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What Makes People Happy, Part 2 (posted 7/13/26)

On Friday I started a series of articles about happiness, and I talked about how money and income, along with career and gender, impact happiness.  I’m heading toward some thoughts on how politics and political ideology affect happiness, but on the way I’d like to consider a couple of other factors: the impact of social media and social connections, and the impact of religious belief. 

First, it’s pretty easy to see social media as a big dose of brain poison that you’re inviting into your house and life on a daily basis.  But I won’t go nearly that far.  I think the internet is like many things in life, in that it is not intrinsically good or bad.  It offers many possibilities that you can use to either improve your life or degrade it. 

Sure, there’s lots of porn and conspiracy theories and political dreck that takes over way too many people’s lives.  But there’s also smart conversation and music and all of the great achievements of humanity at your fingertips.  And there’s the possibility of making a network of social connections, too.

Regular readers will remember that I only started this page because an impressive guy calling himself CO (the Cautious Optimist) started a Facebook page called Cautious Optimism over 10 years ago now, and invited me to join some early members and write occasional pieces there.  The site dealt with everything from culture to music to politics and humor, and people were free to contribute links and commentary for everybody to discuss.  A great person volunteered to police the site and kick out the trolls (Shout out to Laura Belveal!), and soon many hundreds of smart and interesting people started chiming in, and a great community of over 30,000 members grew up there.  Facebook inexplicably shut the site down last November for no reason that they were willing to disclose, and that was a real loss to many of us – which is a sadly ironic testament to the positive impact that social media can have in our lives.   

By the way, some of you have regularly been asking me if the mysterious CO might ever start the page up again.  I can only say that I’ve been in regular contact with him, and have been encouraging him to do so; he seems to be considering it, but I don’t know more than that right now.

Anyway, having said all that, social media still has obvious downsides that impede personal happiness in ways that I think we’ve only started to grasp.  Some of them are simply the opportunity cost involved in anything that takes up that much of your time.  If you’re spending many hours a day consuming social media on screens, you’re by definition not spending those hours interacting with people in the real world, or reading books, or learning a language or an instrument, or walking in the woods.

Also there is the big problem of comparing yourself to others – most of whom have painted a falsely positive picture of their own lives in their online posts – which is a recipe for misery, and also for feeding the narcissism to which we are all susceptible.  Everybody wants to be an influencer of some sort, with their own podcast or website, and will seemingly sell their souls for clicks.  (And I say that as someone who has been on a few podcasts, and writes my own columns and has recorded a few videos for this, my own website!)

(Sidebar: Narcissism is terrible, whether it is exacerbated by social media or not.  The quality that is opposed to narcissism – humility – is an old-fashioned and misunderstood virtue, because we often think of it as putting yourself down or feeling inferior.  But I love CS Lewis’s definition: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”)

Another problem with social media is the way it can cut us off from community, social networks and inter-connectedness.  (And of course, it is good when it does the opposite, as I think it does when people use it to establish worthwhile and nurturing online communities like the late, lamented CO site.) 

Researchers who study happiness have long pointed to having friend networks and social connections as a reliable index of personal happiness, and though social media has clearly exacerbated the deterioration of these connections, it was already going on in America before the internet.  

Robert Putnam wrote an influential book in 2000 called Bowling Alone, in which he documented the trend.  He pointed to the marked decrease of people participating in social organizations like scouting (for children), and civic or fraternal organizations like The Lions Clubs, Elks Clubs, Rotary, Kiwanis, etc. for adults.  His title comes from the fact that while slightly more Americans were bowling, many fewer were bowling in organized leagues.  Hence “bowling alone.” 

The declining participation in fraternal organizations – some of which were religiously affiliated, such as the Knights of Columbus or the Hibernians – was mirrored by decreasing church attendance and participation in religious organizations.  And that trend influences human happiness, too.

There is a large body of research that suggests that actively religious people are happier than irreligious people.  Some studies point to variations within the larger finding – looking at the way the connection between religious participation and happiness may be shaped by differences in nationality, economic status, and others – but the overall connection appears to be consistent.

A recent study from Pew Research of survey results from the US and 25 other nations is fairly typical.  Those studied were categorized into three groups: the actively religious (who worship at least monthly), the inactively religious (who identify with a religion but attend less frequently), and the unaffiliated, or “nones” (i.e. the non-religious).

In most of the countries surveyed, the actively religious were more likely than those in the other two categories to describe themselves as “very happy.”  In the US, 36% of the actively religious – compared to 25% of the inactive and 25% of the “nones” – described themselves that way. 

The same pattern held when looking at how often the three groups also participated in other types of non-religious organizations, such as charities and clubs.  Among the actively religious, 58% also participated in at least one nonreligious voluntary organization, as compared with 51% of the inactives, and only 39% of the “nones.”     

I know it’s wise to tread lightly when it comes to religion, but I will say that I find these patterns both intuitive and counter-intuitive, in different ways.  Because of my own bias – I’m a Christian – I’m predisposed to think that my faith would naturally make people generally happier.  The word “gospel” means “good news,” and the idea that a loving Creator made me in His image is pretty sweet.

On the other hand, I can also see ways in which religion could make one unhappy, and atheism could make one happy.  Because the idea of adhering to a moral code that forbids a lot of pretty alluring things – hookers and blow are off-limits, as is smiting the many idiots in life who strike me as quite smite-worthy – and teaches that at the end of this life I will be called to account by my Maker for every word and deed in my life?  Not so giddy-making.

Conversely, atheism – to the extent that it sees humans as animals with a more developed frontal cortex, morality as human-devised and arbitrary, and conscience as an illegitimate restriction imposed on the individual by others in their own self-interest – gives one a desirable permission slip to do what feels good or serves you.  Hookers and blow and smiting the smite-worthy are back on the table, along with raping and pillaging and all else that you can do without getting caught. 

(Or, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, “If there is no God, nothing is impermissible.”)   

Now I’m not here to tell you which is the One True Religion.  I’ve made my call on that, but you’ll have to work that out on your own.  (I recommend doing so with fear and trembling, so….) 

But this last point provides me with a transition to my remaining thoughts about happiness, which I will explore next time.

Here’s a preview: politics strongly affects happiness, with conservatives generally being much happier than leftists. 

My previous point suggests at least a partial explanation, because Republicans are per capita much more religious than Democrats.  Another Pew Research Center study that has been conducted three times since 2007 – this one looking at the “religious identities, beliefs and practices” of over 35,000 Americans – includes the following findings:

81% of Republicans identify with a religion, as compared with 50% of Democrats

52% of Republicans pray daily; 41% go to church as least monthly; 48% say religion is important in their lives

For Democrats, those numbers are 35%, 24% and 28%, respectively

Another study found that even as the percentage of Republicans who are irreligious has grown, there is still a large “God gap” between the parties.  This phenomenon played out in the 2024 election, when 80% of Trump voters identified as Christians, compared to just 40% of Harris voters.  Two-thirds of Harris voters “seldom” or “never” attend church.

So if religious people are happier, and more conservatives than liberals are religious, that pattern partially explains the happiness gap between the left and right. 

But only partially.  If you’ll hang in there with me, I’ll look at some of the others causes in my next column.  

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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What Makes People Happy or Unhappy? (posted 7/10/26)

In Monday’s column, I talked about my mid-year resolution (timed to correspond with the beginning of America’s second quarter-millenium on the Fourth of July) to turn away from political anger and toward a more charitable outlook on political differences. 

Several factors have motivated me to try to make this turn.  For example, I’m trying to follow Uncle Jesus over here, and I know that even though we all tend to characterize our own anger as the righteous variety, it’s more often the toxic and soul-harming type.   

Also, the festivities around the 250th brought the difference between happy conservatives and miserable liberals into even sharper contrast than usual.

And that got me thinking about a topic that I’ve seen many times over the years: the purported happiness gap between liberals and conservatives.  In recent years I’ve been keeping lists of articles about various topics that interest me, and this is one I’ve returned to.

In fact, I’ve got some thoughts on the subject of happiness and unhappiness generally, and I’m going to write a few columns on the subject.  I’m hoping that some of you will share your thoughts on the subject, too.

To start with an overview, I’ve seen a lot of studies about happiness, and the various causes that researchers analyze, including gender, age, income levels, health, education levels, religious belief, political affiliation, and psychological orientation toward either pessimism or optimism.  The subject seems endlessly complicated, with a great number of moving and inter-related parts.

For example, income and wealth would logically be a big factor.  Anyone who is under financial pressure – who worries about where the next meal is coming from, or struggling to make rent before being evicted – would naturally be pretty unhappy. 

On the other hand, the context of relative poverty – for example, if you’re young and living rough while trying to get through college or grad school – can often greatly mitigate any unhappiness around money.  First, because being young and in school is a temporary phase you’re going through, with the expectation of much better things to come. Second, in that phase you are likely surrounded by others who are similarly situated, and a big part of money unhappiness (IMHO) comes from comparing yourself to others who are doing much better. 

Making $25K as a TA in your late 20s, surrounded by others in the same boat is a lot less troubling than earning $35K as a teacher in your late 30s, when all of your college buddies are now making six figures.

So at first glance, it seems obvious that having more money would be correlated with being happier.  Except that there are many cliches arising from how false that assumption is — “Mo’ money, mo’ problems” – and tons of cautionary tales of rich people who are miserable, sometimes even self-destructively so. 

The research I’ve seen suggests that having money does increase happiness, but only up to a point.  The idea is that having a decent job and enough money in the bank to relieve the fear of the wolf at the door makes most people a lot happier; as you move beyond that, though, there quickly comes a point of diminishing returns. 

I remember reading a study – this was probably 10 or 15 years ago – that found that Americans’ sweet spot for the minimum salary to make them happy was around $60K per year.  (Adjust that for inflation, and it’s probably around $100K now.)  One interesting point in that same study was that when people were asked how much one would need to earn to be considered “rich” or “well-off,” that number was almost always roughly twice what the respondent was making.  Somebody making $60K thought that someone bringing in $120K had it made.  The person getting that $120K thought that a quarter-million would scratch his money itch just fine.    

That finding strikes me as pretty accurate, given what I know about human nature. 

Good health seems like a logical pre-requisite for happiness, too.  But on the one hand, most of us are healthiest in the prime of our youth – maybe from mid-teens to early 30s? – yet most of us don’t associate the struggles of the teenage years and trying to figure out your place in the world, find a spouse and some kind of job, with unbridled happiness. 

On the other hand, suffering from debilitating illness or long-term health declines would naturally tend to dent one’s happiness, to say the least.  I got a little taste of that this spring, when I was struggling through my spine injury, and my life goals were reduced to trying to find a position comfortable enough to allow me to sleep for more than a few minutes, and trying not to get addicted to sweet, sweet oxycodone.  (For those interested, you can read about that rough time in my columns from March.) 

Now that I’m well past the very painful stage, and on my way to returning to being an awesome physical specimen with the strength of ten men, I’m happier.

Other aspects of happiness arise from fulfilling a purpose, and some such purposes are clearly gender-coded, if not gender-dependent.  Both genders need to find an outlet for their talents and abilities, and both are generally happier – though there are always exceptions – if they can find a loving spouse and have a family. 

I think men are designed by nature (or Nature’s God, IMHO) to be happiest when they are providing for and protecting a family.  (I remember an old psychology text suggesting that if a woman admires and appreciates an emotionally healthy man, he’ll do just about anything for her.)  That has been changing in recent years, with more women than men getting degrees and professional work, but I think a typical man’s occupation is still more central to his identity and happiness than it is to a typical woman.  

One common topic of discussion when you meet a man for the first time is to ask him what he does, and losing a job usually hits a man’s sense of self and self-worth harder than it does a woman’s.  It’s common for men to struggle when they first retire, and heart attacks in the first six months after retirement are not super rare.  If you’ve defined yourself by your job for your whole adult life, it makes sense that a bout of post-retirement depression would be as common for men as post-partum depression is for women. 

One of the main good effects of women’s liberation in my lifetime has been that women can develop and use their talents and pursue ambitions in the world of work outside the home.  Yet one of the worst effects of feminism has been to pressure women to pursue a career, even if that thwarts their hard-wired desire for marriage and children, too.  The ticking biological clock and sadness among childless older women have become cliches for a reason.

Having said all that, in my next several columns I’d next like to look at several other causes of happiness or the lack thereof, including religious belief, social connection and the largely pernicious effects of social media, and political affiliation.  

To summarize and preview, the research I’ve seen suggests that social media has a lot of deleterious effects that we don’t really have previous experience with; that religious people are generally happier than non-religious people (but with some interesting/surprising caveats); and that leftists are generally much less happy than conservatives, even correcting for the many other causes involved. 

This last point has a lot of permutations to it, and raises an intriguing chicken-and-egg question: does leftism cause people to be unhappy, or are already unhappy people drawn to leftism?

The political aspect of unhappiness vs happiness is what drew me back to this subject now.  When I saw how miserable lefties were during the run-up to the 250th, I didn’t find myself being angry at them for ranting about what a lousy place America is, as much as feeling sorry for them, and wishing better for them.  Obviously I think they’re wrong about the country, and that makes their dark mood even sadder, since it is (IMHO) unjustified and unnecessary.  (As regular readers know, I have a few good friends who are lefties, and I truly do hate to see how miserable they get when our side is in office and doing all the right things.) (😊)

On the one hand, the leftists’ bad mood made some sense, since the president of the opposing party (and a particularly hated one, at that!) was in the White House on the nation’s birthday.  (I know I would have been a little less happy if President Que Mala was giving a 250th speech that started with a land acknowledgment and then moved straight into word salad!) 

But here’s another preview: recent surveys have consistently shown that liberals’ level of patriotism is much more dependent on whether their party controls the White House and/or congress than does conservatives’ patriotism.   Conservatives are generally markedly more proud of America and happy to be American than are liberals.  Also, even though conservatives are just as dissatisfied when a Biden or Obama is in office as Dems are when it’s Trump or Bush, our happiness levels don’t fluctuate nearly as much as the happiness of Dems.         

I’m going to explore some of these questions next time.  But in the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing some of your thoughts on the topic, too. 

Have a great weekend!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Thoughts on our 250th, & the Gap Between the Left’s & Right’s Views of America (posted 7/6/26)

I hope you all had a happy Independence Day! 

I had a good one.  Gainesville does fireworks on the July third on UF’s campus, and my wife and I walked over and watched them.  On the Fourth we went to see the new Young Washington movie, which was really good, and a heartening experience.  There were multiple showings of it on multiple screens throughout the day, and while some of the earlier ones were full, our theatre was about half full. 

Watching it felt like a bit of a throwback.  We seldom go to the movies anymore, for the most old-guy, “get off my lawn” reason: Hollywood hasn’t made much worth watching in recent years.  (I’m too old for superhero movies, and I get the clear impression that most actors hate me and everything I stand for, so…) But this movie was well-made and patriotic, and covered ground that I’d mostly forgotten from school (i.e. Washington’s early years and fighting in the French and Indian War).

There was some chatting in the theatre before the movie got started, but it was actually pleasant.  Everybody was in a good mood, and love of our country came up in several conversations I overheard.  There was actually applause at the end of the film!  The very nice guy who sat next to me quietly said, “Amen,” when Kelsey Grammer said a few patriotic words after the movie ended and before the lights came up. 

I got a few compliments on the new t-shirt I was wearing, too.  It has an illustration of Washington wearing sunglasses, and says, “It’s only Treason if you Lose.”  (I’m starting a new tradition of wearing that one every Independence Day.)

Overall, it was a nice reminder of all the decent people out there, which you can lose sight of if you spend too much time in political arguments online, or watching our degraded legacy media.

Which brings me to my subject today.  Over the last several years, I’ve found myself getting more angry at the left, and more worried about the path our country is on, in large part because of the extent to which so many of our young people have been indoctrinated into hostility toward America by the elite left in our colleges, media, and politics. 

And I’d like to try to squelch that anger, and turn away from it.  Consider it a New Year’s resolution as we begin our second quarter-millenium as a nation.

But I know that it’s going to take some serious effort on my part.  Because the gulf between the right’s view of this country and the left’s view has never seemed larger, or more ominous.  

I know that there are plenty of bad actors on the right, and plenty in the elite right who are happy to exploit the base’s patriotism, resorting to performative jingoism for their own advantage.  But I think the vast majority of everyday conservatives are like the people in the theatre with us on the Fourth.  They love America, and are grateful for the Founders who got it started, and the military who have protected it, and the American people who have kept it going.

I think that same attitude would largely have been true of everyday Democrats when I was a kid, and before.  And I think it’s still true of many of them today, including the blue-collar people I grew up with, and many of the academics I worked with, and some of my friends and family members who would never cancel me just because we disagree about politics.

But I can’t deny the evidence of how far left the Dems have gone, and how many of them are now openly disdainful of the country.  There was always some of that on the left, but now much of the mainstream left has soured on America, before we even get to the depressingly large swing toward actual socialism under the Democrat banner.

Part of this is clearly due to TDS.  Trump is a unique character, and there’s no denying that his flaws are as prominent as his virtues.  He is often a jackass, and he says many offensive things.  Most of us on the right know that; he makes us face-palm a lot too. 

So I’d love to think that that’s most or even all of what the left hates about America, and about us.

But I can’t.  Because I’ve seen them froth about Reagan, and then about W Bush.  (They were calling him “Bushitler” 16 years before Trump appeared on the scene.)  I’ve seen them demonize milquetoast half-Dem RINOs like McCain and Romney.  And that’s before they cheered and gloated over Charlie Kirk’s murder.

The reactions of the elite Left toward the 250th Independence Day has been instructive.  With a dishearteningly small number of exceptions, the responses have ranged from vile, vulgar and hate-filled rants, to politicians’ dyspeptic statements, to half-hearted, “two-cheers” kinds of messages.

The former group includes Project 1619-style accusations that we were founded purely to carry out slavery, and we haven’t gotten any better since then.  Consider socialist Democrat Chris Rabb, a PA House candidate who just won a primary.  He used the 4th to denounce the Declaration of Independence as a “lofty screed” that “notoriously” and “purposefully erased indigenous and black peoples.”  Or long-term GA Democrat Hank Johnson, who called the USA “the world’s number one bully” and “the Great Satan.”

The middle group of sour griping is well represented by Mamdani’s creepy hostage-video-looking screed on the eve of the Fourth lamenting all of the hungry American children, the monopolies dominating every industry, oligarchs buying elections (not Soros or the majority of billionaires who supported the Dems – they’re the good oligarchs), and “masked agents terrorizing our streets.” 

If by “terrorizing our streets” you mean “enforcing our laws.” 

The least bad/negative of the third group is typified by Jessica Tarlov’s mostly positive tweet: “Happy Independence Day!  For all her faults, no better nation and so lucky to be born an American….”

That’s a compliment sandwich, starting with good wishes and ending with a statement of gratitude.  But in the middle – because she can’t help it – there has to be an acknowledgement of our fault and flaws, even on our 250th birthday.   

That is so tired!  We all get it: no nation or group of people is perfect.  Anyone who has lived on earth for more than three or four years knows that.  You don’t have to keep saying it, because it insults everyone’s intelligence.

And before one of my lefty friends can say that I’m making too much of it, or that I’m too sensitive to a tiny, insignificant slight, consider this analogy, which I’ve heard before, and said before: How would it sound if you talked about your spouse the way many/most lefties talk about America?

It’s become a cliché for many leftists to insist they love America, but then recite the list of her flaws (slavery, racism, the Trail of Tears, sexism, penning up Japanese Americans during World War Eleven, etc.).  But picture talking about your spouse that way (focusing on her flaws, comparing her unfavorably to many other women in the world, etc.).

In fact, Tarlov’s post gives us exhibit 4,398,237 to illustrate this point.  Imagine if I gave my smokeshow wife an anniversary card, and penned some thoughts inside that began, “Happy Anniversary!  For all your many faults, there is no better woman, and I’m lucky to be your husband.”

Sure, that last part would be totally true.  But I’d never be able to appreciate her reaction to it, because I’d be writhing on the ground cradling my aching testicles after she drop-kicked me after reading, “For all your faults…” 

And she’d be right to do so.

Because you don’t talk (or think) that way about someone you love!  And you don’t talk (or think) that way about a country you love, either.

Okay, so that doesn’t sound like I’m turning over a new leaf for my new (mid-)year resolution, does it?  But next column I’m going to write about research showing a “happiness gap” between conservatives and liberals, and I’m going to suggest that the lefties’ unhappiness is intertwined with their falsely dark view of America.

And though that doesn’t sound hopeful on the face of it, I think it is.  Because their immiserating view of America isn’t accurate or true, which means that they’re not doomed to hold on to it.  They can lay it down, and recover a patriotic liberalism that would allow them to oppose Trump and Republican policies they disagree with, without demonizing the country, and its past, and half the people currently in it.    

So I’m going to try to turn my anger at them more toward empathy.  Because even though righteous anger exists, and even though I find a lot of catharsis in venting about bad political actors, I also know that anger ultimately hurts those who hold on to it and stoke it within themselves. 

And I don’t want that for myself and us, just like I don’t want that for our political opponents.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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So…That Column Didn’t Age Well! (posted 7/3/26)

I had meant to write a column about Independence Day today, but I’m going to put that off until Monday, partly because I’d like to comment on what happens during the big 250th, and partly because of the SCOTUS rulings that came down this week.  I think those are worth some more reflection.

On Sunday night I wrote about how SCOTUS has been doing a pretty good job lately, and how originalist judges have been so much better at sticking to interpreting the law rather than legislating, and how their judgments usually have the mark of common sense in them.

Annnnnddddd… SCOTUS just made one very bad ruling and a couple of other shaky ones that might make it appear as if I’m a dope who doesn’t know his Schumer from a hole in the ground.

In my defense, I did say that I expected that we’d get a bad ruling on the birthright citizenship issue, and I hate having gotten that one right.  The ruling that states didn’t have to count only ballots cast or received by election day was wrong-headed, but not a huge deal, IMHO.  It said that a ballot that was postmarked on or before election day and received within 5 days after election day could be counted.

That’s dumb, because giving an extra week for the ballots to come in does open the possibility for cheating, unless the state scrupulously and competently examines all ballots for authenticity and postmark.  (Good luck, if you live in a blue state.)  Besides, there’s an easy way to both allow mail-in ballots and day-of election ballots on equal terms: require that if you want to mail your ballot, you have to do so 5 days before election day.  

If you bumble around and miss that deadline, or can’t decide who to vote for until election day, just vote on that day, the way everyone in the country did for more than two centuries, until a few years ago!        

At least SCOTUS got the “no dudes in women’s sports” case right.  But even that one was a little weak, since they just granted states the right to protect female athletes in that way, rather than requiring that all states do so.

The birth right citizenship case was the big one, and it really hurt.  I’ve got 5 thoughts on that, in no particular order:  

First, we could have afforded to lose one of the supposedly originalist/conservative justices, but both Roberts and Coney-Barrett did the wrong thing.  (The definition of “doing the wrong” thing in legal circles is “joining Ketanji, Sotomayor and Kagan on any opinion!”)  Roberts has been disappointing for a long time, but Amy Coney-Barrett was supposed to be different and better, and she’s been mediocre at best, and has dropped the ball on some really big cases.  (I hope this doesn’t mean she’s drifting to the left – a la Souter, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Conner, and many others.)

Second, it’s very frustrating that only GOP-nominated justices do this.  The lefties on the court are picked by leftist presidents to predictably rule in partisan leftist ways, and they always do.  Or at least almost always.  The rare exceptions are when a case is 9-0 or 8-1, so they’ll vote with the conservatives.  But that’s only when the case is so obvious that nobody can make an even quasi-reasonable case otherwise, and/or when the outcome is so certain that their vote could not possibly make a difference. 

But I can’t think of an important case that was closely decided – 6-3, or especially 5-4 – when a leftist judge found with conservatives, in a way that set back the leftist political agenda.  Maybe some of you out there can point to one?

Third, that point actually puts the lie to the partisan leftists who are always ranting about a corrupt, right-wing court, even though that court finds against conservative causes or positions on a fairly regular basis.  (As it did here, on a huge issue that Trump and conservatives badly wanted.)  Again, the mark of a truly partisan, politically compromised court would be one that always went for the outcome that confirmed and advanced their political priors.  And that is obviously true of many members of SCOTUS in recent decades…ALL of them on the left.

Fourth, Roberts and Barrett’s reasoning was tortured.  They had to acknowledge the importance of the key legal phrase from the 14th amendment – that citizenship automatically goes to those who are born in the US and “are subjection to the jurisdiction thereof” – but they argued that the meaning of that phrase is defined by the British idea (in Latin, “jus soli,” or “right of the soil”) of people being subjects of the king, which they claim that we borrowed and retained from them.  

(By the way, it’s awfully ironic that the same leftist crowd hollering about wanting “No kings!” are today happily adopting the most anti-democratic, pro-kings interpretation of all time… because in this context, it greatly increases their own political power.) 

Fifth, Thomas and Alito were deft and masterfully scathing in dissent, pointing out all the factually wrong assertions and mistaken interpretations that Roberts and Barrett made.  Thomas is usually the most concise of the justices, with his opinions averaging only a few pages; this time he wrote 91 pages, debunking in detail the errors of the majority.

He and Alito pointed out that the 14th amendment was narrowly tailored to apply to the children of former slaves, and that it did not apply to those with loyalties to other nations, the two best examples being American Indians, and the offspring of foreign diplomats.  (The Indians were later granted birthright citizenship through the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924; diplomats’ kids have never had it, and still don’t.)

The British themselves got rid of the principle of jus soli in 1981, and no other nation on earth grants unconditional birthright citizenship to the children of illegal parents.  Except, tragically, and until we can find some way to overturn this erroneous ruling, the United States.

So again we come back to common sense, in addition to all the legal language and precedents and prior interpretations.  Does it make ANY sense to say that the children of upstanding, legal residents working and residing legally in America (i.e. diplomats) are NOT given citizenship, while the children born to foreigners who broke our laws to get here and are here illegally (and thus subject to deportation themselves) ARE given citizenship?!  It’s a ridiculous outcome, in a way that I think is parallel to the other huge political problem of our day: voting fraud.

In both cases, the left is making facially absurd arguments to cover up the most transparently self-serving and illicit power grab imaginable.  They push for a basket of shady voting rules – ubiquitous mail-in balloting, ballot harvesting, same day registration, no ID or proof of citizenship to vote, and ballot counting that can take weeks – and coincidentally, every single one of those makes fraudulent voting much, much easier.  Just like allowing birth-tourism and anchor babies creates a huge influx of otherwise illegal voters that will eventually rob indigenous American citizens of the political power they are entitled to. 

Ugh.  With justices like the GOP-appointed Roberts and Barrett, why would the Left need to try to pack the court?

But we’re cautious optimists around here, and the Simpson family motto is “nil desperandum” (never despair).  So what’s the bright side, and what can we do now?

To begin with, we need to remember that common sense is still the hallmark of our philosophy, and kryptonite to the left.  And the fact that Roberts and Barrett departed from common sense to vote with the three partisan leftist justices is an indictment of them, not of our ideas.  

And that’s an easy case to make to the everyday (non-lawyer) American people.  Consider these simple questions that have come out of recent high-profile SCOTUS decisions:

Are people “in” the country when they’ve arrived at – but are still on the Mexican side of — the southern border?

Does “election day” mean “election week or election month?”  Or, you know, “election day?”

Is “Temporary Protected Status” a temporary status, or a permanent status?

Are males different than females, and should they be able to play on female teams against females? 

Should a foreigner come here illegally, give birth, and have that child automatically become an American citizen?

The answers are obvious, and we are on the right side of every one of them.

We should let these election day and birthright citizenship decisions light a fire under us in exactly the same way the Dobbs decision to reverse Roe v Wade lit a fire under the pro-abortion Left.  (Except that we’ll be motivated to correct some terrible mistakes, while the Dems were motivated to…continue aborting babies.) 

The ridiculously obvious cheating in California’s recent primaries illustrated how important clean elections are, and allowing a flood of illegals and counting votes for weeks threaten our confidence in the system.  We should use that issue to hammer the Dems in light blue, purple and red states (the deep blue states are beyond saving on this issue, at least for now), and to push for the Save Act, even if we can’t get it before the mid-terms.  It’s an 80-20 issue, and it should help us in the 2028 cycle, and it might even help us eke out a win in the mid-terms if we’re even close to striking distance of the Dems.

And a closed border and deporting illegals are popular too (even if not as popular as they should be), and they’ll become even more so as more progress is made, and more terrible stories come out about new crimes perpetrated by illegals against citizens. 

In the last several days I’ve heard a new idea that I love: Trump should write an Executive Order —I’d love a law on this, but it would never get through this congress – banning the entrance of any pregnant female foreigner into the US or any US territories!  People who legitimately want to visit the United States are now going to be inconvenienced by needing to provide proof that any birthing-aged female who wants to enter is not currently pregnant.

Chinese birth-tourism schemes alone have created an estimated 1.5 million Chinese “American citizens,” none of whom has any connection to this nation at all.  Their moms came to the US or an American territory under false pretenses, gave birth and yoinked a set of citizen papers from cowed bureaucrats, then went straight back to China.  So now there is a voting bloc under the control of the CCP that could legally steal any election in which the margin of legitimate victory is less than 1.5 million votes! Not to mention the millions of children whose illegal parents are using them as pawns to get their own citizenship from the next feckless Dem president who gets into the White House.

This cannot go on.  

Publicize these infuriating examples, run nationwide ads, and push that EO.  Say that we’d prefer not to do this, but this SCOTUS ruling gives us no choice.  If birthright citizenship is going to be forced on us in ways that prevent American citizens from determining who will become their fellow citizens, our national sovereignty and security are threatened, so we must act!

This is one more 80-20 issue that we can run on, in the midterms, and in 2028. 

Let’s go! And happy Independence Day!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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What Do Last Week’s SCOTUS Decisions Tell Us About the Difference Between Originalist Judges & Partisan/Activist Ones? (posted 6/29/26)

The short answer is: nothing that we didn’t already know.

I started reading SCOTUS rulings three or four years ago, and I’d recommend that all of you should do that.  They’re not nearly as difficult to follow as I’d assumed they’d be for non-lawyer doofus like me. 

And if you’re a fan of clear thinking and clear writing, they provide a variety of great examples of how to construct persuasive arguments, and how not to.  (Read some rulings from Sotomayor and Brown-Jackson for the latter, and you’ll have the same amount of faith in SCOTUS justices as you do in Tony Fauci, “50 top intelligence officials,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

I will acknowledge that I’m biased in favor of the originalist approach – try very hard to determine the original meaning of the laws in question, and bind yourself to that, regardless of your own political priors – vs the “living constitution” lefty alternative – look for ways to interpret the laws such that your own political preferences will be advanced. 

Many people would say that those are not fair descriptions of the two positions.  But I think I’ve given a lot of examples and details to back them up in my past columns on various SCOTUS decisions:  Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson (on abortion); Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (overturning Chevron deference); Obergefell (gay marriage); NY State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2nd amendment), and various district judges whose anti-Trump rulings (on executive power, DOGE, immigration, use of EOs, and just about everything else) have been overturned by appellate courts or SCOTUS, etc.  And many actual expert legal analysts have provided tons more examples in many articles and books.

The reason I’ve become an originalist is that IMHO, those positions are generally very carefully reasoned, with copious references to specific textual language, backed up by specific examples from other cases and historical precedence.  The “living constitution” rulings tend to move away from textual specifics, concrete arguments, and relevant citations, in favor of anecdotes, political lectures and desired political outcomes.  (Again, read anything from Ketanji Jackson; she sounds more like a petulant activist on Bluesky than a judge, and even Sotomayor and Kagan have slapped back at her in the last couple of years.)

The lefty justices go very heavy on emotional argumentation and reading into the motivations of lawyers and judges they disagree with.  And even when arguments necessarily rely in part on more abstract logic or common sense (in addition to statutory language), the lefty judges continually demonstrate a less than firm grip on either.

One example from last week – this one came not from SCOTUS, but from District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson – was a ruling to block Trump’s steps toward banning the use of SNAP (food stamps) funds to buy sugary soda.  Never mind that the USDA which ultimately oversees SNAP is an executive agency, this judge doesn’t think the chief executive (if he’s orange, at least) should have any say over what executive agencies do. 

By the way, Berman-Jackson is an Obama appointee.  Unexpectedly!

Now I’m no more a nutritionist than I am a lawyer.  But just off the top of my head – using only my crystal brain and common sense – I can lay out the case for preventing taxpayer money being used to buy soda for SNAP recipients. (In addition to the fact that the executive branch is in charge of executive branch agencies, I mean.)

I know without looking at it that the statutory language originating the food stamp program is full of verbiage about the need for nutritious food.  I also know that no legitimate nutritionist or doctor would say that sugary sodas are nutritious, or that their consumption does not increase the chance of obesity.  I also know that obesity is one of the top health problems for Americans, and that it is even more common among welfare recipients who get SNAP.

So even someone with an AOC-level IQ understands that our tax dollars should not be used to make fat welfare recipients even fatter.  But Trump wants to stop that.  So the AWFL Obama-appointed judge has to do her part to ensure that your money be confiscated and given to famine-resistant welfarians to further their dreams of going full dirigible at your expense.

Try to find that right enumerated in the constitution. I’ll wait.   

Another example that the leftists on SCOTUS are allergic to common sense: last Thursday’s ruling in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, in which Alito had to explain that immigrants whom the law says must be in the US to claim asylum must actually be…in the US to claim asylum.

I’m not making that up.  The lefties argued that an immigrant who arrives at the border (but doesn’t cross it) should be considered to be “in the US.”  Therefore, they should be able to claim asylum, and enter and stay in the country until that claim has been ruled on.

Never mind the actual reality, which is that the vast majority of asylum claims are bogus and eventually denied (unless a Dem is in office, in which case they are almost never even adjudicated).  Alito patiently explained that arriving AT a border is not the same as having crossed that border, just like knocking at your door is not the same thing as being inside your house.

And the three leftist justices either pretended not to understand that, or actually did not understand that.

Yikes!

Okay, on to the one case from last Thursday that I found most interesting, and most emblematic of the differences between originalists and living constitutionalists.  The case is Mullin v. Doe, and it upheld Trump’s attempt to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from migrants from Haiti and Syria.

The ruling was 6-3 (Unexpectedly!), with Alito writing the opinion, and Kagan the dissent.

The summary (SCOTUS rulings call it a “synopsis”) is only 2 pages, and gives a clear overview of the question, the competing arguments, and the rationale for the ruling. 

Alito’s ruling is 24 pages, but the crucial part only takes him about 4 paragraphs.  He starts by quoting the TPS’ originating language: “There is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection.”

Even though Alito goes on to parse the specific language here – he cites the definition of “determination” in the OED and three other, American dictionaries, for example – he first follows the quote above with the obvious observation: “This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad.”

Indeed it is.  But the leftists fighting the issue still cover their eyes and ears and ramble through a series of ridiculous claim that the TPS charter doesn’t actually say and mean what it obviously says and means. 

In response, Alito enumerates the left’s arguments before taking them apart at the joint, setting the demolition up with a curt statement that, “Respondents and the courts below offer several theories to overcome the plain meaning of the judicial-review bar, but none is sound.”  

One example of Alito taking the scalpel to the leftist arguments involves the issue of Trump’s supposed racist motivation for ending TPS, as seen in his comments on Haiti being a “sh*thole country.  (The legal cliché, “The truth is an absolute defense” just popped into my mind, for some reason.)

Alito responds on page 22: “Ironically, both [the plaintiffs’ lawyers] identify a strong, race-neutral explanation of these officials’ statements: the present administration’s general stance on immigration and its obvious antipathy toward past administrations’ TPS policies.”  He points out that so far, 13 TPS designations have come up for renewal during Trump’s second term, and his DHS has ended TPS in each of those cases.   

He then goes on to list the nations with TPS status that Trump has ended, some of which are Asian, Central Asian, South American, or Central American, as well as African.  He dryly notes, “Most would regard this as a racially diverse group of countries….”

Yep.

Kagan writes the dissent, joined by the two other lefties on the court, and spends the majority of her case arguing why the “TPS is not open to judicial review” language doesn’t actually mean that, and also that Trump’s boorish comments about Haiti show that his only possible motivation is racism, despite the fact that Alito dispositively disposed of that claim.

And then she closes by making emotional, heartstring-tugging appeals through anecdotes about the specific plaintiffs.  The Haitian guy has held TPS for 15 years, works in a lab researching Alzheimer’s, and has diabetes.  The Syrian lady has been here for 13 years, has a job working with disabled people and taking care of her elderly mom.  Also, she fears that her 17-year-old daughter will have a tough time in Syria because she speaks little Arabic. 

As with so many of the leftist arguments, those have nothing to do with the law, which should be the substance of any SCOTUS case.  Personal anecdotes aren’t supposed to decide legal issues; if they did, each ruling would be thousands of pages long, with both sides compiling emotional stories of affected individuals. 

The giveaway proving that the leftist justices are essentially activists in robes is that just like partisan lefties in Congress and the media, they NEVER recount emotional anecdotes that don’t support their own political preferences.  They’ll talk about how much the Haitian guy and Syrian gals’ lives will be disrupted by sending them home after they’ve been here for so long – without realizing that that is a great reason to NOT allow temporary protection to turn into long-term/permanent protection! And they’ll try to turn Pretti, Good and George Floyd, etc. into innocent martyrs. 

But they’ll never talk about Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, or the hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans assaulted, robbed or murdered by immigrants, many of them here on TPS, or about taxpaying American citizens being forced to spend untold billions on allowing foreigners to enter and stay in our country, in contravention of our laws. 

Thankfully, in the last few years a majority of SCOTUS justices have staying out of the legislating business.  However, I’m still bracing myself for the upcoming ruling on birthright citizenship, which ought to be overturned, but almost certainly won’t be.  

Still, SCOTUS has been doing the right thing lately.                                                         

Not because most of their rulings have agreed with my political preferences, but because they have been following our laws as written.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Today’s Theme is Chickens Coming Home to Roost (posted 6/26/26)

First up is the story of the Kansas City fare-free bus experiment, which began in 2020, and inspired Commie Mamdani to try to repeat its dazzling success in NYC.  If by “dazzling success” I mean “miserable failure.”

Which I do.  Because the Kansas City scheme just went down in flames. 

Or is it “up in flames?” 

Well, it involved buses, so they most likely just burst into flames and then rolled – slowly and sadly – until they went over a curb and then crashed into a tree. 

You don’t need me to explain why it failed, because you’re not low-IQ children, or socialists.  (But I repeat myself.)  But just in case a socialist wandered across this column: giving “free” things to incentivize dead-beatery doesn’t work. 

The geniuses in KC estimated that the magic buses would cost $8 million per year to run.  Annndddd… “The true cost of running a free bus network was later found to have skyrocketed to roughly $15 million annually, partly due to unexpected costs and inflation.”

Say it with me, people: Unexpectedly!   

The one actually unexpected part of this story was the reaction of a shockingly sane Democrat, in this case Rich Azzopardi, who ran Andrew “Grandma Killer” Cuomo’s campaign against Mamdani. 

When a NY Post reporter told him that the KC plan had gone belly up, he said.  “This is my shocked face.  The math was never going to work.”  He also suggested that Mamdani drop his bus plan, and also his “nonsensical Soviet-style grocery stores, too.” 

Rich Azzopardi is now officially the smartest Democrat in New York.  And boy is he lonely!

Speaking of New York Democrats…holy moly!  How about that primary election bloodbath on Tuesday?  Every far-left Dem ran even farther left, only to find that a bunch of true whacko communists had already outflanked them on their left, sprinting – full-Stalin style – toward Gulag City.

(Which, I suggest, they should re-name NYC in about 18 months.  “Come for the breadlines, stay for the violent orgy of cultural collapse!”™)

And yes, I’m using the word “communist” instead of “socialist” because I’m a stickler for accuracy.  (And also, you say “po-tay-to,” I say “po-tah-to.”)  Because in the real world – as opposed to in Marxist theory, which claimed that socialism would transform into communism, in the desolate fantasies in Marx’s imagination – there is no real difference.   The second “S” in “USSR” stood for socialism, and the graffiti in Havana said “socialismo,” but everyone knew Russia and Cuba were crawling with commies.  

Hilariously enough, one of the dopes who got both hammered and sickled was the oleaginous Dan Goldman, one of the sleaziest of the virtue-signalers during the lawfare against Trump, and a nepo baby worth around a quarter of a billion dollars as an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. 

An article on Townhall on Wednesday summed up the ramifications of the primaries by citing studies claiming that NYC will likely lose around $12 billion from Mamdani and his comrades’ war on the wealthy and successful. 

They also provided a picture that is worth at least 12 billion words, which showed Mamdani celebrating with Brad Lander on one side of him and Darializa Avila Chevalier (a fringe character who is in the 7th year of a Sociology PhD program) on the other.  The caption of the picture of those three read: “22 years in college, 0 private sector jobs.”   

Yep.

What a year!  We’ve gotten rid of Jasmine Crockett and Al “wolfman” Green, and now Dan Goldman.  And sure, the new NYC commie congress-weasels are going to be terrible.  But by the time the 2028 election rolls around, they will be providing some grim cautionary tales to remind rational voters why they can’t vote Democrat.

Speaking of which: Que Mala! 

Did you hear Que Mala’s rambling answer in her interview with Don Lemon?  For your sake I hope not, because life is too short to spend time watching Don Lemon talking to that empty pantsuit.  Unless you’re me, and have to take one for the team.

Anyway, after a Tolstoy-length digression about light and the future and many other disjointed semi-ideas, she arrived at the compelling thought that we all need to have hope, and that – I am quoting here – “Hope should be a verb.”

It IS a verb, you moron.  As in, “I hope that Que Mala runs again in 2028, so that we can see her humiliate herself and torture the Democrats.  AGAIN.” 

Meanwhile, in Maine, Graham Plattner continues to be a never-ending font of cringe.  Most recently, he blurted out that he really loved Planned Parenthood, because that’s where he used to get his testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

Ew!  Especially given his terrible record of abusing women, does anybody ever want to think about Plattner’s off-the-rails sexuality?      

Between this and his erotic fixation on self-pleasuring in porta-potties – I wish I were making that up, except that if I had the kind of mind that could make that up, I’d be as unhinged a perv as Graham Plattner – how weird is it that getting a notorious Nazi tattoo would not even be one of the top 3 worst things this creep has done?! 

The top two of my personal list would include his evil, sneering disparagement of a fellow American soldier who was badly wounded in an effort to draw Taliban fire away from his comrades, and his beating of women.  Third place would be his deranged desire to rape a hypothetical home invader, but – according to Mr. Maine Kampf – “not in a gay way.” 

Yikes.  First of all, I’m no licensed sexologist, but I’m not sure a guy can fantasize about raping another guy without at least a little gayness in the mix there somewhere. 

Second, WTF?  If you’d asked a 16-year-old me, I might have fantasized about Farrah Fawcett breaking into our house in Illinois.  Like when my folks and sister were gone, for some reason.  But even then, I WOULDN’T have fantasized about raping her!

I would have fantasized that she would take one look at the worldly man about town that I was at 16 – with my own freshly minted driver’s license, and a sweet ’72 Gran Torino (my dad’s) with a hood scoop and a blue racing stripe – and instantly fall in love with me.  And yes, perhaps we’d have enjoyed carnal relations, if the poor thing was too smitten with me to help herself. 

But no, rape would not have been involved.  And yes, it would have been in a very straight way.  Good lord Plattner, you don’t have to share every twisted thing that rattles through the cobwebs in that ten-cent head of yours!

Finally, there has been a lot of good news from the courts this week.  First, a judge in Texas actually threw the book at the 8 violent Antifa scumbags who were convicted after attacking an ICE facility and shooting a cop last summer.  Even though the cop survived, this was a serious crime by a bunch of vile insurrectionists, and it didn’t happen in Portland, or Seattle, or any other blue city or state. 

So the criminals didn’t get a hearty handshake and probation.  Instead, the shooter got 100 years in prison, another got 70 years, five others got 50 years each, and the final convict got 30 years. 

Because: Texas!  (And also: Trump!)  Hopefully all the other un-eff-ables out there in their mommy’s basements or on Ivy League campuses will think twice about joining the next insurrectionist riot.  (Though thinking twice suggests that they would have already thought once.  So…)

The other good news came in several SCOTUS cases.  I’m going to read several of those over the weekend, and possibly talk about them on Monday.  But I already know one of my favorite parts, which came out of the ruling affirming that Trump can terminate the supposedly “temporary” protected status (TPS) of immigrants from Haiti and Syria. 

I feel bad for the immigrants who were wrongly allowed in rather than being helped in their own countries.  But the dishonesty  of the Democrats in this is outrageous, as is their hypocrisy, especially considering Haiti.   

Obama first issued TPC to Haitians already here after an earthquake in Haiti in January of 2010.  He did so without any legislation or permission from congress, and he said that the protection would last for 18 months, though it could be renewed after that.  (Spoiler alert…)  The TPS was still there when Trump took office seven years later.  (Unexpectedly!)

When Trump’s DHS secretary announced in 2017 that the TPS would be terminated, a local judge blocked it, referring to the legal precedent of “Orange Man Bad.”

Because of course he did. 

The case was still under appeal when Trump’s first term ended, and when Biden stumbled into the White House, he immediately renewed it, and then did so again and again. 

Because of course he did.

And now the Dems have their non-binary onesies in a bunch because SCOTUS finally said the obvious: a temporary status change is, you know, TEMPORARY.  (What’s that, Justice Kinison?  OH! OHHHHHHH!!)  And if one president can unilaterally declare a TPS – like Michael on The Office declaring bankruptcy – another president can unilaterally declare the end of a TPS. 

Of course the Dems don’t see it that way.  They are only thinking of the Haitian children, who are now in their 30’s, since they’ve been here for at least 16 years.  “Won’t someone think of the Haitian children?” they cry.  “Haiti is a terrible place, plagued by crime and poverty and Haitians, not to mention earthquakes that ended decades ago.  How could someone be so cruel as to send people back to a Schiff-hole country like Haiti?!”

Remember that time when a certain Orange Menace pointed out that Haiti was a Schiff-hole country?  And all of the Democrats in the land simultaneously lost their Schiff, and threw themselves on the ground, foamed at the mouth, and howled for months that anyone who even thought such a thing should be throw in jail and maybe executed, preferably after being tortured first?

I do. 

Good times.

Have a good weekend, everybody.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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I Love Foreign Tourists Who Appreciate America, but I Don’t Like Soccer, or Obama’s Ugly Library (posted 6/22/26)

I really like the positive blog postings from all of the foreigners who came to the states for the World Cup, and have been rhapsodizing about all the great things they’ve discovered about the USA.  From the Waffle House to Buc-ee’s to the size of the country, the diversity of the landscape and the friendliness of the American people, they’ve been citing a lot of everyday things that we take for granted.

It’s especially nice to see our nation through their eyes after so many years of relentless negativity about America.  The elites in Europe have been sneering at us even as they depend on us for their defense, and for many of the inventions, innovations and trade that have enriched their lives.  Too many of the millions of illegals who have been coming here criticize everything about America even as they praise the home countries that they couldn’t wait to get away from.

And of course, way too many of our own citizens don’t appreciate our great country.  Some because they went to college and were indoctrinated into the trendy leftist disdain for everything good, healthy and normal, and some because they’ve been spoiled, and take the blessings of living here for granted, as we all tend to do. 

Against that backdrop of international disfavor and domestic carping and self-flagellation, it is incredibly refreshing to see appreciative visitors, wide-eyed with wonder and enthusiasm about everything they see as they travel across America.

On the other hand, I don’t like that some of these blogs are phony, or at least exaggerated, and driven by self-serving motives.  I’ve heard that at least a few of them are AI-generated, and that many more are coming from bandwagons of people who want to promote their own causes or blogs.  The latter makes sense, because with so many people getting into podcasting, people are always looking to find a way to get clicks and attention.

After the wild success of a few foreigners’ podcasts that have gone viral – Freddy from Germany is a particularly famous one, but you can quickly find a half-dozen others – it couldn’t happen any other way.  Americans are a huge, mostly patriotic audience, hungry for acknowledgment of the beauty of our country and the virtues of our system and culture, and for the chance to tout our hometowns and states.  So catering to that hunger would inevitably draw some inauthentic copycats.

But we shouldn’t let that dampen our enthusiasm.  I wrote several months ago about a wholesome British couple with a blog in which they traveled around the South, reveling in how welcoming and engaging everybody was.  They were taken to gun ranges to get a taste of our pride in the Second Amendment, on boat rides to see gators or do some fishing, and to local attractions and bars and restaurants of all sorts.  And this was well before the World Cup visitors and the recent spate of pro-American travel blogs.

Our country and people are mostly awesome, and it’s good to be reminded of that.  Especially because if we only watch the media, we can start to think that dysfunctional hives of malcontents – LA, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, NYC, etc. – are the norm, rather than the blessedly rare exception.

Oh, and I can’t leave this topic with one more thing I hate: soccer!

Sure, it’s great that so many foreigners came here to watch soccer, but got introduced to America’s greatness instead.  But it would be even better if they were here in the fall, and had the chance to see real football, so that they could realize how lame soccer is.  And then renounce it, and all of its foolishness.

The latest example of soccer’s imbecility came last week, when the world soccer community (shudder) went crazy because of one momentous, epoch-defining game.  It was between Cape Verde (a small island nation off the coast of Africa, with around half a million people) and Spain, which is apparently a soccer powerhouse, and a favored contender in the tournament.  It turned out that tiny Cape Verde wildly over-performed in its David vs. Goliath game.

It was a classic underdog story that transcends sports, and captures the public imagination.  Like the Miracle Mets of 1969, or the Miracle on Ice Olympic hockey game when the US beat the Russians, or when an unknown Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson.  

And the breathless sports reporting reflected the instant-classic status of the contest.  Headlines announced that “Cape Verde Pulls Off Historic Upset,” and that “Cape Verde Stuns Favorite Spain in Historic Contest,” and called it, “A World Cup Shocker.”  One story began, “It may never get better than their first day at the World Cup for Cape Verde.”   Grown Cape Verdian men were openly weeping with joy at the end of the game.

But before you wonder how tiny Cape Verde could defeat European powerhouse Spain, they couldn’t.  And they didn’t.  They tied.

I know what you’re thinking. “Martin, you hilarious, ruggedly handsome genius, only you could think up something as absurdly comic as an epic, heroic battle that ends in a tie!  Are the Miracle Mets remembered because they achieved a tie in the World Series?  Did euphoric chants of ‘USA! USA!’ cascade down on the stunned Russkies’ heads in 1980 because we tied them in the Olympics?  Ridiculous!”

But no.  I’m not making that up.  They tied. 

So your next thought is probably that that must have been one hell of a back-and-forth, edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster of a tie, where each team traded goal after goal, before finally collapsing in exhaustion.  You’re probably guessing that the final score was something like 12-12.

But no. The game was scoreless!  A zero burger!  The “highlights” of the game would consist of several minutes of clips in which one team or the other got within a quarter-mile of scoring a goal…and then failed.  The pride of Cape Verde and the indolent Spaniards played for 60 minutes – or however long a soccer bout lasts – and they scored the same number of goals together, as I scored by myself.

And I wouldn’t play soccer if you cut off both of my arms, and told me that that was the only sport I could ever play for the rest of my life.            

So, yeah.  You know everything you need to know about soccer if you just ask the question, “What would it take to achieve ‘the best it will ever get’ plaudits, and garner World War III-sized headlines in soccer?” 

Because the answer is, “A scoreless freaking tie.”    

In other news that I already wrote about recently, the Obama Library/Flak Tower/Ginormous Trash Compactor opened last week, and the ceremony was as obnoxious as the structure itself, and the man it honored.

First, because as the great Babylon Bee noted, “Obama’s library cruelly disenfranchises millions of black Americans by requiring photo ID for entry.” 

(Just as we should never stop mocking Liz Warren’s forked-tongue fairy tales about her native ancestry, we should never stop mocking leftists who claim that blacks are incapable of getting IDs to prove their identity before they vote.)

Second, because the speeches were kicked off with that hallmark of hypocritical stupidity and lameness, the “land acknowledgment.”  In this case, Valerie Jarrett – the grifter who is getting $750K per year to be a librarian at a library with almost no books in it – gave a shout-out to “the Nishinabe, the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatami” who originally occupied Chicago, I guess. 

I really wish that all Americans would start heckling anybody who gives a land acknowledgment in public ever again.  Something like, “Give it back, you virtue-signaling hypocrites!” or “My great-grandpa was on the Council of Two Fires, before those Council of Three Fires jackasses stole the land from him.  Boo!” 

However, in this case, that wouldn’t work, because any Ojibwes or Odawans who might be wandering by and get offered the Obama Library land back, would take one look at that gigantic, ugly, inverted paper shredder and back slowly away with their hands out in front of them, saying whatever is Odawan for, “No way Jose!  You can keep that monstrosity.”

Third, like you, I thought that Jarrett’s opening would be hard to top when it came to unsettling comments from the dais. 

But that was before I heard Obama’s odd opening words: “Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station.”

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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The Left’s Argument Against Colonizers: We Agree, But They’re Not Going to Like It (posted 6/19/26)

Recently I’ve come across the same politically tendentious topic – colonization – raised in two different and interesting ways, and both involved pushing back against the dominant, mostly leftist narrative on the subject.

Everyone knows that narrative: Colonizers are bad.  They’re powerful.  They’re aggressive.  They’re outsiders and bullies who come into someone else’s land and wreak havoc, victimizing the locals and taking over, and then exploiting the natives and their resources for their own benefit. 

Of course there is a lot of truth in that narrative.  Much of history is taken up by stories of more powerful and technologically advanced peoples – sometimes just more violent ones – expanding into foreign territories and colonizing them.  Some empires are less brutal than others, and some cultural exchanges are more one-sided than others, but there seems to be a central template for the practice.

Today there is a general sympathy for the colonized and hostility toward colonizers, in ways that often transcend politics and cross political lines.  Especially in a culture with a Judeo-Christian DNA and heritage – even though that heritage has been receding for the last century or more – our Ur-texts demonstrate empathy for and see virtue in the downtrodden.  (Blessed are the meek; the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, etc.)  We tend to naturally sympathize with the little guy, and the underdog.  (We are on Team David, vs Team Goliath.)

But that has not always been the case.  Warrior cultures by definition valorized combat and conquest.  Self-confident cultures often saw aggressive expansion as bringing the benefits of their superior culture to their neighbors; that was always self-serving and arrogant, and in some cases it was complete BS.  (I’m looking at you, jihadist Islam.)

But not always.  The Greeks and the Romans brought many benefits to the peoples controlled by their empires, as did the British, and some of the other European powers.  Along with the coercion and subjugation, colonies got more functional political systems, and more advanced scientific and medical innovations.  Trade often benefited both sides, even if not equally so.   

But while colonization was often seen as a complicated or nuanced process, today it has been totally subsumed in leftist politics, and thus turned into a Manichaean, caricatured moral soap opera of black-and-white categories.  Marxist economics casts the rich as evil oppressors and the poor as the noble oppressed.  Leftist identity politics sees gender and race through a lense of good and evil: females are enlightened and cooperative, males are toxic and competitive; “people of color” are innocent victims, whites are guilty victimizers.

So it follows that colonizers are always and everywhere the rich, white, male exploiters (i.e. the worst bad guys) and the indigenous/colonized are the poor, non-white, female-coded exploited (i.e. the best good guys). 

Of course that conception is so over-simplified as to be ridiculous to all but the wokest of the lefty wokesters, and I know I’m not telling you anything that you didn’t already know.  But an article in American Greatness – I highly recommend that site – by Spyridon (Don) Andrews called, “Indigenous Nonsense: History Doesn’t Care Who Got Here First” really lays the case out perfectly. 

A month ago I wrote about “clock setting,” which is the idea that you can win an argument if you are able to decide where to start the story.  In the context of colonizing, clock setting arises when one side claims to have “gotten here first,” which Andrews rightly takes apart.

Mexicans partial to arguments of groups like La Raza say that much of the southwestern US is rightly Mexican, because they were here first, before American colonizers pushed them out by winning the Mexican-American War in 1848.  But Spaniards would say that they were in modern Mexico first, before Mexicans defeated them in the Mexican War of Independence in 1821.  But Aztecs would say that before the Spanish showed up around 1500, they’d run the place for two centuries. 

And many small tribes would say that THEY were indigenous to that area before the Aztecs showed up around 1300 and started cutting thousands of beating hearts out of chests every other Tuesday.        

So everybody is a clock setter.  Or a sun-dial setter, or whatever. 

Andrews points out that there is nothing necessarily morally elevated about being an indigenous group, or morally debased about being a colonist, and that “I was here first” might carry weight on a playground, but not in a serious, historical or political argument.  (I’m paraphrasing him.)

Andrews criticizes the kind of leftist multiculturalism that claims no culture is superior to another, while at the same time assigning an inherent moral superiority to “indigenous” cultures.  Which, you may notice, is self-contradictory, and stupid.

He cites the examples of various African countries.  Inconveniently for a modern lefty, all of those countries’ histories were characterized by one tribe after another colonizing the place, and then being colonized in turn, long before the first European whitey ever showed up. 

Though he doesn’t put it this way, would you rather live in Rhodesia under the colonizing Brits, or newly re-christened Zimbabwe under incompetent, indigenous thug Mugabe?  Would you rather live in Uganda under the colonizing Brits, or when it was run by indigenous monster (and cannibal!) Idi Amin?    

Annndddd…AOC and the Squad got both answers wrong.

Andrews ends his article eloquently: “In the end, legitimacy is not inherited. It is earned. It does not arise from ancestry, mythology, chronology, or blood. It arises from competence, justice, liberty, opportunity, and the rule of law. The question is not who was here first. The question has always been, and will always be, who governs well.”

Coincidentally, not long before I came across Andrews’ article, I heard The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh discussing the murder of Englishman Henry Nowak by Sikh British citizen Vickrum Digwa, and Walsh’s word choices startled me.

He referred to Nowak as “an indigenous Briton” and Digwa as a “colonizing foreigner.” 

It’s a provocative reversal of our usual expectations, of course, and at first blush it came across as a sarcastic jibe.  But upon reflection, I think Walsh is right to point out that leftist-driven anti-white racism has completely inverted power politics in today’s England, and it got Henry Nowak killed.   

In the culturally dominant (lefty) narrative, Digwa would be the put-upon victim.  A non-white minority in a white-majority nation, he practices a foreign, minority religion in a nominally Christian nation. 

If his encounter with Nowak had been a racial parable told in a leftist cocktail party or faculty lounge instead of a real-life story, we’d expect it to go about like a black man’s confrontation with a white man in the South when it was run by Democrats and their Jim Crow laws.  A black guy has a confrontation with a white guy and stabs him to death.  The (white) police are called and yada, yada, yada…the black guy ends up in the electric chair or lynched.

But in real life, the story unfolded in exactly the opposite way.  Digwa is actually a colonizer – a foreigner with cultural power that gives him the arrogant confidence to impose his will on the indigenous population.  The indigenous Britons cannot carry weapons in public, but Sikhs have special privileges to carry ceremonial knives, because the native justice system submissively gives their foreign religion special accommodations. 

Digwa is the aggressor, and he stabs Nowak several times, including in the back of his legs when he tries to flee for his life.  Far from being worried about the police, the privileged Digwa knows that they will take his side against the indigenous nobody he has just stabbed.  So he calls them and lies that Nowak was racist toward him, and attacked him.  The cops show up, and just like good ol’ boy southern sheriffs, they accept his version, despite its variance from the facts right in front of them.

Digwa is unharmed, while Henry is curled up on the ground, bleeding and gasping for breath. So the cops ask Digwa if he’s been hurt, and then treat the dying Henry like a criminal, mocking him when he claims to have been stabbed (“I don’t think you have, mate,”) and then dragging him on the concrete and handcuffing him, despite the fact that he is obviously no threat to anyone. 

When Henry dies without prompt medical care, the indigenous government kowtows to the powerful colonizer, treating him with kid gloves (he was reportedly not even handcuffed when he was arrested), and starting a PR campaign to cast the indigenous white victim as the racist aggressor, until overwhelming video and forensic evidence force them to reluctantly charge Digwa.   

And even THEN, the government’s main official response has focused on warning the powerless racial minority of the indigenous public (white Britons now make up less than 37% of London residents, according to the UK Office for National Statistics) against saying anything negative about or responding angrily to the culturally dominant, colonizing foreigners of color who are politically favored in their country.     

Like most white folks, I don’t enjoy talking about race.  But the left’s anti-white racism – here and around the world – has gotten so common and so hateful that it can’t help but provoke some harsh reactions.  In the UK, the murder of Nowak, the attempted beheading by a Sudanese colonizer in Ireland, and the systematic, mass rape of a quarter million indigenous British white girls by Muslim colonizers have produced outrage.

Until now, the Left has cowed most Europeans into submitting to waves of non-assimilating migrants from the Third World.  They’ve also managed to get many Americans to passively tolerate millions of entitled foreigners illegally pouring into his country. 

But that momentum seems to have been reversed.  Americans elected a president to shut the border and deport illegals.  The Irish and the British have been protesting in the streets at the cruel government that has ignored their pleas and forced a kind of secular, abusive dhimmitude on them.

Even the European Parliament, within the last 48 hours, passed a vote on the Return Directive, “the first measure to seriously restrict immigration at the European level.”  After the vote, loud chants of “Send them back!” broke out.  In the formerly castrati-ridden EU!

So I’ll end where I began.  We’ve heard the elite left’s message about colonizers.  They’re bad, and powerful and aggressive.  They’re outsiders and bullies who come into someone else’s land and wreak havoc, victimizing the locals and taking over, and then exploiting the natives and their resources for their own benefit. 

We’ve seen that a lot lately, in Somali Learing Centers and fraud rings in MN, and Mexican flag-waving riots in LA, and attacks on ICE and law enforcement in blue cities from coast to coast. 

The citizens of Europe and America have heard the leftists’ rants, and their chants, and their righteous anger, and they’ve convinced us: Foreign invasions and colonizing are bad, and the indigenous population should resist them.

But something tells me that the left is not going to like it when they are on the receiving end of the argument they’ve been aiming at us.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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A Happy Dead Guy Story, & a Sad Architecture Story (posted 6/15/26)

Let’s start this Monday on a happy note.  Dack dook is dead!

I don’t know if I’ve got that pronunciation right.  But I’ve got the facts right.  Dack dook has been turned from a bad terrorist into a good terrorist.  He’s assumed goat-barn temperature.  His birth certificate has been revoked. 

The IDF announced on Sunday that they took out Hezbollah senior commander Ali Mussa Daqduq.  Details on the nature of the “strike” that brought the FO in response to Dack Dook’s many years of F(’ing)A were sparse, but I’m guessing that the cause of death was HVBS (“High Velocity Ballistic Suppository”) and that he’ll get a closed-casket funeral. 

His resume is about what you’d expect from a jihadi creep – leader of the Golan Terrorist Network, killed lots of Jewish civilians and children, kidnapped and murdered 5 American soldiers, etc. 

Good riddance to a bad goblin.  (Also, I wish Trump would stop telling the IDF to quit retaliating when terrorists continue to fire missiles into Israel.  As long as Dack Dook types are still messing with the shofar, they need to keep getting the horn, IMHO.)  

Turning to a less happy story, Obama’s monstrosity of a “Presidential Center” is finally going to open to the public this Friday, so be sure to pick up your over-priced tickets and prepare to start camping out in lines around the block right now. 

I’ve written a little about this before — I mentioned that you’ll know it’s open once the ominous, gigantic Eye of Sauron bursts into hellish flame atop it – but the telling details continue to roll out on a daily basis.  It has become the physical embodiment of Democrat ideology, manifesting as it does the leftist trinity of ugliness, incompetence and financial corruption. 

The ugliness strikes you immediately.  This is the architectural equivalent of a typical un-eff-able AWFL you might see at an anti-ICE riot: a lumpy body, holding up a sneering, multiply-pierced face, topped by purple hair, and carrying a clearly obscene and yet obviously misspelled sign. 

If this building were a person, you know it would hate its dad, and shout its abortions.

The land it desecrates – er, sits upon – was a National Register-listed park-scape designed by Frederic Law Olmsted, the master who gave us Central Park, the Biltmore Estate, and the Stanford campus, among many others.  But what does he know, compared to Mr. “If you like your doctor, you can keep your Doctor?”

The monstrosity that Obama plunked down onto that space evokes the work of another well-known architect, Albert Speer, who designed the glowering flak towers in Berlin after the tide had turned against the Nazis in World War Eleven.  (Don’t look now, but that reference has Graham “Maine Kampf” Platner as aroused as if he were flouncing through a field of porta-potties.)

It’s nearly windowless – one suspects because otherwise the poor souls who find themselves trapped inside it might hurl themselves out into the grim embrace of death.  And it has words from one of Obama’s speeches silhouetted in gigantic letters that wrap around two sides of the building.

Fittingly, they are very hard to read.  But this might be a case of form following function, since Obama’s speeches often made no sense, but when they did, they were hard to stomach. 

All across the spectrum, the reviews are in, and they are not good.  It’s been described as, “a fortified sci-fi prison,” a “stocky, truncated obelisk,” a “Klingon prison,” a “lecture in stone,” a “grim, repellent violation of all that is good and holy,” and “what would happen if Stalinist brutalism and Hitlerian self-mocking gigantism had a baby.”

Okay, those last two were mine.  But I stand by them completely.

But it’s not just the ugliness, it’s the incompetence.  Just like Newsom’s phantom bullet train in California, Mamdani’s “free” grocery stores in NYC, and Obamacare before it, the budget projections for Obama’s eyesore were a cruel joke.  The building was originally projected to cost $300 million.  That had crept up to $500 million by 2017, and then to $700 million by 2021, and is now coming in at around $850 million! 

Which means that if an honest audit were ever done on its real cost – don’t hold your breath – the final tab will likely be an even billion or more. 

And for that we get what one illustrious architecture critic has called, “an enormous granite bowel-movement defacing Chicago’s south side.” 

Okay, that one was me again.  And I still stand by it.   

But those obscene, bloated budgets are where incompetence shades into financial fraud.  The Obama Foundation was given a sweetheart 99-year deal on the land – over the heated objections of many little-guy area residents – for a payment of just $10.      

And even after burning through a ginormous pile of cash, the Barack brain-trust has still managed to stiff a wide array of contractors, many of them black!  The president of the African American Contractors Association said that at least seven black-owned subs have asked him for help over missing payments, some of which are in the seven figures.

It’s hard to untangle all of the lawsuits going on to try to get the elite leftists in charge to keep their word and pay their bills.  (Good luck!  And again, don’t hold your breath!)  But the largest single lawsuit – against the structural engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti on behalf of a black-owned sub – is for $40 million, and the amounts various contractors have been promised but not paid appear to easily involve at least tens of millions more. 

Hilariously enough, the black-owned sub is suing Thornton for having blamed delays and cost overruns on underperformance by minority-owned subs, and for having allegedly claimed that “firms that were not minority-owned could have completed the work without problems.”  

To paraphrase Jay-Z – I know, if I’m not quoting Shakespeare or the King James Bible, I’m constantly quoting Jay-Z – it sounds like this project had 99 problems, and DEI was definitely one!   

But don’t worry.  Even if the ugly Obama-drome project screwed a bunch a bunch of working guys, you can rest easy knowing that his cronies in the Democrat elite were all greased with obscenely high salaries.  Obama made his old Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett the CEO, and last year she was paid $740,000!  The executive VP of the project got over $600K, and the group’s “chief legal and people officer” (whatever that is) got $425K.

Did I mention that the Obama Center has put out a call for unpaid volunteers to work in his hideous monument?  I’m not making that up.  Val Jarrett is hammering checks for three-quarters of a mil per year, but Obama needs gullible peons to work for free.   

If you still haven’t thrown up in the back of your mouth, consider that the Obama Foundation had promised that they would build the thing entirely with private donations from fat-cats and billionaires (who I’ve been reliably informed are really evil…unless they are nepo-babies or leftists, I guess?) They also assured Chicagoans – when they got that sweetheart price of $10 to buy the land – that they’d create an endowment of $470 million “as basically an insurance policy so the taxpayers wouldn’t get stuck with the bill.” 

As a show of good faith, they started that fund by setting aside $1 million for that purpose at the ground-breaking in 2021.

Annnndddd…it’s still at $1 million, 5 years later.

Unexpectedly!

So to re-cap, we’ve got an ugly, wildly over-budget structure, built on graft, broken promises and the betrayal of the working class for the benefit of the rich and connected. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democrat party in architectural form. 

By the way, I have two tickets for the Obama Memorial Flak Tower grand opening this Friday, and I am looking to exchange them for two tickets to the first game of the Indiana Bears in 2027.  Any takers, please DM me.

Enjoy, Chicago!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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Causes for Optimism, Plus My Own Personal Brush with Voter Fraud (posted 6/12/26)

To start with some good news, I was glad to see that even in these contentious times, a Texas jury was able to resist the racial arsonists supporting Karmelo Anthony and render a true verdict on his murder of Austin Metcalf.  Especially considering the firehose of nonsense and racial hatred coming from Anthony’s supporters. 

One angry black woman went viral as she screamed some of the dumbest rhetorical questions you’ve ever heard: “What do you want us to do?!  I’ve got 5 boys.  I ain’t got nothin’ to tell ‘em no mo!  You can’t walk away no mo.”

Who’s going to tell her that walking away is exactly what Karmelo did NOT do, but should have done?  If he had, Metcalf wouldn’t be dead, and he wouldn’t be going to prison!

And what should you tell your boys?  Really? 

[start Kinison filter] That’s quite a puzzle you’ve got there, ma’am.  What should you tell your boys?  Gee, I don’t know…how about you tell them… DON’T MURDER PEOPLE!  DON’T STAB THEM IN THE HEART AND CREATE AN UNSURVIVABLE WOUND!!  OH!  OHHHHH!!! [end Kinison filter]

And as so often has been the case in the last several years, the most idiotic comments of the day came from pseudo-hood-rat Jasmine Crockett.  In a fact-free rant on her execrable podcast, she described the murder weapon – a 4-inch blade with serrations at the base – as some kind of tiny thing (she held her fingers about an inch apart), and concluded that, “I would have argued that with the size of it alone, you wouldn’t even think it was a deadly weapon.”

Brilliant!   How could anybody think that knife was a deadly weapon?

I mean, other than the fact that Karmelo killed a guy with it.

Speaking of Crockett, one cause for optimism is that she is just one of many jackass politicians and media figures who are on their way out this year, from both sides of the aisle.  A partial list would include leftists like Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Scott Pelley, and Katie Porter, Al “the wolfman” Green, Frederica Wilson and Imhotep Pelosi, plus RINOs like Tillis (NC), Cassidy (LA),  Cornyn (TX) Marjorie Taylor Green (GA), Massie (KY) and Cocaine Mitch McConnell (Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens).

On the other hand, I’m also grateful for a few who are staying.  The leader of that list has to be Que Mala Harris, who is currently at the top of the polls of Democrat contenders for 2028.  I don’t think there’s any way she will get the nomination, but it will be hilarious to watch her flounder through an attempt! 

Just behind her is… drumroll please… Joe Biden!  You may have seen his sad appearance at Jill Biden’s book event with Whoopi Goldberg last week, during which he wandered up to ask a question, and then yammered away without a microphone, while Jill pretended that she was glad to see him.

The great part that most people didn’t notice at the end – because Joe was once again babbling without a microphone – was when he said, “I’ve got a book coming out in September, so make sure you buy it!” 

Man, I wish I could have seen the faces of the elite Democrat power brokers when they heard that!  The thought of the worst president ever popping up again – shortly before the midterms! –to remind voters of how terrible he and his party were when they last had power? 

That is chef’s kiss (of death) perfect!  

On a more serious note, in my last column I complained about the blatant voter fraud in California, and by now we’re all sick of that story.  Mostly because the recent shamelessness in the late great Golden State is just the latest iteration of a very familiar pattern of leftists hijacking elections.

From the systematic corruption of Tammany Hall in 19th century NYC, to Huey Long’s Louisiana Democrat kleptocracy in the 1920s and ‘30s, to the old jokes I heard when I was in college in a Chicago suburb in the 1980s about “whoever wins the cemeteries will win the election,” the tradition has continued. Slimy Democrat machines have been rigging elections for the better part of two centuries. 

In the last several decades, Democrats all over the country have added a few new wrinkles to their grift, pushing a raft of voting laws that are transparently intended to invite voter fraud.  They’ve outlawed even checking voters’ IDs, and have pushed same-day voter registration as well as motor-voter schemes that automatically register everyone to vote when they get a driver’s license.  (This at a time when blue states are giving licenses to hundreds of thousands of foreigners, knowing that whether they are here legally or illegally, they are NOT legally entitled to vote.)

Wide-spread mail-in balloting, with little to no oversight or checks.  Extending voting day to voting weeks or months.  Using unmonitored ballot drop boxes.  (Watch Dinesh D’Souza’s recent documentary about that.)  Not to mention ballot harvesting, which might be the most corrupt of all.

I know: you’ve heard it all before.  But I actually had a personal experience with creepy Democrat voter fraud, during my own callow youth.

The year was 1982.  Michael Jackson’s Thriller was at the top of the charts, MTV was just a year old, and I was a college sophomore.  Which was perfect, because I was extremely sophomoric.  (My wife would tell you that I’ve never grown out of that phase.) 

That fall I took an abnormal psych class that included an internship component, which consisted of going to a local mental health facility once a week for three hours.  We were allowed to interview the staff who worked there, observe the patients when they were in common areas, and write reports and a final paper about the experience.

That was a mid-term election year, and Chicago Democrats were already experienced in ballot harvesting.  Right around election time a skeevy Dem ward heeler showed up at the mental hospital with a bunch of absentee ballots and many cartons of smokes, and after doing some glad-handing and distributing the cigarettes, he left with a big folder full of completed Democrat ballots.        

Being a typical young male, I was primarily concerned with girls and sports, and was totally uninterested in politics, so I can’t remember all of the details.  I know the employees got cigarettes, but nearly all of the patients got them, too.  (The main motivational strategy to ensure good behavior from the patients at the time was using cigarettes as part of a token economy, and it seemed like all of them smoked, including one poor guy who had already lost part of his jaw to cancer.) 

Even as apolitical as I was, it struck me as really sleazy that all of the guys we were observed – some of whom thought they were Napoleon or Christ, or that the government was listening to their thoughts – had all “cast votes” for Democrats.  I remember some jaded laughter and world-weary head-shaking among the staff about it.  But none of them seemed outraged at all, and I had the sense that that was the way things always ran in Chicagoland.  

Having said all of that, I have two main thoughts on this subject.  First, as I said in my last column, the GOP had better do everything they can to push nationwide voting reforms and anti-fraud legislation, starting with the SAVE Act.

Second, I never want to hear a self-righteous wokester sneering that a Republican presidential candidate has lost the popular vote ever again!  That’s been a leftist talking point for years – until 2024, when Trump shocked them by winning the popular vote – and they’ve always used it as a way to argue that GOP election victories are illegitimate. 

But from now on, we should throw that claim right back in their faces.  Because as long as big blue states – and big blue cities in otherwise sane purple, red or light blue states – are as transparently corrupt as California has demonstrated itself to be in this election cycle, there is no way any honest person can cite popular vote totals with a straight face.  (No offense, Jimmy Buttigieg-Talarico.)  

In fact, there’s no way to even estimate within a margin of error of many millions of votes what a legitimate final vote count might be.  And that’s on you, Democrats!

Am I saying that you should pepper-spray the next leftist who tells you that the late Joe Biden got 81 million votes in 2020, or that Nithya Raman got more votes than Spencer Pratt?

That’s exactly what I’m saying.   

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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