Tag: history

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

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

Hence, German.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately for Germany, she did not learn that. 

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

Can we please not repeat Germany’s mistakes here?

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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A Few Thoughts About the History of Slavery (posted 8/26/26)

Today’s midweek column is here because I’m in the early stages of a discussion with a lefty long-time buddy of mine about racism in America’s history, and today: how much of it there is, how it’s distributed across different ethnic groups, and etc.

As I was thinking about the subject, a short video on the racism-adjacent subject of slavery coincidentally showed up in my feed from Dominic Frisby, whom I’d never heard of before.  A little digging showed that he’s a British comedian, author and voice actor, who writes on various topics, including finance and economics. 

The piece of his that appeared in my feed was an 8-minute video on “The 10 Largest Slaveholding Civilizations in History,” which I would recommend to everyone who wants a quick overview about the subject.

Frisby starts by defining his terms, primarily differentiating between slaves and other semi-free peoples such as indentured servants and serfs.  (The distinction is important, since if serfs counted, Russia would rank much more highly in terms of numbers of people enslaved.)  Then he lists the top ten enslaving civilizations – actually the top 12, since there are two ties on the list – in terms of who enslaved the most people during their history.   He ends by giving a link to his sources; I looked at those briefly, and they do seem to fit with what I already knew of world history when I came to this video.

Here is his list:   

1. Roman Empire (actually the western Roman empire, 27 BC – 395 AD) 160 million slaves

2. Mughal Empire (1526-1857) 112 million slaves

3  Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258) 63 million slaves

4. Mali Empire (1214-1610) 57 million slaves

5. Sultinate of Delhi (1206-1526) 36 million slaves

6. (tied) Joseon Dynasty in Korea (1392-1897) and the Byzantines (i.e. eastern Roman empire, 340-1453)  with around 28 million slaves each

7. Third Reich (1933-45) 26 million slaves

8. Ancient Egypt (3000-30 BC) 13 million slaves

9.  China’s Qing Dynasty (1644-1910)  12.6 million slaves

10. (tied) – Abyssinia  (1270-1974) 9-10 million slaves

                  Umayyad Caliphate (661-750) 10ish million slaves

In his commentary at the end, Frisby notes a few surprising omissions.  The Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, another Muslim empire who was one of the most prolific slave trading empires, don’t make the list, but mostly for a very gruesome reason: they castrated their slaves, which prevented the cascading large number of slaves in future generations. 

He also notes that the Ottomans and many other slavers (especially Muslims) got many of their slaves from eastern Europe, which is why the word for “slave” – in English, Arabic, and several other languages – comes from the word “slav.” 

He also mentions that the Brits, who had a long history of slave taking and trading, don’t make the list of most prolific enslavers.  The same is true of the USA, who recent textbooks and rants from leftist activists inform me, actually invented slavery, and practiced it in much greater numbers with much greater cruelty than any nation in history.  (I chalk this statement up as confirmation of the famous Ronald Reagan (Peace Be Upon Him) quote, “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant.  It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”)  

While I already knew that a very small percentage of black slaves in the Mid-Atlantic slave trade from Africa to the New World actually went to the country that became the United States, I didn’t know HOW small.   

Of all of the black people enslaved by other black people and sold to Europeans who shipped them across the Atlantic, only 3% of those slaves went to the country that became the United States.  And in the larger context of world-wide slavery, only .002% (i.e. 2 one-thousandths of one percent) of all of the recorded slaves transported out of Africa (by Arabs and Europeans) went to the USA.  

Other politically incorrect facts that you are unlikely to hear in a self-hating Western classroom:

*Much slave-taking was intra-racial: white Vikings enslaved white Europeans; Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans; Asians enslaved other Asians, and most Africans enslaved other Africans (at least before Arab and European slavers created a big demand for African slaves, at which point Africans began to enslave way more Africans, to sell to those groups)

*Inter-racial slave-taking went in all directions, with white Europeans enslaving black Africans, brown Arabs enslaving black Africans and white Europeans, etc.  On the eve of the American civil war, an estimated 10,000 black slaves in the south were owned by black masters.

*3 of the top 12 enslaving nations/dynasties were predominately African (Abyssinia, Mali, and Egypt)

*4 of the top 12 (and 3 of the top 5) were Islamic states, accounting for 221 million slaves

*The only modern European nation on the list was the Third Reich, and the only other European nation in the top 12 was ancient Rome, in the top spot. 

*As usual, the Nazis punched above their weight in terms of evil, racking up an astounding 26 million slaves in only 12 years.  Compare that to Abyssinia, who “only” enslaved 10 million over 700 years, or Egypt, who “only” managed to enslave 13 million over almost 3000 years!

Perhaps the most damning fact about slavery for modern people: between 46 – 50 million people are enslaved around the world TODAY!  Most of their slave masters are Asian, African or Muslim.  (Unexpectedly!)  

As I will shortly be telling my lefty buddy, of course (of course, of course!) all of these facts do not mean that slavery in America was not bad, or that it is not a moral stain on our history that must be acknowledged and taught as part of our history.

But these facts ARE facts, and they do contradict and undermine the propagandistic distortions and lies that the elite left has been teaching us and our kids for decades now, among them that slavery in America was uniquely evil, that it wasn’t a part of every major society from the dawn of human history until the 19th century, and that white Americans today have inherited racial guilt from the actions of a minority of long-dead whites.

But that they have NOT equally inherited nobility and the proper gratitude of all Americans for the actions of the long-dead white abolitionists who suffered and sometimes died to end slavery in America.     

For the record, I reject the idea that anybody inherits either guilt or innocence from their ancestors.  But then again, I’m one of those oddballs who doesn’t believe in double standards, about race or anything else.

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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Dems Have Been Lying About Racism & Conservatives Again… Unexpectedly! (post 5/22/26)

As a party that has exploited racial grievance for many years, the Democrats have been having a tough go of it recently.  The fact that American society has made a great deal of progress re: race over the last 50 years or so has created a supply-and-demand problem for race mongers on the left. 

There is simply not enough real racism to allow them to play the race card convincingly enough to bully anyone who is not already indoctrinated into their vision of an evil Amerikkka.  You can see that in their sad line-up of recent candidates of proposed African-American martyrs to white racism.   

A century ago – when the Democrats themselves were in charge of white racism (!) – they had Emmett Till, and scores of similarly innocent black folks beaten, harassed and even lynched by evil whites.  And you know they’d like to champion the cause of, and profit from,  similarly righteous black victims today.

Unfortunately, the best they can do is try to canonize black criminals, who died in the process of committing crimes.  Trayvon Martin was beating a Hispanic guy’s head into a concrete sidewalk and had already broken his orbital bone and given him a concussion by the time he got shot.  Michael Brown held up a convenience store, and when questioned by a cop, beat him and fought for his gun until the cop shot him in self-defense.  Jordan Neely was a violent recidivist who was threatening a subway car full of innocent citizens when Daniel Penny put him in a defensive chokehold that accidentally resulted in his death.

If innocent black folks were constantly being killed for no reason by racist white monsters, Martin, Brown and Neely would NOT be anybody’s choice for the poster boys for innocent black victimhood.  But that’s all that leftist racial grifters have to work with. 

So they pretend that Martin was the innocent kid in his grade school graduation picture, and that Brown put his hands up and said, “Don’t shoot,” and that Neely was a benevolent Michael Jackson impersonator just minding his own business.   

To add to the Dems’ humiliation, the recent revelations about the long-running grift of the Southern Poverty Law Center have driven the point home in a darkly hilarious way.  The SPLC money train was so threatened by the lack of evil white racism that the racial arsonists on the payroll were facing the horrifying reality that they might actually have to go out and find honest work! 

And they were way too lazy and unskilled for that.  So they managed to round up a pitiful collection of the tiny remnant of KKK mouth-breathers, and a few more who were willing to cosplay as KKK members if the money was right.  And they paid them millions of dollars to scare gullible liberals, so that the SPLC fund-raising scam could continue.

But just when they thought they might have beaten the dead horse of racism back to life, the SCOTUS ruling getting rid of racist gerrymandering threatened their stranglehold on power yet again.  Immediately, one Dem politician and MSM talking head (but I repeat myself) after another sounded the alarm: “If we can’t draw tortuously convoluted district lines to ensure a heavy black majority, there won’t be any black members of Congress left!  Because: RACISM!”

Let me count the creepy, slanderous assumptions underlying that insult.

First, it assumes that blacks will only vote for black candidates – i.e. that blacks are racists – since it assumes that those gerrymandered black districts will always send black pols to Congress.    

 As with most lies, there is some truth in this.  Because every group has some racism in it, and most groups have a bias for people who are like them, racially or otherwise.  Military vets are predisposed to vote for other vets; blue collar workers or farmers for blue collar workers or farmers, etc.  So most blacks have traditionally voted for black candidates too, all things being equal.

Inconveniently for this argument, Trump got millions of black votes in his presidential campaigns, more than any other GOP candidate in the last century or more.  But if you Dems want to insist that black voters are monolithically racist against all non-blacks, okay.

Second, this claim assumes that whites will not vote for black candidates. 

Ahem.  May I call to the court’s attention a certain B. Hussein Obama, the twice-elected black president who would never have won without the votes of tens of millions of (judgment-impaired) white voters?  (In fact, tens of millions of voters who voted for Obama twice went on to vote for Trump multiple times.  Which by itself destroys the Dem narrative about the supposed bone-deep racism of MAGA.)

Or other black candidates who have received the majority of white votes in their districts, whether they ultimately won or not?  Like Tim Scott (SC), Larry Elder (CA),  Herschel Walker (GA), JC Watts (OK), Michael Steele (MD), and many others.  Some of those were great candidates and some were lousy, but all of them got a majority of the white vote.

As did Byron Donalds when he won a House seat in the free state of Florida in 2016.  And he’s the front-runner to be the next Governor, which means that he’ll win millions more white votes.    

In fact, the wrong-ness of the anti-white racial grifters on the left can be most clearly – and hilariously! – seen in Memphis and Virginia.  In the racially gerrymandered, heavily black district of Memphis, black Dem voters have been electing and re-electing, for the last 20 years… wait for it… white Jewish doofus Steve Cohen! 

And what did Cohen do as soon as SCOTUS fixed the racist gerrymander, which meant that he’d have to appeal to a more diverse electorate in November?  He withdrew from the race! 

The delicious, schadenfreude cherry on top of that just-desserts sundae is that the initial new front-runner for that House seat was a black female GOP candidate!  Now that there is going to be a vigorous primary, she might not be the eventually nominee. But how sweet would it be if the Democrat “black representative” (who is white) is replaced by the GOP “white supremacist representative” (who is black) in Tennessee 9?!

Phony Democrat race-baiting was also evident last November in Virginia.  There, the vast majority of supposedly racist conservatives voted for the black candidate instead of the white one.   

And spoiler alert, the vast majority of supposedly black-supporting leftist white voters voted for the whitest woman this side of Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) and against the blackest woman this side of Lawrence Taylor (Winsome Sears). 

And the whitey won!  So hooray for non-racist Democrats!  (Sarcasm very much intended.) 

The reality is that despite the Democrats claiming that all voters are motivated by race above all, that is not even remotely true.  The Dems themselves would be thrilled to have white Steve Cohen stay in his seat, instead of a black female conservative, which gives their game away.

Voters on both sides of the political spectrum vote based on a variety of prioritized factors, with race coming pretty far down the list for most of us. 

I can’t speak for all conservatives – although what a utopia this country would be if I did! – but I have two priorities that are far above all others: I want conservatism and electability.  Thus I’ll always vote for the most electable conservative in every primary or general election. 

Beyond that, I don’t care nearly as much if they’re black or white, male or female, straight or gay, ugly or attractive, tall or short, fat or thin, rich or poor, sick or healthy, Christian or Muslim or atheist, or anything else.

Which is not to say that I wouldn’t use some of those other factors as tie-breakers, especially in primaries, where two candidates might appear to be similarly conservative and electable.  In that case I would prefer a Christian over an atheist or Muslim, because I am a Christian and trust a Christian ethical worldview more than a Muslim or atheist one (I’d be a pretty lousy Christian if I didn’t!) 

I’d also lean toward an attractive candidate over an ugly one – because most voters would probably vote for the former over the latter, all else being equal – and a rich one over a poor one – because a more well-financed candidate has a better chance, all things being equal.

After that, I’d probably have preferences in some of the other categories, too.  I’d rather have someone young than old, thin than fat, and healthy than sick – because the former indicate a candidate with a better statistical chance of being able to serve longer and at the peak of his/her powers. 

But again, it’s all about conservatism and electability.  I’d MUCH rather vote for an old, black, fat, atheist, gay, female conservative than a young, white, thin, Christian, straight male liberal!  

Because no matter how often leftists pretend that we’re all voting based on race, ideology and electability are much more important.

Which is yet one more proof of how diminished racism has become in America today.  So, sorry lefties, but race baiting isn’t going to work on most of us anymore.  You’re going to have to find legitimate, positive reasons for Americans to vote for you. 

And I’ve seen your candidates.  So…

Good luck with that! 

Que Mala/Crockett ‘28!

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The Godfather, Vigilantism, & anti-ICE Protests, Part 2

In the last column I discussed the opening scene of The Godfather, and how leftist protesters wrongly see themselves as the good kind of vigilantes when they are quite the opposite.  But I left two groups out of that category.  Because it’s not just the protesters, but elected politicians and many judges who are also acting as vigilantes, IMO.

Which seems counter-intuitive, to say the least.  How can elected leaders – Mayor Small Frey and Governor Jazz Hands – become vigilantes who rebel against the government when they run the government?  And how can judges – Boasberg and the hundreds of Boasberg clones throughout the nationwide district and (sometimes) appellate courts – be circumventing the laws when they are in charge of upholding the laws?

The answer is simple: the politicians and judges are local officials who are opposed to the federal laws of the land – embodied in our Constitution, our immigration laws, and the sections of the U.S. Code that deal with interfering with federal officers in the performance of their duties, etc.

So yes, elected officials and local judges can be insurrectionist vigilantes in 2026, just as their Democrat forebearers were in the Southern slave states in 1861.

Having said that, I’d like to turn to the potential for right-wing vigilantism, if the current administration isn’t able to stop the lawless anti-ICE protests occurring in various blue states and sanctuary cites around the country.  I hope it doesn’t come to that, because vigilantism is always fraught with dangers for a society. 

But as I discussed in the last column, it can also sometimes be a proper course of action. 

Let’s briefly revisit the Godfather.  The mortician comes to Vito as a patriotic American citizen.  “I believe in America,” he says, in the words that open the movie.  “America’s made my fortune.  And I raised my daughter in the American fashion.”

He is, in other words, the kind of legal immigrant we would like to see.  He appreciates the country and the blessings it’s given him, and he has assimilated.  When his daughter is attacked, he goes through the proper, legal channels (the cops and the courts).  

But it’s significant that his name is “Amerigo Bonasera,” meaning “America, good night.” Because the American government betrayed him in his hour of need.  So now, the proper (though morally problematic) course of action is to go to the Godfather for the justice that the justice system did not provide.

Vito knows that, even though his initial words demonstrate why mob justice (in this case, literally “mob” as in Mafia) was his preferred first choice: “Why did you go to the police?” he asks. “Why didn’t you come to me first?”

The answer is clear for all of us conservative, law-and-order types: Because we SHOULD go to the police.  They’re supposed to protect us from criminals and give us justice.  And in a society in which the justice system is functioning properly, all vigilante action would be disordered and wrong.

But when the government has failed (or even intentionally abandoned) its core function of protecting citizens from criminals – I’m looking at you, Democrat party! – many people see vigilante justice as a viable option. During the dark days of the Biden maladministration, as we watched millions of foreigners lawlessly pouring over our border, day after day for years, many of us on the right and center felt a kind of growing desperation and despair. 

A few states took small steps toward taking the law into their own hands, Texas being one example.  When Governor Abbott pleaded with the feds to enforce the border in his state, he proposed that Texans secure their own border, if the feds wouldn’t.  When Biden forbid Texans from protecting themselves – immorally forcing Texan citizens to suffer the ongoing harm from the flood of illegals – Abbott appealed that to higher courts, while in the meantime defiantly maintaining his own barriers at the border.

Fortunately, there is a sane but narrow majority on SCOTUS that allowed Texas to reinforce their border, even if only on a watered-down technicality, i.e. the barriers that Biden started destroying were on municipal or private land, not federal land. 

But that was a terrifyingly close-run thing.  If Hillary had been able to appoint a couple of SCOTUS judges, or if Trump hadn’t won in 2024, who knows how badly things would be going right now? 

This is why I think conservatives are being ever more tempted to explore dramatic alternatives to resist the cascade of illegitimate power grabs by national Democrats, which are still going on. The left has relentlessly attacked the integrity of our democratic republic in multiple and critical ways. 

• They’ve illegally declared sanctuary territories, in blatant contravention of the Supremacy Clause and other parts of our Constitution.

• They’ve admitted tens of millions of illegals and tried to give them the vote, and thus an insurmountable lock on all future national elections.

• They’ve resisted all attempts to ensure the integrity of our elections (through no ID requirements, unrestricted mail-in voting, vote harvesting, unvetted vote counting, etc.)

• They’ve pursued widespread judicial insurrection, via partisan local judges who transparently rule based on their political priors instead of our laws.

• They’ve allowed massive fraud networks in their states, which steal from all American citizens, since the lion’s share of the stolen funds come from the federal taxes we all pay.

For these reasons and more, we cannot allow the feds to back down, and allow insurrectionist mobs in Minnesota – or Portland, or LA, or anywhere else – to drive them out and get away with it.  That’s what happened when the Democrats started the Civil War.  Just like Small Frey saying, “ICE, get the f**k out of Minneapolis,” they said, “Federals, get the f**k out of the South.”

That time, a Republican president marshalled some forces and went down and militarily disabused them of their insurrectionist notions.  After some false steps with some 19th century versions of RINOS – I’m looking at you, McClellan! – he got himself a future GOP president in the form of bad-ass Grant, and achieved some good old fashioned “peace through strength” by 1865. 

But the Dems didn’t completely get the message.  They formed the KKK, and they passed Jim Crow laws, and after some more decades of their insurrectionist schemes, more Dem governors (the Tampon Tims of their day, except without the effeminate Jazz Hands demeanor) once again defied the feds.  They stood in the doorway of schools and harassed worshippers at churches, until another GOP president sent the National Guard to kick their arses and restore the law and the constitution.

Now we’re in the same position, and we’ve got to make the dishonest hypocritical Dems eat their own words.  For years they’ve demanded that “nobody is above the law” and “insurrection must be punished.”  We agree.  And now they need to find themselves on the pointy end of those particular sticks. 

Otherwise, the eternal call of vigilante justice, as embodied in the Godfather, might one day be listened to by American citizens who are not going to tolerate mobs of violent criminals – foreign AND domestic – taking over their cities with impunity.

Because we don’t want to see Amerigo go silently into that Bonasera. 

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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History Corner: Why We aren’t Nazis, and Trump isn’t Hitler (posted 11/12/25)

I hope you all had a meaningful and contemplative Veteran’s Day, and that you’re getting into a Thanksgiving mood.  Here in north Florida it has dropped below 40 degrees, so many locals have broken out the parkas, and are still shivering anyway. 

I’ve been paying at least minimal attention to the current kerfuffles in Washington, and am glad that this pointless shutdown is finally ending.  And it’s fun to watch the blue-on-blue sniping over that, with the most extreme lefties raging at the Senate Dems who voted to break the filibuster and end the shutdown, while those lefties try in vain to reason with Those Who Can’t Be Reasoned With. 

Note to self: Pick up another bag of popcorn at Publix tomorrow, because you’re out.

Amidst all that, I saw a few new stories of more violent attacks on ICE agents doing their jobs, and yet another rash of Dems comparing them to the Gestapo.  And this on the heels of a lefty friend of mine asking what I think of “the Right’s Nazi problem.” 

If it was anybody but him, I would have let my sarcastic freak flag fly – I keep it in my temperature-controlled flag wardrobe, along with my Stars and Stripes, my Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and my Gator flag (the latter will remain in storage until we can find a coach who can distinguish between his fundament and a hole in the ground). 

But because I love that guy, I didn’t say, “Do you mean the problem we have with the left calling us Nazis all the time for no rational reason?”

Instead, I wrote a thoughtful reply pointing out that with the exception of a handful of whackos who have no mainstream support in conservative circles, American conservatives have no connection to Nazis whatsoever.  Because we hate Nazis as much as we hate communists.

But that got me thinking that perhaps some of you would like a quick primer to summarize why the Nazi-GOP and Hitler-Trump comparisons are ridiculous, which you can share with any lefty relatives or acquaintances who raise the subject.  (Because if you just punch them in the face, then YOU’LL be the bad guy.)

So, before you can say, “We don’t deserve you, Martin!” here it is: 

First, for most leftists, “Nazi” has become an almost meaningless term of utter derision, to be applied to nearly every conservative they disagree with.  In that way, Nazi is just like “fascist” – it basically means very, very bad, and has been divorced from all historical meaning and context.

It is taken as axiomatic in academia and the mainstream left that Naziism and fascism are both right-wing ideologies.  But as with so much that is axiomatic in academia, that is at best a distortion, and at worst just false.  Because there is plenty of evidence that Naziism and fascism are more leftist than rightist ideologies.

A great book on the subject is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” (2008).  Even though Jonah has sadly contracted a severe case of TDS, he’s a very good writer, and he lays out the ideological and historical connections in great detail.    

Mussolini was a committed socialist for years, and started the fascist party only when the mainstream socialists rejected Italian nationalism.  But he didn’t reject socialism/leftism, as much as combine it with nationalism. He named his party after the “fasces” – a Latin word for a bundle of bound wooden rods/sticks that the Romans had used as a symbol of authority. 

That branding combined his love of Italy and the Roman Empire, authoritarianism, and his leftist devotion to collectivism.  (The explicit symbolism was that the weak individual sticks become unbreakable when combined into a collective.) 

A common definition of fascism starts by calling it “far right” (because of course it does), but then says that it is characterized by, “a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”

Look at that the description, and tell me what parts do NOT also apply to communism or the various “socialist republics” (USSR, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, every nation behind the Iron Curtain, etc.).

“Ultranationalist” doesn’t apply, because good commies are internationalists (workers of THE WORLD unite, and all that), and possibly “natural social hierarchy” (though that is the defacto situation in communist countries, where party members are always an elite class above the peasants).

But all the rest of that definition applies 100% to communist governments.  1. Dictatorial leader (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ceausescu et al)  2. Centralized autocracy (check) 3. Militarism (yep) 4. Forcible suppression of opposition (yep)  5. Subordination of individual interests for the nation/collective (yep).  6. Strong regimentation of society and the economy (hell yeah!)

Hitler and the Nazis, on the other hand, were such eccentric weirdos that their political DNA is tough to fit as neatly into a left/right spectrum. The Jew hatred was apolitical, and made them almost unique, in that they were fanatically devoted to winning the war…but simultaneously crippled their own war effort by devoting tons of badly needed resources – men and materiel – to killing Jews.  And Hitler’s personal pathologies and enthusiasms made his government’s policies volatile and erratic. 

Just like Mussolini, Hitler was a nationalist, and didn’t reject socialism – just international socialism.  That’s why he named his party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. (If the Nazis truly were wholly right-wing, they would be the first and only rightist party in the history of the world with “socialist” and “workers” in its name!)  But since nationalism is (correctly) usually associated with the right, and because Hitler’s most hated enemy (after the Jews) was the communists, it became easy to see the Germany/Russia conflict as right vs. left, rather than the fratricidal battle among socialists (national vs. international) that it was. 

That’s not to say that Naziism was purely a leftist ideology.   Only that it was a weird goulash of multiple, sometimes contradictory influences: right-wing nationalism; virulent anti-Semitism; Master Race/perverted Darwinist racism; and authoritarian leftism. 

What has always aggravated me is that our country (and the West writ large) has rightly come to terms with and utterly rejected Naziism, but we’ve never done the same with socialism/communism.  (I join those because Marx and most of his orthodox descendants see them as inexorably joined: socialism is the interim step in which the workers take control of the means of production, and communism is the second step in which the State withers away.  Step 2 has never happened, of course, because the theory is fatally flawed and disregards human nature.)       

It’s socially acceptable (and even chic) for college kids to wear Che Guevara t-shirts and commie iconography (hammer and sickle jewelry or pins, etc.) in a way it would never be for them to wear a Himmler or Hitler t-shirt or swastika pins. In colleges, whole fields can call themselves “Marxist” without any stigma, and I’ll bet that only a tiny minority of college kids know that Stalin almost certainly killed more people than Hitler, and Mao slaughtered more than the two of them combined, or that communism/socialism killed well over 100 million people in only a little more than a century.

I think that that’s what makes communism/socialism so dangerous: it has never been held to account and rejected, the way Naziism (rightly!) has been.  Too many people still attribute good motivations to the commies/socialists – they supposedly wanted a more egalitarian and economically fair society (some surely did, but many clearly didn’t!) – and completely gloss over the fact that that system inevitably descended into dictatorship, oppression, poverty, environmental degradation and mass murder. 

This terrible, dishonest distortion – Hitler’s crimes and 15-20 million killed are the epitome of human evil, but the gulags and 100+ million communist murders are just well-intentioned tragedies along the path paved by collectivized farming, 5-year plans and the Great Leap Forward, etc.  You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as Lenin said – is in large part the result of the dishonest and inaccurate way history is taught in America.

Finally we come to the idiotic Trump = Hitler comparison.

Hitler took power at the end of January, 1933.  Within his first SIX MONTHS, he banned other political parties and labor unions, pushed through the Enabling Act which allowed him to make laws without even consulting the Reichstag (congress), and in 18 months he’d executed over 150 leaders of a rival element in the Nazi party in the Night of the Long Knives, and taken total control of the judiciary.  Within his first 5 years, he’d invaded and subsumed another country, forced all young boys to join the Hitler Youth, murdered an estimated 70K-100,000 disabled or gay Germans, and started throwing dissidents into proto-concentration camps.

By comparison, Trump has been in office for a little less than 5 years over his two terms, and unlike Hitler in his first 5 years, he has not tried to ban the Democrat party or unions. (In fact, a near or actual majority of private sector union members likely voted for him last year).  He has not tried to abolish congress, and they’ve hampered him at every turn, tying him up in hoax investigations that took years before he was vindicated.  The oppositional judiciary has buried him in a blizzard of bogus TROs, which he’s appealed but abided by.   

He hasn’t murdered a single Republican (not even the RINOs!), Democrat, gay guy or anybody else.  He’s got Jewish grandchildren and has appointed many Jews to his administration, and he’s a national hero in Israel, after having spearheaded a peace treaty and the release of Jewish hostages. 

You know, just like Hitler did, with the Jews putting an honorary kippah on his head and carrying him out of the Reichstag on their shoulders, chanting, “Hit-ler! Hit-ler!” and “We love you, Adolf!”  

So remember: If some leftist asks you why conservatives love Nazis so much, don’t punch him.  Instead, print out this column and give him a copy.  Then say, “Good day, sir,” and turn on your heel.

If he tries to speak again, say, “I said GOOD DAY!” 

If he insists on continuing to bother you after that… commence to punching.   

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Who Are the Real Insurrectionists?(posted 10/14/25)

There is a lame tradition – at graduations, in some pedestrian columns (not mine, shut up you haters!) – of giving a dictionary definition of a well-known term as an introduction. “Webster’s defines ‘graduation’ as a ‘ceremony marking the end of a period of study,’ but it is actually the beginning of a whole new journey into a new phase of life…”

Well, I’m going to risk following that lame tradition to make an argument about a contentious political term that the left has been using as a weapon in recent years. The same way they’ve used “Nobody is above the law!” – but are now running from that claim, now that it turns out that all Democrat bad actors would very much like to remain above the law, thank you very much.

That term is “insurrection.” And here – brace for the lameness – is the definition, from the American Heritage dictionary:

“1.The act or an instance of open revolt against civil authority or a constituted government.

2. A rising against civil or political authority, or the established government; open and active opposition to the execution of law in a city or state.

3. A rising in mass to oppose an enemy.”

The Democrats have been calling January 6th an insurrection every day for years, and using it as a cudgel with which to beat all conservatives. They held sham congressional hearings over it – with no GOP members chosen by the GOP, which has been the accepted practice in such hearings, for obvious reasons – and repeated it endlessly, everywhere.

During a four-year period in which they had zero accomplishments and plenty of disasters – the Cadaver and the Cackler at the top of government, the humiliating and incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan, 9% inflation and trillions of extra debt, a wide-open border, mentally disordered males in every women’s room, etc. – the Dems have turned the “worse-than-9/11 insurrection of January 6th” into the sole reason to vote for them.

Of course, all conservatives have acknowledged that to the extent a minority of those involved in January 6th were destructive, and got violent with the police, they should be condemned, and charged and punished according to the law. And we don’t condone the bad actions that day.

At the same time, the left’s wild exaggerations and lies about January 6th required rebuttal, which we’ve done, if for no other reason than to shoot down the ridiculously exaggerated comparisons to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.

To wit: the whole thing only lasted a few hours; of the roughly 1500-2000 people who were there, only around 10-15% did anything violent at all; the majority of the protestors were middle-aged or senior citizens with clean records, who walked around inside the capitol taking selfies for a half hour or less and then departed peacefully. Even the ones who fought with cops brought no weapons, and they killed or seriously injured zero people.

(I’m not 100% sure about the “serious injury” part. But considering that the MSM wildly exaggerated every single aspect of that day – including breathlessly reporting that the MAGA-nauts brutally murdered 5 cops, when the actual number, again, was zero – I’d bet my house that no cops were seriously injured that day. Because if they had been, they’d be the most famous cops in history, and we’d all know their names the way we know George Floyd or Trayvon Martin.)

I guess if you really stretched the formal definition hard, you could say that the minority of January 6ers who fought with cops engaged in some insurrectionist – I would say insurrectionist-adjacent – behavior. I don’t think you can call a very short-lived, unarmed struggle with a small number of cops “an open revolt against civil authority” to be taken deadly seriously.

I suppose you could call it “a rising…[in] active opposition to the execution of the law,” in the sense that the ostensible goal was to prevent Biden from taking office, as far-fetched and delusional as that aim was.

But as to the third part of the definition, I don’t see how you can call a few hundred unarmed people – out of a nation of 330 million – brawling like drunken, idiotic frat boys for several hours a “rising in mass to oppose an enemy.”

Now compare that to the gigantic, repeated, months-long, nationwide orgy of violence and destruction of property committed during the BLM and Antifa protests/riots/vandalizing loot-fests of 2020, and the sustained and violent anti-ICE protests and attacks this year.

Not one nationally prominent Democrat (with the possible exception of Fetterman?) or MSM talking-head propagandist that I’m aware of has called ANY of those mob attacks acts of “insurrection.”

But let’s go back to our tripartite definition. Could these events be reasonably called “act[s] of open revolt against civil authority or constituted government?”

Obviously! The insurrectionists are openly defying our immigration laws and multiple federal agencies (ICE, Border Patrol, DHS), and opposing the well-precedented legal use of the National Guard to protect and safeguard federal property and agents.

Could they also be called “open and active opposition to the execution of law in a city or state?”

Same answer. And it’s not just happening in “A” city or state, it’s happening in MANY cities and states all across the country. And it’s happening with the open support of governmental officials on the local, state and national levels.

In my late, great home state of Illinois, Brain-dead Brandon (mayor of Chicago) and Governor Goodyear, (D)irigible, are both defying federal authority as we speak. And Mayor Brandon has declared areas of the city “ICE-free” zones.

On the one hand, that is likely to be as successful as declaring Chicago a “gun-free zone.” (How’s that working for you, Brandon? What’s that? I couldn’t hear your reply over the incessant chatter of small arms fire and bodies hitting the ground.) But on the other hand, trying to ban federal agents enforcing federal law clearly violates the supremacy clause, among other constitutional strictures.

Finally, and obviously, they clearly represent groups “rising in mass to oppose an enemy.” It’s hard to know precisely how many different people have participated in this years-long insurrection, because many of them are serial offenders, participating in dozens or even hundreds of separate riots in separate cities and states. But the numbers of perpetrators are obviously well into the hundreds of thousands, and likely into the low millions.

(Put your shoes back on and take my word for it, AOC: that’s a lot more than the several hundred bad actors on January 6th.)

But let’s get beyond the letter of the law in the definition above. Everybody can easily tell the difference between seriously threatening insurrections and momentary tantrums by tiny groups of marginalized people with no chance of overthrowing the government.

Consequential insurrections with even a tiny chance of success always involve armed perpetrators, recognized leaders among the rebels, serious organization, a plan for an end game, and strategic, coordination actions to get there (ex: taking control of armories, communication facilities, or other significant government facilities; arresting or taking hostage key government figures, etc.).

Does any of that sound like what happened on January 6th? None of those boneheads were armed. The closest thing they had to a leader was a bi-polar weirdo in a horn-hat whom nobody knew. (The logical leader for a real insurrection would have been the president who stood to retain power… but Trump never coordinated or communicated with the J6ers, and in fact explicitly told them only to protest, and to do that peacefully!) (Which would make him the Worst. Insurrection leader. Ever!)

They had no organization, no plans for an end game, and no strategic plans to gain control over any location or assets more consequential than Imhotep Pelosi’s ceremonial gavel.

But the leftist insurrectionists pass all of the tests required to be considered a serious threat. They are obviously armed with everything from slingshots, clubs and various deadly throwable objects (cans of soup, pavement, frozen water bottles) to cars (used to ram agents and their vehicles) to fireworks, handguns and long guns. They’ve murdered at least 27 people, and have badly injured literally thousands of others.

They have recognized leaders, and an organizational structure composed of associated national networks and coordinated local cells, like the 10-creature team who lured ICE agents out of a facility in TX with fireworks, and then ambushed and shot at law enforcement, striking one in the neck.

They obviously coordinate, with some supporters providing housing near ICE facilities, some providing political cover, some gathering and disseminating intelligence (including doxxing individual ICE agents and broadcasting the locations and movements of law enforcement who are carrying out their legal and constitutional roles). Others provide them with funding, and also with legal support. (One such idiot was the Vice President, who used the power of her office to solicit funds to bail out violent insurrectionists who had been arrested!)

They were also determined enough to cost literally billions of dollars of damage in just the second half of 2020: $2 billion in insured damage, and likely that much more in uninsured . And that’s not counting the costs of paying for what is likely millions of man-hours of LEO time and overtime, not to mention the costs of trying, convicting and housing those who end up in jail. Or the clean-up costs of public buildings, highways, court-houses or other government facilities and private businesses.

And they have won victories. They forced kangaroo trials that failed in many places (against Kyle Rittenhouse in WI, for example) but succeeded in others (against Derek Chauvin in MN). They set up temporary lawless zones like CHOP, even though those ended in disaster. (UNEXPECTEDLY!) More importantly, they have cowed state and local officials in many insurrectionist cities and states.

What is a “sanctuary city” if not a place where insurrectionists defeated law-abiding citizens and seized control over their public infrastructure and government, in open rebellion against our democratically established democratic republic?

I always like to apply the double-standards test to all political issues, and something tells me that the lefties who love designating “sanctuary cities” when it comes to our immigration laws would not be so happy with conservatives declaring their cities and states as sanctuary areas.

For example, I for one would love to declare my hometown a sanctuary tax-law city. If Dem mayors can declare LA, Chicago and NYC to be ICE-free zones, how about we declare half the country IRS-free zones? We demand that the IRS stay out, and we won’t obey any tax laws within our state or city borders. Starting tomorrow our gas stations will stop collecting gas taxes (gas is now $1.50 per gallon!), our grocery stores will stop collecting taxes on food, snacks, beer, cigarettes, and sombreros for use in comic videos mocking Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.

Also, we could create and distribute an app to allow citizens to track IRS agents or other tax collectors who come into our cities. We will also form mobs – and if we can’t get there, we will lionize such mobs – to surround, obstruct, attack and possibly shoot at such agents. Because everyone knows that people who enforce tax laws are Nazis and fascists.

That’s absurd of course, because we’re the ones who obey laws and pay more than our fair share, and we are disgusted by the idea of murdering people who disagree with us.

I hope the violent left has enjoyed their victories, because now we’re turning the tables on them, and helping them to reap that which they so eagerly sowed. They lectured us about how “no one is above the law,” and now we’re proving them right. (Ask Letitia, and Fani, and Comey, and Pencil-Neck, etc. how they feel about that.)

And since they screamed that insurrectionists deserve the harshest of punishments?

Coming right up, comrades!

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

History: Does Part of the US Belong to Mexico? (posted 10/13/25)

This week I’ll be doing some travelling, starting on Wednesday.  I’ll go up to TN to see my mom and sister, then on up to IL and WI to see some leaves change and hang with my cousins, before visiting mom again on the way back home. 

But I’ve been noodling around with many column ideas for a while, so I’m hoping to post columns on Wednesday and Friday, and I’ll play it by ear for next Monday.

Today, as Trump appears to be on the verge of shepherding a peace deal in the Middle East that would earn him universal acclaim – even on the left, if he weren’t so orange and trumpy – I’m going to talk about his other greatest accomplishment (IMHO): his success at stopping illegal immigration and deporting the illegals who are already here.

I want to focus on one specific aspect of that struggle, which is the ideological arrogance of some of those who have come here illegally, especially those from Mexico. 

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that many Mexicans came here for a very logical reason, which is to escape the poverty and chaos of their badly run homeland in favor of the opportunities to improve their lives and future in America. That is a worthy goal, and I don’t blame anybody who wants to achieve it.

Don’t get me wrong: if they came illegally, they’ve still got to go back.  If they voluntarily self-deport, they can have a chance to be heavily vetted, and to someday potentially immigrate legally.  (If they don’t, and they force us to catch and deport them, don’t let the door flatten your sombrero on your way out.)

But I’m not talking about those Mexicans.  I’m talking about the ones who have adopted an obnoxious and false leftist ideological fantasy that much of the United States morally and legally belongs to them.  This belief has been part of the lefty/multicultural/anti-colonizing ascendency in academia generally, and Hispanic and American studies in particular.  (Common terms are the “All of Mexico” movement, and the “Reconquista.”) 

The theory is that much of the southern and western United States once belonged to Mexico, and since taking land by political conquest is immoral and illegitimate (at least when Europeans or white folks do it), a big chunk of the USA is not really “America,” and Mexicans have a right to be here and stay here.  And maybe be given the land back officially, just as some argue that black Americans should get cash reparations or else property, in a variation on the “40 acres and a mule” formula. 

As a former academic, I encountered later iterations of this aggressively misinformed concept in the form of “land acknowledgements,” those fatuous pronouncements preceding various events (graduations, conferences, etc.) bemoaning the fact that the event is taking place on land once owned by various Edenic, noble (non-white) peoples such as the Hekawi tribe or the Wakandans, from whom it was brutally stolen by Euro-whities. (Boo, whitey!  Boo!) 

Basically, the conceit is that the imaginary Elizabeth Warrens – brown gals with long black hair in braids, deer skin dresses, and cheekbones you could skin a Tatanka with – were all dispossessed by the actual Elizabeth Warrens – translucent AWFL shrews whiter than a yodeling competition in Reykjavik in January.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  

Phony land acknowledgments were the highest form of virtue signaling, making the scolding whiners feel morally superior while costing them nothing.  (If they believed their own BS, they’d cancel the event, insist that the venue be given to the descendants of the Apaches or whoever, and abandon their own houses immediately.)  

This ideological stance only added to the larger trend of resistance to assimilation, which has made the recent explosion in illegal immigration so much more destructive than earlier waves of immigrants.  And this is obviously a significant problem with at least a large portion of Mexican illegals – and their pale-face lefty enablers – judging from the violent protests and attacks on ICE this year, including those involving flying Mexican flags and burning the American one.

Needless to say, believers in those ideas vigorously oppose any suggestion that they should assimilate to American culture!  To the contrary, they are entitled to claim the land for themselves, after which we can be required to assimilate to their culture, if they allow us to stay.

So let’s take a little stroll down history lane, and see how well this theory holds up.

Spain started controlling parts of the Americas in 1493, and started planting cities and missions in what is now the USA in 1565 (starting with St. Augustine).  Their control of parts of America lasted for almost 3 centuries, until they started weakening in the 19th century.  They lost Louisiana to the French in 1803; they ceded Florida to the US in 1819.  And then they lost the rest to Mexico in the Mexican War of Independence in 1821, who then lost it to America in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. 

So to the extent that most of the disputed Western territories that eventually became the site of the “Reconquista” political fight today (CA, AZ, NM, etc.) were “owned” by any nation, they were owned by Spain for 250 years, then by Mexico for 25 years, and then by the USA for the last 175 years. 

Which means that the La Raza rioters say that big chunks of the US belong to them because Mexico controlled it for only 25 of the last 450 years!  Needless to say, they don’t talk a lot about how the Mexicans “stole” it from the Spaniards before America “stole” it from them!  

Because after all, the Mexicans won their land fair and square, in a war, whereas the grifter gringos won it from the Mexicans…um…fair and square…in a war.  (What’s Spanish for “D’oh!”?)

And their case is even weaker when seen in the light of the racialist identity politics of most “educated” young lefties.  Because from what I’ve read, Mexico has a much more stubbornly persistent racially binary, privileged/under-privileged make-up than the multi-racial USA does.

A disproportionate number of the most influential/rich/politically connected Mexicans descend pretty clearly from the Spaniards who ruled Mexico for most of its history.  The descendants of Aztecs – shorter and more squat, with darker skin and flatter features – are easily distinguishable from the taller, lighter-skinned European Spaniards. 

And those guys were European colonizers to the core, and would be considered white in modern leftists’ racial taxonomy. 

But before you award the Nobel Prize for Victimology to the “native” Mexicans, hold on to your maracas.  Because if we canoe back a little farther into the mists of history, we find that those “native” Mexicans were actually the racial descendants of the Aztecs, who were very successful colonizers in their own right. 

In fact, Cortes’ conquest of the Aztecs was made possible in part by brutal Aztec treatment of their neighboring tribes, which motivated those tribes to take revenge on them by giving the Spaniards assistance and local knowledge.

Now I don’t believe in all of this racialized identity politics that the professional/academic left does.  I’m more of a conservative, merit-based/MLK guy, into judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.  But if I did buy into the racialist left’s taxonomy, I STILL wouldn’t think that the Mexican protestors should be fighting ICE and Americans. 

To the extent that they are Aztec-descended, they should be pissed at the Spanish (i.e. “white”) power structure that’s been keeping them down in Mexico.  To the extent that they are Spanish/white, they should mock the Aztec-descended Mexicans, because they are condemning the Spanish for colonizing them, while the Aztecs only had “Mexico” because THEY had colonized/genocided the previous inhabitants.

And to the extent that they are proud Mexican patriots/nationalists who don’t care about racial differences amongst them – and good for them! – they should be ashamed of themselves for whining that the Yankees “stole” Mexico from them 175 years ago, when THEY had stolen it from the Spanish 25 years earlier.  Just like they should feel sheepish because they resent being forced to speak English, when they only speak Spanish because a bunch of white Europeans forced it on them, and wiped out the native Nahuatl language.

However it would be fun, if they did manage to drive out the Americans and take over LA, to hack their phone systems with messages that started, “For Nahuatl, press one…”  And then they could suffer when some Aztec jerk who calls himself whatever is Nahuatl for “Bad Bunny” gives them four months to learn Nahuatl before he yowls out some terrible music at halftime of the Super Bowl of soccer.  (Making a horrific experience even worse!)

Illegal aliens’ fantasies of forcing American citizens to adapt to their own cultural norms is just one more reason to deport them.  Unlike earlier immigrants who admired America and were excited and eager to become Americans – like my Scots-Irish and German ancestors, and my wife’s Norwegian and British ones – too many illegals prefer their home cultures, and would rather create outposts of El Salvador or Somalia here, or live in Muslim enclaves with sharia law here. 

That is certainly not true of all immigrants, and I’m sure there are many Muslims who want to get out from under the jihadi freaks running their nations, and many Central Americans who want to escape the d-bags who have turned their countries into an oppressive hell-holes, and many others who just want to work hard and become patriotic Americans.

However, thanks to Joe Biden, many Democrats and some Republicans, we’ve got a huge mess on our hands now, and we got here by allowing millions of unvetted illegals to flout our laws.  But as the Secretary of War once said, “That sh*t is over!”

It’s going to be hard to devote a lot of time and resources to processing more would-be immigrants while we’re spending a fortune to deport the millions of illegals here now.  (Again, thank Joe Biden for that!)

When we do get back to vetting new immigrants, we’d better vet the hell out of them!  Because along with all of the good ones hoping to come for the same reason most of our ancestors came – before there was a welfare system or any social safety net, and you were expected to assimilate to American culture, instead of the other way around – there are many who want to come for the welfare benefits, and the chance to spread their own hatred of the West and American culture.

And we’ve already got enough leftists, thank you.  

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Celebrating Independence, & Contemplating the Left-Right Pride in America Gap (posted 7/4/25)

Well, this is my fourth column of the week, and I’ve still managed to fall behind somehow on all of the (mostly good) news that’s happening.  And I’m half-way through the process of reading the entire SCOTUS ruling from last week on nationwide injunctions. 

So my plan is to have a column on Monday with my thoughts on that great SCOTUS ruling. (Will I also be mocking Ketanji Jean-Pierre?  Damn straight.)  And I foresee another 4 column-week (at least) coming next week, if I’m going to have any chance of keeping my head above water during the deluge of winning that’s happening right now.

But I’ve buried the lede, because it’s Independence Day, and I hope you all have a great one.  

It’s hard to talk about this day without going through a bunch of cliches that are so familiar that we’re now too close to see them.  But this really is an amazing country, founded by geniuses, and with a history we should be proud of.  And while we often take it for granted, I’ve been encouraged by a feeling that there seems to be a recent uptick in appreciation for the country. 

However, that appreciation might not be as widespread as it feels to me, a fact brought home by a Gallup poll I read a few days ago, which is fascinating for three reasons: 1. It ties into a discussion I’ve been having with one of my lefty buddies recently.   2. The reporting on it was a textbook example of MSM media bias. (And no, we don’t hate them enough.)  3. It clearly illustrates a profound difference between the left and right in America.

I wrote a few months ago about several lefties who are good, old friends of mine, and in one of my recent email exchanges with one of them, I commented on those leftists who really dislike America.  In his response, he said that he hoped I didn’t think he was among them, and I assured him that I didn’t.  He’s a good man and he loves the country; I wouldn’t be able to maintain a friendship with somebody who hates my country. 

But I think it’s pretty obvious that there is a disturbingly large segment of the left who disdains America, and it includes too many of the party’s leaders, including their last living president.   Obama famously expressed his desire to “fundamentally transform” America because he thought it communicated the ambition of his policy agenda.  But many of us realized the clear inference of that statement: if you love something or someone, you don’t want to “fundamentally transform” them. 

When they look at American history, many leftists focus almost exclusively on the sins that we share with all other nations throughout history – slavery, violent clashes with earlier inhabitants, bigotry – rather than the breathtaking achievements that set us apart.  And they judge us for the former more harshly than they ever would judge other nations, while they downplay, deny or elide our accomplishments.

They don’t just view us as no better than other nations, but as much worse.  Ilhan Omar says that Somalia is better than America (though she seems frustratingly unwilling to go back there), illegal thugs from Mexico wave their flag and burn ours, and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s influential leftist screed blames America for 1619 (which we shouldn’t have to point out was a century and a half before America existed) and denigrates 1776.

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan was well calculated to enrage the left, and boy did it!   Their primary response was summarized by creepy Andrew Cuomo, then governor of one of our largest states: “America was never that great.”

On this Fourth of July, let the left have that pinched and sour lie. I’ll stick with the idea in one of my favorite poems, this one from Sir Walter Scott.  It starts with these lines:

“Breathes there a man, with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said,/This is my own, my native land!/Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,/ As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,/ From wandering on a foreign strand!”

(I wish the complainers on the left would spend a little more time wandering on a foreign strand, instead of staying here and b*tching.) 

The end of the verse switches to contemplating the rightful end such a person will come to:

“The wretch, concentred all in self/Living, shall forfeit fair renown,/ And, doubly dying, shall go down/ To the vile dust, from which he sprung,/ Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.”

Walter knew what he was talking about. 

So here’s the reporting on the Gallup poll’s results.  In 13 left-leaning publications – HuffPo, Daily Kos, Axios, Newseek, etc. – the headlines are a variation on a theme:  American pride falls to record low.  (Remember: this isn’t talking about pride in your sexual tastes or fetishes.  That was last month.) 

Several publications are a little more dramatic (“Americans have never hated being Americans more,” says the New Republic), or identify the real cause of the problem: “American pride plunges to new low under Trump,” says Alternet; “National Pride in American takes dramatic nosedive under Trump,” sneers the Daily Beast.     

So the message is clear: more Americans than ever think that America sucks, and it’s all Trump’s fault.  Unexpectedly!      

But you won’t be shocked to find that the feckless media bottom-dwellers skewed their headlines.  Because the poll itself breaks the results down by political groups, and it finds that Republicans are pretty consistently proud to be American, while pride among Independents has been slowly slipping over the last 10 years, but is still a majority position.

But the vast majority of diminished pride has happened among the Democrats, 62% of whom were proud to be American last year, while only 36% feel that way now.

So the accurate headline isn’t “Americans’ pride plunges under Trump.”  It’s “GOP consistently proud, most Independents proud, Democrats throw a tantrum like whiny little beeyotches when they don’t get their Cadaver in Chief.” 

Which leads me to my final point concerning the dramatic differences between the parties.  It’s natural for your pride to ebb and flow a little bit, depending on whether your guy is president or not. 

Even I (an optimistic, America-loving patriot) – when watching Joe Biden fall up staircases and over sandbags, and scream at the clouds like Grandpa Simpson, and poop on the Pope – had to fight the urge to wear dark glasses and a baseball cap low over my forehead in the hopes that people would mistake me for a miserable Canadian. 

But the surprising thing is that pride in our country is not only highest among Republicans, it’s much more consistent.  The Gallup poll has tracked national pride since 2001, and in the wake of 9/11, GOP pride was at 90%; for the next 24 years, it averaged right around where it is now, at 92%.  It only dipped into the 80s during the 4 years of Biden, and at its low point was still at 84%.  

The Democrats started out at 87%, and briefly touched 90% once, in 2002.  Since then it’s been a steady decline, staying in the high 70s to low 80s until 2015, when it plunged down to 42% during Trump I.  It recovered when Biden began his reign of error, but even then it only reached a high of 62.

The Independents have generally been in between the two parties.  It’s a little troubling that Independents’ pride has also been sliding – if less extremely, and with less volatility than the Dems’ – from 76% ten years ago to 53% now.  But my instinct is that if you forced Independents to declare for one party or the other, the most patriotic among them would go to the GOP, and the less patriotic to the Dems, leaving both parties about where they are now.

We probably didn’t need this poll to tell us the two main take-aways from the data. 

First, Democrats are generally less patriotic than Republicans. Over the last 10 years, which were evenly split between Dem and GOP presidents, only a little over half of Democrats (55%) said they are proud to be American, while more than 90% of Republicans said that over the last 25 years. 

Second, Democrats’ patriotism is much less steadfast; it waxes and wanes depending on whether or not they control the White House.

On both of those points, I’d much rather be on our side than on theirs.  I’m glad that we can see America with all of its flaws – and yes, these are often expressed in the foolish choices manifested in badly chosen presidents – and still love it, and be proud to be American.

Watching so many on the other side cling to their bitterness and focus it on this amazing country is hard to take.  Their rejection of our founding and traditions leads to so much unhappiness, as we’ve seen in the degradation of the big blue cities, the hollowed-out universities, and the lost reputation of the compromised legacy media. 

But we can’t let that temper our own optimism.  We’re winning a lot of battles now, and the ship of state is slowly turning in the right direction.  Our successes and their failures are making the differences between our philosophies all the more stark, and more and more people are voting with their feet,  

We’re still facing a lot of challenges, and we’ve got a lot of obstacles to overcome.  Getting our budget under control, repairing the damage caused by an open border, and cleaning up our damaged institutions is going to be a long slog.  But every generation since the founding has had to fight to preserve the republic, so we know that it can be done.  

And we can see the road the Democrats are on – in California, Chicago, and now New York City – and we know how they’re going to end up.

Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

Happy Independence Day, everybody!

Hamas delenda est!