Author: martinsimpsonwriting

The Good, the Bad, and the Moron of the Month Nominees (posted 9/24/25)

On this hump day, I want to mention a few highlights from Charlie’s memorial service and from the week that Trump is having, and offer a couple of contenders for “Moron of the Month.”

I only watched excerpts from Charlie’s memorial so far – it’s all still too raw for me, so when I find myself getting too sad or too angry, I turn to other things – but I liked what I saw.  There were some politics, of course, but more faith, and I’m sure that’s a balance that Charlie would approve. 

Both testaments were well represented by the speakers.  Marco Rubio, JD Vance and Erika Kirk had the New Testament covered.  I continue to be more and more impressed by Marco and JD, and they both did what one of my old pastors used to say was his main job: preaching Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.  I’ve known about JD’s faith before, but I didn’t know Marco had that in him, so good on both of them.

And of course Charlie’s widow showed stunning grace when she forgave Charlie’s killer, while some of us are still looking into how one might volunteer to be a government rifleman in Utah for any future executions that might come up.  (I for one wasn’t asking for a friend.)

But the OG testament also had a few proponents.  Stephen Miller gave a barnburner, dishing out the brimstone on the malevolent leftists who cheered Charlie’s death with his, “You are nothing!  We are the ones who build; you can do nothing!” oration.

On his podcast, Michael Knowles shared that a non-Jewish friend of his, after Miller spoke, leaned over and said, “Man, the Jews can REALLY do that Old Testament stuff!” 

But the best Old Testament touch came from Trump, in probably the most controversial moment of the night.  I am far from an always-Trumper, but I believe that most of Trump’s detractors only pretend to be offended by him when he’s clearly joking. 

Trump’s delivery was perfect when he said, “He did not hate his opponents, he wanted what was best for them.  That’s where I disagreed with Charlie.  I HATE my opponents, and I DON’T want what’s best for them, I’m sorry.  I’m sorry Erika…. But I can’t stand my opponents.”  The crowd laughed, and then Trump smiled and pointed upwards and said, “Charlie’s angry.  Looking down, he’s angry at me now.” 

That was so obviously a joke, and a self-deprecating one, and it relieved some of the tension in the room the way loving jokes about the departed often do at a wake or a funeral.  Trump’s enemies – and some Christians (who take themselves too seriously, IMHO) – might not think it was funny, or appropriate, but I don’t believe them when they breathlessly claim that he was seriously proclaiming hate.

Even beyond the memorial service, some prime Trump was served up this week.  Between blowing up a fourth boat full of drugs and gang-bangers and dressing down the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the UN, Trump is in full FAFO mode. 

And also DGAF mode.  And also “FYATHYRIO” mode.  (Okay, that last one’s a little clunky.  But it ends with “and the horse you rode in on.”) 

I hope that Trump will just take the next step, and pull us out of the UN entirely.   They let literal terror states and commie gulag states (like Afghanistan, Cuba, etc.) sit on the Human Rights Commission, and they censure and condemn Israel more than all other countries combined.  So let’s just give them their eviction notice and one month to vacate the HQ in NYC, and then announce that Trump has commandeered the building to be his Presidential Library.  (Even if he didn’t follow through, it would be hilarious to watch the top of leftist heads blow off all over the country!)

If we need a formal association of nations to do what the UN was originally supposed to do, we can form a new one.  Call it the Justice League, or something equally guaranteed to enrage the bad guys, and limit membership to worthy allies.   If your nation is run by mullahs, commies or dictators, don’t bother applying. 

Without further ado, here are three nominees for Moron of the Month:

1. Many numbskulls compared Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary suspension to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as equally threatening to free speech.  Georgia Democrat Senator John “he really p*sses” Ossoff was amongst the worst, calling both the murder and the suspension “completely unacceptable.” 

Good lord!  To call that an “apples and oranges” comparison is an insult to both fruit and analogies.  They’re not apples and oranges, you idiots!  They’re apples and ocelots.  Or apples and tectonic plates. 

Or apples and whatever object in the universe is the most metaphysically opposite of apples, ever!

2.  I didn’t see Rachel Maddow’s interview with Que Mala Harris about her terrible book, because I have a life to lead.  But I did see a few excerpts from it on a conservative site, because I need a daily dose of schadenfreude-tastic entertainment.  

Apparently her book trashes the entire Democrat establishment, blaming everybody but herself for her humiliating loss last year.  In one particularly fun excerpt, the human word-salad-shooter accidently said the stupid part out loud, saying that she wanted to pick Mayor Pete as her VP candidate, but she couldn’t, because Americans won’t vote for gay people.

I know what you’re thinking: So she chose that paragon of masculine straight-ness, “Jazz Hands” Wolz instead??  Brilliant!

Anyway, it was fun to be reminded of the incompetent bullet we dodged last November.  Maddow asked her about not picking Mayor Pete, and the exchange was classic Que Mala: 

Maddow said, “To say that he couldn’t be on the ticket effectively because he was gay was hard to hear.”

Harris responded, “No, no, no.  That’s not what I said, that that’s, that he couldn’t be on the ticket because he is gay.” 

Then she served up this word side-salad:  “My point in, as I write in the book, is that I was clear that in 107 days, in one of the most hotly contested elections for president of the United States, against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no floor … to be a black woman running for president of the United States and, as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man, with the stakes being so high, it made me very sad. But I, I also realized, it would be a real risk.”

(For the grammarians among you, that’s at least 10 interrupting prepositional phrases – I stopped counting when the migraine hit – that separate the two parts of what passes for the main thought in that sentence: “My point is, it made me very said.”)

So… she definitely did NOT say that he couldn’t be on the ticket because he is gay, but then she explained why he couldn’t be on the ticket.  Because the stakes were high.  And it would be risky. And he’s very gay.  And that makes her sad.

Oof.  It’s almost like everybody can understand why, after those 107 fateful days, she got her arse beat like it hadn’t been beaten since she and Willie Brown were role-playing “naughty cheerleader gets sent to the principal’s office” during her job interview way back in the day.

Oh, sorry.  Trigger warning.  And gag-reflex warning.

My bad.

But in case you were thinking that nobody could possibly have said anything dumber than that this month, hold on to your hat, and your nomination ballot, because I give you:

3. JoJo from Jerz, a bile-filled far-left internet-botherer (but I repeat myself) who is well known for posting very stupid and hateful things.  For example, the morning after Charlie Kirk was murdered, she posted, “Things feel very dark in America this morning.  Very, very dark.”

Sorry, that wasn’t the morning after Charlie was killed; it was the morning after Jimmy Kimmel was suspended.   Because nothing says “dark night of the soul” like a rich, hateful, unfunny comedian getting a forced week off, I guess. 

But that’s not why she’s in the running for Moron of the Month.  She earned that dishonor by trying to defend the mean-spirited and politically tone-deaf Dems in the House who voted against a resolution to honor Charlie Kirk’s life.  To do so, she followed the time-honored tradition of changing the subject from bad leftist behavior to smearing alleged (or even hypothetical) bad behavior by the GOP.

But she did it in the most hilariously self-owning, rake-stomping way possible.

Saith the jerk from jerz: “Senate Democrats should introduce a ‘Melissa Hortman day of remembrance’ and see if Republicans object to it.”  And then hit “send,” and sneered, and picked up her second box of wine of the morning, I’m guessing.  

Hortman was the little-known Minnesota Democrat politician who was murdered this past summer.  For the record, no conservatives had spent the last several years demonizing her as a fascist Nazi who deserved to die, and the nut who killed her said that he did so because Tim Walz wanted him to. 

But Jojo was holding onto a box of wine with one hand, and the slanderous lie that Hortman was killed by MAGA with the other, and she thought she had really dropped a truth and logic bomb on the hypocritical conservative scum who know damn well that they would NEVER vote for a resolution honoring a murdered Democrat!     

Annnndddd…it turns out that a resolution to honor Hortman and condemn political violence WAS introduced in the Senate in late June.

Annnndddd…nobody in the GOP protested it, or voted “present” or “nay.” 

That’s right, the GOP UNANIMOUSLY voted for the resolution! 

Because (D)emocrats (D)o it (D)ifferently.  

And we’re not like them.

Rumors that JoJo ordered a new computer that day, after the previous one was drenched in a ginormous, comical spit-take of Costco Cabernet have not been confirmed.

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Erika Kirk is Better than Me, and Trump is on a Roll vs. Drug Runners (posted 9/22/25)

Reason #135 why Erika Kirk is a better person than me: at Charlie’s memorial service, she forgave his murderer.  Which is an amazing and Christ-like thing to be able to do. 

I aspire to that kind of grace, but even though I never met Charlie, and can’t possibly feel his loss anywhere near as strongly as she does, I’m not close to being there yet.  In fact, last week I did some research to make sure that Utah still uses the firing squad for executions (they do, though lethal injection is their first choice, unless they can’t obtain the necessary drugs, which is often the case).

And if that’s not the perfect execution method for this coward – in a “live by the long gun, die by the long gun” sort of way – I don’t know what is.  Utah uses 5 riflemen (one with a blank in his gun) to carry out executions, and they pin a little target over the criminal’s heart beforehand.

I’d like to see a guy accidently go to pin the target on the killer’s crotch, then go, “Oh, my mistake.  I’m sure we’ll all be aiming for your heart.”  And then wink at the guy.  And possibly lean over and whisper to him, “You know that the real-life fascists are totalitarians who kill people for speaking out against them, right?  So Charlie was the anti-fascist, and you are the actual fascist.” 

And then maybe he could show the guy his bullet, into the casing of which he had carved, “No, YOU catch, fascist!”

And if he were really cool, the rifleman could re-enact one of my favorite scenes from the great, Elmore Leonard-inspired tv series Justified.  He could hold a bullet out in front of him, and drop it into the creep’s lap, and then say, “The next one’s gonna be coming a little faster.”

I also wouldn’t be disappointed if all four initial bullets missed the killer’s heart.  Maybe one could hit each knee, and one the groin?  And how cool would it be if the fourth one took off a bunch of his ear?  Then, while the riflemen waited a while for somebody to go find four more bullets, they could have a loud conversation that my conical purple wizard hat tells me would go like this:

Riflemen (RF) 1:  Wow, what are the odds that we’d all miss his heart?

RF 2: I know, right?  And now we have to wait until someone can walk slowly to the armory and try to scrounge up some more bullets, while this guy bleeds profusely.

RF 3: And whoever shot him in the groin?  Talk about “aim small, miss small!”

RF 4:  Taking off his ear was a pretty weird shot too.  Why does it ring a bell, somehow?

RF 5 (snapping his fingers): I’ve got it!  That’s where this creep’s leftist co-religionist shot Trump, who is coincidentally also another anti-fascist.  (And then all five of them could give the bleeding coward a long, dirty look.)

And, scene. 

So…yeah.  Erika Kirk is an amazing person.  And I’ve got a lot of work to do on that “forgive your enemies” part of my faith.

In other news, I haven’t commented on a lot of good things that have been going on, since I’ve been so preoccupied with the Charlie assassination story.  I think CO and others have rightly pointed out some wrong moves that Trump has made recently, but overall, I think he’s still mostly on a roll, and I’d like to start the week off with a few of those. 

I’m really glad that Trump is now looking into using RICO laws to go after Antifa.  I’ll talk more about that in a future column, but for now I’ll just say that this is one more thing that Trump is doing that conservatives have dreamed about for years, but had given up on ever seeing come to fruition.  

Ending the federal Education Department was another one of those.  That department wasn’t in the constitution or any founding documents – it had only been created in the 1970s, for crying out loud!  And it obviously didn’t do anything worthwhile: it didn’t train teachers, or improve curricula, or raise test scores. What it did do was fill up a huge building on some expensive real estate in DC, and employ an army of six-figure educrats who produced nothing of value.

Another former pipe dream had been the defunding of NPR and PBS.  Another was building a border wall.  And now those three things are a reality, along with a lot more.

Another great recent development has been Trump’s blowing up one drug-running boat full of fentanyl after another.  There have been three of them so far, and they are awesome for many reasons:

1. They involve exciting videos with a chase scene that ends in a dramatic explosion. 

2. They represent a lot of deadly drugs that will never make it to our shores, and a dramatic lesson for would-be Venezuelan drug runners watching their buddies get blown up on tv.

3. They also gave the usual suspects on the left the opportunity to display their own moral imbecility.  The same talking heads and pols who could barely muster any concern for Charlie Kirk after he was murdered were full of grave pronouncements about the illegality and horror of those poor drug traffickers, gone too soon.  What about due process, and their now fatherless children?  Who is going to teach those youngsters the ins and outs of lethal drug running? 

Oh, won’t someone think of the future gang-banging, American-murdering children?!

4. There’s a pretty good chance that my high school Spanish is failing me.  (The main thing I remember is, “Silencio por favor, Martino.”  Which I think means, “You’re doing a great job, Martin!  Keep it up.”)  But I’m pretty sure “agua” means water.  And you can’t spell “Tren de Aragua” without “agua.” 

So unless I’m mistaken, “Tren de Aragua” means “burial at sea, under mucho agua.”  Which is perfect, because lately, the most common last words for predatory Venezuela criminals have been, “Ay, dios mio!  Glug glug glug.”   

Finally, I am all-in on Trump’s decision to change the name of the Defense Department to the War Department.  The leftist establishment reacted in two equally wrong ways: some of them said that this was the end of the world, and the rest said that it was just a meaningless semantic change, and so why was Trump wasting his time doing it?

The second group is just wrong.  Names of things are important, and often represent ideological battles lost or won.  Many times, giving something a name that sticks represents a stolen rhetorical base that shapes everything that comes afterward.

For example, both parties try to give every bill they pass a name with positive connotations.  If you call an obscenely bloated, propagandistic spending bill “The Inflation Reduction Act,” many stupid people will not notice that it inevitably causes inflation to skyrocket. 

If you name a quintessentially fascist group – one whose members form “black blocs” of armed thugs and carry out organized violence campaigns to coerce and intimidate citizens – a name like “antifa” (anti-fascist), very, VERY stupid people will cite that name to hold that group blameless.   (I’m looking at you, Don Lemon.)

I could go on and on.  “Planned Parenthood” is dedicated to wiping out parenthood.  The “American Civil Liberties Union” is hostile to the civil liberties of one half of the country.  “The View” is hosted by a bunch of arousal-killing harridans wearing ideological blinders producing a Ray Charlesian political blindness.

So yes, the War Department sends a very different message from the Defense Department.  I understand why the change was originally made: we are not the typical kind of empire that grinds its enemies underfoot, enslaves the defeated peoples, and claim their lands as our own subjugated provinces. 

We won WWII with a War Department, and afterwards, as we looked at Japanese cities that were glowing, and German cities that were smoking, we figured we’d made our point.  So we switched to “Defense Department.”

Self defense is – or at least used to be! – universally recognized as a legitimate right of all nations.  And we wanted to be thought of as a nation that doesn’t start wars, but will sure as hell end them!  Which was good, as far as it went.

But “defense” just doesn’t get the point across the way “war” does. 

Would Shakespeare’s speech by Marc Antony stir us the way it does if it went, “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of defense!”?  Would World War I carry the same emotional weight if it were called, “The Great Defense,” or “The Defense to end all Defenses?” 

Is anybody going to read “Defense and Peace?”  Would anybody be intimidated by a cigar-chomping general growling that “Defense is hell!” 

Would Isaiah’s dream connote the same promise if he looked to the day when we “beat our swords into plowshares, and study defense no more?”

To summarize the difference between “defense” and “war:”

Joe Biden claimed to be “defending” America from drug trafficking, and that took the form of ushering unvetted traffickers across our border, with a “save the date” government form asking them to show up for a court hearing in 5 years.

But Trump is waging a WAR on drug traffickers. 

And that looks a speed boat racing across the water, before being hit by a Hellfire missile and turned into a flaming wreck, while its gang-banger crew cartwheel into the water missing a few limbs, crying, “Ayieee!  Why didn’t I join Tren de dry land?!”

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Three Typical Bad Ways to React to an Assassination, & Some Life Advice (posted 9/19/25)

I was about to open this column by congratulating myself for writing 5 consecutive columns this week, and proclaim myself a national treasure. 

Then I remembered that within 13 years, Charlie Kirk started several of the most successful political operations in American history, flew a billion miles while producing probably 10,000 hours of public speeches and debates, had a wildly popular podcast and radio show, landed a great wife and fathered two kids, and made himself the most influential political figure with young people in the entire country, all while educating himself on the Western canon, the Bible, and the most significant philosophical and political issues of the day in his “spare” time.

But back to me: I mocked some leftists and channeled a little Sam Kinison, and misspelled “Sydney Australia” and “champagne.”  So I’ve got that going for me. 

Anyway, I thought I’d ease into the weekend by discussing a few of the leftists whose behavior these last 10 days has been repellent, but in ways that fit very common cultural patterns.  I was going to start with Ilhan Omar (#jihadenthusiast, #getyourhandsoffyourbrother) and her terrible interview with Mehdi Hassan, but I already got to that yesterday.

If you haven’t read that column, get on it.  (I mean, drop everything, and scroll down this page to see it, or find it at Martinsimpsonwriting.com)  But I pointed out she did the very common leftist move of smearing conservatives and conservatism without offering any evidence for her slanders, or else wildly distorting what the conservative actually said.

You know the pattern.  You say, “Men can’t become women.”  And Crazy-Eyes McGender Studies howls, “So you’re for transgenocide!  You want all the transgenders genocided!!”

So I’ll move on to three examples, picked from a very crowded field of contenders, each of which illustrates one of the most common bad traits of leftism.

First up is Hypocrisy, so let me introduce you to Canadian cabinet minister Nahanni Fontaine.  Right after Charlie was murdered, she posted a vile tweet that almost reads like a parody of leftist hatred, calling him all the usual names: “racist, xenophobic, transphobic, islamophobic, sexist, white nationalist mouthpiece.”  (And a partridge in a pear tree.)  She also accused him of “standing for nothing but hate.”

So far, so typical.  In any politically healthy country, such a heartless post would mean that Fontaine blew it.  (Stupid dad joke for 100, Alex!)  But this was Canada, so nobody knew what to expect.

But even amongst the enervated castrati Canucks, there was enough outrage to produce a video compilation of Fontaine’s past self-righteous statements, which included nearly a dozen repetitions of the sentence, “When someone shows you who are they, believe them.”

This was delivered in such a tone of smug self-righteousness that gag reflexes were triggered all over America’s evil top hat, I’m guessing.

But despite the fact that Fontaine’s vile post had just definitively shown everyone exactly who she was, she tried to convince them not to believe her, by posting the most transparently false statement since Slick Willy told us that he did not have sex with that woman.

She released an “apology” that said, “Violence has no place in our democracy…. In a world too often divided, we should strive to show empathy to everyone, even those we didn’t agree with.” 

Instead of saying, “Yes, we should.  And you did the opposite of that.  So hit the snowbank,” – Or whatever Canadians say instead of “hit the bricks,” – her hypocritical and false apology was accepted, and she kept her job.

Because: Canada.

The second bad leftist trait is arrogance, and that was very well personified in the person of George Abaraonye (and that’s the last time I’ll spell his last name correctly, because it’s not worth wasting time to look it up again).  He is the incoming president of the Oxford Union, the elite debating society that I wrote about in Tuesday’s column. 

Charlie Kirk put in a very strong performance there a few months ago, which I recommend that everyone watch if you’re a fan of intellectual jousting, and one of his opponents was this George Abalone.  He was the least impressive of the Oxfordians. 

The other debaters and the audience dressed informally but normally, but Mr. Abu Dhabi couldn’t manage that.  He showed up in slippers, sweat pants, a black t-shirt and dreads(!)  He was also not particularly articulate, which one would think might come in handy if you were engaging in a…DEBATE AT OXFORD FREAKIN’ UNIVERSITY! OH! OHHH!!!

Sorry, my latent Kinison reflex has been kicking in a lot lately. 

Anyway, George Abracadabra tried to make a muddled argument about patriarchal gender roles that I think he meant as a passive-aggressive suggestion that Charlie’s traditional views are sexist and icky.  Charlie responded that males are actually denigrated in elite circles today, and challenged him about the use of the phrase “toxic masculinity.”

Abercrombie responded with a little word salad to the effect that toxicity is inherent in maleness.  When Charlie asked him why no one condemns toxic femininity, Alcazar said that comes from patriarchy’s terrible effects on women.  So both forms of gender toxicity arise from the same issue, I guess, which is that males suck. 

When Charlie asked why, if males are so all-powerful, the male suicide rate in the (feminized/feminist) West is higher than ever before, and higher than the female rate, Abbadabadoo stuttered around, and then said, “Austerity.”

So Charlie pointed out that men throughout impoverished Africa – where most are married with children but dirt poor – have wildly lower suicide rates than those of the affluent, lefty, beta-male onanists in London.  (I’m paraphrasing.)   There was no cognizable answer from slipper boy.     

Overall, George Alopecia displayed the familiar unearned, undeserved and entitled arrogance of a callow youth who’s been pampered in a left-dominated bubble his whole life.  There were several other people of color among the debaters, and they were sharp, but George had “DEI hire” written all over him. 

So you won’t be surprised to learn that when the news of Charlie’s murder broke – just a few months after Charlie had politely and respectfully outclassed George in a civilized debate – he posted two messages saying, “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f**king go!” and “Loool!”  

John Fetterman’s stroke turned him into a much smarter and better man.  I hope that a stone gargoyle falls off a wall onto George Apocalypto at Oxford, and does the same for him.

Finally we have the character deformation centered around Gender Madness, and for this one, the obvious candidates are Charlie’s killer and his disturbed boyfriend.

Media reports have informed us that the boyfriend “identified as a male at birth,” but now “identifies as female” and is “transitioning into a female.” 

Annndddd… strike three! 

We don’t really need to beat this dead, gender-fluid horse again, do we?  No one “identifies” as male or female at birth; they are born either male or female.  I can say that I identify as the Obama Presidential Library, but that doesn’t make me an ugly architectural monstrosity crammed with dishonest documents. 

And when you translate “a male transitioning into a female” from delusion-speak to reality-talk, it becomes “a male undergoing damaging mutilations and/or chemical interventions to transition into a male who more closely resembles an unattractive female than he used to.”

But it wasn’t sad enough that Lance was struggling with gender dysmorphia.  (By the way, he renamed himself “Luna.”  Because of course he did.) He had to throw the weird fetish of being a “furry” – someone who gets sexual gratification from dressing up in animal costumes – into the mix, too.

Now I am generally not one to judge people harshly about sexuality.  Sexual attraction is powerful, and its influence has made fools of all of us at some time in our lives.  It’s also frustratingly irrational.  In addition to the common attractions to one of several main body parts, many people are wildly attracted to more eccentric parts, for example. 

Victorian men could apparently be wildly turned on by a woman’s exposed ankle.  Some people today are enthralled by feet, which is idiotic.  (Simpson’s First Rule of Human Behavior: Any attraction that I don’t share is by definition “idiotic.”)  Shortly after I met my smokeshow wife, she put her hair up on a hot day, and I discovered that the nape of her neck is extremely alluring.

That’s not idiotic.  (See the rule explained above.)  But it is definitely irrational.  Who watches women walk by and thinks, “Mmmmm, look at the cervical vertebrae on her!”? 

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

Anyway, I was born in the late 19th century.  (Central Illinois in the 1960s and ‘70s was exactly the same as in the 1880s, but with cars instead of horses.)  So I tend toward the traditional, and am not wild about needless change.  My wife has pointed out that one of the most common phrases she’s heard from me in recent years is, “Is X broken?”

For example, when millions of phantom votes appeared in electronic voting tallies for Joe Biden, I said, “Are paper ballots broken?”  When parents started steering their young boys into playing soccer, I said, “Is football broken?”  When eccentrics started getting iguanas and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs as pets, I said, “Are dogs broken?”

So the first time a tv news story came on about a furry convention, I turned to my wife.  But before I could say anything, she said, “Wait, let me guess,” and jumped up and started walking around the room, waving her arms and talking in a fake deep voice in a completely inaccurate impression of me.

“Is sex broken?  Does the missionary position or reverse cowgirl no longer work?  Do people have to dress up like raccoons and pandas? Are lingerie and French maid costumes no longer available?”

Or at least I think that’s what she was saying.  Honestly, I was too distracted by the slender, adorable back of her neck to follow.  

Perhaps I’ve said too much, again.

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.

Take it from 19th Century guy: Nothing good is going to come from spending your life online, developing a bunch of fetishes and making up fake genders and connecting to other confused people even more depressed and unmoored than yourself, enslaving yourself to benighted urges, and politics, and the toxic and disordered spirit of the age.  

That road leads to a life deformed by immiserating lies. Lies like, “Your country is evil, and must be destroyed to produce something better.” And “There is no God, and no moral order beyond your own desires.” And, “Why can’t a guy have a healthy, normal relationship with his boyfriend who is pretending to be a girlfriend who is pretending to be an enormous squirrel?”     

It’s not too late to reject all that.  Turn your back on racial and class hatred, and Bluesky, and the politics of envy, and politicians who feed your resentments and tell you you’re a victim. 

Get outside and touch grass, and make friends, and go to church.  Read some Thomas Sowell, and Shakespeare, and CS Lewis.  Watch some Charlie Kirk videos, and listen to some good music.  Fall in love with a good person and get married and have kids.

That’s going to take you to a very different place than those lonely rooftops in Butler, PA and Orem, UT, or those Christian schools in Tennessee and Minnesota where those lost souls gave in to their dark temptations and opened fire.    

Because the cardinal virtues aren’t broken.  But leftism and fighting reality are.

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Charlie Kirk was the Best of Us, and the Left Came up with 4 Ways to Lie About Him (posted 9/18/25

My topic today is what a horrible target that leftist weirdo picked to murder in Utah last week.  Not that killing anybody because you disagree with him isn’t everywhere and always a horrible thing to do.

But ironically, Charlie Kirk was the best of all of us on the right, in terms of his kindness, generosity, and lack of hate, bigotry, and all other bad qualities that the hateful, bigoted left pretends to dislike.

Again, NONE of us deserves to be killed over political agreements (duh!), but think of all of the most famous or influential conservative media figures.  I used to like Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens, but they’ve gone off the rails recently.  Alex Jones is three-quarter loon.  Rush was great, but he had his share of tasteless comments and actions.  (And by the way, when he lost his hearing, the entire left media and blogosphere celebrated wildly.  Many of them did the same when he died.  One might almost think that celebrating serious health setbacks and death of their political rivals is in the Left’s DNA…)  

Ben Shapiro is a genius but gives no quarter on many political issues, as does Michael Knowles.  Matt Walsh is fearless, and has gone hammer-and-tongs after leftists, especially on transgenderism and anti-white racism.  Stephen Crowder is hilarious and insightful, but he throws rhetorical haymakers with the best of them. 

Don’t get me wrong: I really like all of those people. (Except for Jones, Owens and – sadly – Tucker, nowadays.)  And I give anybody who has done thousands of hours of speaking a lot of grace, re: cherry-picking their worst handful of moments. 

Because in my own small way, I know how tough it is to not repeatedly make an arse of yourself if you speak or write enough.  In my 700+ columns here over the last 9 years, you could make a “Worst of Martin” compilation that would shame my parents. 

And that’s AFTER I’ve edited out numerous f-bombs, dozens of gross references to Que Mala-on-Willie Brown encounters, juvenile insults about the physical appearances of thousands of leftist hatemongers, and – after the latest vile comment from the likes of Joys Reid and Behar, Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, Grandma Squanto et. al. – offensive rhetorical questions on the general theme of, “Do you service your clients with that mouth?”

So, yeah.  Anybody who does a lot of talking or writing about politics has said some stupid and offensive things from time to time, even your roguishly winning curmudgeon of a Roving Correspondent.  (And don’t protest that I’m a prince among men and a hilarious genius, and that to know me is to love me. I tell myself that in the mirror every morning, and I can only partially buy it.)  (But thank you anyway.)

Again, Charlie was the best of us.  He did more public speaking and writing than almost anyone, while making fewer mean-spirited or genuinely offensive comments than anyone.  Which is what makes it especially infuriating to witness the tidal wave of specious leftist attacks on him in the days before and since his murder.

So, because as CO himself has pointed out, everything is better when put into a list, I have classified the leftist complaints about Charlie into 4 categories:

1. Generalized, unsupported smears.  These are the usual, meaningless epithets: fascist, Nazi, bigot, homophobe, transphobe, gynophobe, arachnophobe, blah blah blah.  But there were milder ones too.  A CNN goblin, minutes after the shooting, said, “He’s a divisive figure.  Polarizing, a lightning rod, whatever you want to call it.” 

Pro tip: if you want to insult someone, you might not want to use a term so anodyne that it could equally accurately be used to describe Jesus, Gandhi, Buddha or Martin Luther King.  Because anybody who’s made any kind of difference in this world is thought of by someone, somewhere, as “divisive” or “polarizing.”  You moron.

One of the most basic concepts that I used to teach to inexperienced students in my persuasive writing and debate classes was that all claims must be supported by evidence.

This first type of smear is never accompanied by examples/evidence.  An example from one leftist pol among hundreds comes from CA state senator Scott Wiener: “Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. Also Charlie Kirk was a vile bigot who did immeasurable harm to so many people by normalizing dehumanization.”

He seems nice, doesn’t he?  He got the “bigot” shot in, and the nebulous “normalizing dehumanization” too.  And he didn’t cite an example of either.  Because of course he didn’t.  Because there were none.  Just a hateful claim, and no evidence.

Like Anthony Weiner and Charles Blow, this little man richly deserves his last name.

2. Specific, unsupported smears.  Otherwise known as bald-faced lies, these would seem to be rarer, since they are easier to disprove.  And yet there were plenty of them, with leftist trolls just making up Charlie quotes out of thin air. 

The most infamous came from Stephen King, who claimed that Charlie “advocated stoning gays to death.  Just sayin’.”

In King’s defense, he’s come up with mesmerizing stories about demon-possessed cars and alien/spider/clowns that live in sewers and prey on children (spoiler alert), and both of those are only slightly more believable than that Charlie Kirk would advocate stoning gays.  

Of course King ran from that quote like the fat kid on the train tracks in Stand By Me when somebody mentioned that the Kirk estate could sue him for such a blatant lie, and slide some of that sweet Stephen King cash over to Erika Kirk and the kids.      

3. Out-of-context smears (general):  These are at least loosely tied to a specific issue, even if still left vague and evidence-less.  One of the best examples of this crime against decency comes from Ilhan Omar, the Jew-hating Squad member (but I repeat myself) who did an interview with another anti-Semitic creep, Mehdi Hassan. (Who happens to have one of the highest SFPIs [Simpson Face Punchability Indices] ever recorded, at 98.)    

Here’s what she said about Charlie: “What I do know for sure is that Charlie is someone who once said, umm, guns save lives, after a school shooting.  He was someone who was willing to downplay the death of George Floyd.  (Here Hassan said, “Called him a scumbag.”)  [And] downplayed slavery…by saying Juneteenth should never exist.”

I don’t even have to look these examples up to guess what Charlie actually said about them, because I know his belief system (because it’s mine too) and how it would apply to each of these examples. 

He and I would say that guns save lives, because that’s provably, statistically true.  See John Lott’s work for the details, but in addition to all of the criminals shot each year, guns prevent something like 100K crimes each year, mostly without firing a shot, since cowardly criminals often run away when their would-be prey displays a gun.  And he probably mentioned school shootings because almost all of those end only when a good guy either shoots the scumbag, or the scumbag shoots himself or surrenders when armed good guys show up.

I’m sure he only “downplayed slavery” in the sense that he objected to the Left’s racist and anti-American focus on slavery as the only important aspect of our history.  To them, anything less than condemning America and whites completely and all the time – despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of whites died to free the slaves and that America was only the second nation in world history to free ourselves of slavery – counts as “downplaying slavery.” Which it isn’t.

Also, Juneteenth sounds goofy, and it’s become one more politicized excuse to pick racial scabs on a wound that should have started healing 160 years ago!  Juneteenth isn’t as bad as Kwanzaa, but it’s not great.  And it doesn’t make anyone a racist to think so.

And as far as calling George Floyd a “scumbag,” that’s probably one of Charlie’s harshest comments in 10,000 hours of public speech.  And it’s still not as offensive as 72% of the things that come out of your ungrateful mouths all the time, Ilhan and Mehdi!

Also, while I taught “Writing in the Law” I learned that “truth is an absolute defense” against defamation, including accusations of scumbaggery.  And while George Floyd was created in God’s image, he spent a lifetime making terrible, evil decisions.  He was a degenerate junkie and career criminal right up until the day he died, and he once pointed an armed pistol at the belly of a pregnant woman during an armed robbery.

That’s first ballot “Scumbag Hall of Fame” material right there.

Evil Ilhan ended her rant by saying, “There is nothing more F-ed up than to completely pretend that his words and actions have not been recorded.  These people are full of sh*t, and I think it’s important to call them out, and—”

Hang on a second.  I forgot that I was wearing my conical purple wizard hat, and I’m suddenly getting a message from Sam Kinison’s ghost for Ilhan. 

[Begin Kinison filter] Hey there, Ilhan, it’s funny you mentioned things that are F-ed up, because I’ve been watching from here in heaven, and I’ve noticed one thing that’s more F-ed up than anything Charlie Kirk ever did.  And that’s…MARRYING YOUR OWN BROTHER!  OH! YOU MARRIED YOUR OWN BROTHER, YOU B*TCH!!  OHH!! You were either helping him to commit immigration fraud against the nation that was generous enough to save you from that sh*thole desert you lived in…  (IT’S A DESERT!  FOOD DOESN’T GROW THERE! OH!)  …Or else you were doing it to BANG YOUR OWN BROTHER, YOU SICKO!  OH! OHHHHH!!!  [end Kinison filter]

4. Finally we have the more specific, out-of-context smears.  A good example among many would be one spread by Karen Attiah, a black opinion editor at the Washington Post, and coincidentally, a racist whitey-hater of the first order.  Unexpectedly!    

Karen (HA!) posted the following quote from Charlie: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.  You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”  She presented this quote as if Charlie was making a blanket statement about black females.

Unfortunately for Abysmal Attiah, actual quotes are pretty easy to check.  So many people did.  And they found that in addition to ripping it out of context, Attiah actually changed one word that completely changed the meaning of the quote.  Unexpectedly!

Here’s the context: It was July of 2023, a few weeks after SCOTUS ended affirmative action in college admissions.  The left was very displeased about this, and they got their collective non-binary onesies up over their collective heads, and raged about it. 

In a misguided attempt to show how great affirmative action discrimination was, Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown-Jackson all acknowledged that they had gotten affirmative action.

And Charlie said, “Yeah, we know.  You do not have the brain processing power….”

You see the change there?  Because Charlie said “YOU” at the beginning, he clearly wasn’t talking about black women in general, but about these four particular black women.  And he wasn’t making the charge himself, he was pointing out that they had admitted this about themselves.

Remember what I said before, about the truth being an absolute defense? 

Michelle Obama – secret service code name “Scowling Wookie” – disguised her lack of intelligence better than the others, hidden as it was beneath her smoldering anger, and her prison-ripped outside-linebacker physique.

But anyone who listened to Joy Reid or Sheila Jackson Lee for more than 3 minutes knew that they were three consonants short of a full Bingo card.  And I’ve read several of Ketanji’s writings – mostly dissents in cases where even Kagan and Sotomayor were giving her half-baked ramblings the stink-eye – and… Yikes!   

If the Supreme Court were a kangaroo court – and I mean one made up of literal kangaroos – I’m pretty confident that Ketanji would still be in the bottom third of the justices in terms of IQ.

So yeah, “not much brain power” is a little harsh, especially for sweet Charlie.  But…

Fact Check: True.

Let me end on a happy note: even the far-left WAPO had had enough, and they fired Karen Attiah last Friday. 

So fill your cardboard box with all your race hatred and grudges and hit the bricks, Princess!  Maybe the Wakanda Times is hiring.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to finish the week strong with one more column.  So if you see me plodding by shakily, hand me a water bottle and tell me I’m looking as ripped as Michelle Obama.   

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Part 3 of 3 Columns on the Aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s Murder (posted 9/17/25)

I think I may have found the smartest Democrat in congress.

I know, that sounds like the set-up for a cruel, list-making joke.  E.g. let’s identify the most impressive leftist SCOTUS member, the most mentally-healthy Squad Member, the most attractive Antifa Member. 

So sure, the competition is not exactly stiff.  But my candidate is Ro Khanna.  Because on Tuesday, on CNN, he said, “Every Democrat was horrified by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.” 

I didn’t say Ro was the most honest Democrat.  (The candidates for that one could fit into a phone booth!)  I said he was the smartest Democrat.  Because he has the sense to know what your average third-grader should know: if you’re a politician who wants to win elections, you’re supposed to at least SAY that you’re horrified by the assassination of a good man from your political opposition!

But I think that even as he was saying that, Ro realized that he was in trouble, since for the last week all PWFEs (People With Functioning Eyes) have watched literally thousands of Democrats all over the country ghoulishly celebrating Charlie’s murder.  So “all Democrats are horrified” wasn’t going to fly.

He amended the thought two sentences later, saying, “That has been what every elected Democrat has said.”  That was a little better – again, most minimally competent politicians know enough to hide their evil glee from the public – but it was still, sadly, a lie.

Because disgusting Ilhan Omar trashed Charlie during an interview with the equally disgusting Mehdi Hasan the day after Charlie’s murder, and Grandma Squanto Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher), J(um)B(o) Pritzker (#putdownthatoversizedturkeyleg) and many other elected Dems pivoted within seconds from Charlie’s murder to blaming Trump’s rhetoric.  Which is not something that anyone truly horrified by a murder would do.

When Ro was ratioed into next week, and buried with thousands of clips and examples of Dems cheering Charlie’s death, he finally had to retreat to saying that “every elected Dem I talked to” was horrified by the assassination. 

Okay, Ro, we get it.  You talked to yourself in the green room mirror at CNN before going out to sell that line.  Nice try, anyway.

Since we’re cautious optimists around here, I’ve got a short list of some good news that I see coming out of this heartbreakingly awful story:

1. There is now a huge new spotlight on Charlie Kirk’s work. And that necessarily means more people following in his footsteps and joining his cause. (Witness the 54,000 new applications for Turning Point membership or chapters.  54,000!)  Because any normal person with an unclouded mind (regardless of political priors) who watches any number of randomly chosen videos of Charlie’s speeches and debates will see a lot to admire, as well as realizing that the gloating leftist mobs have been lying about him.

2. There is also now a huge new spotlight on the left, and everywhere that spotlight moves, it reveals a bunch of sick, hateful humans scattering like cockroaches at being exposed.  (No offense to cockroaches, who are just as God made them, and haven’t intentionally shriveled their souls by choosing a path of gleeful leftist hatred, like certain teachers, “journalists” and elected officials I could name.)

3. An ancillary benefit of all of the malevolent lefties exposing themselves through their own social media ghoulishness is that waves of them are being fired.  And that doesn’t just make me giddily happy – though it certainly does that! – it also improves every school, organization and workplace out of which their sorry asses have been kicked. 

Think about that.  Every school, every hospital, every newspaper that is no longer employing those ghouls has now increased its collective IQ, mental health, workplace quality of life, and ability to serve its students or customers. 

4. Another ancillary benefit is that the remaining employed lefties have learned that it’s not the Biden years anymore, when they could behave horribly without consequences, and every normal person has now been emboldened to push back on those lefties if they start acting like idiots in the future.

5. The exposure to Charlie’s wholesomeness and the left’s creepiness is prompting many people to leave the left and move at least tentatively toward conservatism.  More importantly, IMHO, many are also coming to Christ, or at least moving in that direction. (Seeing a good Christian man martyred by evil goblins can do that.)  

Okay, I’d planned to refute the leftists’ specific attacks on Charlie’s work, and to analyze four leftists who behaved in representatively bad ways this past week, but I’m going to call a mid-column audible instead. 

I’ll save those ideas for a column tomorrow and one on Friday, for the rare quintfecta of a 5-column week.  (Yes, I think I just made that word up.  And yes, it’s spectacular.)

Because I want to discuss a topic that CO raised, to a spirited response, yesterday: Pam Bondi’s announcement that the Trump administration will be going hard after hate speech after Charlie’s murder.  

I agree with most responders that Bondi didn’t phrase the point well by relying too much on the problematic term “hate speech.”  But I also think she was smart to respond shortly afterwards, and clarify that she was talking about going after speech that involves incitement to violence and threats, which is already illegal, and widely accepted as such.

So, a self-inflicted wound, but a very minor one, and quickly cleaned up.

I think we conservatives should push back hard against hate speech laws for the same reason we should do so against hate crime laws: because both of them sound good initially, but they are far too subjective, and give far too much power to government bureaucrats. 

It sounds good to say that you’re going to enhance criminal sentences if you kill someone because of their race, gender, sexual preference or religion, because we don’t like racism, sexism, etc.  But that has 3 main flaws, IMHO.

First, we often have to guess at people’s motives for their crimes.  (Criminals will quickly learn to claim that they killed for whichever motive will draw the least severe sentence.)  Second, how important is motive, really?  Am I any less dead if I’m a white guy killed by a black guy, or vice versa?  Or a woman killed for being female vs. a man killed for being male?

But most importantly, hate crime laws punish people differently based on whether they committed the identical crime for government-approved motives – I killed you to rob you, or because you stole from me, or because I was drunk and just lost 5 large betting on the Bears – or government-disapproved motives – I killed you because of your skin color, or genitalia. 

And I don’t think the government should have that kind of power.  After our experience over the last decade or so, do any of us trust judges or the legal system as much as we used to? 

Everyone knows that in a deep blue city or state, hate crime enhancements go lopsidedly in one direction.  A far-left judge or jury will look into the heart of a white murderer of a black person and see racism, when they won’t see racism in a black killer of a white person – even when the white killer has no documented history of racism, and the black killer is on video muttering “cracker” and “white devil” while stabbing his white victim.    

Listen to many leftists – and academics – of any race, and they’ll tell you that it’s not even POSSIBLE for a black person to be racist against whites!   Does that sound like a recipe for an unbiased application of hate crime enhancements?

Hate speech is even more problematic, since it necessarily clashes with fundamental free speech rights.  Hate speech is nearly always in the eye of the beholder, and inevitably comes down to “speech that I hate.”  Especially when the totalitarian left and its voracious desire to control everybody is involved. 

When “words are violence,” and silence is also violence, the leftist speech police has total control.  That’s why they redefine words, or drain them of all meaning.  Violent Jew-haters will call Jewish conservatives “Nazis.”  Angry imbeciles will call supporters of free speech, free markets and smaller government “fascists.” 

Bigots will call people who want to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin “racists.”

Science-denying narcissists will call medical mutilations intended to deny your actual gender “gender-affirming care.” 

Labeling speech you don’t like “hate speech” is a power game used as a cudgel by people who couldn’t persuade people without coercion, and couldn’t win a debate to save their lives.

That’s why they hated Charlie so much.  He was smart, and well-informed, and had common sense, reason, and benevolence on his side.  Whereas they are dimwitted, uninformed and malevolent, and reality is squarely against them. 

In that situation, what’s a loser a**hole to do, but pick up a gun?  (I mean, besides run for office as a Democrat?)

Or as somebody on X said last week, “They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi.  They call you a Nazi so they can kill you.”  

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

Part 2 of 3 Columns on the Aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s Murder (posted 9/16/25)

Thank you all so much for your many thoughtful responses to my last several columns.  I appreciate the cathartic release (and salutary effects on my blood pressure and mental outlook) of being able to write here, and get all of this angst out of my head and off of my chest!     

That being said, this might be another rare 5-column week, because each time I sit down with my thoughts, I find my fingers flying over the keyboard like Stephen King on crack.  (Only without the malevolent political derangement that talented but hate-benighted writer has been spewing lately.) 

One other point before I get started.  Though I have an appreciation for a sparingly used swear word in my writing, I try to keep that to a minimum.  When I’m drafting something and the emotions are strong, I’ll write an unexpurgated version, and then go back and edit most of that stuff out.  (I’m like a rapper, with a clean and dirty version of every song.  Except that instead of writing awful, tuneless crap, I produce sparkling gems of English prose.  Also, I never use the “n” word, even in a rough draft!  Because: narwhal, please!) 

But since I learned of Charlie’s murder, I am wearing out the “f” key on my computer!  I’ve always liked Gutfeld’s bit, where he says a funny tongue-in-cheek sexist line, then instantly defuses it with a graphic that drops, accompanied by a bass voice saying, “A sexist would SAYYY!”

I need one of those for half of my first-draft thoughts: “An angry right-winger would SAYYY!”

Anyway, when I left off yesterday, I’d outlined the violent, hateful response from the Left to the death of their four primary martyrs in recent years, when three of the four of them were career criminals, and all of them were killed because of their own violent actions while committing new crimes. 

Now compare the reaction of the right to the wicked murder of Charlie Kirk.  For the last five days, there has been a gigantic, nation-wide emotional response.  Only it hasn’t involved an orgy of violence, or night after night of rioting and looting and burning down whole city blocks.  Nobody in any city has spent a single dollar on plywood to board up their windows. 

We righties haven’t put on all black, and armed ourselves, and attacked the headquarters of the DNC, or the offices of CNN and MSNBC, or the offices or homes of Democrat politicians.

We haven’t painted slogans on our armor and public buildings saying “ALAB” (All Leftists Are B*stards), or “Kill the Commies!”  We haven’t blocked interstates, or set cars on fire, or gone to hotbeds of leftism like Berkeley and broken into campus buildings.  Many of us own guns, yet none of us have shot a single leftist.

Our response hasn’t been “mostly peaceful.”  (Left-wing media speak for “horrifically violent, but in ways we approve.”) 

It has been “actually, literally peaceful.”  As in, “Pax Christi,” (the peace of Christ).

In churches and on campuses, in parks and at state houses, we met in our handfuls and hundreds and thousands, and we prayed, and sang hymns, and remembered a good man, cruelly taken by an evil one.  In Madison Square Park, several hundred of us waved America flags, and sang Amazing Grace. 

We held up signs and made memorials of candles and roses in London, and at the American embassy in Berlin, and in Sydney, Australia, and at the Reagan Library in California.  Thousands of Koreans marched through the streets of Seoul, waving American and South Korean flags and chanting, “We are Charlie Kirk!”

In Scottsdale, where Charlie lived, and in Utah, where he died, we held prayer vigils, and said the rosary.  Small remembrances popped up all over the country, from Maine to Florida to Oregon, in big cities and small towns.

And everywhere, there were crosses and American flags and pictures of Charlie and hand-written signs covered with Bible verses and quotes from Charlie and expressions of love and sorrow. 

The political gulf is obvious.  The left (not all of them, but many) riots, and burns, and steals, and destroys.

We pray, and mourn, and celebrate a life well-lived, and control our righteous anger, and successfully fight to keep it from spilling out, and taking an eye for an eye. 

They have violence, and we have vigils.  They burn the American flag, and we wave it, and fly it at half-mast.  Take away the details of this particular assassination, and I still know which side I want to be on.

I haven’t had a chance to respond to your comments from yesterday (because I’ve been writing like a maniac), but I did want to agree with but also challenge Tari Trowbridge’s point, when she said that the left doesn’t have a corner on fringe radicals.  I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t accept any Manichaean argument that we’re 100% pure and they’re 100% evil.

But I would push back a bit on the idea that the right “has its share of murderers,” if by “our share” anyone would suggest that it’s a roughly proportional, 50/50 breakdown.  (And I don’t think Tari was suggesting that.)  And I would also require more evidence from the MSM when they immediately label some killers as conservative or MAGA, simply because their targets were Democrats or leftists.

Tari mentioned the guy who killed the Dem pols in MN as a right-wing example, but as I said last week, I don’t think that example holds.  Yes, that killer was a registered Republican, and yes, he murdered three Democrats.  But he was nuts, and had been appointed to a committee by the Wolz administration, and specifically said that he was killing those people to help Democrats Klobuchar and Wolz.

Others have mentioned the guy who tried to kill PA Dem Josh Shapiro by setting his house on fire.  And yes, though that guy had been a political independent until 2024, he did try to convince family members to vote for Trump last year.

On the other hand, he was diagnosed as bipolar and schizophrenic, with a long history of criminal behavior and mental illness, and he was off his meds.  And investigators found that he had targeted Shapiro based on “perceived injustices toward the people of Palestine.” 

Quick political quiz: a perp targets a Jewish politician because he sides with Hamas over Israel.  Which side of the political divide do you think THAT would-be killer belongs to? 

If you said anything other than “the Left,” you have been disqualified, and must depart the field with your head hanging in shame.  

Having said that, I’ll still grant Tari’s general point, that there are bad actors on both sides.  (All of us are fallen.  The battleline between good and evil goes through every human heart.)  I hadn’t thought about the mass murder by bomber Tim McVeigh, who was more libertarian/government-hating, but still clearly “on the right,” and I know that a few abortion doctors have been killed by right-wingers over the years.

But here are the salient points:      

1. Most high-profile or mass killers are at least partially mentally ill, and to the extent that they evince any political ideas at all, it’s often hard to tell what portion of their motivations involved politics.  (Son of Sam killed because his neighbor’s dog told him to.  Some killers attack because they think Trump or Biden are sending them instructions through the fillings in their teeth.)

2. If we could analyze and classify every killing in which the primary motivations were political (with additional secondary or tertiary motivations that might involve mental illness, childhood trauma, etc.), I’m confident that among those primarily-political crimes, the Left ones would lopsidedly outnumber the Right ones.

3.  And even in the context of mental-illness-driven murders, one of the most prominent of those motivating conditions in recent years involves trans/gender dysmorphia.  Which the first four versions of the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) all classified as a mental disorder, and which the fifth and latest version – in an obvious attempt to trim its sails for political and not medical/psychiatric reasons – still classifies as a “mental health diagnosis” for which psychiatric/medical treatment is often indicated.  And ALL of those attacks that I’m aware of have been committed by leftists.

That’s tragically true of Charlie’s killer: literally the last question he ever took involved transgender killers.  It was asked by someone clearly implying that the number of trans killers had been exaggerated by the Right for political gain.

Annnnnddddd… then a hateful, leftist antifa fan who was banging his “trans” roommate murdered Charlie Kirk before he could answer.

So “F” you guys!  F you hard, and F you long.  And F the perverted little furry-cosplaying freak you rode in on. 

(An angry right-winger would SAYYY!) 

But the most important thing about the differences between these killers is that the leftist ones are using the same talking points and citing the same hateful complaints that are espoused by millions of mainstream Democrats, including those in positions of power.

Yes, some (maybe even many) elected Dems have condemned Charlie’s murder.  As I said last week, I pray that for their souls’ sake, they are sincere.  But it’s also true that NOT offering at least a rote “condolences” message would be an act of political suicide in all but the deepest of blue districts.

Even so, thousands and thousands (probably tens or hundreds of thousands!) of otherwise normal-seeming Dems and leftists in responsible positions have gone full-Satan or Satan-adjacent about this.  School teachers, doctors, college profs and Deans, congresscreeps, “journalists” etc. have not been able to at least pretend to be human beings in the wake of Charlie’s murder.

Should I, as a Christian, revel in their firings and arrests?  Probably not. 

Should I be drinking celebratory shots of bourbon, and considering buying some champagne, to celebrate each new high-profile defenestration of a hateful goblin who’s crying over a cardboard box of his/her possessions on a Tiktok video after she/he/it has been fired?   Definitely not.

Am I doing so anyway?

Abso-freakin’-LUTELY!  (An angry right-winger would saayyy!) 

Should I be taunting those freaks, thusly:

“You lost your job (not your life) because you couldn’t control yourself enough to refrain from vomiting the vicious hatred from your black little cinder of a heart onto public websites and social media. 

Charlie lost his life (not just his job) because he tried to debate and reason with you.

So cry me a river, buttercup!”

Yes, I will someday regret the feelings that are roiling in my posts this week.  And someday I’ll repent, and I’ll get back to trying to be better, and to love my enemies, and to try to forgive them even though they DO know what they do.

But to paraphrase the king from Lord of the Rings, when orc asses had to be kicked, “A day may come when the courage of conservatives fails, when we forsake our friends and forgive their murders.   But it is not THIS day!”

Okay, maybe I got a little carried away, or the Knob Creek got the better of me.

Let’s see if I can do better tomorrow, when I try to find a few silver linings in this story, and look at a few representative lefties and see what we can learn from their reactions

Hamas (and trantifa) delenda est!

Part 1 of 3 Columns on the Aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s Murder (posted 9/15/25)

I know: I’ve got to get over Charlie Kirk’s assassination.  But please bear with me, because that story is haunting me, and I can’t stop thinking about it just yet.    

(As the Book says, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”  And for me, this is still the season for mourning, and for railing against the evil a-hole who murdered Charlie Kirk, and those who celebrated his murder.)

I’ve already got enough drafted for several more columns, so I’ll make this Part 1 of 3.  And sure, once I’ve done a little more praying and confessing, and I edit out of all of the “F” bombs and the physically impossible sexual acts that I’ve invited the Charlie-haters to do to themselves, that’ll cut the rough draft by a good 500 words or so.  So I’ve got that going for me.

Anyway, I’m going to focus mostly on the Left, and their reaction to Charlie’s murder, and at least partial culpability for it.  But I can’t help talking about Charlie just a little more, too.

Over the weekend I was watching some of his public speeches, and I landed on an excerpt from his recent debate at Oxford.  The details aren’t important, other than that his responses were thoughtful and smart, as usual.  But I caught my breath when the debate was interrupted with a plug that Charlie gave for a book by Todd Nettleton (which I am now going to get and read) called “When Faith is Forbidden: 40 Days on the Frontlines with Persecuted Christians.”

What stopped me, and landed like a physical blow, was when Charlie read the name of the organization that Nettleton leads: The Voice of the Martyrs.

And now Charlie is one.  And I am still so pissed.  

Then, just last night, I came across a full video of that Oxford debate.  (I’d recommend watching it if you haven’t seen it, though doing so might make you even angrier about the mind and spirit that we lost last Wednesday.)  Remember: Charlie had a high school diploma, and decided to forgo a college education in favor of creating one of the most important political organizations in the world instead. 

But he also asked some wise mentors for a reading list of the great works, and over the next 13 years – while he was doing the work that 10 average men might be able to do in a lifetime – he read voraciously, and educated himself on the Western canon.     

The debate took place in front of one of the oldest and most august debating societies in what used to be called Christendom, and it was broken into two parts.  For around an hour, Charlie responded to challenging questions on very controversial topics, from birthright citizenship and mass deportations to racism in the US justice system and free speech restrictions in the UK.  After that, he did a Q&A debate with a series of six Oxford debaters for forty-five minutes.

 And that self-taught American high school graduate coolly, respectfully and politely wiped the floor with the most expensively-educated alleged brainiacs in the Mother Country.

USA! USA! USA!

Actually, they weren’t all hyper combative, and the give and take was respectful on both sides.  But as a teacher of argumentative and persuasive writing and debate, it was a pleasure to watch Charlie think on his feet, and deftly construct and refute arguments with unflappable good humor.

One particular opponent of the six in that debate was less impressive, and he is actually back in the news now.  But I want to save that story for part 2 or 3, so that this one doesn’t get too long.   

In my column on Friday I said that the mainstream right doesn’t encourage, sanction and justify violence like the mainstream left does.  But for this entire weekend, I repeatedly thought about an equally important fact: we also don’t react to violence like they do.  And they should be damned grateful for that!

In Charlie Kirk, the malevolent left has created a martyr, as they almost did – twice! – with our president.  And as they did with a number of the aforementioned murdered Christian school kids, and Jews in several cities.  They murdered an unknown healthcare company CEO for the crime of running a company in a field of which the left disapproves.  They’ve attacked and assaulted and shot too many cops, border patrol and ICE agents to count, all for the “crime” of enforcing our nation’s laws.

Now please get out your notebook and your number 2 pencil (yes, I’m old) and make a list of similar conservative atrocities committed against commensurate leftist targets. 

Include all of the times when righties shot up a rainbow church while non-binary warlocks were teaching the kiddies inside such lefty hymns as, “Stalin loves me, this I know, ‘Cause Das Kapital tells me so,” and “What a friend we have in Gaia, all our sins and griefs to weaponize.”  And all the times when GOP assassins shot Democrat presidents and influencers.  And all the times when conservatives shot NPR executives in the back like micro-phallic loser cowards.   

I’ll make myself a cup of coffee while I wait for you to complete your list.

What’s that?  I don’t even have time to make a cup of instant coffee, because there have been no similar right-wing murders of similar left-wing targets?

Huh.  What do you know about that?   

But it’s not just that we don’t react to our opponents’ violence the way that leftists react to right-wing violence – which, inconveniently for them is exceedingly rare.  We also don’t react to our political opponents’ mere EXISTENCE the way that the left does.

Consider this: most conservatives can give you a long list of leftists whom we believe are terrible people who have done terrible damage to our country.  For example, I think that Joe Biden was an egregious grifter of a president who got 13 good American soldiers killed in the incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan, enriched himself and his family by using his addict son as a bagman for bribes from Chicom mass murderers and corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs, and is a cadaverous creeper around young girls.  (And also, just plain cadaverous.  Not a joke.  I’m being serious.)

I think Obama is a narcissistic whitey-hater who poisoned American race relations and doubled our national debt to no good end.  I think Bill Clinton is a sleazebag who raped Juanita Broaddrick and left no female bottom within arm’s length ungroped for his entire adult life.  I think Hillary Clinton is worse than her terrible husband, and that the most useful public service Que Mala Harris ever did was that thing with Willie Brown.

I think George Soros’ original name was George Sauron, and I wouldn’t give you a plug nickel for every Democrat in the House and Senate, except for the hulking, man-child weirdo John Fetterman.  (And I still think he’s better suited to don some fake plastic bolts in his neck and scare trick-or-treaters at Halloween than to be a US Senator.) 

I could go on a lot longer.  All conservatives could.  But have you noticed that none of us have tried to kill any of those people? 

Donald Trump is intermittently a great president, and an irritating jackass.  But the Left calls him Hitler, tried to jail him for life, and tried to assassinate him twice.  Most conservatives think the last four Democrat presidents (at least!) range from “horrible” to “also horrible,” and yet none of us have tried to jail, bankrupt or kill any of them. 

We watch their SCOTUS judges and can’t believe their non-responsive, a-constitutional ramblings.  Sotomayor looks like a mediocre, partisan hack, and Ketanji Jackson – who somehow sounds like she’s got advanced CTE despite having never played a down of football in her life – makes Sotomayor look like Maimonides.

And yet our leaders have never stood outside the Supreme Court and screamed that they will reap the whirlwind, and won’t know what hit them if they don’t rule our way.  And we’ve never inspired an armed right-winger to travel cross-country to Kagan or Sotomayor’s house (I assume that Ketanji lives in a van, down by the river) on a mission to kill one of them.   

You can also see the vast gulf between the parties by the quality of their “martyrs.”    

Trayvon Martin was a ne’er-do-well kid who was justifiably shot in self-defense, while in the process of bashing George Zimmerman’s skull into a concrete sidewalk.  Zimmerman was called a “white Hispanic” – a genus which had never before existed, until the Left needed a way to blame whitey for a false racial crime committed by a Hispanic guy.  And Obama said that “Trayvon could have been my son.”  (If you were the kind of parent who raised the kind of son who went around committing attempted homicide, I guess?)

Michael Brown was on film committing a strong-arm robbery against a small Indian convenience store worker shortly before he attacked and beat a cop, fracturing his orbital bone and trying to get his gun before he was justifiably shot.  Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson lied that Brown had been shot while holding his hands up and not resisting.

(You may have seen the story that Dorian Johnson got shot to death last week, allegedly by a girlfriend he was beating at the time.  Unexpectedly!)

George Floyd was a junkie and career criminal who once put a gun against a pregnant woman’s belly during a robbery.  When he was committing another crime and the police were called, he died of an overdose that was wrongly attributed to a white cop’s restraint of him, despite the coroner’s report saying that the restraint didn’t kill Floyd. 

Jordan Neely was a homeless black guy and violent recidivist criminal with a record as long as JB Pritzker’s grocery list (#putdownthatoversizedturkeyleg), when he threatened and menaced a bunch of subway riders in NYC.  When a Marine put him in a choke hold to protect the civilians and Neely died, corrupt leftist DA Alvin Bragg charged the Marine with manslaughter, and put him through a criminal trial that ended when even a lefty New York jury came back with a verdict of, “You’ve got to be sh*tting me!”

Each of those four criminals, despite dying in the act of committing yet another crime, have all been elevated to the Mount Rushmore of Leftist Martyrs. 

“Hands up, Don’t Shoot” became a lucrative, fraudulent nationwide money grab, and racial arsonists like BLM, Al Sharpton and most of the black caucus have made hay out of portraying Neely as a harmless Michael Jackson impersonator and Michael Brown as a “gentle giant.”  Pathetic pandering leftist politicians put on dashikis and bowed on one knee to honor Saint Floyd, the Patron Saint of Opioids. 

And the Left rioted and justified widespread, continuous, lawless destruction in the name of their Four Horsemen of the Race-pocalypse.

Tomorrow, I’ll compare the Right’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder, and examine the media’s orgy of rake-stomping self-beclowning reactions in the aftermath.

Spoiler alert: we can never hate the media enough!

Hamas delenda est!

Some Thoughts on the Depravity of the Left After an Assassination (posted 9/12/25)

I’m still under a dark cloud after Charlie Kirk’s murder, but the aftermath of that heinous act has thrown into stark relief the radical differences between the left and right, writ large. 

I don’t want to do a simplistic, Manichaean “they’re all terrible and we’re all great” thing.  Primarily because it’s never true.  All of us are fallen and broken in some way, and there are good and bad actors on both sides.  

It’s also useful to remember the line from Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn – a great man who knew more about the evils of totalitarian leftism than any of us – to wit, “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.”

But that truth doesn’t excuse or prevent us from trying to honestly judge the varying degrees of evil or corruption in competing groups or ideologies.  And I think it’s just demonstrably true that the left has a real problem with its own base, in the form of a sick propensity to embrace and justify political violence.

Consider the most significant recent examples of serious violence that were politically motivated.  There have been three mass movements of organized, long-lasting political rioting in the last 5 years, all propagated by those on the left: the BLM riots, the Antifa riots, and the recent anti-ICE riots in LA and several other cities.  The first two continued for months, causing billions of dollars of damage, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, in cities all over the country.   

When it comes to individual attacks, we’ve got the shooting attack on the GOP softball practice that nearly killed Steve Scalise; two assassination attempts on Trump in the span of a few months; the attempted burning to death of Jews in Boulder, and the murder of the young Jewish couple in DC; the mass shootings of Christian school children in Nashville and again in Minneapolis; the murder of the health insurance CEO by back-shooting coward Luigi Mangioni; and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk. 

What counter-balancing examples are there from the political right?  When it comes to group violence, I can think of only two possibilities: the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, and January 6th.  One person was killed in Charlottesville, and the only one killed on January 6th was a Trump supporter.  Both were events lasting no more than a few hours, carried out by several hundred people who acted violently – as compared to the many hundreds of thousands in the organized mobs of violent leftist rioters who wreaked havoc for literally months, and all over the country.

When it comes to individual attacks, the only ones I’m aware of were the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and the three Democrat office holders recently murdered in Minnesota.  And none of those turned out to be committed by right wingers for recognizable political motivations. 

Gifford’s shooter had no discernable or rational political beliefs and was mentally ill, believing among other things that “the government was controlling people’s minds by controlling their grammar,” that the Mayan calendar apocalypse was imminent.  Pelosi’s attacker was a schizophrenic, intermittently homeless, commune-dwelling hippy. 

And after some excitement in Democrat circles because the Minnesota Democrat killer appeared at first to be a Trump supporter, it turned out he was a whacko who killed the three pols because he thought it would help Amy Klobuchar and Tim Wolz. 

In fact, the white supremacists at Charlotte were also not affiliated with any mainstream conservative group or school of thought.  Trump denounced them at the time and since, saying they should be “condemned completely,” and no white supremacists hold any office or sway in GOP circles, in congress or any other national office.     

(I know: many Democrats scream about white supremacists throughout the GOP.  But they are either lying, delusional, or both.  Because when you examine their claims, it turns out that in their world, “white supremacist” means anyone who opposes racial discrimination of any kind, and supports the constitution, merit-based hiring, hard-work, punctuality, and every other good thing under the sun.)    

In fact, the closest you can get to any political violence from the right that had any support from any mainstream Republican or conservative groups was arguably that committed on January 6th.  And initially, the violent minority among the J6ers were almost universally condemned by every corner of the conservative world.

That only changed after the Democrats went after all of them so viciously, imposing a double standard so blatantly unfair that by the time Trump was re-elected, most Republicans agreed with his decision to pardon them.  (Even then, there was at least a strong plurality of opposition to pardoning the small number of January 6th protestors who had been violent.)  After watching Democrats let hundreds of thousands of violent thugs, rioters and looters in BLM and Antifa go without so much as a slap on the wrist, we conservatives were no longer willing to tolerate the wildly disproportionate punishment of non-violent J6ers who peacefully walked through the Capitol and then went home.   

Again, I would challenge my leftist friends to cite any examples of representative conservatives, motivated by and espousing mainstream conservative beliefs, who have committed acts of political violence.  To the extent that they can point to anyone, they’d have to dig up some far-fringe sliver of whackos with no serious connection to any legitimate, influential conservative candidate or group.

Compare that to the leftist practitioners of political violence listed above.  BLM and Antifa might not speak for ALL Democrats, but they certainly speak for the majority of the most energetic Democrat base.  The central views which can be found in any of their manifestos, speeches, banners or chanted slogans – the condemnation of free-market capitalism, of America as irredeemably racist, and of the “evil” rich, along with disdain for straight people and white people and the police – have been commonplace in the last half-dozen DNC platforms and Democrat presidential candidacies.

Steve Scalise’s shooter was a mainstream Bernie bro and campaign volunteer.  The Muslim Jew-murderers in Boulder and DC (and elsewhere) are no more anti-Semitic than the jihad enthusiasts in the Squad.  Trust-fund coward Mangioni is a folk hero to bloodthirsty, dimwit leftist fangirls (of both sexes) throughout the Democrat party and blogosphere. 

And the transgender venom spouted by the murderers of Christian kids in Nashville and Minnesota – and, if early reports are right, by the killer of Charlie Kirk – could be lifted directly from the malicious, pseudoscientific babblings of the “57 genders” mainstream of the Democrat party. 

And this isn’t new.  The totalitarian Left has always justified political violence.  Marx’s obsession with revolution was never about peaceful, democratic change.  Lenin is often credited with the cold-hearted cliché about needing to break a lot of eggs to make an omelet (though it may have come from that earlier proto-Leninist, Robespierre).  Stalin dismissively called the murder of a million people a mere “statistic,” and Mao happily noted that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Today many senior Dem politicians were smart enough to condemn Charlie Kirk’s murder, and I hope that for the sake of their souls, they were sincere.  But we also saw an outpouring of vile celebration over this good man’s death from Stalin’s heirs, eagerly pursuing the bloody family business.  If the Democrat party wants to avoid disaster, it needs to do something about the poisonous progeny it has allowed to spawn.             

I think it’s a good sign that a smattering of leftist hate-mongers have lost their jobs today because of their wicked tweets, posts and videos.  MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd (and boy, does that guy put the “anal” in “analyst) lost his job, along with his audience of literally dozens.  So did a couple of creepy academics, and an even creepier “transgender” comic creator lost his new series.     

On the other hand, the cesspool of Bluesky is full of vitriol, and Democrats in congress wouldn’t even allow a moment of prayer in the House when Kirk’s death was announced.  Evil blimp Pritzker (#putdownthegiantturkeyleg) and phony squaw Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) both rejected the idea that they should tone down their vile rhetoric, and said that Trump is the problem.

That’s right.  The people who have called all conservatives “Nazis, fascists and existential threats to democracy” non-stop for years can’t see why that might have inspired some of their more unstable coreligionists to act as if those slanderous lies are true.  And they’re simultaneously offended because Trump shoots his mouth off about Rosie O’Donnell being fat, and calls lunatics and illegals “lunatics” and “illegals.”  

Ugh.  At times like these I feel a kinship with H.L. Mencken, when he said, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” 

But even momentarily indulging in that fantasy would be betraying my faith, and the cause that Charlie Kirk died for.  While his foes spouted hatred and justified violence, Charlie did what old-school liberals always said they wanted: he engaged in spirited debate.  He gave as good as he got when confronted by trolls and bad-faith homunculi, but he was even-handed and told the truth to those who would hear it.

He always made a point of allowing people who disagreed with him to come to the front of the line – as Ben Shapiro and many other conservatives routinely do. And I think it’s telling that I can’t think of any leftist “intellectual” or influencer who does the same.  They prefer stacked partisan audiences, classrooms where they have power over cowed students, and the ability to cancel anyone who defeats them in a fair argument. 

I’ve read a few Christian commentators over this last, sad 36 hours, pointing out that for the faithful, death is not the end, nor should it be sad.   

But then I think of the famous, shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.”  Most of us know that one if we know any, and it is a favorite of lazy students who were assigned to memorize a Bible verse.  (I respectfully plead the Fifth on this point.)

But many don’t remember the context.  It appears in the book of John, and His reaction is caused by the death of his friend Lazarus.  He weeps, and the next verse says, “Behold, how He loved him.”  

Even though most of us never met Charlie Kirk, that’s how we feel now, and it’s right that we should.  Let those whose poisonous politics are shriveling their souls wallow in their hatred; we shouldn’t lower ourselves to their level, and their misery is its own punishment.

Regular readers will remember that I discussed one of my favorite Shakespeare sonnets (#73) last month.  It’s a somber meditation on death, by an old man facing the end of life.  The speaker sees in his own frail body, “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” 

Though the context of a dying old man couldn’t be more different from Charlie being cut down in the prime of life, the final couplet could have been written about what just happened on a beautiful, early fall day in Utah:

“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”   

Charlie is definitely gone too soon.  However, since the news broke, it’s become clear that he inspired so many young people. 

We can take comfort in the prospect of a thousand Charlie Kirks stepping up and continuing the work that he had started. And in the words often read in Advent services: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it.”  

But even so, it is heartbreaking to be talking about Charlie Kirk in the past tense.   

My Class Reunion (posted 9/10/25, before the news of Charlie Kirk’s death broke)

I’m back home in Florida after my trip north.  As always, it was nice to get away for a while, and also nice to get back home.  The highlight of the trip was my first high school class reunion in 45 years, which took place on Friday evening, in Bloomington, Illinois. 

I got into town on Thursday evening, and had a late supper with a cousin who was working at a nearby power plant during September.  Afterwards, I watched the second half of the first NFL game of the season in my hotel room, before falling asleep.

The weather was a nice break from early September at home – cool and sunny – and I had a rare chance to spend an entire day on Friday, running around two familiar towns from my past – on my own, and with no particular agenda.   First I drove the 18 miles to El Paso, the town of around 2500 where I spent a decade from age 10 to 20.

Cruising into town, I found myself thinking about a moment in A Christmas Carol, though Dickens’ setting in a 19th century winter in England couldn’t be more different than a Midwestern farm town in late summer of 2025.  When the Ghost of Christmas Past transports Scrooge to his long-gone hometown, he looks around himself and says, “I was bred in this place.  I was a boy here!”

For the next couple of hours, I experienced the strange kind of disorientation that revisiting places from long past always produces.  Everything was familiar…but different, too.  Some buildings were smaller; some run-down, some remodeled.  The high school was the same, but the football field behind it was shrunken, somehow.  (I know.  It is still 100 yards, plus the end zones.  But it felt like a stadium when I played on that field.)

Our old house is the same, though painted a different color.  There are two new blocks of houses on the north side of town, in what had been cornfields in 1980.  I drove past several houses of old buddies, and they seemed closer than I remember, probably because the geography in my long-term memory was hard-wired for measuring distances on foot or by bicycle.

I recognized every detail of two houses of old girlfriends, both of which I could still walk or bike to with my eyes closed.  (“Remember it?” Scrooge says.  “I could walk it blindfold!”) Parked outside of both houses, I knew which windows had been each of theirs – both on second floors, a smart move for the dads of pretty, teenaged girls – and felt the jumbled, sensory echoes of old crushes, the indescribable longing no less strong for having been so ephemeral.

I remembered old cars I’d had – a rickety little Chevy Monza that I’d learned to drive a stick in, and a very cool ’72 Ford Gran Torino with a hood scoop and a blue racing stripe.  I remembered the clothes I’d worn – always Levis, usually flannel shirts, and later on, a letterman’s jacket – and the haircuts I’d had – all terrible! 

Driving toward the three-block downtown, I remembered music I’d listened to – with specific friends, or specific girls, or on specific trips:  Thin Lizzy and Foghat and the Beatles and Cheap Trick, and a dozen others. 

Most of the local class reunions are scheduled for early September, when the social event of the Midwestern year was going on: the Corn Festival.  New Orleans can have its Mardi Gras, Germany its Oktoberfest, and European capitals their Christkindlesmarkt, but for a teenage me in the late 1970s, the Corn Festival had everything!

Crooked ring-toss games, crooked shooting gallery games, a game where you could toss a ping pong ball into a tiny goldfish bowl and win a goldfish that would inevitably be dead in a week.  Rickety rides put together by alcoholic carnies with missing fingers and prison tats.  And all the best foods: sweet corn and fried chicken and cotton candy and ice cream cones (waffle or cake) and chocolate shakes.    

The guys who’d survived two-a-days and made the football team could wear their jerseys for the first time at the Corn Festival, and the cheerleaders wore their uniforms.  I reached a social status peak – driving the Torino, wearing my El Paso Comets jersey and walking through the Corn Festival with a cheerleader on my arm – that I never equaled until decades later, when I was tapped by the great and powerful CO as the Roving Correspondent.  (And before you can ask, yes: an orb, a scepter and a ceremonial sword were involved in that rite.)

Anyway, on Friday morning, the three blocks of Front Street were blocked off, and the Corn Festival rides were all in place.  The festival itself didn’t start until around suppertime, so I went to visit my favorite old haunt that didn’t involve either girls or sports: the Carnegie Library in Jefferson Park. 

Because I was raised in what was essentially the 19th century – before cell phones or the internet, when we had three tv channels, and they actually went off the air each night, after playing the national anthem – we could still have a park named after Jefferson and a library given to us by Carnegie without a mob of multiply-pierced freaks denouncing them as racists and robber barons, respectively.

The library was small but impressive, built of white stone, with round turrets flanking the front door.  To a 10-year-old me, it seemed like a classic European castle, and I spent many hours in there, preparing for my quixotic career as an English professor.  At some point in the intervening decades, a modern wing was built onto the old library, so I went straight through the new part to get to the old one, and found that I remembered the layout well.

I was surprised to find my old yearbook laid out on a heavy reading table!  Then I noticed that there were half a dozen other yearbooks, each from a year ending in “0” or “5,” because other classes were having their reunions in town this weekend, too.  So I looked through that yearbook, and felt another wave of renewed nostalgia. 

After lunch at a favorite pizza place in town, I drove back to Bloomington, home of Illinois State U, where I got my MA in the middle 80s, before God guided me to Florida, to meet my wife and produce my children, and become a Fightin’ Gator.  

I spent my afternoon visiting some familiar sites around town, and then walking through campus, which is greatly changed.   There are a lot of new dorms and academic buildings, and a lot of big hotels, but a several-block area of two-story brick buildings still remains, anchored around an old movie theatre that now appears to show mostly art movies and old movies. 

The reunion that evening was at a classmate’s house on one of the prettiest streets in an older part of town.  Around 20 people showed up, which wasn’t bad, considering that our graduating class had only had about 68 people in it.  Most had been to earlier reunions, so I’d missed out on seeing them then. 

Two of my best friends are in Texas now and couldn’t make it, but I got to see a bunch of other friends, and was pleasantly surprised that for the most part, the years seemed to drop away, and the conversations were easy.  I talked to a few classmates whom I hadn’t been particularly close to, but we found each other funny and easy to talk to.  I enjoyed the time I spent with them as much as I did the time I spent re-connecting to others I’d known better.

We spent almost four hours there, and the time went quickly. I found out a lot about everybody’s marriages, kids and grandkids, along with careers, successes and losses.  No one was obnoxious or overbearing, and a few who had been a little intense or manic in high school had mellowed, as one would hope.  The whole evening had a nice, Midwestern vibe, with no one putting on airs or getting into their cups and causing a scene.

A lot of pictures were taken, and when someone suggested that we take one of all of the bald guys, there was a lot of laughter, and no offense taken.  In fact, one of my female classmates happily joined in that picture; she’s a lovely person, who recently found out she had cancer, and the chemo’s effects earned her a place in the bald photo. 

In keeping with our stage of life, some discussion naturally turned to mortality and health issues.  One of my buddies had his arm in a sling after a recent shoulder surgery, and several had had cancer scares.  One of my best friends, now in Texas, had planned to come, but recently had part of a lung removed due to cancer, even though he’s never smoked. 

A few weeks ago, one of the reunion planners put together a list of classmates who have died, and I was surprised to see that it was 14 out of our original 68.  That seems like a lot, considering we are in our early 60s!  The individual stories run the gamut from the tragically predictable to the “there but for the grace of God go I” variety.

Two classmates went in car wrecks before we graduated high school, and a few from cancer between age 40 and 60.  Drug and alcohol problems have accounted for more, including a good female friend of mine who died of cirrhosis at 50.  One of the wilder guys in our class died in a shoot-out with police, and there was talk that it might have been “suicide by cop.”  Heart attacks have taken a few, and a handful have moved away; a few of those have shown up in obituaries, but with no mention of the cause of death. 

I talked to one classmate who wistfully described his marriage breaking up after his wife had lost a set of premature twins, and then “gone off the deep end” and eventually left him.  I talked to another who had been on the wild side in high school, but who now seems to radiate a kind of zen peacefulness.  It turns out he had a terrible heart attack two years ago, which has brought him to a deep faith that he was a little sheepish to tell me about.

He had just arrived at a work function when he went down, and everything lined up perfectly for him.  Two of the people there had CPR experience, and paramedics and a good hospital were nearby; his heart stopped three times, but they were able to resuscitate him each time, and his surgery went very well.  He’s savoring every day and feels like he’s playing with house money, and I loved hearing him tell that story.   (I’m trying to look at life the same way, and am happy to do so without an intervening heart attack to forcibly focus my mind!)

Most of the group have kids, and a lot have grandkids.  Most of them seem to have enjoyed their careers, and a little more than half have retired.  A few love their work, and have no plans to retire.  Experiences with family have been all over the map.  Almost half of the ones I talked with have divorced, but most of them seem content with their second spouses, or no spouse.  Kids have been a great source of joy for some, and the cause of a lot of pain for others.     

Overall, I really enjoyed reconnecting after so many years.  Everyone there talked about looking forward to getting together again in 5 years for our 50th, even though I think a lot of us probably shared one thought about that: how many of us might not be around for the next one?  Someone joked that we’re now in the sweet spot: retired (so we have more flexibility to come to a reunion) but not yet dead!

On one final personal note, we just found out that our youngest daughter is going to be heading off to England for at least the next year.  She had applied to several PhD programs this year, but with all of the university budget cut-backs recently, neither she nor any of her friends from Boulder’s competitive summer research program had gotten a slot.

But a former professor of hers pointed her to Exeter’s Master’s program, and she applied to study Physics with a focus on Astronomy.  She was accepted yesterday, so she’ll be leaving in a week.  My wife will fly over with her to get her squared away, and then we’ll both be looking for an excuse to go to England once or twice this year to visit her. 

Since I got back home I’ve caught up on some national news, and noticed that the Dems have continued to firmly grab onto the “10” side of several 90-10 issues.  So I’ll be back with another column on Friday to celebrate the salutary and mock the mock-worthy.         

Hamas delenda est!

Charlie Kirk is Gone, and Our Nation is Worse For It (posted 9/10/25)

Yesterday afternoon I was noodling around with some snarky thoughts on today’s politics for my Friday column, when the news hit that Charlie Kirk had been shot, and then that he had died.    

Like most conservatives, I followed him often over the last several years, and admired his energy and his committed leadership.  He was a solid debater, by turns generous and pointed; he was combative without being hateful, and matched his responses to the good faith (or lack thereof) of his opponents.

A self-educated and hard-working college dropout, he routinely bested his “educated” interlocuters with a combination of good humor and well-chosen counters to the logical fallacies that leftists routinely tried to use against him. 

It’s so sad to see him stolen from us so soon, and right now I’m more angry than anything.  Already a lot of the usual leftist suspects are gloating about and celebrating his murder, while continuing to think of themselves as the good guys in our political debates.  The same creeps who call us Nazis and implicitly justify the violent attacks by their leftist co-religionists – on Steve Scalise, on Trump, on Jews in Boulder and DC, on the Christian school kids in Nashville and Minneapolis, and now on Charlie – have the gall to blame Charlie’s non-violent rhetoric for his murderer’s cowardly act. 

As I write this there is no info yet on Charlie’s killer, but if he turns out to be the kind of hateful,  leftist narcissist we’d most expect, I hope good guys with guns can run him down quickly.  And I hope that they shoot him a lot, and that he dies painfully.  But not too quickly.

I’ll repent for these thoughts later.  But the best I can do right now is to try to find some slight silver lining in this dark cloud of a tragic killing.    

When Rush Limbaugh died in February of 2021, I was glad that he had had the chance to see Trump elected the first time, and to get a Presidential Medal of Freedom from him at Trump’s last SOTU.  But it had to be a bitter pill for him to see Trump lose in 2020, and to see Trump and the GOP at their lowest point, in the wake of January sixth, shortly before Rush died.

By contrast, I’m really glad that Charlie got to see his hard work come to fruition when Trump won in November.  I just re-watched the video of him on election night, surrounded by the conservative young men and women he’d helped inspire and lead.

At a little after midnight, after months of hard work and hours of frantic coverage and endless reading of tea leaves and exit polls, the early returns had begun to look better and better for Trump.  When the news came in that Pennsylvania, and thus the election, had been called for Trump, Charlie got quiet.  With tears of joy in his eyes and his pretty wife hugging him, he took it all in, while the other guys were buzzing and chattering all around him. 

When one of them noticed that Charlie had become speechless for once, he laughingly called for him to say something.  At that moment, all Charlie could get out was, “I am just humbled by God.”  

A few minutes later he said, “I want you to remember that we did not earn this, that this is God’s mercy on our country.” 

I never met him, of course, but that’s how I’m going to remember Charlie Kirk.  Over the last months I’ve had cause to contemplate the many ways that death can come for us – from Alzheimer’s in old age to a brain tumor out of the blue; from a sudden heart attack to a long, debilitating illness. 

And although 31 is way too soon, and though Charlie leaves a young wife and two children under 3, he died in honest service to God, a good cause, and a great country.  Painful though it is, there are many worse ways to die than that.

Our nation owes him a debt, and to uphold his widow and his children.    

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.