Month: September 2026

Feckless RINOs, Phony Dems, & the Mid-Terms (posted 9/21/26)

So Labor Day is over, and the pace of political news is picking up, the way it always does in the last couple of months before a mid-term election.  My gut tells me that the GOP will definitely lose the House, and might possibly lose the Senate, narrowly.  If the polls are close to right, and there aren’t any big momentum changers, that seems to be the smart bet.

On the other hand, I might be cautious, but I am also an optimist, so I haven’t given up hope.   I’ve acknowledged all of the headwinds we’re up against: the decades-long pattern of the party in power losing way more seats than our thin majority margin is now; Trump’s lack of discipline that gives many distracting gifts to our opposition (his name must be on the Kennedy Center, he’s re-naming all of the lakes in North America, etc.); and his inexplicable mishandling of Iran since late April, for example.

Instead of continuing to blast IRGC forces when they were on the ropes (my preference), or having Bessent put the economic vice on them back then instead of waiting until late August, he allowed them almost 4 months of phony negotiations under a cease fire.  We’re back to near-max pressure on them now, but even if they’re soon in their death throes, they’ll survive long enough to be able to spring some kind of low-level October surprise that hurts the GOP chances, and helps the Democrats in November.

It is going to be some bitter irony if the IRGC collapses or gets overthrown between the mid-term and the end of the year, when it does us no electoral good! 

On the positive side of the ledger, between the surging DSA commies and some of the extremist candidates the Dems have nominated, they are doing their best to snatch a few defeats out of the jaws of victory.  It’s hard for me to believe that weirdos like James “I eat meat, but not in a gay way” Talarico will win in Texas, or that Abdul “Allahu Akbar!” el Sayed will win in Michigan (except in Dearbornistan.)  And I think there’s at least a decent chance that conservatives in Iowa and Ohio won’t go for Dems who pretend to be conservative.     

Tallarico had quite the red-flag moment last week.  Someone from the crowd in a press availability asked him in passing who his favorite drag performer is, and without a second’s hesitation Talarico gave the name of someone.  And that someone was not RuPaul.

I only mention RuPaul because even I know that name.  I know he had some kind of tv show, and was around enough in the pop culture zeitgeist that his name would be recognizable even to someone who was not the least bit interested in drag performers. 

But remember that Tallarico is running for a Senate seat in Texas, and that he is a male who identifies as a straight male.  (Seriously.  He allegedly has a girlfriend, but I think she goes to another school.  Possibly in Canada.  But she is super real.)  So you’d think that his team of consultants would have coached him up on this kind of thing.

Most guys would usually be able to quickly drop at least a name or two when asked a “Who is your favorite BLANK?” question in many categories.  You should be able to go 10-deep on your favorite football player.  Actually, you should be able to go 10-deep on your favorite running backs and quarter backs.  I was raised in Illinois, and could be woken up from a sound sleep and go 5 deep on favorite Bears linebackers while barely out of the REM stage.  (The answer is Butkus, then some combo of Urlacher, Singletary, Wilbur Marshall and Otis Wilson, if you’re scoring at home.)

You should have at least 5 top rock guitarists at your fingertips (If Stevie Ray Vaughn is not on that list, you’re dead to me), along with at least 5 country singers (Johnny Cash and George Jones must be two of them), and at least 3 favorite WWII airplanes.  (The judges will accept the Mustang and the Spitfire, and one other of your choosing.)  

If you’re in Texas, you should be able to name a bunch of Cowboys players, a handful of gun makers, several rodeo riders, and at least two favorite whiskeys and your favorite cut of steak. 

But you should never, EVER have a non-RuPaul drag performer’s name chambered and ready to go at the drop of a feathered boa if you’re running for a Senate seat in the great state of Texas!   

It’s not primarily the gayness (which isn’t the campaign killer it would have been a few decades ago) that is the problem.  Scott Bessent is gay, and nobody cares. Because he’s not pretending to be a cattle-driving, brisket-eating, six-gun-toting, Stetson-wearing, he-man Texas ranger.

It’s the transparent dishonesty, with all of the corresponding cringe. 

There are just some groups a candidate shouldn’t know well enough to have an instinctive top-favorites list to blurt out. 

Strippers. K-pop bands.  Illicit drugs of choice.  Porn movies.  Fashion designers. Manga characters.  No grown man running for high office should know any of those, especially not well enough to have them at the tip of his tongue.  

But more than the fish-out-of-water mismatch of a candidate in Texas who could name all of the first-ballot hall of fame drag queens, it’s the phoniness of the whole mess.  Talarico is pretending to be many things – a mainstream Christian, a carnivore, conventionally heterosexual, a Texan, relatable – none of them convincingly.

I know.  Newsflash: politicians – on both sides of the aisle – are phony and dishonest.

But I’ve noticed a depressing pattern in the different ways both sides lie. 

When Republicans lie to their voters, the lie is that they are more conservative than they actually are.  They run as rock-ribbed conservatives, but when they get into office they reveal themselves to be RINOs.  I swear that when they first get to DC and check out their new offices, they find a briefcase on their desk full of pre-written excuses for why it’s actually not possible to cut spending, pass voter ID legislation, deport all illegals, or do most of the other stuff they ran on promising to do.

By contrast, when Democrats lie to their voters, the lie is that they are more moderate than they really are.  Slick Willie says the era of big government is over; Obama says there are no red states or blue states, just the United States; Biden is blue-collar, centrist “Scranton Joe”; Tim Walz is a duck-hunting, football-coaching, military man. 

Then they get into office, and govern like a far-left amalgam of Lenin, Castro and Bernie Sanders.  Which delights their leftist voters – both those who were gullible enough to believe their “we’re normie moderates” schtick, and those cynical enough to know they were lying all along. 

The aggravating results?  Conservatives are always outraged at the leftist wolves in moderates’ wool, who govern much farther left than they said they would, and we’re also infuriated by the feckless RINOs…who govern much farther left than they said they would!

But the motto on the Simpson family crest – I’m not making this up – is “nil desperandum,” Latin for “never despair.” 

And so we shouldn’t.  We’ve got 6 weeks left, and a lot more cash on hand to spread the truth about the DSA Dems and their dysfunctional plans and candidates.  And there are some stories that indicate a few trends that might be moving in our direction.

I’ll talk about those in my next few columns.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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I’m a Feminist…but not THAT Kind of Feminist (posted 9/18/26)

Over the course of my life, feminism has been a very powerful force for good, winning many crucial battles against the systemic sexism that unjustly oppressed women and forced them into a narrow range of choices in life.  And feminism has also been a destructive, negative and politicized force that has ended up repulsing millions of women and men.

As a former liberal arts professor who would have been run out of academia on a rail if any of my colleagues would have seen the previous sentence, I had to deal with the cognitive dissonance engendered by those two contradictory definitions during the early part of my career.  But fortunately for me, professor Christina Hoff Sommers wrote a book called Who Stole Feminism?, in which she coined the terms “equity feminism” and “gender feminism.”

When I read that book, the clouds parted, and my uneasiness on the topic disappeared.  (Don’t get me wrong.  I didn’t start discussing these ideas in staff meetings.  Because: survival instincts.) But I realized that I am an equity feminist.  I love women in general – my mom, my sister, female friends and girlfriends back in the day and my wife now, as well as my amazing daughters who came along later – and I abhor misogyny in all its forms.

Equity feminism is the ideology of those who want equal rights, opportunities, and non-discrimination and all other legal protections for women.  The best thing about gender feminism is that it wants all of those things too.

Unfortunately, it also adds a lot of politicized, bad stuff (IMHO) to those goals, and is much more focused on the latter rather than the former.  Although I would quibble that more accurate labels for gender feminism would be “politicized” “leftist” or “academic” feminism, I’ll use Sommer’s terms here.  

Gender feminism is the dominant form of feminism in academia and the legacy media, which is a shame.  It is leftist in orientation, with an adversarial worldview that sees males as natural oppressors prone to misogyny, and females as oppressed victims whose prime directive is to fight the patriarchy in all its insidious forms.

There is of course a grain of truth in that exaggerated notion: the “battle of the sexes” and “love/hate relationships” are clichés for a reason.  Men and women regularly find themselves at cross purposes with each other, as suggested by the myriad stories, myths, jokes and plays on that topic, in pretty much every culture.  See the Taming of the Shrew, for example.  (I highly recommend it, and I think this Shakespeare kid has got a big future!) 

Although most gender feminists won’t explicitly say that males are morally inferior to (or worse than) women, the ideology implicitly holds that view.  Women are naturally cooperative, empathetic and supportive, whereas men are naturally competitive, callous and aggressive.  Much masculinity – possibly most?  Maybe even all? – is toxic, but there’s no such thing as “toxic femininity.”

“Mansplaining” is condescending sexism, but “womanlecturing” has never happened, and is also perfectly justified when it constantly happens.  😊  And “manspreading” is always and everywhere an intentional affront to females, with NO biologically-related explanation.

[Insert PSA here: “Each year, millions of American men experience the trauma of ATCT.  But Accidental Testicular Compression and/or Torsion is no laughing matter, and it should not be the subject of cruel mockery or offense.  Your donation of as little as $5 per month – payable to Martinsimpsonwriting.com – can help us raise awareness, along with the funds needed to combat the bigotry coming from ATCT-deniers in the non-testicular community.  For a donation of $10 or more, we’ll even send you an ATCT ribbon – never mind what shape or color it is! – that you can proudly wear, to show your solidarity with the cause.”]

Outside of academic and leftist circles, gender feminism has gotten a bad reputation, mostly because of its more hostile and radical (even if “mainstream”) advocates.  For example, Catharine MacKinnon is an influential, Yale-educated, widely published senior law professor at Michigan, famous for such quotes as, “The arena of logic was made by men for men; it was expressly founded on the exclusion of what is not male…” and “Feminism, Socialism and Communism are one in [stet – she meant “and”] the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.”

Simone de Beauvoir, author of the groundbreaking The Second Sex claimed that women shouldn’t be “authorized” to be homemakers.  In a famous interview with Betty Friedan, she argued that if women are allowed the choice of staying home and raising kids, too many will do so.  (Because ladies, your gender feminist overlords know better than you do how you should run your lives.)      

Sidebar: It turns out gender feminism has infected some search engines and “fact checking” sites, too.  Because as I was writing the previous paragraphs, I wanted to confirm my memory of de Beauvoir’s creepy authoritarian “women should not have choices” quote.  So I did a quick search for, “Simone de Beauvoir quote from debate with Friedan ‘women can’t be allowed the choice to be homemakers because too many of them will take it.’”

The first result I got was “There is no verified record of de Beauvoir saying” my quote.  Instead of giving the actual quote, the software gave me several paragraphs of an interpretation that softened de Beauvoir’s actual position, including these lines: “She emphasized women’s freedom…and that true liberation requires the ability to choose roles beyond traditional domesticity.”  Which is really interesting, because that statement is much less objectionable.

Oh, and it’s also [begin Kinison filter – THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT DE BEAUVOIR ACTUALLY SAID!  OH! OHHHH!!! – end Kinison filter], i.e. that women should NOT be allowed to choose traditional roles.

I then went to Duckduckgo.com – which I recommend, as I’ve found it to give more unbiased responses – where I found the actual quote: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children.  Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will take that one.”

Which, you may notice, is almost exactly the prompt I asked for in the search engines that claim that it doesn’t exist.  It’s a sad day in America when the one place you cannot confidently go to check some facts is a Fact Checker™.  

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

Because gender feminism is coded political and lefty, when a conflict arises between equity feminism and lefty politics, gender feminists almost always go with the politics over the equity.  For example, gender feminists who proudly tout their support for leftist female politicians – Hillary, AOC, Pelosi et al – absolutely hate Margaret Thatcher, Marie Le Pen in France, the lesbian leader of AFD in Germany, etc.  And they will ALWAYS vote for a male leftist over a female conservative.  (You may have noticed the same thing re: race.  Lefty black activists love them some Kamala and Ketanji, but Clarence Thomas and Tim Scott are “house-N-word Uncle Toms.”)  

Because it’s less about supporting females or blacks than it is about supporting leftists – which is why Virginia lefties happily voted for snow-white Abigail Spanberger over very black Winsome Sears, for example.

I don’t even blame them for that, because I’m the same way in reverse.  I’ll happily vote for a black lesbian conservative over a straight white male leftist every day of the week.  But that’s because I’m an openly non-racist and non-sexist conservative, whereas the lefties who despise Thomas and Thatcher are pretending to be pro-black and pro-woman when they are actually politics-over-race-and-gender voters. 

Me too.  Except that I’m not a virtue-signaling hypocrite about it.

Among all the other flaws inherent in gender feminism, it checks two of the cultural boxes that I most hate: double standards, and the selective empathy that necessarily accompanies them. (Regular readers might be forgiven for thinking that I possibly harp about these too much, but I think it’s appropriate here.)

Since gender feminism is grounded in a Manichean dichotomy that can be summarized with only slight exaggeration as “women good/men bad,” it is naturally prone to double standards.  That’s why gender feminists would condemn as offensively sexist a higher education system in which the student body was 60% male and only 40% female.  But since the student body in American colleges today is around 60% female and 40% male, that is both hunky and dory.

It’s also why, if you live to be Nancy Pelosi’s age (i.e. 2178 years young) you will NEVER see a jury with 9 females on it argue to acquit a father who murdered his three children, no matter the circumstances involved.       

By the way, on the “you can’t trust fact checkers” front, here is the statistic I just found on Educationdata.org when I was researching the college paragraph above.  Under “college enrollment by sex,” the first item is – and I swear I am not making this up – “39.7% of enrolled undergraduate students are male; 54.5% are female.”

Um.  That comes out to 94.2%.  I guess the remaining 5.8% are chromosome-less? 

Man, as soon as I reach my fund-raising goal for the scourge of ATCT, I am going to pivot and start raising awareness for ASFLO-CAG (Americans Suffering From Lack of Chromosomes and Genitalia). 

As surely as night follows day, selective empathy shows up in the immediate wake of double standards.  If men are oppressors and women oppressed, it’s only right that women receive all of our empathy, and men none.  Meanwhile, in the real world, both genders have real problems.  (And don’t remind me about the ASFLOCAG community, because I’m already on it!)

While women attempt suicide more often than men, men kill themselves way more frequently.  Male biology means that men seriously physically harm women more than women harm men, but even there, domestic violence is way more evenly distributed between the sexes than I would ever have guessed.  Men get much worse treatment in divorce courts than women, are more likely to be murdered, are more likely to be imprisoned, etc.

Many crises are gender coded.  Women are pressured over their appearance, and thus are prone to more eating disorders and body anxiety, while men are pressured over their ability to earn and provide, and thus are more prone to job-loss-related (or mediocre-employment-related) depression and suicide, as well as strokes and other health declines in the wake of job loss.  Social media exploits women’s generally higher sociability and anxiety, resulting in more female-on-female cyber bullying, and more unhealthy, narcissistic, competitive selfie-mania; online porn exploits men’s generally stronger sexual appetites, resulting in more solipsistic isolation, and creepy incel frustrations and alienation. 

Gender feminism is a subset of identity politics, which reserves all empathy for the in-group, denying the vulnerabilities and the equal value of the out-group, thus consigning them to a kind of second-class citizenship.

So women are victims and deserving of help, but men aren’t. And black lives matter, but blue lives or white lives or Asian lives don’t.  And rich people are mostly evil and always suspect…except for leftist billionaires like George Soros and Tom Steyer, and leftist millionaires like Bernie and Pelosi and Hassan Piker.  And no one is above the law (especially conservatives), except millions of illegals, who should be completely exempt from that law and must be given amnesty.

It might be naïve of me, but I think that equity feminism now has widespread acceptance, as gender feminism is waning.  Just like old-school anti-black racism is no longer welcome in mainstream or polite society – one use of the n-word cripples careers, unless the speaker is a black rapper or activist, who will drop a list of “house n-words” (i.e. blacks who have rejected anti-white racism) at a moment’s notice – old school misogyny is also verboten.

But the extremism and the misanthropy inherent in gender feminism have turned off the majority of all but the far left.  I don’t think that young women who shy away from the label “feminist” are rejecting equity feminism.  They just don’t see the average male as a predatory oppressor, and their natural enemy.  They don’t believe that “trans women are women,” and they don’t want to be bullied about that.  They don’t like being told that they shouldn’t be able to choose to have and raise kids, and they don’t like being told whom to vote for.

In fact Donald Trump, who probably says more things that are off-putting to women in general than any other modern politician, only lost married women to Hillary Clinton by 2 points in 2016, and he won a majority of married women’s votes in 2020 and 2024.  Which has to drive gender feminists absolutely crazy! 

I think it’s a cause for optimism that many people now share my position.  They’re feminists, but not THAT kind of feminist.

Remember: September is ASFLO-CAG Awareness Month, so spread the word!

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Something Has Gone Wrong on the Left, and It Ought to Bother All of Us (posted 9/14/26)

In my column last week about land acknowledgments, I mentioned that there are some depressing stories in the news lately. 

I wrote one sentence with two examples, referring to a recently signed law in Massachusetts legalizing abortion up until the moment of birth, and the Lindsay Clancy murder trial: “A frightening percentage of American women have apparently lost their minds, and are celebrating and bragging about legislation that allows abortion right up until the baby’s head crowns, and – on a related note – are hailing as a heroine a disturbed woman who meticulously planned and carried out the strangulation of her three small children.”

A good friend of mine who is a well-intentioned lefty emailed me to say that he thought those lines were rage-baiting, and a caricature that unfairly portrayed leftists as monsters.  Because I know that he is a good man, I’m writing a personal response to him to clarify my thoughts.  But as I was doing that, I realized that there may be some value in sharing what I was getting at with you, faithful reader. 

So first, to get an obligatory disclaimer out of the way: I understand “rage baiting” to mean posting something provocative that you don’t really believe, with the intention of getting people angry and upset, in order to generate clicks and (ultimately) money.  If I’ve got that definition right, I’ve never posted rage bait in my life. 

I believe everything that I write here – allowing for some exaggeration and hyperbole for comic effect – and I write to discuss issues I find engaging and important, to get some catharsis from mocking dimwits and bad-faith actors in our politics and media, and also to provide some entertainment and (hopefully) some laughs.  Other than a few folks who occasionally hit my tip jar, I don’t make money from this page.  Fortunately for me, I don’t need to. 

So, when it comes to whether I think all lefties or Dems are morally monstrous, of course I don’t.  I know too many good-hearted lefties – friends, family members, colleagues from my university teaching career – to believe that.

But I do see a lot of disturbing behavior on the left lately – especially in the elite Left in politics and media, as well as in the most energized base of the Democrat party – and in ways that I don’t think were common in lefties from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.  Worst of all, I think that a lot of it is not coming from the far extreme fringes of the left, but from the mainstream.  Which is WAY more troubling to me, and I think should be to all decent people, whatever their politics.

I had three main trends in mind when I came across the Clancy killings story.  First, the ghoulish glee and celebrations over Charlie Kirk’s murder (wounds that have been freshly re-opened, as a lot of evil people geared up to celebrate the anniversary of his assassination, in a quasi-holiday they’ve dubbed “the Kirk-aversary).  Second, the mainstream left’s transformed view of abortion from a troubling but necessary option into a positive good.  Third, the widespread and socially sanctioned justification of and satisfaction over Luigi Mangione’s murder of a health care CEO.  

All of those examples are even more disturbing because of what they share. They all fall under the umbrella of the mainstream left increasingly approving of violence to advance their political goals.  There is a lot of polling documenting this trend, and also a consistent political gap on this issue; leftists are much more likely than conservatives to agree that political violence is acceptable in varying circumstances (i.e. rarely, sometimes, or often). 

The Charlie Kirk and Luigi Mangione examples seem much more morally black-and-white than abortion (which encompasses many ethically fraught complications in which competing interests must be balanced).  Because decent people aren’t supposed to celebrate and lionize the murder of non-violent people for their political opinions with which you disagree!  

I know: assassinations and attempts have always happened on the far fringes.  Oswald killed JFK, Hinckley shot Reagan, that nutjob killed John Lennon, three leftists (and counting) have tried to murder Trump, etc.  Those a-holes often became infamous, but they didn’t become celebrities, lauded by both mainstream politicians and seemingly normal everyday people, like the literally tens of thousands of seemingly normie leftists who celebrated the assassination of Charlie, and mourned the failure of Trump’s would-be assassins. 

And yes, there have always been at least a few deranged women who became groupies of famous murderers like Manson, Bundy, etc. some even marrying or getting impregnated by deranged murderers while they were on death row.  But look at the Mangioni cult!  He shot a father and husband in the back like a coward, for the terrible sin of being an executive in a field that the left disapproves of.  And tons of high-profile leftist celebrities and politicians openly praised him and his actions, not to mention the many thousands of sick women publicly fantasizing about banging him, because he’s a cute murderer with the proper leftist politics.

Even on abortion, the mainstream left has gone so far to the extreme that old-school Dems would be horrified.  I didn’t love the traditional mainstream leftist take on abortion – it should be “safe, legal, and rare” – but I recognize that that was better than what the left is supporting now.  (That “rare” was an acknowledgment that a moral tradeoff was being made, the implication being that abortion was the lesser of two evils, rather than a positive good.)

Today mainstream lefties argue that formerly taboo late-term abortions are something to be normalized and even celebrated, as embodied through the “Shout your Abortion” movement, lefty pols and celebrities crediting their abortions for being crucial to their success in life, and etc.

Thus the August signing of an abortion bill getting rid of all restrictions right up through the ninth month, by Massachusetts governor Maura Healy.  The tone was celebratory, and she was surrounded by smiling, applauding women when she signed it.  If you watched it with the sound off, you’d have thought it was a bill to build a new hospital or school.  The only things missing were the party hats and noisemakers.

And yes, that strikes me as deeply creepy, and morally troubling.  Especially because I am old enough to remember when everybody knew that men and women were different, and that their primary differences were hard-wired, either by God (spoiler alert: Yep!) or by evolutionary biology (that too, IMHO).   Men’s prime directive (among their other goals) was to be aggressive in the protection and defense of women and children, and women’s prime directive (among their other goals) was to be nurturing and empathetic, in consonance with their maternal instincts.  

I know.  That all sounds so archaic and absurd! If only it had the common sense, logic and primo results of today’s enlightened geniuses who don’t know what a woman is: 42 genders, and 84 pronouns, and slicing up your natural, functional genitalia to produce sterility, hostility and raging bouts of suicidal ideation.  We should definitely give them more control over our lives!

Anyway, the traditional, normative picture – whether religious or secular – is of men putting themselves in the front lines of danger.  If their village is under attack from a neighboring tribe, they send the women and children to the safest building in the middle of the village, and then they fight the invaders to the death.  If all of the men are killed or gravely wounded, the women push their babies back behind them, and face the enemy at the door, doing everything they can to save their kids, or die trying. 

Similarly, if the Titanic is sinking, the men sacrifice themselves, so that “women and children first” get into the lifeboats.  If a woman and her children are trapped in a burning building, the mothers will always try to shelter their babies with their own bodies, so that when the firefighters arrive, if any survivors are found, they are the babies.

Isn’t that the moral scenario that you picture?  And wouldn’t you have instinctive contempt for a man who elbowed a few women or children out of a lifeboat to save himself, or for a mother who tossed her infant to a tiger so that she could escape?

That’s how I felt when I saw the crowds of people with the “Free Luigi” signs, and the hordes of women eager to sexually service that slimy, murderous little coward.  And that’s how I felt when I saw the thousands of unhinged videos celebrating Charlie’s murder.  Most of those were made by women.  Even worse, among those whose profession was disclosed, the traditional “helping” professions – teachers, nurses, social workers – were disproportionally over-represented! 

And that’s how I felt when I saw the social media posts and the protests by the women wearing pink, and supporting Lindsay Clancy.  These are mothers, relating to the Clancy story AS mothers. And yet they expressed no maternal instincts, barely even mentioning the dead children, and directing much of their scorn at Clancy’s husband, who many accused of being the real murderer. They also poured vitriol on the (male) doctors, and health insurers, and drug companies, all of whom were much MUCH worse and more culpable than poor, angelic Lindsay!

Having said all that, I still have a lot of empathy for Lindsay Clancy, because whether she was insane or just deeply distressed, she is truly a tragic figure either way.  She was obviously despairing, and even if she is able to avoid legal responsibility for the killings, she has to live the rest of her life paralyzed, and knowing that she killed her three beautiful kids.  And no legal punishment can be worse than that.

But these women – along with their counterparts smiling in Maura Healy’s office, and in the Tyler Robinson fan club, and in the Luigi Mangioni fan club – are frightening. Many of them talked as if they had been in Lindsay’s exact same position and could totally empathize.  (Again, not with the three dead children, or the grieving husband who lost them.)  But of course that’s not true, because none of them murdered their own children.  Doing so is vanishingly rare.  It should shock the conscience of all mothers to contemplate it – and it does, for millions – rather than evoking vicarious excitement and solidarity, and a kind of empathy that almost seemed to shade into admiration.

As I was thinking about all of this, a short video popped up in my feed.  It showed a young female comedian in a comedy club, doing an edgy, dark-humor routine.  This lady received the question, “Why do you think the women in this generation are doomed?”  Her answer: “When a man harms a child, even prison inmates make him a target; even violent criminals know there’s a line you don’t cross.  But when a woman harms a child, she gets a fan club and a million dollars.”

Okay, not exactly a family-friendly joke.  And in this sad context, none of us feels like laughing.  But that joke works because it has one essential thing: a grain of truth, which the audience recognizes. 

I can’t see into the hearts of the women championing Lindsay Clancy, and that’s God’s job anyway, so I wouldn’t presume to do it.

But I saw how they acted and what they did, and I heard what they said.  Instead of empathizing with Lindsay but still condemning her actions, they acted out the punch line of that sad, dark joke: they formed a fan club for her, and donated more than a million dollars to her.

For the sake of our nation and of our souls, the Left – and the rest of us – needs to do, and to be, better.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Three Instructive Stories out of Germany (posted 9/12/26)

Regular readers may remember that I’ve been dabbling with learning German for the last several years.  My mom’s people came over to the States in the 1880s from Germany, and at some point we’re going to visit there to follow some of mom’s genealogy.  Also, since I have Alzheimer’s in my family, I’ve been doing everything I can to keep myself in decent shape, eat right, and exercise my mind in ways known to help slow the advance of that particular affliction.  And one such mental activity is learning another language.

Hence, German.

So I’ve been noticing stories about Germany more lately, and three particular ones caught my interest, all of which contain very timely lessons for us.  First, the story of the AFD electoral victory in the region of Saxony-Anhalt; second, how unhappy that electoral victory has made former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and third, the fact that there has been a brain drain of people leaving Germany.

While I don’t follow German politics very much at all, I do know that the AFD (Alternative for Germany) party is constantly derided as far-right, with dark mutterings about Nazi affiliations.  The first time I saw the “far-right” label, I guessed that the party is actually center right.  Because the dominant MSM throughout Europe seems to be similar to our MSM: the noun “right” must always be accompanied by one of a short list of adjectives (“far,” “hard” or “extreme”).

And the “Nazi” label is familiar to anybody who has paid attention to American politics, where every right-winger is assumed to be a Nazi until proven innocent.  And spoiler alert: they can never be proven innocent. (Meanwhile Gropey McSturmfuhrer Platner, with an actual SS Totenkopf tattoo, is just a snuggly, blue-collar oyster farmer.) The big difference in Germany is that with their 20th century history, nearly every party has a Kevin Bacon-esque connection to either national socialists, or to international socialists (i.e. everyone who lived under Soviet and Stasi control in East Germany until the USSR fell). 

So I did 38-seconds’ worth of a search, and found that the AFD’s co-leaders are Alice Weidel – a lesbian married to a woman – and Tino Chrupalla – whose name suggests Polish ancestry.  (Because Nazis were well known for their warm feelings toward lesbians and Poles.)  The AFD seems way too comfortable with the KGB thug currently running Russia (again, a strange position for a Nazi group to take), but the single issue that has driven their rise and success in recent cycles is a promise to close their borders and deport the millions of immigrants from Islamic and other Third World countries whom Angela Merkel’s government allowed in.

Recent polls consistently showed that the German people have not been pleased with the rising crime, welfare burdens and terrorist attacks on various Christmas markets that have come along with the influx of thinly vetted migrants.  But the “respectable” German political parties (i.e. the leftist ones) have told their citizens whatever is German for “go F[riend] yourself.”  (Ooh, trigger warning for you German speakers, because I just looked it up: “Fick dich.”)   

So a week ago, the AFD won 51% of the vote on election day, clearly a result of the citizenry saying, “Nein, DU fick dich, comrade!”

But a funny thing happened after the polls closed.  German elites had often spoken of an anti-AFD “firewall” that was intended to ensure that those evil Nazi lesbians never be allowed to win elections, and what do you know?  A surge of late mail-in ballots came in, and those ballots had results wildly different than all the in-person votes.  When the dust (and the bull scheisse) had cleared, the AFD had only 43.8% of the vote.  That makes them the largest party, but just three seats short of the absolute majority that would have allowed them to honor the democratically expressed intentions of German citizens.

Gee, it’s almost like widespread mail-in voting is way more susceptible to cheating, whether in California, Illinois, New York or Deutschland.  (Remember when Obama made that same point?   I mean, before he flip-flopped, and started touting how great loosely regulated mail-in voting was?)

Anyway, the AFD’s strong showing disturbed Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor from 2005 – 2018.  While Merkel led a party that was nominally center-right, she turned out to be a Germanic Abigail Spanberger – pretending to be a moderate but governing hard left.

National Review summed up her tenure as having “transformed a high-social-trust society with an economy the envy of Europe into a declining economic and social power riven by crime, social unrest, and seemingly irreversible economic decline.”  She also veered to the left by avoiding fiscal sanity, specifically by undermining Germany’s energy security and stability “by shutting down nuclear power plants, committing to green energy, and adopting a policy of relying on Russian gas.”

Then, in 2015, she opened the borders to a flood of immigrants from Syria and other Third World countries.  And when Germans wanted to speak freely about what a cluster-schtup that was turning into, she pushed through a new censorship law to muzzle popular dissent.

Sounds about right.  And it explains how the AFD — originally known as the “professors’ party” founded by to free-market economists in 2013, and a tiny, fringe group at first – became the powerhouse that won big last week.   

The third story is a column written by German professor Rainer Zitelmann entitled, “More and More Germans Are Leaving Their Country, Unexpectedly!”  (Okay, that “unexpectedly” was mine.  But Rainer knows his scheisse.)

Zitelmann documents the trend of talented and ambitious Germans leaving their country, to the tune of around a quarter-million per year for more than a decade.  (The net loss is a little less than 100,000 per year, since some people have also been moving in.)  Zitelmann points to recent studies finding that around 1 in 5 Germans say they are considering emigrating, and among those under 29, 21% “are making concrete plans” to do so. 

Zitelmann also references a recently published book by Alexander Steffen called “Goodbye Deutschland,” in which he reveals that those leaving are predominantly highly skilled (75% have college degrees, and on the whole they are ambitious and entrepreneurial), while those moving in tend to be low-skilled.  While Steffen supports “qualified immigration,” he warns of a trend we’d be wise to beware of: “Too often, [Germany] keeps and financially supports people who burden its system, while losing or driving away people who would make the country stronger.” 

Zitelmann mentions that many of those fleeing Germany complain about high tax rates and punitive levels of micro-managing government regulations, but he also points out that many of those he interviews find greater fault with the same trend that has shown up in a Ipsos-MORI survey of 13 nations: Germany is second only to France in the amount of social envy directed at the rich. 

The successful emigres don’t like the high taxes, but they leave primarily because of the social stigma directed at them for succeeding.  “Elsewhere, success is an invitation; here, it is grounds for suspicion.”  Self-employed and small business owners didn’t like the endless forms and punitive regulations, but they moved away “because they felt that the state treated them as adversaries rather than as the people who pay for the whole system.” 

The motivations of those who left to start businesses or invest elsewhere can be summed up by one man who said, “I didn’t leave because of the taxes.  I left because of the envy.”   

I don’t think it takes a genius to see the connections among these three stories, nor to recognize their relevance for our country.  Mass immigration – especially when many of the immigrants want to bring their own cultures with them rather than assimilate – is disastrous.  And Uncle God might just have known what He was doing when He sent Moses down the mountain with 10 rules, one of which said, “Don’t covet.”  (That’s Old Testament for “envy.”)  

Also, we should heed the 20th century’s main lesson: don’t elect communists.  (That’s Old School for “socialists.”)

NR was unusually pointed – but not wrong – when it described Angela Merkel as “Germany’s second-most-regrettable chancellor.”  (That’s gotta sting!) 

And David Strom summed up her philosophy – and that of the socialists writ large – perfectly,  arguing that when she was being raised in East Germany, Merkel imbibed the leftist world view:  “A firm belief that reality has no sway over the course of history … a misplaced sense that social justice and social good can come from ignoring basic facts…and that reality has a power all its own, and the battle to overcome it leads only to decline and tyranny.”

Unfortunately for Germany, she did not learn that. 

Because as Strom notes, “Her impulse was to replicate East German policies in the West.  You can take the girl out of East Germany, but apparently you can’t take East Germany out of the girl.”    

Can we please not repeat Germany’s mistakes here?

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Acknowledging That Land Acknowledgments Are Weaponized Nonsense (posted 9/8/26)

Okay, even though I’m everywhere and always a cautious optimist, I’ll admit that we’ve had some bad news stories lately.  

For some reason we are still dragging our feet on blasting the IRGC forward into the Stone Age.  Some truly creepy leftists have decent chances to win Senate seats from a bunch of red states in November.  A frightening percentage of American women have apparently lost their minds, and are celebrating and bragging about legislation that allows abortion right up until the baby’s head crowns, and – on a related note – are hailing as a heroine a disturbed woman who meticulously planned and carried out the strangulation of her three small children. 

Sadly, such things are par for the course in this vale of tears.  The “crooked timber of humanity” and all that. 

But as always, there are good things happening, too.  Our border is effectively closed, over 5 million fewer people are on SNAP benefits since the beginning of this year (and nobody’s starving, because most of those 5 mil were ineligible in the first place, plus everybody is a little bit healthier, without our tax dollars buying them their SNAP-breakfast: Captain Crunch washed down with Coke), and football season is upon us.    

Plus, my magical body is making great progress at absorbing the piece of my spine that broke off between C6 and C7 in February.  (See my columns from March and April for the wonderful story.)

Oh, and also, Smithsonian head honcho Lonnie Bunch is retiring, after leading that organization into the valley of woke nonsense and America trashing.  This after the Domestic Policy Council released an exhaustive report in July, detailing the amount of aforementioned nonsense and trashing that our tax dollars have subsidized at the Smithsonian. 

You may remember when the Smithsonian’s director Anthea Hartig appeared before Congress that month, to try to defend the museum’s indefensible actions, including the “mass action toolkit.”  This document included (among other things) a list of everything in America that constitutes “white supremacy.”

Spoiler alert: it would have been much easier to list everything that the leftist wokies believe is NOT white supremacy: Malcolm X, BLM, and the music of Marvin Gaye.

Anyway, Hartig didn’t know it, but she was walking into a dramatic re-enactment of “The Empress’ New Clothes” fable.  Because one of her questioners was Brandon Gill.

By the way, speaking of good news stories: Brandon Gill.  That guy is a stone-cold killer in a Q&A format.  He looks a little like Clark Kent, and he’s got a very low-key delivery.  He reminds me of a righteous interrogator version of Hannibal Lecter: he’ll rip the heart out of some lying sleazebag, while his pulse never goes over 85.  

He always does his homework, and his deadpan method is to ask if his victim believes some absurd notion.  When the hapless dope says, “No, of course not,” Gill comes back with, “That’s strange, because in a speech you delivered on August 9th, 2012 in Memphis TN at the Hilton on 2nd Avenue, at 2:13 p.m. Central Time, you said, and I quote, “Absurd notion you just said that you don’t believe.” 

So it was a thing of beauty to watch him give Anthea Hartig the full Gill Treatment™, i.e. he rhetorically took her apart at the joints.  When he asked if it was important to be polite, she looked confused, and said, “Excuse me?”  He repeated the question, and she replied, “Yes sir.” 

Then he pointed out that the mass action toolkit identified politeness as “a defining characteristic of white supremacy culture.”  Then the quiet question: “Ma’am, are you a white supremacist?”  She looked down, then tried to dance away, saying, “I’m not exactly familiar with that passage of the mass action toolkit, which is not something we developed.”   

It went on and on that way.  He asked if she agreed that “objectivity” is also a core white supremacy tenet, and when she denied it, he asked why her document promoted it.  She flat out said, “It’s not our toolkit,” and he pointed out that the Smithsonian under her leadership had been promoting it for quite some time.

As much fun as it was to watch Gill defenestrate knuckleheads, the vision of America presented by the Smithsonian is not as black-and-white as partisan bickering suggests.  The Smithsonian has many great exhibits, and does tell the story of America’s virtues and flaws.  But the larger point is that in the 1950s (to pick one time period) the darker parts of our history were given shorter shrift than they should have been.

But in the last half-century – and picking up speed during the last several decades – our left has swung the pendulum way too far in the other direction.  And the hyper-critical double-standards applied to America – exaggerating our flaws while minimizing our virtues, and doing the opposite for all other cultures – is a toxic trend that now represents mainstream thought in academia, along with institutions like the Smithsonian. 

Which brings me to a point I’ve raised before: the endlessly hypocritical and annoying recent custom of the “land acknowledgment.”  Regular readers may remember that at the beginning of my oldest daughter’s graduation ceremony when she got her Masters in Nursing from U Mass Amherst, the first speaker started out with, “As we get started, I want to acknowledge that we are now on the ancestral lands of the Jigamash and the Hekawi tribes…”  (“I’ll take fake Indian tribes and F-Troop deep pulls for 500, Alex.”)

Before I could leap to my feet and yell, “Boo!  Give back the land, you virtue-signaling jackass!  BOOOO!!” my HAATDP wife (Hot As A Two-Dollar Pistol) (Duh) clamped her seemingly dainty hand on my lower thigh as if momentarily possessed by the grip strength of the Incredible Hulk.  So I wisely cleared my throat and stayed where I was.

Anyway, the leadership at the Smithsonian and most of academia are big fans of the land acknowledgment.   Unexpectedly!

And they’re not subtle about it.  In fact, the NEA developed a guide for land acknowledgements (UNEXPECTEDLY!) that left no doubt as to where their allegiance lies.  “Don’t sugarcoat the past.  Use terms like ‘genocide,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘stolen land’ … to reflect actions taken by colonizers.”

The issue arose during Hartig’s questioning, this time from TN congressman Tim Burchett, who played video clips of Hartig repeatedly giving land acknowledgments at various museum events.  Those included verbiage like her gratitude for “the opportunity to work and live in their territories” and her thanks to the “first peoples on whose land we gather today.” 

Does anyone else find the present tense there to be strange?  She’s not referencing territories or lands that WERE ONCE theirs; she’s saying that those lands are theirs now.  Which is a little incoherent, since she’s a rich white lady speaking at an institution named after a white British scientist, in the capitol of a nation where around .002% of the population are actual Indians.

And no, that doesn’t count Liz Warren, who is about as Indian as the offspring of Edgar Winter and Tilda Swinton.  (#neverstopmocking)  

Burchett followed the video clips with the obvious question: “I’m wondering have you ever planned on donating any of your personal property or any of the property of the Smithsonian to any of these tribes?”

To which Hartig replied, “Hamanah hamanah hamanah…Can I please pull up my pants now?” 

Okay, what she really said was, “I don’t believe that is pertinent to the conversation, sir.” 

Because of course she didn’t.  But still, the point was still clear.  She’d already been depantsed, and that was before the Gillinator™ had even stepped up to the podium, with the ominous Sergio Leone soundtrack from a Spaghetti western playing in the chambers.

I really like John Fonte’s take, in his article in The Federalist about the Smithsonian and stolen land.

He points out that the Lakota Sioux sued our government in 1980 at SCOTUS and won compensation for the Black Hills, which they turned down, because they want the land back instead.  Which is rich, since the Lakota arrived in the Black Hills around the time we were becoming a nation in 1776. 

Annndddd…they killed a bunch of Cheyenne and Crow Indians, and stole the Black Hills from its true “rightful, indigenous owners.”

Except that the Cheyenne had stolen that land from the Kiowa before them. 

When we remember that the Indians of this time didn’t have written languages, it’s a little surprising that we know which tribes stole which land from which other tribes at all.  Even so, we know that the Sioux were at least the second iteration of colonizing thieves amongst the native peoples whom we’ve come to call by the official collective noun of “the Liz Warren Communities.”

(Pull out your tom-toms and recite the chant with me: #wemustneverstopmockingher.)

And it’s pretty certain that if we had any written records, we would find out that the Kiowa slaughtered their way to stealing the Black Hills from some tribe before them, who stole them from some tribe before them.  And so on.

It’s turtles in headdresses, all the way down.

So again, there is some good news happening amidst all of the current sturm und drang.  Lonnie Bunch is retiring, Anthea Hartig took an educational tongue lashing pour encourager les autres, and four seats on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents are expected to open up this year, so we might be able to correct that fine institution’s wayward drift.

If anyone in the administration is reading this, I hereby volunteer to take Lonnie Bunch’s place.  I’ve got some ideas about bringing some balance to the joint, starting with a shout-out to the fine Scotch-Irish and German folks who brought the Simpsons’ bloodline to this great nation.  The end of that acknowledgement?  “You’re welcome.” 

Oh, and in the tradition of renaming the Gulf of America and Lake Dontario, I will preside over the restoration of the newly rechristened…Simpsonian Institution.    

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Frustration Friday (posted 9/4/26)

I hope this little bit of alliteration doesn’t catch on – it’s no Taco Tuesday, for example – but today feels like Frustration Friday to me.

Even as I say that, I’ve got to admit that my ability to feel frustrated is greatly reduced, for many personal reasons.  I just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first time I met my smoke show wife; Cassie the Wonder Dog is still a gamer, hanging in there even though she’s now 15 years old.  Plus, God is in His heaven, and football season is about to start.

And yet. 

Why does it seem like more than half the country is losing its grip on reality?  Right now there is at least an even chance that the GOP (flawed and aggravating as it is) could lose senate races in five red states that Trump won by double digits, or close to it.  Iowa.  Ohio.  Texas.  Georgia.  Alaska.  Are you kidding me? 

I know that Paxton is a very lazy and shaky candidate in Texas.  But the GOP candidates in all four of the other states, plus Michigan, seem solid.  And all of their Dem opponents range from “meh” to “Aiiieeeee!” on the cringe scale. 

A vegan, gender-ambiguous “Christian” who hates Christianity… in TEXAS?  Little Jon Ossoff is a do-nothing non-entity in GA, Sherrod Brown got beaten as an incumbent senator last time around in Ohio.  And Muhammad Allahu-Akbar El-Sayed has campaigned with a jihadi freak, and has an entire madrassah full of dirty laundry in the forms of past quotes about how terrible the police, Jews and America are, and he still appears to be tied with a competent conservative opponent.

I know that the mid-terms are always tough for the party in power, and with Trump’s approval ratings in the high 30s, I’d expect us to lose in most blue and purple states.  But I hope that the sane part of the electorate in the red states comes to their senses by early November. 

Speaking of coming to one’s senses, I’m glad to see that Trump finally seems to have come to his, and has dropped his foolish attempts to negotiate with the genocidal weird beards ruling Iran.  His initial strikes were so successful, and within less than a month we had the enemy on the ropes, so I’ll never understand why he took his foot off the gas instead of just finishing them off.  The war has gone on for 6 months now, and over 4 months of that has been wasted time, while we were allowing the congenitally lying goat-romancers of the IRGC to drag their feet on agreements they never would have kept in the first place. 

That was the least Trumpy decision Trump could have made. 

We seem to be back on track since Tuesday, when we responded to a few feeble Iranian attempts to fight back by striking between 50-100 sites Tuesday, including “air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and facilities, mine laying capabilities, and communications sites.” 

That’s all great.  But the IRGC has been at our mercy since March. So why the hell were there still 50-100 IRGC sites of any type still standing in September?!

More please.   

On another topic, the MSM just ran another story with a sensationalist headline meant to hurt conservatives. In other news, water is wet, that thing on Maxine Waters’ head is scaring small children, and Liz Warren is as white as the World-Wide Albinism Convention in Reykjavik, Iceland. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  

This time the story was about a data center in Oklahoma.  Data centers are not without their downsides, and I’m no data-center-ologist.  But I have a long-standing rule of thumb: whenever you encounter an issue where the Chicoms, the Democrats and Tucker Carlson are all on one side, take the other side. 

So when a slew of MSM sources went nuts about a bad-news data center story on Monday, I began my internal countdown until the story proved to be BS.  And I wasn’t disappointed.

The large print at HuffPo was typical: “Oops! Data Center Accidentally Wastes 3 Million Gallons of Water in Drought-Stricken State.” 

The first red flag popped up a few paragraphs in, when the facility in question was described as a Bitcoin mining operation.  Which is not what most people think of when they think of data centers. 

Helpfully, when the story was posted on X, community notes began to quickly debunk its claims.  Long story short, the business was an illegal Bitcoin mining facility without a permit, and had been told to shut down in 2023, but never did.  Also, the water line that broke was tied to an illegal fire hydrant the criminal operators had installed.   

So a criminal operation broke a bunch of laws, and the government failed to do even the minimal due diligence and catch them.  Therefore data centers are bad, and must be outlawed.   Duh. 

Townhall made another good point about this story, highlighting the way that our lefty media is very quick to condemn private businesses (including by lumping illegal operators in with legitimate businesses), but never shines the light on governments who cause much bigger problems.

To wit:  In 2023, six cities in Texas collectively lost 88 billion gallons of water due to poorly maintained water infrastructure. That’s 241 millions of gallons per DAY.  New York City loses around 155 million gallons every day.   But California tops them all.  Through a heady mix of incompetence, misspent tax dollars and a thicket of Byzantine regulations that would make Stalin blush, Newsom-stan loses an estimated 740 BILLION gallons a year in uncaptured urban run off. 

That’s over 2 billion gallons per day, every day!

But sure, a one-time loss of 3 million gallons – not because of a legal data center, but an illegal bitcoin mining outfit – means that we must tear down free market capitalism. 

We don’t hate the MSM enough.

However, I’m not going to send you off into the weekend on that down note.  Because every Frustration Friday has its silver lining, and for this one, we’ll go to Cedar Hill, Texas.

On Tuesday, an as-yet-unidentified armed robber decided he would kick off September by robbing a bank. 

Because who wants to do honest work, when you are lazy and greedy, and have a knife?

By the way (spoiler alert), what is that old saying about bringing a knife to a gun fight? 

Oh yeah: Don’t do that.

Well this genius never got the memo, because he went into the Chase bank in Cedar Hill, brandished his knife, and announced a bank robbery.

Annnnnndddddd…one of the customers pulled his gun and shot the guy.  Because: Texas! 

Our sad little crook fled the scene – if by “fled” you mean “limped away from” – but he didn’t get far before making his best decision of the day:  lying down on the ground and taking the asphalt-temperature challenge.   

It’s good to know that in a world turned upside down, where red states might be voting for Democrats and Trump thinks he can make a deal with jihadi fanatics, you can still count on some things. 

Like a thug trying to rob a bank in Texas, and immediately getting shot.

Also, the cherry on top of that timely lesson that crime doesn’t pay? 

One less Talarico voter in November. 

So we’ve got that going for us.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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