Author: martinsimpsonwriting

Fatal Empathy (posted 2/2/26)

I talked to an old friend of mine the other day.  Regular readers have heard of him, because he’s one of a couple of lefties I’ve been close to for years. 

Many readers from the CO site – which I’m still hoping to be able to revive with CO, so please be patient – have commented to the effect of, “How can you be friends with a leftist, after everything they’ve done and everything you’ve said about what they’ve done?”

Which is a rational question to ask.  Though an even better question might be how can he be friends with me, after everything he thinks conservatives have done?  Especially since lefties are usually pretty quick to cut off and cancel anyone on the other political side, IMHO. 

The answer is that even though I think his politics are wildly wrong, and he thinks the same about mine, deep down we both know that there are some things more important than politics.  I’ve known him for 40 years, and he’s got a good heart.  I was godfather to one of his kids, and he introduced me to my smokeshow wife, and for that I will forever be in his debt.

I love him like a brother.  A lovable but addled and confused brother.  😊

The reason I mention all that is that since our conversation, I’ve been thinking about the chaos in Minneapolis, and I’ve come to the conclusion that good lefties are wrong about immigration and ICE for two main reasons: they’ve misunderstood the law, and they’ve misunderstood and/or misapplied empathy.

Empathy first.  The first time I heard the term “toxic empathy” was not very long ago, but it has become a hotly debated topic since then.   At first glance, the concept would appear to be oxymoronic – how could “empathy” ever be “toxic?”  But you don’t have to think very long to come up with tons of examples to prove that it often is.

Anyone who has been in or observed human relationships – watching one spouse enable another by making excuses for abuse; loaning money to somebody with a gambling problem; giving $20 to a homeless guy who uses it to buy the fentanyl that kills him; parents spoiling a child until he’s a 30-something basement-dweller – recognizes that reality.

The same negative results ensue on a political level, when government programs that are meant to help people actually incentivize bad behaviors that gravely damage the recipients.  Giving women welfare benefits only if there is no man in the house produces sky-high fatherlessness, and traps them in dysfunctional dependence, which is an unmitigated disaster.  Guaranteeing college loans to people to get worthless grievance studies degrees produces bitter 30-somethings with $200K in debt and a minimum wage job.  Etc.

But aside from the toxicity issue, empathy is very often only selective, on both the right and the left.  Some on our side empathized with the nonviolent people among the J6 protestors way more than we empathize with the non-violent among leftist protestors, because we basically agree with the former and disagree with the latter. 

But the lefties in Minneapolis and around the country have taken that to an extreme, IMHO.  I haven’t heard any lefties express empathy for Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, or any of the thousands of Americans who did nothing wrong, but were attacked or murdered by unvetted illegals.  But they have been gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over illegals who broke our laws (including wife-beating human smuggler Kilmar), and legal immigrant citizens who were briefly detained to confirm their legal status before being released.

The elite leftists have used a cloak of lies to try to turn the five-year-old boy with the cute backpack into a tiny, photogenic victim of cruel ICE, claiming that ICE “arrested” him.  The truth, of course is that ICE took care of the kid after they tried to take his criminal dad into custody, and the creepy POS fled, leaving the boy behind in freezing weather.

Yet the leftists condemn the ICE agents who cared for him, rather than the criminal dad who abandoned him.  Unexpectedly!

Speaking of kids, it’s been widely reported that around 300,000 illegal children have been snuck in and given into the custody of others – some probably relatives or friends of their parents, but many fraudsters posing as their parents to improve their chances of getting in, and many others either cartel-associated or cartel-coerced people who facilitate the sexual and other abuse of those children.

Anyone who actually cares about kids has to be horrified by the prospect of a third of a million small, powerless victims of the left’s pitiless policy of opening the border to unvetted waves of uncontrolled immigration and human smuggling.  And yet the elite left has been utterly silent about this massive crime. 

And when Homan announced last week that this administration has located and rescued around 145,000 of those victimized kids, the silence of those who can’t stop virtue signaling about, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” has been deafening. 

Not one word of celebration or relief.  Not even a grudging “good job” from the armies of those who claim to be the champions of “undocumented” children.  

Compare that to the tsunami of grief for Robin Good and Alex Pretti.  I know that many good lefties actually do grieve for those two, just as I and many other conservatives feel some sympathy for the tragic ending that their own disordered ideology led them to.  But I also know that many in the leftist elite are more than happy to exploit the deaths of those two for their own propagandistic political gain.

That much is clear from the way they’ve relentlessly lied about both cases.  They claim that Robin Good was an innocent mother who stumbled into an ICE action, and died while trying to flee the murderous agents, through no fault of her own. (The truth was that she and her partner had trained at an organized anti-ICE boot camp, went there to illegally interfere with agents, and was killed in the process of committing multiple crimes, including driving her car toward an agent who had already been hit and dragged by one of her political co-religionists previously.)

They claim that Alex Pretti was a noble nurse, murdered by ICE agents for the “crime” of trying to help a woman they were victimizing.  (The truth was that he was a repeated assaulter of ICE agents who went there to attack and interfere with their legal actions in a chaotic situation, and died in the process of committing multiple crimes.)  

Ironically, misplaced and toxic empathy played significant roles in both of their deaths.  Because one of the best examples of toxic empathy in government is the policy of going soft on crime, which both of the dead protestors had learned to expect.

Nationwide anti-ICE protests routinely violate a great many of our laws, and yet almost none of those in the mobs of protestors/agitators/rioters ever face legal consequences for their actions.  They aren’t arrested, or if they are, they are quickly released with all charges either dropped, or reduced to the equivalent of a traffic ticket.  (And that amounts to an actual reward, since they gain admiration and praise from their disordered companions for heroically “standing up to the fascists.”)  

Thus the protestors – exhilarated by an intoxicating mix of political hatred and a sense of their own moral superiority and the righteousness of their cause – see some of their companions screaming at the LEOs, and throwing the first objects or fireworks at them. And nothing happens to them.  So they join in, and things accelerate.

And soon, they end up believing that their opponents are basically powerless against them, and they will never face any consequences for their crimes, which they don’t even recognize or acknowledge ARE crimes.  

That process ends with Robin Good dead, and her partner wailing, “Why are they using real bullets?!”  (Anyone not drunk on an ideological fervor involving delusions of invulnerability can clearly see the obvious answer: When you attack armed LEOs and try to run over them with a real car, you can expect to catch a lot of real bullets.)

That process also ends with Alex Pretti’s death.  If law enforcement had arrested him shortly before, when he committed multiple crimes at a previous protest (interfering with an arrest, spitting at cops and damaging one of their vehicles, then fighting with one of them), he would still be alive today. 

But because he didn’t face an arrest 10 days earlier, he was emboldened to escalate his criminal behavior until he faced the end of his life 10 days later. 

And ironically, the actions of his comrades also played a huge role in his death.  One of their tactics has been to constantly blow whistles at an ear-splitting volume, which is obviously disorienting and extremely aggravating and even painful to the LEOs carrying out their legal tasks, as it is intended to be.

Because Pretti was carrying a gun – which he could legally do – to a legitimate law enforcement action where he intended to commit crimes – which he could NOT legally do – he had already put his life at great risk.  In the ensuing confusion, when one of the cops saw his weapon and called out, “Gun!” things instantly escalated, as they must.

Tragically, one cop had already gotten Pretti’s gun away from him when other cops – because he was struggling with them (which one cannot legally do), and because they were almost certainly not aware that he no longer had his gun on him – shot him.

Typically, in that situation a cop will let the other cops know when he has removed and secured the weapon from the criminal.  And it is very likely –to say the least – that the cop in this case tried to do that.

But because a mob of insurrectionist a-holes surrounded the cops and Pretti, blowing their deafening whistles, no one could have heard the information that would almost certainly have saved Pretti’s life.

And so Alex Pretti – just like Robin Good, and (as sad as this is to say) Ashli Babbitt – died, almost entirely because of his own reckless actions.

Next up: I’ve researched and will try to summarize the main legal issues underlying the anti-ICE and pro-illegal immigration wave that is sweeping the country.          

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est! 

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In Search of the Elusive “Moderate Democrat” (posted 1/30/26)

Over the last several years we’ve seen thousands of examples of the lunatic fringe of the left.  And since they are so disconcertingly entertaining and easy to mock, they have naturally garnered a lot of our attention.

From the Jerry Springer-style minstrel show antics of Jasmine Crockett to the dead muskrat that Maxine Waters wears as a wig, and from the dude pretending to be Rachel Levine to the White Walker pretending to be Cherokee princess Liz Warren, the absurdity of fringe leftists helps sane people to see them coming from a mile away, and discount anything they say.

But one group has done more damage, and that’s the faux moderates, i.e. far leftists who pose as sane, non-threatening center leftists.  The last two Democrat presidents have come from this group, for example. 

Barack Obama famously gave a speech proclaiming that “there are no red states or blue states, only the United States,” and he promised to be a unifier who would bring about financial prudence and the end of racial tension.

Annnndddd… he governed as a leftist ideologue, exacerbated racial divisions, rammed through a government takeover of health care that began failing immediately, and doubled the national debt in eight years. 

The late Joe Biden pretended to be a non-threatening moderate, and many gullible citizens voted for him specifically to avoid the wacky leftism of Beta O’Rourke, Spartacus Booker, Bill duh-Blasio, Bernie Sanders and Grandma Squanto Warren. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Annnndddd…then Biden’s team of embalmers and taxidermists governed as far left as Bernie would have.

That trend has continued to this very day.  For two good examples I give you Tampon Tim Walz and Abigail “White Witch of the North” Spanberger.

Que Mala picked Knucklehead as her VP because… well, because she has absolutely terrible judgment.  About every decision.  All the time.

But also because he was supposedly the safest and most “moderate/normie” choice.  She couldn’t pick another female or minority, because America would be rightly skeptical about a double-DEI ticket.  She couldn’t pick Josh Shapiro because her base is made up of jihad-adjacent, raging anti-Semites.  She couldn’t pick Mayor Pete because of the gayness.

I know.  She wanted to avoid the gay, so she ended up with… Jazz Hands?  (See “terrible judgment, every decision, all the time” above.)

Once Walz was chosen, the Democrat PR machinery clanked into motion.  “Walz is a football coach.  He’s a military man, with decades of service in the Guard.  When he’s not hunting, he’s fixing cars, and being “Minnesota Nice’.”

Annndddd…because God exists, and He loves us, we dodged that bullet.  And in the year since Trump took office, we’ve gotten tons of evidence of how devastating that bullet would have been if we hadn’t dodged it. 

Because it turns out that he knows nothing about football.  (You don’t “call a pick six,” you dope.)  Or about hunting.  (That’s the wrong end of the shotgun to hold, and the shells go in there, and that’s an Elmer Fudd hat, not a codpiece.)  Or about cars. 

Or about – I’m just guessing here – heterosexuality.

He’s only “Minnesota Nice” if that phrase means “prone to demonizing conservatives as Nazis and law enforcement as the Gestapo.”  And his “military” career consisted of spending decades at least a continent away from any war, and then quitting the minute he was supposed to lead his unit in an actual war zone.

And as soon as Trump started to actually try enforcing our laws and constitution, Walz has stoked the insurrectionist flames like the most nihilistic, wild-eyed revolutionary since Lenin. (If Lenin had been as effete and incompetent as he was evil.)

But Albino Spanberger might be the quintessential example of the faux moderate. 

She was elected as Virginia governor in November as the model “centrist Democrat.”  While fringe lunatics like Commie Mamdani and Jay “I want to see GOP children murdered in their mothers’ arms” Jones were getting elected mayor of NYC and AG of VA respectively, Spanberger was pitched as the anti-Mamdani. 

When conservatives pointed to the far-left candidates – Mamdani, Jones, that crazy wench who ran on an “I hate Christianity, country music and the South” platform in NASHVILLE(!) – as the extremist future of the Democrat party, smarter Dems held up Spanberger as the shining counter-example. 

“She won as a centrist in a purple state!  Forget the Crocketts and the Squad and the communist whack-jobs, Abby is the moderate, Great White Hope for the Democrat future!  (Well, they didn’t say “Great White Hope.”  But she’s certainly a super-white hope.)

Annnndddd…her first day in office she started pushing the most far-left, radical agenda that Virginia has ever seen.

She reversed Youngkin’s EO 47, which committed VA law enforcement to cooperate with ICE in deporting the worst criminal illegal aliens in their jails.  She proposed reducing minimum sentences for serious crimes like – I swear I’m not making this up – manslaughter and rape. 

And she doesn’t just love actual rape.  She’s also quite a fan of the financial kind, because she proposed a raft of new taxes on nearly everything, from deliveries and hotels to guns and ammunition, and a more than doubling of the top state income tax rate.  She wants to guarantee “free” (i.e. provided by Virginia taxpayers) education to illegals. 

And she wants to do everything possible to ensure crooked elections, including allowing voting over the internet (!), extending the time to receive late mail-in ballots and “cure” faulty ones, and making it ILLEGAL to hand-count ballots!

And she wants to change Columbus Day to “Indigenous People’s Day.”  (Insert your own Liz Warren joke here.) (#neverstopmocking)

In other words, Spanberger’s entire campaign was a lie.

Unexpectedly! 

The moral of the story is clear.  With the possible exception of John Fetterman, there is no such thing as a moderate Democrat anymore.  And tragically, medical science has not yet devised a way to induce a stroke in every elected Democrat, so that at least some of them would come out of it as reasonable humans.  (Sure, many others might die in the process.  But isn’t that a risk we should be willing to take?)

There are only communist/socialists, extreme-left Democrats, and far-left Democrats.  And any Dem who calls herself a “moderate” is – as I may have mentioned in a previous column – an evil, scummy liar.

Vote accordingly, America.     

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Minnesota Madness (posted 1/28/26)

Thanks again for all of your kind wishes at my mom’s death; I really appreciate all of the texts and emails I’ve gotten, and love you all. 

At the risk of intellectual whiplash, I turn from the passing of my amazing mother who is now in a much better place, to the turning of Minnesota into a much worse place, thanks to a motley assortment of malevolent, violent, lying communists.

As I’ve had a chance to catch up on the news for the last several days, I keep getting surprised by something that should not surprise me: yes, the radical left are inveterate liars, but it boggles the mind that even after so much practice, they are still so freaking terrible at it!

Consider just a few examples among many.

Over the last five years, they’ve never stopped yammering about how horrific insurrection is, and how it creates an existential threat to our democracy, and the perpetrators must be tracked down and hammered with the harshest penalties the law will allow. 

And by “insurrection,” they meant a couple of hundred unarmed idiots fist-fighting with cops at the capitol for a couple of hours, killing no one and (as far as I know) seriously injuring no one.  Also, a thousand or so Midwestern grandparents walked through the building, took some selfies, and then left within a half hour or so.

But now we’re seeing an insurrection going on for months, in real time, every day.   And if January 6th was an insurrection, then THIS one is an ultra-mega-super-duper insurrection, carried out by massive, armed mobs, working in coordination to attack LEOs who are enforcing our constitution and laws. 

So naturally, those same lefties are shrieking at the top of their lungs and demanding that the insurrectionists be harshly put down with all the force the State can muster.

HA! I kid because I love.

Of course they’re supporting the insurrectionists and demonizing law enforcement.  Because: evil scummy liars.

They’re also saying that entering the country illegally is not a crime, and that when Trump claims that it is, he’s Hitler.  Never mind that Obama gave many speeches saying the same things – we can’t tolerate people coming here illegally, and they should all be deported. 

Or that Bill Clinton left the loving embrace of a gullible mistress long enough to read the same message from his teleprompter, before running back to resume “polling the electorate” as soon as the cameras were off.  

The same creeps also celebrated when unarmed Ashli Babbitt got shot to death by a mediocre cop when she was crawling through a broken window into the capitol building.  The leftists said she got exactly what she deserved.

For the record, and because I hate double standards, I will also say that she did a very stupid thing that day, and that even though her death was tragic, she was primarily responsible for her own death.

Of course, leftist creeps all over Minnesota and the media are wailing when any of their violent co-religionists end up in Ashli Babbitt’s position.  It’s way more stupid and dangerous to do what Robin Good, Alex Pretti and thousands of violent leftists are doing every day – attacking ICE agents, ramming them with cars, shooting fireworks (and in a few cases bullets) at them, etc. – than to do what Babbitt did. 

And yet they are holding up Good and Pretti as heroes, and encouraging many more morons to join them in self-caused deaths.  Because: evil scummy liars.

But it’s not just violent stupidity.  It’s also routine, garden-variety stupidity. 

Do you remember the main talking point of dimwit Hakeem Jeffries and dozens of elected Dems during the fall shutdown? “The GOP is lying that illegals are getting Medicaid or other welfare benefits, because it’s illegal for them to take such benefits.” 

(Because if there’s one thing that we know above all else about illegals, it’s that they would never do anything…illegal?) 

Hakeem and those same scumbags now: “Cutting off billions in Medicaid and SNAP and welfare housing benefits will cause starvation and death among the millions of illegals who depend on those benefits…which we swore 7 minutes ago that none of them were receiving.”

D’oh!  Say it with me: evil scummy liars.

I must admit that I’ve gotten some schadenfreude-tastic fun out of watching some of the more absurd of the leftist imbeciles being on the receiving end of an industrial sized can of karmic whoop-ass.

How about the two evil wenches who bit two different LEOs?  One of those is in danger of losing a finger, and the two morons have been arrested and are facing a possible eight years in prison.   

The only thing surprising about that story is that after watching a lot of those lefty female rioters, I thought that the only thing any of them were biting were either pallets of Lil’ Debbies, or dozens of comically oversize turkey legs. 

And did you see the portly idiot who grabbed a flash-bang grenade and tried to throw it back at the cops?  When the inevitable happened – hilariously! – she ran back toward her comrades, screaming and holding her injured hand up.  Then, when she got within camera range of them, her drama-student instincts kicked in, and she fell to the ground, wailing.

This dope apparently didn’t understand the “BANG” part of “flash-BANG!”

On the bright side, at least the Marxist mope didn’t flash us.  Which would have been horrific and PTSD-inducing.   

Speaking of drama queens, my favorite recent LARPing narcissist is self-identified Antifa member Kyle Wagner. 

If you haven’t seen him, he looks exactly the way you would expect him to look: facial and neck tattoos, and two giant gauges in his earlobes in what I call the “I am totally unemployable” appearance package.  He also has described himself as a “master hate-baiter,” which is SO close to being accurate.

In an incendiary video he made several days ago, he wore a black t-shirt with a vulgar slogan on it, and a blue bandana around his neck, and he spoke with all the drama and bombast you’d expect from a guy who lives in mommy’s basement but fancies himself a revolutionary hero.

He stared into the camera and delivered a monologue about how leftist women need to realize that brave menfolk like him need to risk their lives to stop the Orange Fascist’s storm troopers: “We can’t end this without good men in the streets, armed and ready to protect innocent people from being gunned down by these massed murderers, these fascist occupiers.  I need boots on the ground and I need them prepared to do what needs to be done so that this does not cost more innocent lives. We do not have any more time to let this drag out. I know it sucks, but this is the Iron Front.”  Then he actually saluted, and said, “Vive la Resistance.”

Okay, Captain Keyboard. 

He posted a second video a little while later, in which he said that he cannot legally possess a firearm, but told others with guns to “show up.”

First, I wonder why Admiral Earlobes has been banned from possessing a gun.  Second, is this brave warrior actually going to let a fascist law keep him from carrying a gun anyway?  Third, is he really going to urge others to enter the fray with guns while he stands on the sidelines and tries to flirt with any female rhinoceri who might be attracted by self-dramatizing cowards?

The answer to that last question was answered in short order.  Because as soon as his video came to the attention of fascist overlords who might do something about it, he posted another video saying that, “they’re going to silence me.” 

Quoth the brave leader of men: “I am basically on the run now. You know, I have safe places and I have evacuations planned out, but, the way things are going, I’m going to have to be very resourceful, and that’s going to take support.  As I’ve said a million times, I am going to stay in this fight to the bitter end. I’m not gonna run away, but I will need some help.”

Is that not beautiful?  At the first hint that there might be consequences for his idiotic posing, this wuss tries to squeeze some money out of gullible leftists who might fall for his act. 

And that ending is chef’s-kiss perfect: “I’m fighting to the bitter end!  I’m not gonna run away!”

Says the guy who hits “send” on his video, and then immediately runs away.

By Monday afternoon, brave Kyle Wagner of the Fightin’ Minnesotans had pulled down all of his social media accounts.  And I know you’re disappointed, but his Venmo that he had used to solicit donations is no longer available.

Second verse, same as the first: Evil scummy liars.    

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Requiem (posted 1/26/26)

I want to thank everybody for their prayers and kind words after the short note that I posted last Friday.

Mom died on Saturday night.  And for those who knew her, the world feels a little colder, and a little emptier. 

Regular readers know that she had Alzheimer’s, like her mother before her.  The early symptoms showed up around 5 years ago, and over the last several years, the disease made its heartless, relentless progress. 

This past August we made the tough decision to put her in a memory care unit in a nursing home just a few miles from Rhonda’s house south of Nashville.  The transition was hard on everyone.  Even though mom had toured the nursing home twice with Rhonda and had been excited about going there, when the move was made, she was disoriented, and would often cry when we came to visit her.

In the previous months, she hadn’t recognized the home she shared with Rhonda and her husband as hers, and she was similarly lost at the nursing home.  After some problems we had with the staff there being less attentive than we’d hoped, we moved her to another nearby memory care unit a week before Christmas. 

She had a better couple of weeks there, and made a new friend of a fellow resident, before her condition began to drastically deteriorate.  She became combative, and when staff members tried to redirect her, she became violent with them.  She was moved to another unit for more intensive treatment, before she took a turn for the worse, failing a swallow test and lapsing into a semi- comatose state.

Rhonda called me on Wednesday, and I drove up to Tennessee.  By the time I got to the hospital that night, mom was breathing deeply and rhythmically, but was no longer lucid.  We spent most of the next three days at her bedside. 

The nurses were very good, and the hospice nurses were amazing.  (I had the same experience with dad years ago, when he received hospice care at home – a few miles from mom’s hospital bed – and with my mother-in-law, whom we had in hospice care at our house in Florida for a short time before her passing.) 

One nurse told me that hearing was one of the last things to go, and that patients can sometimes hear you talking to them for longer than you might think.  So we talked to mom a lot, and told her how loved she was.

We put a Bluetooth speaker beside her, and I played some George Jones for her, which she always loved.   However, you never realize how much death and sadness there is in some great country music until you play it for your dying mother.  “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will),” “The Grand Tour” (about a terrible divorce).  Good lord!

So I fairly quickly switched to her other favorite songs: the hymns that we were raised on. 

“Blessed Assurance,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Amazing Grace.”  I mixed in some newer ones too. “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” (the Celtic Worship version is great) and Audrey Assad’s “Even Unto Death.” 

I’ve known and loved most of those hymns since childhood.  But I learned something new about them this week: a hymn will never preach to you like it does when you’re at the deathbed of the woman who introduced you to it, and who loved Christ every day of her life, and who taught you to love Him too.

Mom’s death seemed to strangely echo dad’s.  Dad died in the winter of 2014 on one of the foggiest nights in recent memory, and mom died during a very unusual (for Tennessee) snow and ice storm.  If you were writing fiction, the weather symbolism – the disorienting eeriness of thick fog, and the cold isolation of deserted, snowy streets – would come across as ham-handed, and too obvious.

But it seemed fitting in both cases, and reflected our state of mind as we lost such good and loving parents.       

And yet Saturday night brought contentment and relief, too.  Not just because we knew where mom was going, and Who she was going with.  But because over the last several years, we had been dreading what was in store for her, and for us. 

Mom’s mom died of Alzheimer’s too, spending her final years in a nursing home before dying at 91.  Mom was 87, and she had already lost so much of herself before last night.  It broke our hearts to anticipate the slow, pitiless descent that we feared was in front of her.  We couldn’t bear to think of what her last years might cost her, and how they might threaten to erase our memories of who she really was.   

And now we’ve been spared that, and her suffering is over, and we’ve got so many good memories. 

The day after her death, three stand out to me.

First, I’m so grateful that we were able to take her back home to Illinois for a family reunion last August, a week before she went into the nursing home.  I wrote about that experience in my column dated 8/8/25, which you can find on this site if you’d like.

Everybody was happy to see her, especially because most of them knew that the visit might be the last time they’d have with her.  She really enjoyed the evening, even though the memory began to slip away from her by the time my sister took her back to Tennessee the next day.

As I wrote in the last paragraph of that entry, “When they got home that evening, mom went to bed early, and by the next day she didn’t remember the trip at all.  But for that one night, she was in her old hometown and surrounded by family.  And when she wakes up from this life and the fog has lifted for good, she’ll remember it all.”

I believe that that happened for her last night.

I’ve also written about a second memory of her in a previous column.  This happened around two years ago, after she’d had a minor stroke when she was still living with Rhonda.  When she came home she was still unsteady on her feet, and a fall was a real worry.  So Rhonda told her that she would sleep in her bed with her for the next few nights, in case she needed help getting up in the night.

Mom was okay with that, but by bedtime she’d forgotten the conversation.  So when she turned over in bed shortly after turning off the tv, she was startled to find Rhonda next to her.  She reminded mom that she was going to sleep with her tonight, and mom said that that was okay. 

After a moment, she said, “Did you have a bad dream?”    

Because: you can’t kill a good mother’s maternal instinct.  

My third memory is the one captured in the picture of mom and me on this page.  It was taken around 5 or 6 years ago, and shows me wearing an idiotic turkey hat, and mom wearing a kid’s birthday hat, and laughing so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. 

I can’t remember the exact occasion, except that it wasn’t Thanksgiving, and it wasn’t anybody’s birthday.  So…yeah.  Your guess is as good as mine.  Which probably tells you a lot about the Simpsons.

But that picture captures the essence of mom. 

We even have a few good memories of her passage through the disease.

As her memory failed her over the last year, in her wounded mind she returned again and again to a brick house on Post Street in Ottawa, Illinois, where she was living with her parents when she met my dad.  From there she moved to the nearby town of Marseilles when she married dad.

Her continual mental return to the Post Street house made sense to us, because she loved her parents and she loved our dad, and that house represented the happy bridge between her time with them and then with dad.   

Mom and dad kept their vows to each other, spending the next 56 years together, until dad’s death parted them, just before Christmas in 2014.  She’s lived the last 11 years without him, and even though she’s been happy, and enjoyed her life, she also said many times that she was ready to go. 

And now she has, and they’re together again.   

Rest in peace, mom, and we’ll see you soon.

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Florida Handles ICE Attacks Correctly, & U-Haul Documents Flight from Blue States (posted 1/18/26)

(I’m posting this column a day early because I’m heading down to the Sarasota area to hang out with a cousin for a few days.) 

I swore that I wouldn’t write about Minneapolis in this column, so I’ve got one quick item about the anti-Minneapolis: the free state of Florida.

This one is about an unhinged woman who attacked ICE agents in Jacksonville,

I don’t like to body shame or looks shame, but…this gal has a lot to be ashamed of on both counts.  If I can repeat a very old joke – and I’m the boss of me, so I can – when this gal gets on an electric scale, the message flashes, “Whoa! One at a time!”

Anyway, this lady is named Jennifer Cruz, and when she saw ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws, she got furious.  She jumped out of her car – actually, she unwedged herself from her car – ran over to the police (slowly) and punched one of them, while screaming the usual sweet reason of a leftist irritated by law enforcement.  (“F this and F that and stop doing the right thing!!  Aieeee!”)

Unlike what would happen in a certain misgoverned northern state, this dysfunctional mammal was immediately tased and stuffed into the back of a squad car.  (Vigorous cop workout for the day completed?  Check.)  Then she was driven off to jail, where she was charged with multiple felonies, including resisting with violence, battery on a LEO, and driving with a suspended license. 

By the way, great judgment Jen: “I don’t have a driver’s license, or any impulse control, so let me jump out of my car and attack officers, rather than slowly driving out the parking lot and living to continually drive illegally another day.”  Brilliant!

Governor DeSantis (peace be upon him) responded to the story on X: “Really bad decision to attack one of our troopers.  This isn’t Minneapolis…”

I pray that that man becomes president some day.   

In other news which is also related to what is going on in benighted blue states vs better-governed red states, a few weeks ago U-Haul released its yearly Growth Index, which is a compilation of data which tracks the number of people renting U-Haul vehicles to move out of some states and into others.

And once again, the data show that people are fleeing blue state governance and moving to red states.  Unexpectedly!

For at least the sixth year in a row, California is dead last, i.e. is losing more people than any other.  Which is freaking amazing, because CA is unlike many other states where other factors such as weather, terrible sports teams or rust-belt decay might incentivize some people to leave.

California has been blessed by the most amazing natural beauty and human capital of any state, with great weather and scenery (you can go to the beach in the morning and snow skiing in the afternoon, etc.), and a glut of revenue-generating businesses.  Forty years ago, CA looked unbreakable; they had Hollywood, Silicon Valley, bustling ports and a world-class university system. 

But nothing is so unbreakable that leftism – applied relentlessly and ruthlessly for four decades – cannot break it.  

It’s incredible.  California is the state equivalent of a gorgeous 20-something blonde at the height of her powers, in a room full of 100 straight, single guys. Somehow, the Dems found a way to make that hottie so repulsive that everybody in the room eventually fled, except for one serial killer, two mental patients, and a guy who has been blind since birth.

Of course leftist pols and the legacy media (but I repeat myself) have been denying and/or lying about why this is happening for decades: “Hey, maybe straight guys are finally coming around to the fact that female beauty, youth, perfect skin and a .7 waist-to-hip ratio are kind of gross.  Now they’re looking for a Jennifer Cruz or a Dylan Mulvaney type.”          

But unlike Jazzy Crockett, brother-banging Ilhan Omar, Jazz Hands and Small Frey, the data don’t lie.  

You can find the best overview of the numbers in an article titled, “The Great Divorce Continues,” at Issues and Insights.  It shows that TX, FL, NC, TN and SC lead the pack for the most in-migration, and CA, IL, NJ, NY and MA have the worst records. And the data is remarkably consistent: the five red states at the top were all in the top five last year, and four of the bottom five blue states were in the bottom five last year, with the exception of IL, which dropped from 45 to 49.

In fact, the larger pattern is even clearer with a little more distance.  Of the top 14 best states in retaining their citizens, 13 are red, with the only exception being Washington state at #6.  (If that state still has Seattle in it, I don’t understand that one.)  Of the bottom 10 states, only Ohio (at 43) is red.  (I don’t get that one, either.)

Of course, there are blue cities and counties in red states, and vice versa.  So it also makes sense to look at county-level migration patterns.

Annnnddddd…the leftist dysfunction is even more clear.

From the I&I article: 

“Of the 555 counties that voted for Joe Biden, 343 (or 62%) lost population since 2020. Of the 2,589 counties that voted for Trump, 1,726 (or 67%) gained population.

The 11 counties that had the biggest population declines over the past three years all voted for Biden. They lost a net total of 2 million people.

Of the 11 counties with the biggest gains in population, eight voted for Trump in 2020.”

The one measurement that I haven’t been able to find is an analysis of WHO has been migrating.  I know that CA lost more than 1.6 million people (net) in the ten years before 2022. (And it’s only gotten worse since). But that doesn’t include the likely million-plus illegals, drifters and addicts who have migrated into Cali for the welfare, free needles and judgment-free zones about pooping on the same sidewalks they are sleeping on.

Meanwhile, common sense – and what data I’ve been able to find in scattered sources – suggests that the people who have been leaving blue states are the ones a sane state would most like to keep: functional, productive, hard-working earners, tax payers and business owners. 

The results are as obvious as the dead muskrat that Maxine Waters calls a wig.  They’re as obvious as Ketanji’s horrifically flawed reasoning.  They’re as obvious as Lizzie Warren’s existential caucasian-ness.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Leftist governance is a disaster. 

Now, if only Trump and the GOP can aggressively pursue a crackdown on voting irregularities and fraud – requiring voter ID, cleaning the voter rolls of illegals and the dead, rolling back the fraud-friendly COVID era scams (unvetted mail-in voting for weeks, ballot harvesting, counting votes for weeks after election day until you get the results leftists want, etc.) – we’ll have a better chance of ensuring that in future elections, leftist politicians get to reap what they’ve sown.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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More Lies, Fraud and Insurrection from Minneapolis (posted 1/16/26)

Okay dammit, I’ve got a few more thoughts on Minneapolis before I move on. 

I swear I’m trying so hard not to write about Minnesota in every column, but much like Michael Corleone in the terrible third Godfather movie, “Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.”

Or, to paraphrase, they are really flooding the zone with stupid, and I can’t avoid at least pointing that out in passing.

On Wednesday night, violent a-holes in Minneapolis attacked ANOTHER ICE agent. 

Unexpectedly!

This time the bad guy was an illegal who fled in his car, wrecked that, and then fled on foot.  When the agent caught up to him, he turned and fought.  When two other illegals in a nearby apartment saw what was going on, they charged out with a snow shovel and a broom handle, and started beating the ICE agent.  The illegal target then grabbed the shovel, and started beating the ICE agent.

Then – FINALLY! – the ICE agent shot the guy in the leg.  After which all three illegals went back into the apartment and barricaded themselves inside.  More ICE agents arrived and ended up getting them out and arresting all three of them. 

That’s what happened. 

Here’s the NYT lede for that story: “Federal Agent Shoots Immigrant in the Leg in Minneapolis, one week after an ICE officer killed Renee Good in city.”

No mention that the “immigrant” was an ILLEGAL.  No mention that the illegal was fighting with the agent, or that two other illegals joined in that fight.  Just an agent, going around shooting immigrants. 

A freshman writing for his high school paper could fix that headline: “Illegal Attacks ICE Agent, gets shot, one week after Renee Good hit ICE agent with her car, got shot.” 

Say it with me, people: We don’t hate the media enough!

Also, I noticed something in this story that I haven’t seen anyone comment on: the agent actually shot the illegal in the leg. 

Ignorant lefties who have watched too much tv and don’t know a gun from a gunny sack are always asking, “Why don’t police just shoot a suspect in the leg?”  And now, when an ICE agent actually did that, the left is still whine-screaming about it.  You just can’t please some people.

On the other hand, you can definitely please other people, like me, and (I’m guessing) most of you reading this right now.  Because if the ICE agents start listening to us, the next time three illegals bring a shovel, a broom handle and their fists to a gunfight, we will be very pleased indeed if the ICE agents will shoot them. And not just in the leg, and not just once.  

Meanwhile, a new fraud story came out of Minneapolis yesterday, and you’ll be shocked to learn that those damn Swedes are at it again.

HA!  I kid.  It’s the Somalis.  Because of course it is.

It turns out that $700 million dollars in cash has been sent back to Somali through the Minneapolis Airport over the last 2 years.  And that’s only the amount that was “flagged,” which I’m guessing means that the money was disclosed or found, but then still allowed to be shipped out.

I’m also guessing that that money was way less than the full amount sent out, unknown and unflagged.  The story notes that that much cash, if it was all in $100 bills, would weigh 7.7 metric tons.  Through one airport!

This phenomenon needs to be considered in context of two other recent discoveries: the $8 billion dollars of fraud (at least!) committed by Somalis in Minnesota, and the official stats from the Center for Immigration Studies that as of December 2025, 81% of Somali households in Minnesota are on welfare. 

Rumors that the other 19% own daycares have not been confirmed.

But c’mon, man.    

Logically, if Somalis have committed that much fraud and received that much welfare, there is no way they got their hands on that much cash to send back to Somalia legitimately.  Not to mention that at least some of that taxpayer-provided money has gone to support Al-Shabaab. 

Which is not some delicious dish involving skewers of meat, but a hateful jihadist terror group.

Plus, at least one Somalian married her brother to commit immigration fraud, and should be denaturalized and deported immediately.

So if you’re keeping score at home, the most common career of Somalis in Somalia appears to be piracy at sea.  Until yesterday, it appeared that the most common career of Somalis in America is piracy on land.

And now it turns out they’re also very good at piracy in the skies. 

Next up: Somalis stow away on one of Elon’s rockets to the space station, and… wait for it… Somali pirates in space! 

In light of all of this, I wish the GOP would start accurately describing what the ICE-attacking mobs and sanctuary cities are doing as insurrection.  Because the leftist politicians, media figures and foot soldiers are by definition “rising in revolt, rebellion or resistance against civil authority or an established government.”

So we need to go full court press against insurrectionist sanctuary cities and states for the next 10 months:

1. Demand that their courts and jails hold illegal detainees for ICE to pick up. 

2. Charge the top politicians who refuse to do that with whatever federal crimes are most serious: obstruction, dereliction of duty, insurrection, whatever. 

3. In the meantime, cut off all federal funding to those cities and states for any purpose that can be even tangentially tied to illegals.

My ultra-conservative heart tells me to do that directly and across the board:  Since illegals are receiving food benefits, cut off all SNAP funds; since illegals are illegally receiving schooling, cut off all K-12 federal funds; since illegals are illegally attending colleges, cut off all college loans and funding.  Since they are illegally getting housing benefits, cut off all housing funds. 

But my crystal brain – better than a crystal ball, and more strategic than my ultra-conservative heart – suggests a better way to go about this. Because the dishonest Dems and their collaborators in the MSM would say that we were denying innocent Americans in those states the funds that they should rightly be receiving. 

So instead of cutting off all funds to those states and cities, I suggest that Trump announces a new plan with a public statement along these lines:  “We don’t want to do this.  We hate it.  But those states are screwing their own citizens by taking benefits away from them and giving them to illegals.  And the residents of all non-sanctuary states and cities – which are the majority of the country – do not consent to having their money taken from them and then given to illegals in corrupt sanctuary cities and states.

“So we’ve studied the numbers, and have determined how much money they’ve been illegally giving to non-citizens, whether through SNAP funds, housing benefits, educational benefits, etc.  For example, we’ve determined that Minnesota receives $30 billion in SNAP funds annually, and gives $10 billion of that to illegals.  [I’m making these numbers up to make the point.]

“Starting now, we’ll be giving the $20 billion Minnesota needs to give SNAP benefits ONLY to American citizens.  We’ll do the same with federal funding in every other category.  This will give voters in every state the chance to tell their leaders how they want that money spent.  If they are happy to lose their apartments and have their kids go hungry while tax money pays rent for illegals and feeds them and their families, so be it.

“Again, we will continue to fully fund the states so that they can support their American citizens.  If they want to re-direct much of that money to illegals, that’s up to them, and to you, their voters.”  

The beauty of this plan is that it would put the blame directly where it belongs: on the leftist politicians and activist groups who are ripping off American taxpayers for the benefit of illegals.

I think this would be an easy and popular argument to make to the American public.  I’d point to a precedent from the 1970s.  During the oil crisis when gas shortages started popping up, the feds said that since driving slower conserved gas, the national speed limit should go down from 70 to 55 mph.  When some states balked at that, the feds stopped highway funds for those states until they complied. 

And that wasn’t even to force them to obey a law they had been breaking. Speed limits weren’t in the constitution, and states had always set their own.  It wasn’t illegal to allow people to drive 65 or 70.  The feds just didn’t like it, and decided that they knew what was best.

And if you can withhold funds to force states to make their citizens drive slower, you can sure as hell withhold funds to force states to stop breaking federal laws, and stealing billions from the taxes paid by citizens of all other states!

I’ll end on a historical parallel that I’ve noticed. 

Small Frey, Jazz Hands and hundreds of protestors have been screaming at ICE to get out, saying they don’t want them here.  First, that’s not how any of this works, as they would know if they’d ever read part of the Constitution called The Supremacy Clause. 

Second, they sound exactly like some of their co-religionists from 165 years ago, when another bunch of Democrat insurrectionists told the federal government the same thing, as they attacked Fort Sumter.  “Stay of out of Charleston!  We don’t want you here!”

Today they’re calling face-tattooed gang bangers, child molesters and murderers “our neighbors.”  Which proves that they’re even dumber than the Democrats of yesteryear, who were at least smart enough to not try to sell the public on the lie that they were concerned about their black “neighbors.” 

They were also more honest. 

Because screaming, “We won’t let you have our property!” might sound more jarring, but it’s a lot more true than today’s Dems calling foreign criminals “our neighbors”

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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A Few Thoughts on Scott Adams, & Silver Linings from Minnesota (posted 1/14/26)

Before I get started, I want to talk about the passing of Scott Adams. 

I enjoyed his Dilbert cartoons back in the day, but in recent years I’ve watched some of his podcasts, and came to admire his clear thinking and frankness.  He came out with some perceptive analysis of Trump’s persuasive strategies in 2016, when that carried some career costs, and back when I still feared that Trump was a leftist in conservative’s clothing.  (I still think Trump is not a consistent conservative, and his unforced errors drive me crazy, but I’m happy that Adams’ view of Trump was more accurate than mine!)

I also admired the way Adams faced his death.  Last May he announced that he had terminal cancer, and his conduct since then has been high-octane, old-school male: no drama or theatrical attention seeking, just a stoic acceptance and determination to soldier on and maintain his sense of humor.  He wasn’t afraid to tell the truth and lampoon foolishness, and he seemed impervious to the slings and arrows of small-minded partisans. 

Some people I trust have told me that his books are worth a read, so as soon as I finish the Jack Carr novel I’m reading now, I’m going to read a couple of Scott’s books.  I’m going to start with How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.            

He announced a few weeks ago that he was going to be converting to Christianity, and he was clearly doing so for “Pascal’s Wager” reasons.  After a lifetime as a non-believer, he respected Christian ethics and many Christians (among them were a lot of his fans), but he seemed to be pretty openly hedging his bets.

That struck me as disingenuous, to be honest.  But as I’ve grown in my faith, I’ve realized more and more how much I have to be humble about, especially when it comes to judging what’s in others’ hearts.  And I think Adams’ story is similar to the thief on the cross’ ending: the guy has been a reprobate right up to the end, but he asks Christ to remember him when He comes into His kingdom.   

Christ’s response should be heartening to us all: “Today you will be with Me in paradise.”  And if that was good enough for the thief – and for me – I feel pretty good about my chances of meeting Scott Adams some day.

Okay, on to the news of the day. Which unfortunately means discussing the continuing chaos in Minnesota.  But because I’m a cautious optimist, I do see at least three silver linings amidst the scandals.

First, the cascade of revelations of the various fraud schemes there, as well as the insurrectionist violence and resistance to ICE and law enforcement, are drawing a ton of attention.  And even in the frozen tundra, sunlight is still the best disinfectant.  I hope the feds continue to flood the zone with investigators and law enforcement, and that conservative media and citizen journalists continue to expose the morally bankrupt leftist misbehavior in Minnesota.

Second, I’ve seen two stories within the last 36 hours of DOJ career prosecutors quitting over events in Minnesota.  One story was about “at least six” federal prosecutors in the MN US attorney’s office resigning because the DOJ was going to investigate Renee Good’s partner, and the second was about other prosecutors who resigned because the DOJ refused their request to focus an investigation on the ICE agent who shot Good.

In a perfect world, prosecutors and investigators would be non-partisan, and look into all of the facts and players on both sides.  But after eight years of Obama and four of Biden, no sentient creature believes that we live in that world.  Which doesn’t mean that I want us to be as biased and dishonest as they were. 

But in this case, as each day’s new videos and evidence have come out, they have more and more strongly exonerated the ICE agent, and implicated the Goods, and the anti-ICE “warrior” training and infrastructure that brought them to the criminal interference and obstruction that ended in Renee Good’s death. 

Hence the successively changing stories from Jacob “Small” Frey and Tampon Tim: first Renee was just dropping her kid off at daycare and inadvertently ran into an ICE action; then it turns out she went there with the goal of impeding ICE after having gone through idiot bootcamp and learning how to do so; but the agent was never in front of her car and in danger, and shot her through the side window; then he was temporarily in front of the car and shot through her windshield, but he wasn’t anywhere near being hit by her car; then he was hit by her car, but not very hard.  Etc. and etc.

But back to the wave of prosecutors who have been rage quitting, which I see as a win-win.  Not only do we get competent prosecutors focusing on real problems, but we also get rid of a bunch of partisan, deep-state bad actors, and without going through the time, effort and bureaucratic hoops to fire them, from the initial firing to the inevitable series of drawn-out appeals and re-appeals.

In that way, the faithless prosecutors who quit are similar to illegals who self-deport – they’re solving a vexing problem for us.  Not to mention that it’s entertaining to watch those whining officials just take their balls and go home. 

Or, since they’re actually trans-prosecutors – they identify as non-partisan law enforcers, but are no more that than “Lea” Thomas is a female swimmer – I guess I should say they’re taking their ovaries and going home. 

(No offense to the actual women who are reading this column!)  

Third, as more videos of anti-ICE protests get out, I think average Americans are gaining more respect for LEOs, and getting more repulsed by the “protesting” insurrectionists. 

I know that I don’t have what it takes to be in law enforcement, because just watching a few minutes of those videos makes my blood pressure spike.  I wouldn’t last half a shift before I’d be violating half the moral code I was raised with: “A soft answer turns away wrath.” “Never kick someone when they’re down.”  “Never hit a woman.” 

Not to mention, “Never yank a belligerent moron out of a car, beat him like a rented mule, tase him repeatedly, and then administer a forceful pepper spray suppository.”   

(That’s not the original King James, but I think it’s pretty close to my dad’s paraphrase.)

The sole moral teaching I would be able to live up to would be the Golden Rule, i.e. treating people the way I’d like to be treated. 

But that’s only because if I ever dyed my hair purple, pierced myself until it looked like I’d fallen face-first into an open tackle box, and then attacked cops on behalf of foreign criminals preying on innocent Americans, I would like them to beat my arse up and down the block, and then bounce my head off the curb, the squad car door and door frame as they were tossing me in to take me to jail.

I am seriously in awe at the amount of abuse our ICE agents and other LEOs are able to endure, and shocked that more protestors don’t get treated more harshly than they do. 

As far as the protestors go, I have to keep reminding myself that most of them should be pitied, because you only have to watch them for five minutes to realize that they are such obviously broken people.  Their behavior is a toxic mix of childishness, narcissism and sociopathy.  Their verbal output runs the gamut from screamed profanities to delusional insults to inane chants, and back to screamed profanities.

Take one look at their disheveled, unhealthy and bizarre appearance, and you know that they have no high-quality friendships, and they almost certainly hate their dads, if not both parents.  They are unemployable, and they are most definitely ineffable.

Sorry, not “ineffable,” which means “incapable of being expressed or described in words.”  (Because as long as we have words like “repulsive” and “beastly” and “Aieeeee!  My eyes!” we’ll be able to describe them.)

I meant “un-F-able.” 

Most definitely un-F-able.

Okay, I can’t end that way.  Because just like Scott Adams and the thief on the cross, I need mercy and forgiveness.

So I’ll end by saying that the anti-ICE insurrectionists need prayer.

Prayer, therapy, and some penitential incarceration.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Renee Good is Dead Because of Elite Leftist Liars (posted 1/12/26)

The Minneapolis ICE shooting has been on my mind this weekend, as I imagine it has been on many of yours.  I was already doing some research on crime and punishment in red vs. blue areas last week, when Renee Good ended up getting shot. 

And yes, there is an understood (herself) in between “getting” and “shot.”

And I know what some of you are thinking, and yes, I actually do some research and write about serious topics once in a while.  It’s not all “Pelosi is a mummy” and “Wow, is Liz Warren ever translucently white!” jokes around here.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

I’m going to return to some more general “why can’t leftists make sense about crime” ruminations in future columns, but for now, I’d like to throw out some thoughts on what has gone so aggravatingly wrong in Minneapolis.

To do so, I’m going to draw some connections to the Sovereign Citizens (SC) movement.  If you don’t know anything about SCs, you can search that topic, and find tons of videos of them having aggravating but hilarious run-ins with cops.  But I’ve got to warn you: the videos are addictive, and it’s easy to slide down the rabbit hole and end up watching several hours of them before you know it. 

To summarize, sovereign citizens believe – often at the urging of scammers selling kits and documents that push the SC delusion – that by declaring themselves SCs, they can exempt themselves from any state or federal laws which they find inconvenient or objectionable. 

The most common such laws are traffic and driving laws, which is why the vast majority of SC videos capture the entertaining lunacy that ensues when police pull over an SC, usually because a sovereign doesn’t believe he needs to register or insure his car, or have valid license plates or a driver’s license. 

A typical confrontation involves a sovereign citing a skewed take on an obscure or misunderstood law – they refer to Black’s Law Dictionary a lot, along with maritime law, English common law, international law, and every law but the law of unintended consequences.  (I.e., you don’t intend to get yanked out of your car, tased and cuffed, but – spoiler alert – that’s exactly where your psychotic blathering is going to take you.)

When a cop asks for license and registration, a sovereign will explain that the cop has no jurisdiction over him, and that he’s not driving, he’s “traveling,” and thus doesn’t need silly things like a license, plates or registration.  He asks for the cop’s name and badge number, but won’t identify himself, and always asks for him to call a supervisor. 

The process starts with, “I’m Officer X, and the reason I pulled you over is that you’ve got a homemade cardboard ‘plate’ instead of an official state license plate on your car.”  Depending on the cop’s patience and toleration for nonsense, the process ends anywhere from 4 minutes to a half-hour later, with the cop having to break the dope’s window, pull him out and arrest him.

In many cases, pepper spray or a taser is involved, and in my favorite cases, a cop will allow his K-9 to apply some dental persuasion – after endless warnings that the perp is going to get bit – to get the jerk to comply.

But he never complies! 

Until after a Good Boy or Girl latches on and engages in a spirited bout of “yank the moron back and forth,” at which point the sovereign screams, “What are you doing?!  He’s biting me!  What’s going on?  Why are you doing this?!”    

Good times. 

I bring this up because until Trump got re-elected and millions of leftists started systematically resisting and attacking ICE and other LEOs who are enforcing our immigration laws, I’d thought of sovereign citizens as a tiny, fringe group of dysfunctional humans with no effect on society, other than providing some entertaining YouTube videos.

But over the last year it has dawned on me that many people on the unhinged yet mainstream left have a lot in common with sovereign citizen nutjobs.  Specifically, sovereigns demonstrate four behaviors that leftists also display:

1. Sovereigns are great purveyors of self-serving double-standards.  They demand that a cop comply with every demand they have – identify yourself and your badge number; call a supervisor; prove your jurisdiction – while refusing to comply with any request from a cop (license, registration and insurance, step out of the car, etc.).

Similarly, leftists demand that cops show them warrants, or stop detaining an illegal to explain to every leftist bystander exactly what the legal basis for their action is, even as they continually refuse to follow legal commands of cops to back off, stop interfering, etc.  They demand that all LEOs be unmasked, while they insist that they themselves be allowed to commit crimes while masked.

 2. Sovereigns have a simple-minded, delusional kind of magical thinking about language that is weirdly fascinating to watch.  They act as if they can prevent a cop from doing his job just by reciting incantations.  If they say that they are “traveling, not driving” or that their car is actually “a ‘conveyance’ under maritime law,” or that they are not engaging in “commerce,” all traffic laws cease to apply.  If they repeat “I do not consent” to any order a cop gives them, the cop must let them go.    

Similarly, leftists think that a man calling himself a woman makes him a woman, and that calling a baby in the womb “a woman’s body” makes it so.  They think that calling illegals “undocumented citizens” makes them legal, and citizens.  They think that slapping a sign on their own backs that say “PRESS” or “MEDIC” gives them unhindered access and control over any crime scene.  

3. Sovereigns fancy themselves as experts on the law and their rights…and then proceed to demonstrate that they are Crockett-level stupid.  They insist that a cop has to call a supervisor if they request one.  (He doesn’t.) That a cop can’t make them get out of their car.  (He can.)  That impeding an investigation or resisting arrest aren’t crimes they can be charged with.  (They are.)   That identifying as a “sovereign citizen” means something.  (It doesn’t.)   

Similarly, ICE resisters believe that legally detaining a suspected illegal is “kidnapping.  (It isn’t.)  That taking them to a detention center where their identity and legal status can be confirmed is “disappearing” them.  (It isn’t.)  That a mayor or governor can defy federal law and prevent federal law enforcers from doing their jobs, and can arrest them if they do.  (Aw hell no!)  That calling yourself a “legal observer” means that you can disregard legal commands and hinder ICE actions.  (Nope!)     

4. Finally, sovereigns’ special brand of idiocy usually results in some great FAFO moments, which is what initially drew me into watching way too many SC videos.  Over and over again, a cocky sovereign starts out recording himself while he lectures the police about how he doesn’t have to obey any laws, and ends up in cuffs, coughing on pepper spray and crying like a little beeyotch about how he doesn’t understand what’s going on. 

And before last week, radical leftists have provided many examples of schadenfreude-tastic entertainment.  I remember watching a guy screaming at the cops, only to catch a bean-bag shotgun load in the groin, not to mention the idiot dancing around in an inflated dinosaur costume, until a cop squirted some pepper spray into the air vent in the costume, and he started staggering and flopping around like Joe Biden trying to step over a sandbag.  

But Renee Good’s case demonstrates the tragic side of the predictable results when mobs of imbeciles attack and harass law enforcement doing their jobs.  She was apparently as delusional as the most addled sovereign citizen, imagining herself as a brave iconoclast, resisting the false authority of an illegitimate legal system.

In reality, she was a brainwashed AWFL, steeped in hatred of authority, and cosplaying as a resister of fascism.  She had gone through some half-assed training and identified herself as a “legal observer” — which carries as much weight as “sovereign citizen” – and she and her “partner” inserted themselves into a legitimate law enforcement action, intending to impede it. 

A second wave of bystander videos show that she used her car to block the street, while her partner got out to record what I imagine they both thought was going to be some self-dramatizing social-justice-warrior street theatre.  She was there, obstructing for at least 3-6 minutes, at one point rhythmically honking her horn and dancing in her seat, narcissistically flouting the law and goading the cops. 

And she ended up orchestrating her own tragic death. 

For a great overview of the legal issues involved, check out a veteran prosecutor’s RedState article titled, “Minneapolis Is Not Even a Close Call.”

I wish the elite leftists who have been egging on their foot soldiers would read that, and stop adding fuel to the fire, because I think they’re clearly responsible for the growing conflicts that resulted in Renee Good’s self-destructive foolishness.  By preaching that ICE are fascists and that fighting them is a moral good, they delude them, and shield them from a healthy sense of  guilt and shame – or at least a basic sense of self-preservation! – that might otherwise have dissuaded them from the illegal path they took. 

Because threatening that ICE agent’s life by driving a 4000-pound vehicle toward him was not the first crime Renee Good committed that day.  When she drove to the scene of a legal law enforcement action, blocked the road and began a series of actions intended to draw more protestors/resisters, she interfered with law enforcement, a felony when accompanied by other illegal actions.

Actions such as disobeying lawful orders and resisting arrest, which she did when she refused to comply with cop’s orders to get out of her car.  (The SCOTUS case that said you must get out of your vehicle when a cop tells you to is called Pennsylvania vs. Mimms…which I first learned about while watching sovereign citizen videos.) 

Uninformed leftists who defend Renee Good driving toward the cop say that she wasn’t trying to hit him, but only to get away, which does not help her case.  First, because the law says that her intention is irrelevant, if her actions caused a cop to reasonably believe that she was going to hit him (which he did, because she did).  Second because “trying to get away” is fleeing/eluding, another felony. 

If the leftist politicians and media figures who claim to care about the leftist ICE resisters weren’t manipulating them for their own political purposes, they’d tell them the obvious truth:  Our immigration laws were democratically and legitimately passed, and they state that anybody who came here illegally has committed a crime and is subject to deportation.  Any agency or personnel who are enforcing those laws are behaving legally, and it’s a crime to try to impede, harass, interfere with or stop them.  So don’t do it! 

Because the best way to stop being stupid is for stupid to hurt. 

Good parents know this; slapping a toddler’s hand when she reaches for the stove is better than letting her touch it.  Good governments know it too.  An early arrest and some time in the county jail, or picking up garbage on the side of the highway is better than a slap on the wrist and then years in the state pen after you graduate to major felonies.

I’m thrilled that the administration is flooding Minnesota with 1000 more LEOs, because this kind of ongoing, slow-motion insurrection can’t be allowed to stand.  

And because we’re way past the “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” phase. 

We’re now at “play illegal games, win an early grave.”     

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Minnesota, Mamdani and Maduro, Oh My!(posted 1/9/26)

 We’re not even 10 days into the new year, and the elite lefties have already given us enough material to mock them about until Arbor Day, 2028.  Consider just the three examples of the cascading lawlessness in Minnesota, Mamdani’s horrific start as NYC mayor, and the Democrats’ towering hypocrisy about our incredible capture of Maduro and Mrs. Maduro.

By this time, you would have thought we’d be aware of all of the possible scandals that could come out of Minnesota.  However, as the third Wise Man said when he arrived late to the manger, “But wait! There’s myrrh!”   (Terrible dad joke?  Check.  Still hanging on to Christmas? Check.)

I am so happy to see the White House sending a whole team of fraud investigators from the DOJ to Minnesota.  Not just because it’s always satisfying to see some bad actors get what’s coming to them, but because as the revelations of systemic waste and criminality grow, there will be an impetus to apply the same scrutiny to the vast corruption throughout our federal and state governments. 

And that process has the potential to do a world of good.

It’s hard to believe how easy it was for Nick Shirley to pull out one or two pieces from the Somali scammer Jenga tower, which then immediately caused the accelerating collapse of the whole rotten mess.  And as a former English prof and recovering grammar nerd, I still can’t get over the beautifully evocative symbol of the multi-billion dollar fraud: the sign for the “Learing Center.”

I’m not immune to the occasional typo myself; regular readers will have spotted one or two in my columns from time to time.  (It’s no excuse that I do most of my writing after midnight, nor that medicinal bourbon is sometimes involved.) (Or is it?)  But still, a mistake in an email or an internet post is one thing.

A glaring error in a professionally printed sign is another.  Some Somali had to get hold of a computer – probably provided by a corrupt NGO called “Empowering our Neighbors, LLC” at the low, low cost of $1.2 million to taxpayers.  Then he had to try out several different names, finally landing on the generic-sounding “Quality Learning Center.”

Except that he wrote it as, “Kwalitee Learing Centaur.” 

Fortunately for him, he was able to hire a copy-editing service – probably provided by a corrupt NGO called “Literacy for our Neighbors, LLC” (that’s another $1.2 mil from the taxpayers).  And they cleaned up “Quality” and “Center,” but missed “Learing.”

When he took that verbiage to a sign-making business – “Empowering Signs for our Neighbors, LLC – which is located in a 180 -square-foot store-front in a six-business strip mall across from the railroad tracks.  (Amount billed to the taxpayers from those six businesses in 2025? $214 million.)

And because the workers there have been in this country for 10 years but still speak only in the series of clicks, whistles and glottal pops of Somali, nobody caught the missing “n.” 

Annnddddd…a multi-billion dollar fraud ring collapses, and leftist, race-hustling crooks in Minnesota get to lear a hard lesson!    

And that’s not to mention the latest disaster, with the foolish woman losing her life trying to run down the ICE agent.  Which was the predictable outcome of unhinged leftist media, politicians, and activists brainwashing gullible people by screaming, “ICE is the Gestapo! Enforcing our laws is fascist!” for the last several years.

What did they think was going to happen?

But just when you thought no leftists could be crazier than the Minnesota leftists, Zorro Mamdani took the oath of office in NYC and said, “Hold my Koran and watch this.”

And he hired a recidivist criminal to advise him on crime, and a raging anti-Semite (I know: which one?) to take charge of choosing personnel, and he started an initiative to allow disgruntled tenants on welfare to go after landlords whom they don’t think are giving them their money’s worth for the zero dollars they are paying for rent-controlled apartments. 

And for the leader of this “fix housing problems” unit, he chose a loon named Cea Weaver, who has more red flags than a May Day parade marching past Lenin’s tomb in Moscow.      

First are her eyes.  Look up “crazy eyes” in a dictionary, and right there is a picture of Cea Weaver.

Second, right before she got appointed, she started deleting all of her past social media with both translucently white, bony hands.  (This gal is so white she makes Liz Warren look like Idi Amin.)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Third, because that’s not the way the internet works, some of her old posts and videos starting coming out.  And…yikes!

Turns out she really hates white people, which makes her as self-hating as those secular Jews carrying pro-Hamas signs at Ivy League protests.  She said that home ownership is racist and white supremacist.  She said that she wanted to “impoverish the white middle class” and that her goal is to “decrease the value of real estate.”  (Finally, a leftist political promise you can believe!) 

My favorite quote of hers is a juicy morsel of malignant misanthropy encased in a thick crust of academic-speak: “For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good,” and in the future we will transition to treating it as a collective good under a model of ‘shared equity.’  [That] will mean that families, especially white families, are going to have a different relationship to property.”

Translation: Your “different relationship to property” means that you won’t have any of it anymore.

Usually, this kind of zealot has fire in her belly, and can’t wait to get into power so she can immediately start grinding her capitalist enemies to dust beneath her.  But not Cea.

Because when a reporter stopped her and posed a few questions to her outside of her Brooklyn brownstone – in an area that white interlopers like herself have gentrified, by the way – she cried and ran back into her home.

I’m not making that up.  She literally burst into tears and fled into her house. 

But the star of the show – make that the sh*t show – is Mamdani himself, who gave what had to be the creepiest inaugural address ever.  He doubled down on all of his socialist rhetoric, and produced the chilling sound bite about how he is going to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” 

That sound you hear is George Orwell – and 100 million victims of communist “warmth” – rolling in their graves.

Which brings us to Trump’s theatrical raid on another purveyor of collectivist warmth, the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.  The raid itself was so spectacular – script by Shane Black, directed by Michael Bay, with the working title, “Mission Impossible 12: Grabbing Maduro!” – that even the most partisan Dem couldn’t criticize it.

So they immediately moved on to throwing every possible criticism at the wall, to see what sticks.  “It’s illegal.  It’s a kidnapping.  Maduro is the legitimate president.  What’s going to happen next?  Why didn’t the raiders capture the 47 people below Maduro on the commie flow-chart?” Etc.

There are actually legitimate questions and a lot of uncertainty about what the aftermath will be.  But rather than be serious statemen and raise those objections, the Dems couldn’t help but act like clowns, and reveal their own double-standards and hypocrisy.

Like Cryin’ Cea Weaver, they don’t seem to recognize that the internet and videotape exists, and you can’t run away from past statements you’ve made. 

Statements like Joe Biden’s (RIP) tweet from June of 2020: “Trump talks tough on Venezuela, but admires thugs and dictators like Nicolas Maduro.  As President, I will stand with the Venezuelan people and for democracy.”

That one aged like milk, didn’t it?

Or how about the fact that the Biden administration removed sanctions on Venezuela in 2023 in exchange for Maduro’s promise that Venezuela would hold free and fair elections.  Annnndddd… nope!  After Maduro lost in 2024, he just stayed in power and started persecuting Venezuelan opponents.

Thwarted by the real world as they so often are, on Biden’s way out the door last year, he and the Dems put out a $25 million bounty for info leading to the arrest or conviction or Maduro.  

So they were hoping that some mercenaries, or possible Jason Bourne or Reacher, would raid Maduro’s base, capture him, and spirit him away to the US to stand trial.  But when Trump did just that, the left raced to begin the caterwauling.

Which was hilarious, because just like in the raid on the Iranian nuke sites, the action was over before the usual suspects could even make their signs, hit the streets, and start with the chanting.

Still, it was fun to watch unemployed leftist ne’er-do-wells (When will they do well?  Ne’er!) put down their anime furry porn and stop in the middle of their latest piercing to rally on the streets against the evil, genocidal bombing of Venezuela. 

Annnndddd…the bombing is over!

It was also very entertaining to watch AWFLs and other nonbinary white guys protesting and weeping for the poor Venezuelans, on a split screen with scenes of thousands of wildly celebrating Venezuelans in city streets all over the world. 

It’s a cliché because it’s true: Trump’s superpower is getting his opponents to take the “20” side of every 80-20 issue, and to defend the indefensible.

So to recap, here are the groups and individuals the Democrats have rallied on behalf of since Trump has returned to office: human-smuggling, wife-beating gang member Kilmar; narco-terrorists in Miami Vice boats speeding toward America to profit from poisoning and murdering Americans; judges who blatantly violate laws to help illegals evade our law enforcement; a trust-fund puss who shot a CEO in the back like a coward; leftist trans-adjacent mentally ill or evil people who murdered Charlie Kirk and Christian school kids in two separate massacres; comically transparent Somali land-pirates; and a vicious leftist dictator who they were vociferously condemning 28 minutes ago. 

Great job, lefties!

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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