off, dampening the brave freedom fighters.

One beta male protestor accused the school of intentionally trying to discourage them, saying, “Waah! How am I going to impress my mouth-breathing simpleton friends, and maybe even get a chance at the most dispiriting, low-quality hippie-chick tail ever, with all of this lawn mowing and lawn watering going on?” (I’m paraphrasing, slightly.)

An unnamed university spokesman (and as of this moment, a hero of mine) said – and I swear I am not making this up – “Work on our grounds happens throughout the day.”

I’m not crying. I’m just allergic to newly mown grass and moist Marxists.

My favorite visual of the week came from Emory U in Atlanta, where a bunch of Hamas-loving, cop-hating protestors set up an illegal encampment on campus. After too many warnings, some Georgia state troopers descended on them with the wrath of an angry Old Testament God.

Or at least with the enthusiasm of a well-coached outside linebacker trying to make the first string at an SEC school! You probably saw the video. One particular moron tried to run away, a checkered terrorist tablecloth on his head. (You say “keffiyeh,” I say “terrorist version of a MAGA hat.”) (Hat-tip to CO for that one!)

The dope was run down from behind by a trooper in full gear, including what I first thought was a looped length of rope on his belt, but later realized were just plastic zip ties. (Man, if that had been rope, and the cop had dropped the perp and quickly hog-tied his legs with a rope, that would have been the most awesome trifecta of toxic masculinity – cop, football player and rodeo roper – ever!)

The cop demonstrated perfect form: knees bent, weight going forward, then the lowered shoulder and exploding through the tackle. He even put his head to one side of the target right before impact, to avoid the 15-yard penalty for spearing!

I tell ya, those protestors were dropping like Moanin’ Megan Rapinoe walking into a particularly tall blade of grass!

More, please.

Finally, Gavin Newsom is back in the news, and for a hilarious reason.

(By the way, I realize that today’s column would make a good round on Family Feud: “Name three people or groups that Ron DeSantis has totally owned in the last year! Survey says: Disney, pro-Hamas campus protestors, and Gavin Newsom.”)

Newsom got the brilliant idea of commissioning a $1 coin to honor innovation in the late great Golden state, and tweeted out a call for suggestions of what should appear on the coin. And the people of the internet unleashed a torrent of swift kicks to the smooth, featureless groin of the Ken Doll.

Dozens of proposed designs featured some variation on the tent city: a single filthy tent surrounded by garbage; a few dozen tents with whacked-out meth heads lounging around; an endless vista of tents in the foreground, with the LA skyline in the background.

One suggestion featured a gas-station sign with innovatively high $6+ gas prices. One proposed a wagon train of U-hauls heading east, while another contemplated how to indicate in an image the turning a budget surplus into a $73 billion dollar deficit in two years.

But the leader in the clubhouse seems to be a glowing, golden image of the Golden Gate Bridge, one of its iconic towers partially obscured by a ginormous poop emoji.

It’s a perfect image for California currency under Democrat rule: not a bitcoin, but a sh*tcoin.

Well done, Gavin! Hamas delenda est!