Month: April 2025

Why Has America Volunteered to be Weak? (posted 4/7/25)

Well, this is going to be at least a three- or four-column week, because addled lefties are still creating entertaining and educational stories faster than I can mock them.  I’ve got the third in a three-part series of columns on immigration etiquette coming in the next day or two.

But first, on a related note, something else is stuck in my craw.  Because the anomaly that has most aggravated me about our country’s struggles in recent years is that it’s been so VOLUNTARY on our part. 

For most of human history, when nations struggled or faced the kind of systemic problems that our society has had, the problems have been forced on those nations.   For example, late-stage Rome was beset on all sides by strong barbarian tribes; Poland tried to stave off Nazi mechanized and air forces with cavalry; a weakened czarist system was caught off guard by the demonic frenzy of a communist revolution.

By contrast, consider our recent struggles, in foreign policy and at home: 

Foreign policy example 1: Iran’s despotic mullahs are developing nuclear weapons, which we could easily stop.  We wouldn’t even have to do anything ourselves. 

Our president could just get on a Zoom call with Netanyahu and some serious-looking IDF or Mossad guys. (Think: the modern equivalent of Ariel Sharon and eye-patch-wearing bad arse Moshe Dayan.  And you know that Israel has some of those guys on staff at all times, Jehovah bless ‘em.)    

Trump: The weird beards in Tehran are getting froggy with their nukes.  What do you know about that?

Netanyahu: Little bit.

Trump:  Is that DeNiro?  Are you doing DeNiro?

Netanyahu: Are you looking at me? Because I don’t see anyone else here.

Trump: Ah!  I love this guy!  Anyway, if you happened to know where those nukes were being built, and the United States suggested that we have an interest in them prematurely detonating, how long would that take?

Netanyahu: From right now?

Trump: For example.

Netanyahu glances at a guy in a dark suit and sunglasses standing behind him, looking like a non-goy Jason Statham.  The guy steps forward and whispers something to Netanyahu, then steps back. 

Netanyahu: 47 minutes.

Trump: Sweet! I’ll call Jeffrey Goldberg and tell him I’ve got an exclusive story for him.  (Netanyahu’s eyes widen, and he blinks rapidly.)  AH!  Got ya, Bibi! 

Netanyahu relaxes, then crinkles the corner of his eyes and bobs a finger at Trump.  “You!  You got a gift!” 

Trump (pointing a finger back at Netanyahu):  DeNiro again, from “Analyze This!” I love that one.  Anyway, make some Persian rubble bounce, and no tariffs for you.”

And, scene.

Example 2: The Houthis.  

They’re a Third-World militia with souped-up bass boats and a handful of Iranian missiles, and drones you could get from Dick’s Sporting Goods.  And they’ve been holding up world-wide shipping for a couple of years!  All while Anthony Blinken racked up frequent flier miles in rounds of pointless meetings with a bunch of useless UN types and some Islamic “diplomats” who could barely keep a straight face. 

Then Trump gets in, and comes into a WH briefing room after a round of golf, and watches a Houthi “stronghold” get lit up like Michael Moore’s eyes when he spots an unattended ham sandwich.  Then, a couple of days ago, he releases another video, this time of a bunch of Houthis standing around in a rectangular grouping, planning a new attack.

Annndddd…missile strike!  And suddenly the sand is littered with diced Houthis encrusted in sea salt and seasoned with RPG accelerant.   [Begin Homer Simpson filter: “Mmmm, diced Houthis.”]

Trump posted the video with the Trumpiest of all possible descriptions: “These Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.  Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis!  They will never sink our ships again!”

And predictably, our legacy media – whom we don’t hate nearly enough – immediately tried to claim that the Houthi terrorists were just a bunch of peaceful Yemenis in a tribal gathering. Their evidence?  Undated photos of other Yemenis in other rectangular groupings during other tribal gatherings.

Got that?  Yemenis often get together in rectangles, and this group was arranged in a rectangle.  Therefore, we put the warheads on the wrong foreheads.  Yada yada yada, genocidal war crime!

Ugh!  If these media hacks were around during WWII, you know they’d be showing Nuremburg rallies with Nazis all lined up in rows, with self-righteous voice-over narration saying, “You know who else liked to line up in rows? [Cut to pictures of a Lutheran worship service.]  See?  Germans, all in rows!  The allies are bombing pacificist Lutherans!  Won’t somebody please think of the Lutherans?!”

One fact that the MSM hacks don’t point out?  If the Houthi gathering we just blew up had been a peaceful assembly of Yemeni civilians, the Houthi militia spokes-jihadis would have immediately released a full-run down of the names and ages of the sainted dead.  Which they have not done.

Unexpectedly!

The same trend of voluntarily choosing weakness has been happening on the domestic front too.  Was there any reason for bunches of cops to stand around watching as hordes of antifa and BLM rioters toppled statues, burned police stations, looted stores and did literally billions of dollars of damage to cities all over the country for months on end?

Was there any reason to watch mediocre male athletes pretending to be females, beating the hell out of actual female athletes, when the nation is full of dads of daughters who would have happily tagged in and beaten the third-rate male athletes like rented mules, if only the relevant authorities would have given them a wink and a nod? 

Was there any reason for the nation to stand by and watch as millions of illegals streamed across our border, picking up free cell phones and voter registration forms before fanning out across the country, after which crime rates and welfare spending skyrocketed? (UNEXPECTEDLY!)

There was not.  We volunteered to act weak and be victimized.   And now, post January 20th, we’ve volunteered to be strong, and commence with the legal and tactical arse-whippings. 

And suddenly TDA members are living like rats (with forcibly-shaved rat heads) in El Salvadoran cages, and Tesla-vandalizing incels are trembling in their mom’s basements as they await the cops’ arrival.  (Maybe you’re not as smart as Elon, kids, because he built cars with a dozen cameras in them, and you keyed and set fire to cars with a dozen cameras in them.)   

And illegals who proudly paraded six months ago with signs proclaiming, “Pay me to hate America!” and, “Cuyo calles?  Nuestras calles!” are now huddled in public-housing apartments from which they’ve displaced American veterans, ingesting the last of their fentanyl stash to try to chase away the nightmares of Hulk Homan™ busting through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man with a New York accent and a phalanx of ICE agents right behind him.           

And Hamas-sympathizers at Ivy League colleges who were recently stomping around in their terrorist tablecloth headgear attacking Jewish Americans are cowering in their dorm rooms trying to avoid authorities, like smelly Yahya Sinwar when he fled to that half-demolished building in Rafah, trying to hide from the IDF drone that moments later gave him the ol’ kosher KABOOM!

Speaking of America-hating terrorist sympathizers on campus, you may not have heard about the case of Iranian “legal scholar” Helyeh Doutaghi, who was fired by Yale a week ago, after being linked to the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network (PPSN), which both the Biden administration and Canada had designated as a terrorist-linked group.

Doutaghi has a long history of spewing the usual Islamist anti-Semitic poison, describing as “Zionist barbarity” Israel’s non-genocidal and non-barbarous response to Hamas’ genocidal and barbarous attacks. 

In addition to the religious bigotry angle, she also has the hateful Marxist lingo down pat, blathering on about how Western democracy is “a system built to serve capitalist property…born in genocide and enslavement…and [intended to deny] freedom and sovereignty to the colonized.” She has also promised to “use everything at my disposal to fight the fascist dictatorship of the United States.”

She seems nice, doesn’t she?

This innocent little dove – she’s got a kind of an Islamic AOC vibe going on – was given a visa to allow her into first Canada and then the US, before she eventually got her teaching gig at Yale. In a March interview after Yale first tried to question her about her connection to the PPSN, she said, “I had been very loud and proud about my [organizing] work…in the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and the anti-colonialist movements,” and “[Yale] never raised any concerns” about her “activities.”

Because of course they didn’t.

Anyway, when Yale notified Doutaghi that she was suspended until they could investigate her possible terrorist ties, she refused to cooperate with the investigation, and then was fired. 

When her supporters heard about her suspension and then firing, many of them were especially outraged that this horrific injustice happened during the “holy month of Ramadan.”

To which most normal Americans replied, “Oh NO!  Not the holy month of Ramadan!  Anyway…”   

Because we’re done volunteering to be weak, and to appease the enemies of our country and our culture abroad, and to harbor them here at home. 

Hopefully Helyeh Doutaghi is going through our deportation process as we speak, if she isn’t gone already.

Because I think I speak for most Americans when I say, “Deport Helyeh?” 

Hell yeah!

And also…

Hamas delenda est!

Thoughts on Immigration, Part 2 (posted 4/4/25)

In my column on Wednesday I covered a little bit of the history of our immigration laws, and discussed the long-standing legal and common-sense concept that we have every right to decide who to allow to come into our country, and under what circumstances.  And however much our rules about immigration have developed and evolved, they’ve always included one central idea: we should allow people in who can improve and benefit America.

Hence the five categories that I quoted from the 1891 Immigration Act.  If you’re a foreigner who wants to come here, and you’re stupid, or mentally or physically ill, why would we want you here?  If you’re a criminal, why would we want to be your victims?  If you can’t or won’t support yourself financially, why would we want to work harder and tax ourselves more, just to take care of you? 

On the one hand, it’s weird to even have to say all that, because rational self-interest seems so self-evident and obvious.  If Americans don’t have the right to decide who comes into America, who does?  And if you will predictably make us dumber, sicker, poorer and more preyed-upon, why would we allow you in?

On the other hand, over the last half-century or more, we’ve developed almost a sense of shame – at the very least, embarrassment – about our strength, successes, and wealth.  It hits our ears wrong to say, to the millions who would want to immigrate to America, “What’s in it for us?”  Many schools of thought have added to this unease, some of them good, and some very bad.

I’d include the Judeo-Christian world view that is entwined in our national DNA – and which formed the ethical and political architecture of our Founders’ minds, and the scaffolding of the constitution and democratic republic they built – as the most important factor on the good side.  We were raised on stories of the Good Shepherd and the Good Samaritan, and our duty to care for the widow and the orphan, and for the poor.  We’re a generous and a compassionate people, in no small part because of a wide-ranging body of teaching from Uncle Jesus and his predecessors that, “As you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done it unto Me.”

On the bad side, we shouldn’t underestimate how much damage has been done by leftist schools of thought, and the multitude of ways they have taught our children to hate our country and themselves. 

Multiculturalism tells us that all cultures are equally valid, except that ours is somehow worse than the primitive and the non-capitalist ones.  Socialism tells us that the wealthy are evil exploiters, rather than the creators of rising tides that can lift all boats.  Critical race theory and post-colonial studies tell us that successful first-world countries and the lighter skinned are eternal victimizers, and the rest of the world their rightly aggrieved victims.    

Put that all together and disseminate it through an insular and propagandizing educational system, and you get the modern West – wildly successful, and while flawed, the best available model for the world to follow – yet without the civilizational self-confidence to vigorously defend itself, let alone its borders.  

Which brings us to today, with tens of millions of people here illegally.  They’ve come here for good reasons and bad – some to work hard and make better lives for themselves, some to prey on a wealthy and vulnerable populace, some to take advantage of our idiotically generous and unpoliced welfare benefits.

This has been incredibly frustrating for most Americans.  Clear majorities in all polls say they want less LEGAL immigration, and giant majorities want illegal immigration stopped, and illegals deported.  And yet there have been a network of groups who have been able to engineer the recent waves of illegals coming in.

Self-interested businesses want cheaper labor.  Foreign governments and cartels and their American partners want to enrich themselves through remittances, as well as smuggling and organized crime.  Gullible and naïve church and “charitable” groups have allowed their misplaced compassion (and IMHO, often an intoxicating sense of their own virtue) to blind themselves to the damage they are doing to their own country.    

But most of those people and groups have always been here, and together have always accounted for some illegal immigration into this country.  But the driving force behind the recent flood of illegals has been the Democrat party.  Dem politicians see illegals as an army of future voters who will secure their national political majority for many decades, thus allowing them to achieve their political goals of a more leftist/socialist, and less traditionally American, country.

And the fact that an entrenched network of NGOs and other Dem organizations (which DOGE is just beginning to uncover) can enrich themselves in the process is just icing on the cake for them.

To me, the best thing about the new Trump administration so far has been the way they’ve closed the border and started deportations.  All of my usual hyperbolic mockery aside, I’ve been giddy watching the American people regain their self-confidence, to the point where they will openly support deporting illegals, unswayed by the usual accusations of racism and xenophobia. 

I love watching the elite Left – lulled into an arrogant complacency by years of hectoring us, unopposed – get completely wrong-footed when their usual attacks no longer work.  When AOC lectured Hulk Homan™ that “being in the country illegally isn’t a crime,” he rhetorically pantsed her (it’s not my fault that she has placed her juicy booty – her words, not mine – front and center in the public’s mind) by reciting from memory the relevant portions of US law that proved her wrong. 

All she could do was pull up her pants, stammer, and change the subject.  (Rumors that her panties were red, with a hammer and sickle on the seat have not been confirmed.)

The top Dems don’t know if they’re afoot or horseback on immigration, and it’s glorious to see!   After they insisted for a full year that Biden couldn’t close the border without new legislation, Trump closed it 15 minutes after being inaugurated, and everyone started glaring at those Dems, while they looked at their feet or checked their watches.

When some immigration raids began catching run-of-the-mill illegals along with the violent TDA gangbangers who were being targeted, lefty talking heads got excited.  They actually  thought that it would turn the public against deportations!  But every time they did some kind of “man on the street” interviews, the citizens said something like, “But the untargeted ones are here illegally too?” 

And before the “journalist” could say, “Well yeah, but-“ the citizen would say, “Vamanos!” or “Adios!”      

Hysterical Jamie Raskin actually gave a speech calling for the plane full of gang-bangers to be flown back here so they can have taxpayer-funded lawyers and years-long hearings to see if they get to stay! 

Keep it up, Dems, and let us know how that works for you.

I’ve got a few more thoughts on how likely it is that we’ll be able to deport the vast majority of illegal immigrants, and also on the related controversies over deporting students who were here legally on student visas or green cards.  But this column is long enough, so I’ll save those for next week.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a joke I saw last week…

How badly has Snow Woke bombed? (Unexpectedly.)

Someone posted a pic from the opening night’s 8 o’clock showing… and labeled it “Snow White and the Seven Audience Members.”

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!

Thoughts on Immigration, Pt. 1 (posted 4/2/25)

Since the Trumpkrieg™ started on January 20th, the Democrats have taken the short end of one 80/20 issue after another, but none more important than the issue of illegal immigration. They’ve made so many illogical, specious arguments on the topic that I’ve found myself muttering to myself about this issue more than any others. 

And regular readers know that it’s never a very big jump from “muttering to myself” to “sharing with CO nation.”  So here goes.

The two most annoying leftist immigration fallacies are: acting as if there is no difference between legal and illegal immigration, and acting as if immigrating to America in the 18th century was just like immigrating here recently, or today.

The first point is too obvious to require much debunking.  To equate immigrating legally to doing so illegally is as stupid as equating having a loving relationship with your spouse to rape.  And yet if you were to watch 8 hours of MSNBC or CNN each day – God help you – you would see dozens of boneheads saying, “Except for Native Americans, all Americans are descendants of immigrants!”

Yes, Rachel Maddow.  But you can also say, “Thousands of people go into banks every week, and they leave with money.” 

But most of them go in with a photo ID, and leave with money from their own accounts.  And some of them go in with pistols and ski masks, and leave with other people’s money. 

That’s different!

The second point relies on the listener being ignorant of history.  Which – conveniently for the leftists – most people who went to leftist-run public schools are.

But just like illegal immigration is very different from the legal kind, immigrating to the US before around 1850 was very different than coming in the last hundred years or so.    

That earlier period was marked by a largely empty continent offering immigrants more danger and challenges than tempting opportunities. 

Yes, I said “a largely empty continent.”  And before you can bring up the native Lizzie Warrens living here then – #wemustneverstopmockingher – estimates are that around 4-7 million Indians lived in all of today’s US and Canada around 1492.  That comes out to between 2 and 4 humans per square mile.  And that’s before epidemics thinned that number considerably by the time Europeans got a toehold on the eastern seaboard. 

Back then, there was very little government and absolutely no social safety net.  Nor even any literal safety nets, for that matter.  (Nor seat belts, nor “no smoking” signs, nor labels on the top of a ladder warning that you shouldn’t use it as a step.)  The fledgling nation needed all of the hearty pioneers with grit, ambition and work ethic that it could get.  So it largely welcomed all comers.

And when many of them suffered gruesome deaths – from scalping-involved Warren-cide (#neverstop), being thrown from seatbelt-less saddles in multi-horse collisions, or neck-breaking falls from the top steps of ladders – the rest of the citizenry just went about their business.

Because immigrating wasn’t for whiny wusses.

By the 20th century, and especially with the growth of governmental and other financial support, the situation was very different.  The country could still benefit from hard-working immigrants, but with many areas getting more crowded and the number of would-be immigrants exploding – not to mention the powerful draw of ever-more-generous welfare programs, and newcomers who no longer wanted to assimilate – the risk-reward ratio of large-scale immigration shifted toward more caution, limits and careful vetting. 

You can discern the nation’s developing thinking about immigration by tracking the amount of legislation on the topic during the 19th century.  The Steerage Act of 1819 required that arriving boats have a manifest of immigrants on board, and that those aliens be inspected and given a medical exam before even preliminarily being allowed entry.  Multiple acts in the 1870s and 1880s banned entry to forced laborers, prostitutes and Chinese people.

The two major laws regulating immigration in that century – the Immigration Acts of 1882 and 1891, respectively – enacted increasingly more stringent restrictions on would-be immigrants.

Consider the first paragraph of the Immigration Act of 1891: 

“The following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the United States, in according with the existing acts regulating immigration other than those concerning Chinese laborers: All idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become a public charge, persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease, persons who have been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, polygamists, and also any person whose ticket or passages if paid for with money of another or who is assisted by others to come.”

Let’s break that down.  The list starts and ends with what I think are less relevant points.  I can only guess that the concern about Chinese laborers arose from fear that they would make the rest of us look lazy in comparison, and possibly that they would screw up the grading curve in all of our classes?

The part at the end about immigrants whose passage is paid for by others seems to depend on the context.  If they had family members or solid citizens paying their way in, we should probably consider them.  But if they were funded by some shadowy character – likely named “Soros” – send them packing.

But consider the middle of that passage, which is so relevant that it could have been ripped from today’s headlines.  It lists 5 groups of people – with old-fashioned descriptions that can be easily translated to their modern equivalents – who should not be allowed into the US:

1. Stupid people – “Idiot” later had a specific, IQ-defined meaning, but the modern “stupid” is a suitable umbrella term. 

Fun fact: Psychologists once classified those with an IQ between 0-25 as “idiots,” those between 26-50 as “imbeciles,” and those between 51-70 as “morons.” 

Those groupings are still relevant today, especially if you are trying to analyze members of congress, or answer questions such as, “Is Hank Johnson a low-range or mid-range idiot?” or  “Is AOC capable of achieving imbecility?” or “Have Jasmine Crockett’s remarks about the Texas governor dropped her from moron status all the way to idiocy, or just to imbecility with a dusting of sociopathy?”

2. The mentally ill.  (See: sufferers of gender dysmorphia or auto-gynophilia; watchers of CNN, or The View; Robert DeNiro) 

3. Welfare recipients and those willing to go on the dole.  “Pauper” can just mean “broke” – a temporary state that many (even certain hilarious geniuses) of us have experienced.  And a broke person may even take welfare for a very short time.  But “a public charge” is someone who can’t or won’t support himself, and “likely to become a public charge” is a common fixture in modern America: a habitual and/or multi-generational welfare recipient.  

4. Health risks.   Remember when covid was so threatening that American citizens couldn’t leave their houses…but millions of unvetted third-worlders with hacking coughs were waved through the border like leftist celebrities being welcomed to Pedo Island by Jeffrey Epstein?  And who can read “loathsome, contagious disease” and not think of the plague, TB or the woke mind virus?  

5. Criminals.  These are commonplace, today as in the past.  If you aren’t familiar with “moral turpitude,” think “Hunter Biden.”  And we don’t have many polygamists (i.e. married to more than one person at a time) anymore, having replaced them with never-married baby mommas and dead-beat dads.

Look at that list one more time, and apply it to a sane immigration policy going forward.

Denying entry to group 4 (the health risks) should be uncontroversial to even the far-leftists among us.  If you’re still wearing a covid mask in 2025 and looking forward to your 13th covid booster… zip it, Karen!

Groups 1 and 2 – the stupid and the insane – make up at least a large plurality if not an outright majority of our current Congress.  Annnnddd… we definitely don’t need any more of those. 

And groups 3 and 5 – welfare recipients and criminals – make up the lion’s share of the Democratic base.  So that’s a hard pass. 

Coming Friday: Part 2, in which I apply the lessons above to our current deportation debates.

Hamas delenda est!

Three Leftists Make Fools of Themselves (posted 3/31/25)

Before I get started today, I want to let everyone know that I’ve made another short video – this one on the topic of our crazies vs Democrat crazies — which I’ve posted on my website (Martinsimpsonwriting.com).  You can find it under “Videos” at the top of the screen.

It’s a little different than the ones I made before, and it contains several added features: a small portrait of Cassie the Wonder Dog; a chance to see my scraggly poison ivy beard before I shave it off, and a very brief cameo from the late great Sam Kinison.  So check it out if you’re so inclined, and let me know what you think.

On to the usual political malarky. 

I’ve still got a column on immigration on tap, but I couldn’t miss the chance to mock a few of our leftist antagonists before posting that one… starting with the Good-Year Governor of my old home state of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.

He gave a speech last week at the lefty thinktank Center for American Progress, in DC.  (He kept calling them “CAP,” and I’m sure that I’m not the only one who keep instinctively adding an understood “dunce” before the CAP.) 

He wants to waddle for president in 2028 – which would be easier for him if he wasn’t running Illinois into the ground – and his 20-minute speech and subsequent Q&A was an early step down that road.  I’d like to tell you that I watched the whole presentation, but even my prodigious will power is not inexhaustible.

But I watched most of it, and that was enough to conclude that he’s no worse than most national Democrats right now.  (You can find that description beside “damning with faint praise” in a dictionary of common sayings.)  He can speak in complete sentences, but only if they are filled with a combination of banalities and fashionable progressive lies.

He attacked Elon as a wealthy oligarch, apparently forgetting that he inherited his own billions from mommy and daddy, and used a portion of that wealth to buy a governor’s seat.  He also attacked Trump because he heartlessly withheld masks and ventilators which would have saved the lives of many people in the early days of covid, purely because Trump “[sees] people’s lives [as] a game.”

Which would have been a great point, if we didn’t already know that Trump didn’t do that, and that masks and ventilators didn’t save people’s lives any more than draconian Democrat lockdowns did.  Beyond that, Pritzker offers only glittering generalities, and dishonest insults of conservatives.

The presentation was billed as, “Pritzker Drops the Hammer on Trump and Musk for ‘Cruel and Incompetent Recklessness.’” I couldn’t help thinking that “Cruel and Incompetent Recklessness” would be a great campaign slogan for what the Dems have done to Chicago and Illinois over these last several decades. 

And I think Pritzker would do a lot better for himself if he tried dropping a fork and spoon for a change, instead of a hammer.

Speaking of dropping a hammer, I came across a social media post by Tim Miller – a former RINO and current weasel who writes for the never-Trumper site The Bulwark – which quickly resulted in him being hammered from all sides.

Miller captioned a link to Musk’s DOGE interview with Bret Baier, this way: “Prepare to be lectured to by a guy who has never pleased a woman.”

Which is doubly rich, considering that Musk has about 114 children (which presumably means that he’s pleasured at least a woman or two in time), and that Tim Miller is not exactly the kind of fella whose entry into a room results in a wave of panties automatically dropping.  And that’s before you take into account that Miller is gay. 

A more skeptical guy might ask how Miller even has the chutzpah to opine on what it takes to please a woman in the first place.  But not me.  Because I can easily imagine Miller walking toward a group of women, who all look at him and think, “Oh boy.  What’s it going to take to get rid of this creep?”

But then one of them whispers to the others, “That’s Tim Miller.  And he’s super gay.”

And just like that, all of the women in the group are pleased that he won’t be hitting on them.  So good job, Tim.  Because just by being gay, I’m sure that you’ve pleased way more than your share of women.

My favorite story of the last week was NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher testifying in front of a House committee.  Maher is a standard-issue AWFL, and exactly who you’d expect to be the CEO of NPR. Or PBS.  Or some crooked leftist NGO.

She had to face the worst situation a public official can endure: being questioned by competent people who have the facts at their disposal, when you have left an obvious paper trail proving that you are clearly guilty of everything they’re about to expose you on. 

Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t seem to have been sharp enough to realize any of that.  After posting endless tweets about her super-white New England upbringing, and how she’s woke enough to condemn her northern neighbors for their complicity in the slave trade centuries ago, I couldn’t help but think of another New England tradition: putting bad actors in a pillory in the town square. 

But this was even better.  Because it was like they locked her head and hands in place, and then GOP officials started paddling her, while the angry crowd threw rotten fruit and vegetables at her head.

Her testimony had it all, including ridiculous assertions, unconvincing confessions, and bald-faced lies.

When asked why she’d called Trump a “deranged racist sociopath,” she said that she regretted her words today.  I’ll bet she does, after November 6th!

Brandon Gill went to work on her, and it was beautiful to watch.  He asked whether she believes that “America believes in black plunder and white democracy,” which she had tweeted in reference to a book she loved called The Case for Reparations. 

Maher not only denied that she believed what she tweeted, she said she’d never read that book. Then Gill read her tweet, which said, “I appreciate the day off today to finally fully read The Case for Reparations.”

D’oh!

She also denied knowing of a book called “In Defense of Looting.”  Until…wait for it… Gill read the tweet she posting saying that she’d read that book.

When Gill asked her, “Do you think that white people should pay reparations?”

Finally, she gave a definitive answer.  “I have never said that, sir.”

And Gill brought the paddle down hard.  “Yes you did.  You said it in January 2020.  You tweeted, “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America.  Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt.  Yes, reparations.  Yes, on this day.”

Yikes.  That’s Harry-met-Sally level stuff.  Except that none of us will have what she’s having!

She finally fell back to repeatedly saying that, “My views have evolved since then.”  And eye rolling could be heard throughout DC.  

Especially when she denied that NPR is politically biased.  Which was followed immediately by Jim Jordan pointing out that in the DC area, editorial positions at NPR have 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans.  Ms. Maher was shocked – Shocked! – to hear that.

As much fun as it was to watch Maher getting hoist on her own petard, the larger issue is that NPR and PBS should obviously be defunded, for many reasons. 

First, even if it wasn’t obviously politically biased, there is no reason to force Americans to support government tv and radio channels.  There are tv channels for every interest under the sun, from cooking to travel to Korean soccer to fishing to game shows.  And PBS’s worthwhile shows – my wife watches Antiques Roadshow, and we both like Rick Steve’s travel stuff – would be snapped up and shown on regular, free-market channels. 

Second, they are obviously biased, and that’s doubly insulting in a country that is politically divided.

Third, it’s typical of the totalitarian streak on the left that they would expect us to pay for their propaganda.  Conservatives are glad that our right to own guns is in the constitution, but we’d never expect that American lefties should be forced to buy our guns for us.  And we appreciate conservative outlets like Fox and the Daily Wire, but we’d never expect American lefties to have to pay for those.

But it’s not enough for lefties to pretend that their right to abort their children is in the constitution – they’ve got to force us to pay for those procedures, which we find morally repugnant.  

Similarly, it’s not enough for lefties to demand their own tv and radio networks.  We must be forced to pay for the whispering androgynous soy people to spread their soporific propaganda on our dime.

Finally, the one refrain you hear constantly from advocates for NPR and PBS is that government money makes up such a small part of their funding that it’s barely worth talking about. 

I think it’s time to treat them like Katherine Maher, and call their bluff.  Because if the taxpayer “contribution” is so small, I’m sure they’ll never miss it.

Hamas delenda est!