April 2026 – Martin Simpson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So they can all suck it, Trebek.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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What’s Wrong with Formerly Conservative Podcasters, & How Tim Miller Hilariously Beclowned Himself (posted 4/13/26)

After two consecutive columns full of good news, I’ve got a mix of good and bad today. And as always, I prefer taking the medicine before the honey.

I’ve spoken disparagingly (and frequently) of RINOs and other spineless GOP congress-weasels in the past, but it pains me to see the way some formerly conservative commentators and podcasters have left the reservation, and gravitated toward a combination of leftism, anti-American sentiment, and anti-Semitism.

And yes, a Venn Diagram of those three issues (settle down, Que Mala) would contain a lot of overlap.

I’m thinking of figures ranging from Nick Fuentes – who is about as conservative as Bernie Sanders, and so hasn’t ever really fit in the mainstream right– to Candace Owens (ditto), to Tucker Carlson, whom I used to really like, but who has taken up permanent intellectual residence on Bat Guano Crazy Island. (If somebody gives you A-B choices about who was/is the good guy in the following pairings – Hitler vs. Churchill; Putin vs. Netanyahu; the Iranian Ayatollahs and Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists vs. the Israelis – and you not only hesitate, but pick the wrong one in each case, you should not be taken seriously.)

Saddest of all, for me, has been Megyn Kelly. She is still very good on a lot of issues, but she’s gone past legitimate questions (IMHO) about the Iran war and Israel and into reflexive bias that has driven out her usual common sense and fairness.

She says that when she made even slight criticisms of Israel since Charlie’s murder, many Jewish lobbyists from AIPAC and elsewhere started slamming her as anti-Semitic. That has clearly made her furious, and she now paints the Iran war as 100% unjustified and illegitimate. In recent weeks she has railed about how the wily Israelis manipulated Trump into going to war, how they want to extend the war out of bloodlust, and how they have become the main obstacle to peace because of how they are “carpet bombing” Lebanon.

I believe her about Jewish groups recklessly and aggressively hammering her, despite her previous track record for supporting Israel. But I think that those personal attacks have elicited a similarly personal and increasingly embittered reaction from her, which you can see in the uncharacteristically illogical and thinly supported arguments she’s been making against Israel and the war.

Last week she repeatedly and sarcastically sniped at “our great, close allies the Israelis,” as when she blamed them for tricking Trump into the war. She’s ignoring the widely known truth about Trump, which she has herself often acknowledged: he is a stubborn alpha – for good and ill – who often slaps around his allies, both foreign and domestic. (For example, he famously snapped that both the Israelis and the Iranians “don’t know what the f**k they’re doing” when they continued to exchange missile strikes after the 12-day war last year.) So when she claims that the Israelis manipulated Trump into war, she’s besmirching both the “wily Jews” and Trump.

She also blamed Israel for “carpet bombing” Lebanon, when they’ve done nothing of the sort. As is their consistent modus operandi, they’ve taken great pains to make targeted strikes on terrorist fighters and infrastructure, while minimizing civilian deaths, unlike their jihadist enemies. Megyn never mentions that in the six weeks of the Iran war, Hezbollah has fired between 3000-5000 rockets, missiles and drones into Israel, killing around a dozen soldiers and a handful of civilians, along with many more wounded and many buildings damaged.

So as per usual, Hezbollah (and their sponsor Iran) have continually attacked Israel, and Israel has continued to retaliate, as every nation has a right to do in that situation. But in Megyn’s telling, Israel continues to hammer Hezbollah for no good reason, other than Netanyahu’s desire to kill, and the Jews’ desire to thwart Trump’s attempt to end the war.

She even signed on to the ridiculous Iranian lie that the Trump administration had agreed with Iran’s demand that Israel stop any hostilities with Hezbollah in Lebanon as one of their 10 pre-conditions for peace talks. As a former lawyer and an experienced observer of politics, Megyn knows that countries normally exchange a list of their goals as a starting point for negotiations. In this case, Trump gave a 15-point wishlist (Iran gives up a nuclear weapons program, stops interfering with oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz, etc.), and the Iranians gave their 10-point wishlist, which was a fantasy, considering how badly they’ve been stomped since the war started.

They want to retain the right to pursue nukes, for example, as well as the right to control and tax ship traffic through the Straits, and to get reparations from the US for attacking Iran (after 47 years of Iranian attacks on us and our allies!) And, of course, they want Israel to be forced to stop striking Hezbollah in Lebanon. Which, as I noted above, really means that Israel must stand by and allow continuing Hezbollah attacks to kill and wound their citizens without responding.

There is no logical reason we should expect Israel to agree to that. If we were in their position – if, say, an ally of ours wanted to negotiate a treaty with Mexico, while Mexico was simultaneously firing missiles into our country – we wouldn’t tolerate another nation telling us we couldn’t retaliate against Mexico.

Besides, Lebanon is nowhere near the theatre of war in Iran; it is 1300 miles away! If Iran had not armed Hezbollah and doesn’t want them to continue attacking Israel, they have no reason to object when Israel gives Hezbollah some of their own medicine. And if Iran HAS armed Hezbollah and DOES want them to continue attacking Israel – which is obviously the case – we should rightly tell them to stick their demands up their impotent, comatose ayatollah’s cardboard backside!

The whole thing is ridiculous, and the Trump administration (from JD on down) has denied agreeing to such unrealistic Iranians demands. But on Wednesday, Megyn openly said that we’re lying about that, and the Iranian butchers are telling the truth!

I don’t have any faith in Candace or Tucker, but I’m hoping that Megyn will be able to get over her antipathy against Netanyahu and Israel, and come back to us from the dark side.

Having said all that, I’d like to celebrate a sweet serving of schadenfreude that Tim Miller brought down on his own head last week.

Miller is a former GOP political operative and current host of the TDS-suffused podcast The Bulwark. In the past, Miller worked on the campaigns of John McCain, Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Jeb! Bush.

Because of course he did.

I recently had the pleasure of re-watching a video compilation of the Bulwark’s coverage of election night in 2024, and I recommend it as a pick-me-up if you’ve been watching too much depressing nonsense from Tucker or Megyn. Miller and his companions started the evening smug, gloating over Trump’s Orange Hitlerness and Que Mala’s inevitable victory. And then, over 8 hours they descended through the five stages of grief, except that instead of “acceptance,” they finally landed on “insulting American voters for daring to prefer Trump to the Cackler.”

Good times!

Anyway, last week Miller got offended by Melania’s press conference. And because he is a small man, he decided to insult her intelligence, rather than addressing the substance of her speech.

Because of course he did.

Miller tweeted, “Why can’t the first lady speak english? It’s been 10 years since her husband ran for president consider getting a tutor.”

Let me count the ways in which this small-minded tweet is a hilarious self-own:

1. Melania can speak English, as is obvious from her many interviews and speeches, and the press conference that Miller is referring to. She speaks accented but clearly understandable English; you don’t need subtitles when listening to her. And for the record, her accent is freaking adorable! (Her Slovenian accent – “give,” “it,” and “him” become “geev,” “eet” and “heem,” and her “w”s have a Germanic “v” pronunciation – makes her sound a little like a somehow sexy Lady Dracula.)

2. Miller is falsely claiming that she can’t speak English to imply that she is stupid. But Melania speaks at least two languages (Slovenian and English), and is reportedly conversational in three more (French, German and Italian). Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Miller only speaks English. Which, if his implication that speaking more languages makes one smarter is true, that would make Melania at least twice as smart as Miller, and possibly five times as smart. Which still sounds a little low to me.

3. But even though English is Miller’s one and only language, and even though he writes in that language for a living, he doesn’t appear to be very good at it. Because in a two-sentence tweet, he makes five grammar errors! In this context, “first lady” and “english” are both proper nouns, and should be capitalized. And his second sentence is actually a run-on. There should be a period after “president,” and the imperative last sentence should start with a capital letter.

4. In addition, Miller’s own leftist catechism teaches that only a xenophobic bigot would criticize any immigrant for failing to learn English, let alone for speaking it with a slight accent. So not only is Miller a condescending xenophobe, he’s also a colossal hypocrite. Because you know that if you dared to criticize a gang-banging human smuggler who has been here illegally for 20 years and yet is still illiterate in English, Timmy would shake his tiny fist in outrage.

When Miller’s clueless, self-beclowning tweet got ratioed by many people pointing out his errors, he stupidly returned to Twitter and compounded his mistake with yet another flawed effort: “Strong move to refocus on Epstein in order to distract from the Straight of Hormuz disaster.”

Never mind the fact that Miller’s claim doesn’t make sense. (If Trump’s non-existent illicit tie to Epstein has been falsely used by Miller’s leftist co-religionists to hurt Trump, he would never try to draw attention to it as a distraction from the non-disastrous Hormuz “disaster.”) Because once again, this time in a one-sentence tweet (!), Miller makes a howler of an error.

Even though Miller only speaks English, and even though the words “straights” and “straits” are both English words, he manages to mix them up.

Now I don’t know what’s in Tim Miller’s head. (Other than tumbleweeds and the sound of a lonely, whistling wind, probably.) But he is definitely gay. (Which likely contributes to his immunity to Melania’s supermodel looks and alluring Slovenian accent.)

So you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to guess why a dishonest, small-minded dullard like Tim Miller might subconsciously associate “straights” with “disaster.”

In the words of FLOTUS hottus, “Geev me a break, Meester Meeler. You sound like an eediot.”

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Good News From Marco, and Iran, and Our Airports (posted 4/6/2)

In keeping with the Cautious Optimism tradition, I thought I’d start this week with some positive, feel-good stories.

I’ll open with one of my favorite members of the Trump administration — Marco Rubio – on one of my favorite topics – deporting foreign bad actors.

In this case, the bad actors are numerous children or other relatives of the murderous mullah-acracy who has been running Iran and oppressing Iranians for almost half a century. In many cases, these people have been allowed in legally, but don’t have American citizenship; in other cases, they are naturalized citizens. Marco is heading up an effort to require the former group to leave the USA, and to denaturalize (where possible) the later group, and send them packing as well.

When many leftists hear this, their first instinct is to rend their garments and take the side of the foreigners, just as they did in the case of the wife-beating human smuggler with a final deportation order, Kilmar.

But when conservatives — or others with the common sense God gave most members of the animal kingdom – hear this, they are happy about it. Because they (and we) can easily go back to first principles: no foreigner has a right to come to America.

American citizens have total control over who enters our country and under what circumstances. And though we may allow foreigners who have been properly vetted to temporarily come as tourists or on business trips, or possibly to study, we are under no obligation to let them in, and they cannot force us to admit them, or give them a path to citizenship if we determine that that is not in our interests.

Just as we were under no obligation in the 1940s to allow entry to Hitler’s nephew Johnny Hitler (or Bob Himmler, Tucker Heydrich, or Candace Goering), we don’t have to welcome the children or relatives of the mullahs, ayatollahs or jihadis from Iran.

You may remember General Qasem “Scowlin’” Soleimani, the murderous Iranian big shot who led the Quds Force. (Or, as the NYT, WAPO and PBS probably called him, “an avuncular Teddy Bear of a man with an easy smile and a heart as big as the great outdoors.”) Trump transitioned him from “terrorist mastermind” to “goop in a smoking car” via one well-aimed missile in 2020.

Well it turns out his niece Hamideh and grand-niece Sarinasadat have been living it up in America, while still celebrating attacks against US soldiers, denouncing America as the “Great Satan,” and supporting the designated terror organization IRGC. And their immigration history makes them poster-wenches for the Democrats’ suicidal disdain for America.

They both came here in 2015 – Hamideh on a tourist visa and Sarinasadat on a student visa. A judge granted them asylum in 2019. While I’m no immigration lawyer, I don’t think any tourist visas allow you to stay here for 4 years, and a student visa would normally expire after the four years it takes to get a college degree. And asylum claims are supposed to be very difficult to prove, requiring that you are being persecuted by your country’s government and would be in great danger if you went back.

But Joey “Gaffes” Biden granted them both green cards in 2021 anyway.

Because of course he did.

When Hamideh applied for citizenship last year, she had to disclose that she’d been back to Iran at least 4 times in recent years. Now, if I can turn on my Sam Kinison filter, I’ll explain what a legitimate asylum seeker would never do…

“SHE’D NEVER GO BACK TO HER HOME COUNTRY FOUR FREAKING TIMES! OH!! OOOOOHHHHHHH!!!”

Aaannnnnddddd… last Friday Marco had both Soleimanis arrested, and prepared to send them back to Iran. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “I hope your boat doesn’t run into any Iranian mines when you sail back through the Straits of Hormuz, ladies!”

Speaking of ungrateful foreigners, a federal judge just delivered some more good news to Marco (and us) when he dismissed a lawsuit by a German citizen against Rubio, filed because he thought his visa application was taking too long to be granted.

But this is no traditional German citizen, whom you might expect to be named something like Hans, or Franz, or Tucker Heydrich. No, this guy was named Raheel Sadiq.

Of the Munich Sadiqs, no doubt.

Raheel was upset that his visa application was 9 months old, and still hadn’t been acted on. He demanded that the US government be forced to make a final decision, claiming that the wait “inflicts ongoing human and economic harm.”

I would refer to the aforementioned first principle: no foreigner is owed the opportunity to enter America. But I would also agree with Raheel; he should get a quick and final decision.

And that decision is, “How about NO?” And you’re welcome, because we’re stopping you from “the ongoing human and economic harm” you have been suffering while you wait.

While we’re discussing Iran, I couldn’t forget the main good news story of this past week, which is our military’s heroic rescue of the downed American airman whom the Iranian IRGC were trying desperately to capture.

Thanks to his badassery (despite his injuries, he climbed several thousand feet into rugged hills and hid himself in some kind of crevasse) and that of the American military and Israeli intelligence, the bad guys were held at bay while our guys located and exfiltrated him to safety.

Shot down on Good Friday and rescued on Easter — I love it when the good guys win!

Finally, there was also good news stateside last week.

You can usually identify stories that are good for the country by how little MSM coverage they get, and that proved true about Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports to address the long lines and delays caused by the Democrats shutting down the TSA.

Leftists whined about how terrible that was going to be, yet it proved to be a great success. ICE agents actually succeeding in greatly shortening the lines, and an ICE agent saved a choking baby in one airport. They also made a mockery out of hysterical leftist warnings about how ICE would be “kidnapping” innocent American citizens because they had brown skins, etc.

One Dem congressman actually predicted that ICE would be killing people in airports. Another one noted that these ICE agents – helpful, friendly, accepting thanks from travelers – weren’t the same kind of ICE agents who killed the protesters in MN.

Sane people might point out the subtle difference between those who have had negative encounters with ICE – i.e. illegals who were legally detained because of their crimes, and violent leftists and vehicular homicide enthusiasts who justifiably lost a game of FOFA with law enforcement – and law-abiding Americans who behaved themselves and got along just fine with ICE.

My favorite illustrative “ICE in the airports” story took place at LaGuardia, when a self-beclowning, leftist, beta-male white guy confronted three black ICE agents. (Another statistic that the MSM will not report: ICE agents are much more likely to be brown or black than the general population, just as the violent anti-ICE weasels are disproportionately white and far left. Unexpectedly!)

The male Karen had his phone out and recording as he sallied forth on what he must have believed would be an incident memorializing his brave heroism. In his best theater-kid form, he walked up to the agents and started peppering them with questions in an effort to rile them up. As they ignored him, he persisted, finally saying, “I see you are walking in a group. What’s up?”

I know. You’ll be shocked to hear that the ICE agents somehow managed to resist rising to that brilliant bit of rhetorical bait. So then Soy Boy brought out the big guns, asking,“You guys are the foot soldiers of a fascist regime, right? Is that not what it is?”

At that moment, the agents who had been trying to keep straight faces finally broke. A guy in the front smiled, but the guy behind him couldn’t help it, and covered his mouth and started to laugh as all three of them grinned at each other.

That did not please the social justice warrior, who kept demanding, “Is that funny? Do you think that’s funny?” After a few more feeble attempts, he finally gave up.

But he went straight to social media, where he failed spectacularly at trying to save face by cosplaying as a revolutionary tough guy. (And both “tough” and “guy” are doing a lot of work in that sentence.)

Here’s his post, which I promise I am not making up: “They say speak truth to power, so I did just that. Confronted a fascist to his face today at LaGuardia. His reaction? A smirk. This is what we’re up against—but we aren’t staying silent.”

Good lord! How can that possibly be the flex that he clearly thinks it is? First, I’m pretty sure that an actual fascist, when “confronted to his face,” could probably come up with a response more forceful than a smirk. (Like maybe a rifle butt in the stomach, or a bullet in the head.)

Second, when you’re trying to demonstrate the evil menace of your opponent, whatever precedes “That’s what we’re up against!” has got to be a hell of a lot more daunting than “a smirk.”

Here, I’ll give you a few examples:

“As we manned our positions far below the American planes, they dropped thermonuclear bombs that melted two cities and instantly killed hundreds of thousands of our citizens. That’s what we’re up against!”

“We had barely gotten into our foxholes in Bastogne when we faced a ferocious bombardment and frontal assault by the most battle-hardened and experienced armored divisions in the entire European theater. That’s what we’re up against!”

No matter how hard he tried, the best that that poor, deluded fool could do was to get three cool brothers to laugh in his face.

Because I know my Thomas More, I already knew that, “The devil, the prowde spirite, cannot endure to be mocked.”

But until last week, I didn’t know that the same was true for ridiculous, self-aggrandizing, low-T leftist Donna Quixotes.

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While I Suffer, the MSM Continues Their Idiocy (posted 4/3/26)

This has been a disorienting month for me. My pinched nerve has gotten me out of all of my normal routines, and replaced them with new ones that I really look forward to discontinuing soon!

Thankfully, my PT has decreased the amount and persistence of pain I was experiencing in the first 2-3 weeks of March, but juggling even milder pain meds has resulted in inconsistent sleep and a lot of fuzzy head syndrome. (Or, as it’s known in medical textbooks, “Democrat Cognition Syndrome.”)

For the first time since I was probably 5 years old, I’ve gone a little over a month without reading a book! I’ve also missed pretty much all church services in the five weeks leading up to Easter, which doesn’t feel great.

On the other hand, I’ve been keeping up with some sporadic reading on current events and politics, and I’m really glad to have been able to keep writing columns here, even if at a slower pace. I’ve also had the chance to watch some old movies and new-to-me tv series. I discovered Mr. In-Between, a dark comedy/crime series set in Australia, which shares the kind of admirable/repugnant, morally compromised protagonist that made Breaking Bad and the Sopranos so compelling.

Seeing clips of the dead-on-arrival, virtue-signalling Oscars spurred me to revisit some movies from when movies were worth watching. (I know: I’ve achieved peak old guy vibes. Get off my lawn!) I watched The Searchers, starring a young John Wayne, a Monument Valley setting, and John Ford’s directing; The Man Who Shot Liberty Vally Valance (If Jimmy Stewart ever made a bad movie, I can’t remember it); and Rio Bravo, starring an older John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and a young Angie Dickinson. (If anybody was ever cooler than Dean Martin – dressed in black, his cowboy hat down over his eyes while he crooned away with Ricky Nelson as they waited for a shootout – I don’t know who that would be.)

But amidst all of the jarring changes I’ve experienced the last month, there has been one comfortingly consistent aspect of our national life. And that is the egregious dishonesty of our legacy media, advanced in no small part by a ubiquitous double standard.

I’ll just hit two recent examples among many: the third No Kings protest, and the coverage of our month-long, one-sided war against the violent dictatorship of the mullahs in Iran.

The No Kings street theater protests actually do follow in the American tradition of the rowdy airing of grievances against our politicians. Unfortunately, the grievances in this case do not seem to be tightly tethered to reality. (Which is the most polite way I can say that.)

For example, senator Crazy Mazie Hirono accidentally said the accurate part out loud, when she claimed that, “Donald Trump is not, never will be, and has never been a king.”

Ummmm… yes. Exactly. So what is the purpose of this expensive, tedious, time-consuming third iteration of a protest? To prevent from happening what you’ve admitted has never happened, is not happening, and will never happen?

Okay. Well done then, I guess?

Of course we didn’t need an emotionally dysregulated, low-IQ, elected garden gnome to tell us that. Because anybody who knows anything about the history of kings and fascist dictators knows that none of these protests could have ever taken place if there were actually a king or dictator in America.

If you want to test that, quickly rattle off a list of all of the people in human history who ever marched in the streets insulting their king or dictator – even if only once or twice, let alone thrice! — and suffered no consequences whatsoever.

I know. That list is as short as the “days of honest work done” on Bernie Sanders’ resume.

Also, you know how reluctant I am to raise the issue of double standards. But do you remember when Obama proclaimed a dozen times that our immigration laws would not allow him to just declare that illegals now have legal status, because that would be unconstitutional, and that he’s not a king? And then…one month lay-tair… when he declared that all the DACA kids are now legally in the country?

Or remember when Joe Biden dictated that he could use OSHA to force millions of Americans to take an experimental vaccine, and that he could declare that American citizens with no school loans could be forced to pay back billions in school loans taken out by students, who would no longer need to pay them back themselves?

In fact, remember when Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment – which had been rejected decades before – was now the 28^th Amendment to the constitution, because he said so?

Obama and Biden both behaved much more like kings than Trump ever has, and the Left cheered them on. But now that Trump is trying to use much more modest Executive Orders to do what the voters elected him to do, it’s time to break out the frog costumes and ugly papier mache heads, and rail against imaginary monarchs.

Speaking of ugly heads, many hypocrites on both sides of the aisle have raised theirs to criticize every aspect of the Iran war, out of motivations ranging from reasonable to flimsy to hysterical.

For the record, I think there are aspects of our actions in Iran that are worthy of questioning and criticism. But those are being swallowed up and dwarfed by the number of specious bleatings on the subject.

We opened the war with a strategic master stroke, killing around 40 of the top power players in Iranian politics on a Saturday. The first leftist complaint I saw claiming that Iran had turned into a “forever war” appeared on the following Monday. Because if this war could drag on for 72 long hours, who knows how many decades it might last!

A few days later, the IDF took out the Iranian second string as they gathered to elect the next ayatollah.

From those first few days, many on the left were joined by a handful of sad sacks on the right (I’m looking at you, Tucker and Candace!) in a doom scrolling cacaphony of epic proportions. Despite Trump’s insistence that this would be a very short action – and his track record of just that kind of strike – critics started extrapolating the worst-case scenario of a near-eternal quagmire.

“What if Iran rebuilds its nuclear weapons program during the next 172 months of constant warfare?” “How many millions of American soldiers will die after we put 8 million boots on the ground for the rest of the Trump presidency?” “What about $10 a gallon gas? Won’t somebody think of the $10 gallons of gas?!!”

By the way, and speaking of double standards, check out this head-to-head comparison of headlines when gas under Biden finally got down to $4 per gallon, vs. when it just reached $4 under Trump, as presented on the site Twitchy:

CBS headline yesterday: “With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, it now costs almost $145 to fill up a Ford F-150 pickup truck.” A user pointed out that even this factual stat was deployed to put the worst possible spin on it, by using (but not mentioning) that the F-150 in question was the extended range version, which has the biggest gas tank, and that the fill-up cost would depend on that F-150 being absolutely bone-dry beforehand.

Meanwhile, a CBS story from July of 2022 was headlined thusly: “Gas prices could soon drop to $4 a gallon, Biden energy adviser says. After hitting a record high in June, prices at the pump have fallen for more than 30 straight days.”

Got that? The article hides the fact that gas is still MORE than $4 per gallon, and it doesn’t even predict that gas WILL drop in the future to $4, saying only that gas “could” drop to that level. (Yes. And Joe Biden COULD step agilely over a sand bag on stage. But the smart money is on him tripping over it, falling, and snapping one of his fragile, bird-like leg bones.) And did you notice the source for this weak prediction? Not an unbiased expert or analyst, but a “Biden energy advisor.”

Obviously, the latter article is intended to give Biden political cover for the increased gas prices caused by his policies, while the former article is intended to do maximum damage to Trump.

Consider these more accurate phrasings of the two headlines:

“Biden employee claims that Biden-caused high gas prices might drop to $4 a gallon at some undetermined point in the future.” vs

“Analysis finds that gas prices have temporarily risen to Biden-era levels, predicts they will drop again when the Iran conflict ends, possibly later this month.”

But my favorite bit of laughably biased “journalism” comes from the Bulwark this week. (You may remember those TDS sufferers from early election night, when they were crowing that Que Mala would defeat the Orange, Hitler-esque convicted felon in a landslide. Or from several hours later, when they wept openly and blamed sexism and racism and American stupidity for the thrashing of the Cackler.)

(Cue the sad trombone, and distribute the word salad of defeat, garnished with the sour vinaigrette d’ regret.)

This article, which I swear I am not making up, was written by Jonathan V. Last. (The “V” is not for “victory,” and “Last” is where he ranks on a list of insightful commentators.) The title is, “America Lost. Iran Won. Trump Shat the Bed.”

Did I mention that I did not make that up?

Here’s the opening of the article: “It is true, as the president said last night, that the Iranian navy and air force have been almost eliminated. It is also beside the point. The Islamic Republic has never been – and — never wanted to be – a naval power. They have never made extensive use of air power.”

Then why did they spend billions on all of those ships and planes, J. Last? Just to give the IDF and America a few hours of target practice?

Good lord. The double standard question writes itself:

Can you imagine if the roles had been reversed? If Iran had hit us with a first strike that killed Trump, Vance, half of our chiefs of staff and cabinet members, and our congressional leadership? And then if another strike a few days later killed the remainder of our military leadership, the cabinet, and most of congress, while also sinking most of our navy and destroying all of our air force?

And then, for the next 30 days, Iran systematically destroyed our 5000 most crucial military and infrastructure targets, and then blew up the Golden Gate Bridge as an afterthought?

Do you think that after all of that, little Johnny Last would be writing about how, “Iran Lost. America Won. The Ayatollahs Shat the Barn They Share with their Most Attractive Goats?”

Remember that, the next time Tucker or some other MSM empty head brings you latest update from Iran.

Have a good Easter!

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Month: April 2026

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

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

What’s Wrong with Formerly Conservative Podcasters, & How Tim Miller Hilariously Beclowned Himself (posted 4/13/26)

More Feel-Good Stories (posted 4/10/26)

Good News From Marco, and Iran, and Our Airports (posted 4/6/2)

While I Suffer, the MSM Continues Their Idiocy (posted 4/3/26)