Causes for Celebration and Regret (posted 11/10/25)

Tomorrow is Veterans’ Day, and since I won’t have a column tomorrow, I’ll say thank you to all veterans a day early.  Of course we should all be thanking veterans every day, but we’re humans and fallen, and we often take veterans, like many good things – good health, forgiveness, living in a great country in a good time – for granted.   

But as someone who never served, I’ve always been a little in awe of those who have.  So thanks, all of you.

I also want to give a quick shout-out to Frederick Beal Jr., who is an exemplary American.  And not just because he has been hitting my Tip Jar regularly and hard.  Thanks!

It’s especially good to remind ourselves of some of the best among us, when much of the political news tends toward the depressing, even among those of us who are wired for optimism, whether cautious or otherwise.   

Trump’s re-election and first 9 months back in office have been invigorating.  But how can you not be given pause by Tuesday’s results, with people like bloodthirsty Jay Jones, flat-affect Spanberger, and Comrade Mamdani winning with ease?

In fact, I also may have spoken too soon about Jacob “Low-T” Frey being the lesser of two evils after he won the Minneapolis mayor race over Somali Omar Fateh.  Because when Frey gave his acceptance speech, he opened by speaking Somali for almost a minute.

On the one hand, it’s impressive to learn a foreign language.  On the other hand, for those of us who like the traditional “e pluribus unum” American ideal, pandering to every immigrant group in ways that ultimately encourage fragmented tribal identities over assimilation to an American identity is troubling.

If by “troubling” I mean “a terrible step in the wrong direction.”  Which I do.

Exhibit A in that trend would be to represent a city that is 80-90% native-born American and English-speaking, and to engage in a significant political address in a foreign tongue that none of those citizens understands.    

The same debilitating trend can be seen in many blue cities – where the push for mass migration, illegal and legal – is clearly intended to import a voting base that will keep leftists in power forever.  Bo-Zo(hran) Mamdani got around 32% of the votes from those born in New York, but over 60% of those born outside of America, and Democrat politicians in NYC brag that their public schools teach students in over 100 different languages.

That’s not something to brag about!  Because it’s not xenophobic to say that the language of the United States is English.  You can speak another language as a second language – my wife and I are working on Norwegian and German right now, respectively – but a country can’t function if its citizens can’t speak with and understand each other.

And a city’s politics can’t be healthy when its elected officials engage in clan-based appeals that most of its citizens literally cannot understand! 

Add that to the “List of Things I Never Thought Anyone Would Ever Have to Say Out Loud,” right below, “Men and Women are Different,” and just above, “You Shouldn’t Cheer When Someone You Agree With Murders Someone For Disagreeing With Him.”   

Turning to more positive news, Nancy Pelosi announced that she’s retiring from Congress (finally!) next year, even though she’s only 2149 years young. 

The only questions now are: 1. How many mummy and/or mummy-adjacent jokes can I cram into this column before she trails her burial wrappings out the door?  and 2. Now who will represent the Nile River Valley in 2026?

One good bet: Just like Nancy, the winning candidate next time will probably put out half of his/her campaign ads in hieroglyphs.  (I don’t have a “hieroglyph” button in my software, so I’ll have to translate the winning message: “Bird. Sun. Two guys with coyote heads.  Cat. Tut head. Baboon. Two women with gold headdresses facing each other.  2026!”)

In other good news – I guess – it looks like as I write this that the government shutdown might be over.  And while I wouldn’t bet on it, I hope that this 40-day detour to Pointless-ville will get some Republicans to focus on three issues the shutdown brought to the fore:

1. Why on earth are over 40 million people in America on SNAP?  There has been no multi-year drought or natural disaster, and clouds of locusts have not ravaged all of our crops. However, a plague has struck our land that is worse than either of those: big government leftists have descended upon us with an idea to help the poorest among us, which then ballooned out of control.

FDR started food stamps in 1939 but it ended four years later, when WWII had done what FDR couldn’t do: ended the Great Depression.  And immediately, bodies of the starved dead piled up like cordwood all over the continent.

HA! I kid.  Actually, Americans sailed along for 20 years without food stamps OR mass starvation.  Unexpectedly!

Until another leftist genius, LBJ, got into office and said, “Our food supply isn’t broken. Let me spend a few trillion dollars to fix it, thereby creating armies of morbidly obese dependents who will have to vote for us, because they will literally die if we’re not there to pour Count Chocula down their gullets 24/7.” 

Or words to that effect.

And 60 years later, we have managed to NOT learn the lesson that everyone who lives in heavily wooded bear country already knows: if you continually feed the bears, they’ll lose the ability to feed themselves.  And then they’ll tear hell out of your community.

I know what you’re thinking.  “Martin, I can’t believe you got screwed out of People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive award AGAIN!  You were robbed!  Also, don’t you think it’s very demeaning to compare human beings to big dumb animals like bears?”

First, I was as shocked as you are, and I don’t want to talk about People Magazine ever again. 

Second, before you say that it’s not fair to compare people to bears, did you see any of the MSM propaganda “news” stories highlighting vulnerable SNAP recipients?

They featured one sad character after another, complaining that they won’t have anything to eat starting on November first, and how will they survive without SNAP?  You know that the media were trying to depict a life-threatening crisis by putting on the most sympathetic, tear-jerking “victims” of SNAPlessness they could find.

And yet.  I hesitate to criticize people’s appearance, so how can I put this? 

Those stories were full of people from light heavyweight to cruiserweight to heavyweight… and then grizzly, and Kodiak.  These folks could burn their foodstamps for heat and then go into a cave and hibernate, and when they came out in April, they would be in the best shape of their lives.

And we’d have saved $50 billion.   

But seriously, the “S” in “SNAP” stands for “supplemental.”  And the program began as an attempt to provide a few essentials – bread, beans, rice, milk, butter, potatoes, meat – to a few people who really needed it.  And like every other federal program, it metastasized into a corrupt, harmful cluster-chuck (schumer).

The GOP should carry out a common-sense campaign to reign in SNAP spending: limit it to essential food only (no more junk food or expensive stuff); root out the fraud and abuse (prosecute re-sellers of SNAP benefits/vouchers); stop it from going to any illegals (feed them all, right until they’re put on a plane, boat or bus back to their home countries).

2. All of the Dem screaming about necessary health insurance subsidies only prove that Obamacare is a total disaster.  The GOP needs to broadcast that message everywhere and constantly: the Dems promised you a solution in their ironically and cruelly named “Affordable Health Care  Act.”  Conservatives told you that it would only make healthcare more expensive, and it absolutely has. 

Now the GOP needs to highlight its worst failings – many of the subsidies are going to people making between 100% to 400% of the federal poverty level, and there are readily available charts and graphs that show the steep increase in healthcare costs following the passage of Obamacare.  Get those out there!

It’s going to be tough to fix that broken program with everything else on our plate – thanks, Democrats! – but we need to highlight the nature of the problem, and propose an alternative that undoes what Obamacare screwed up. 

3. One common theme in both the SNAP and Obamacare debacles also helps shore up the necessity for continued deportation of illegals: even if many of them are otherwise not criminals or bad people, millions of them are using resources (SNAP and “free” health care among them) that are intended for American citizens. 

We should be using the left’s inflammatory, angry rhetoric against them.  Every time they hold a press conference or release a TikTok or stage a virtue-signaling protest about how poor and working-class Americans are suffering, we need to fire right back:

Yes! Because you’re giving the resources that should be going to them – billions in food, housing, education and health care — to illegal immigrants!  

We need to shout that into every microphone, camera and social media post we can.

And for God’s sake, don’t shout it in Somali!

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!