Tag: Politics

Some Thoughts on Exploding Drug Boats, and Political Violence in America (posted 10/17/25)

Today I’ve got a little light-hearted mockery, followed by more serious thoughts about political violence in America.

I’ll start with the kind of violence I can really get behind: that targeted at cartel drug-runners.  I love the language of a RedState story on the fate of a Venezuelan drug smugglers’ boat on Tuesday.  The headline said, “Trump Reports Another Intercepted Drug Boat.” 

Yes! If by “intercepted” you mean “blown into small chunks of speed boat, cocaine, and filet of drug trafficker.” The War Department (love that name!) called it a “lethal kinetic strike.”  The word “lethal” is doing a lot of work there, because “kinetic” is something I heard a lot in physical therapy after I’d partially torn my meniscus. 

And that therapy involved neither cocaine nor rapid-onset biological disassembly of my body.

Pete Hegseth’s announcement of the latest kinetic ka-boom channeled Clint Eastwood quite nicely: “The message is clear: if you traffic drugs toward our shores, we will stop you cold.”

Which raised two questions for me:

1. Is Pete trolling the drug cartels with this?  Because from what I saw of those gang members’ transnautical experience – in which something that had been assigned “boat” at its launch instantly changed its orientation, and identified as “ball of fire” – seemed anything but cold.  In fact, I’m guessing the last words of those thugs were something like, “AIIEEEE!  Estoy en fuego!”

2. In the history of Petes, have there ever been two Petes more opposite than Fightin’ Pete Hegseth and Maternity-leave-Takin’ Pete Buttigieg?  (Not since pacifist rabbi Adolf Hersch and another Adolf H….)

Okay, now to more serious business.

In the five weeks since Charlie Kirk was killed, we’ve all spent more time than we ever wanted to spend thinking about political violence.  I’m sure my thoughts on the topic are no deeper than the next guy’s, but I feel like enough time has passed that I might be able to share some ideas without just dropping F bombs like a maniac.  So here goes.

I don’t think the main problem with political violence is the lone-wolf d-bags.  Those exist on both sides of politics, and in all religious, ethnic and social groups.  As infuriating and damaging as they can be, they are found in every human society, and they are not the core issue.

The real problem is violence that is sanctioned by the mainstream of any social or political group, because such sanction reveals a widespread social sickness that threatens the entire nation.  And that kind of violence – socially-sanctioned, approved by the mainstream – exists almost entirely on the left in the United States in recent years.

I would point to 3 leftist groups who have sanctioned violence:

1. Culturally elite non-politicians: These include actors such as Robert DeNiro — who has repeatedly fantasized about physically assaulting Trump, as well as screaming (literally: screaming) about what a dictator, Nazi, punk, coward, etc. he is – and Johnny Depp, who delivered the dead-pan, not-joking rhetorical question, “When was the last time a president was killed by an actor?”

(Ironically, the answer is, “That time when racist Democrat John Wilkes Booth murdered Republican President Lincoln.”  So, great company you’re putting yourself in, dumb-arse!)

And singers like Madonna, who openly confessed that she was thinking about bombing the White House, along with many third-rate no-talent rappers and pop wailers. 

And some of the biggest influencers and talking heads, including podcasters and streamers, as well as MSNBC and traditional media hosts.  Probably the closest thing the left has to Charlie Kirk – at least in terms of views and followers – are Hasan Piker and Stephen “Destiny” Bonnell, and both of them have openly and explicitly called for the death of conservatives.  (See my 9/29 column at Martinsimpsonwriting.com for examples.) 

2. Culturally elite politicians:  It’s hard to think of any Democrats in the House, Senate or previous White House as “elite.”  But their positions – congressman, senator, president, even SCOTUS justice – are elite, and their rhetoric has explicitly opened the door for violence, if not explicitly called for it.

(This example is the closest of the three to being bi-partisan, because our side engages in some of this too.  I’ve got to call balls and strikes, and Trump’s many references to the “enemy within” or its equivalents are not helpful.  Still, though I’m biased, I do think the Dems have been so much worse, and have acted as enemies, at least to the government (when run by GOP) and law enforcement.) 

And though the Dems point to generic calls to “fight” or “target” vulnerable Dem House seats, those figures of speech are ubiquitous on both sides of the aisle.  But has any GOP pol ever gone to the steps of SCOTUS the way Schumer did, bellowing an explicit warning to sitting justices that, “You’ll reap the whirlwind!” and “You won’t know what hit you” if you interpret the law in a way that disagrees with them?

Has any GOP congressman ever matched the level of incitement reached by Maxine Waters – with that raccoon perched on her head above that terrifying mudslide of a face — yelling that any Dems who see GOP pols in public places should, “Get in their faces, and push back on them, and tell them they’re not welcome there!” ?

3. Huge, organized groups in person, and thousands of “respectable” everyday citizens online:  We’ve all grown accustomed to mob violence carried out by Antifa, BLM, and anti-ICE/ pro-illegal groups.  But what was so shocking after Charlie Kirk’s murder was the huge number of people who appeared to be sane, functioning citizens, but who then revealed themselves to be sickening, hate-ridden monsters.

When you think of people videoing themselves being vulgar, giddy and gleeful over a bloody assassination, you think of seriously disturbed drifters and dregs of society, videoing themselves in their parents’ basements, or their squalid homeless camps, or a dilapidated single-wide.  And there were some of those.

But there were many more apparent normies.  They came from all walks of life, with the professions of teachers (K-12), college professors, and those in medicine (doctors and nurses), being well represented, as well as therapists and businesspeople, and even a few in intelligence and the military! 

And all of the anecdotal videos are backed up by multiple, widely-reported polls that reinforce what we’ve all come to know in a way many people didn’t want to believe: leftists are MUCH more likely to support political violence. 

So it’s no coincidence that this stuff happens routinely on the left, and is vanishingly rare on the right!

Did ANY mainstream GOP pols, cultural elites or media talking heads express approval of Tim McVeigh’s bombing?  Even though the attacks on Democrats in recent years – Gabby Gifford, the MN politicians, Paul Pelosi, the arson attack on Josh Shapiro’s house – were NOT carried out by right-wingers espousing right-wing ideology, have ANY mainstream GOP or conservative figures celebrated or excused any of those attacks?

All of which brings me back to where I started: even with the lone-wolf killers, the leftists among them are not scary because they are crazy.  They’re scary because they sound like “normal” mainstream lefties.

Charlie’s killer did not say that his dog or the fillings in his teeth told him to kill.  The murderers of Christian children in Nashville and Minnesota did not say voices in their heads gave them their orders.  The guy who shot Steve Scalise at the GOP baseball practice didn’t say that he was Napoleon, taking vengeance on the Bilderbergers.  

Nope.  Scalise’s shooter was a Bernie bro and campaign volunteer whose social media was full of typical anti-conservative hatred. Both “transgender” child-killers  left manifestos lambasting “transphobic” conservatives.  Charlie’s killer called him a “fascist,” just like 95% of the mainstream Dem pols and media talking heads have been doing for years. 

As disturbing as the normalized violent impulses from the left are to me, I am heartened by how rare and non-influential such violence on the right really is. 

Remember, the last time a “right wing” group came together and killed a person, it was a decade ago, and the group was the white nationalists in Charlottesville.  In that case, the most high-profile white supremacists in the country got together – and “high profile” is an oxymoron in that sentence! (The only one I could name is Richard Spencer, and I’d bet you couldn’t find 1 in 100 Americans or conservatives who have even  heard of him.) 

Those racist “leaders” put out nationwide calls for 4 months to publicize the Charlottesville rally, using all of their social networks and means of reaching their faithful band of followers.  And after all of that, they produced a group of how many tens of thousands of idiots? 

Not tens of thousands at all.  Not even thousands.  The best estimates I can find – and those were from “mainstream” (i.e. center-left or farther left) sites – were that “around 100 people” showed up.  THAT’S the high point of supposedly right-wing hate groups who have been spotted in America for the last 40 years or so, since the last vestiges of the Klan – a group with a Democrat lineage, inconveniently enough – were dismantled by federal law enforcement, using RICO, in the 1990s). 

And THAT’S what Biden and the Dems have been calling “the greatest existential threat to America” today. 

It was a ridiculous lie, and in their heart of hearts, even the Dems don’t believe it.  But DEI is collapsing, the transgender fever has broken, the hostages have been freed in Israel, and the leftist agenda is disintegrating like a Venezuelan drug boat in our Navy’s gunsights, so it’s just about all they have left.

Bless their hearts.   

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

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!

Celebrating Liberated Hostages & Response to Trump’s Success (posted 10/14/25)

This isn’t one of my usual columns, just some random thoughts on this happy day, when Trump did what other presidents couldn’t, and brought at least some temporary peace to the Middle East. 

I just spent 20 minutes watching videos of Jewish families being reunited with their loved ones who had been held for two years by evil animals in Gaza. I don’t know a word of Hebrew, but I didn’t need to.  I think these videos are going right up there in my pantheon of feel-good videos to watch now.  (Joining military members surprising their families after being deployed, people with cochlear implants hearing for the first time, dogs greeting their owners after a long time away, and election nights 2016 and 2024.)

I hope we all learn the lessons of the process that led to this day.  Lessons like, “Don’t appease terrorists.  Maim them with explosive pagers, kill their leaders (even if they’re hiding out in Qatar or Iran), and ignore the UN and spineless anti-Semitic politicians and college kids, here or abroad.” 

And whatever you do, don’t elect a morally confused leftist who can’t tell good from evil as your president.

I hate to say it, but I think that when the joy of this moment has passed, Israel is going to have to do some hard thinking about their strategy of giving up thousands of jihadi terrorists every time Jewish hostages are taken.  I can’t blame them for wanting their loved ones back, and it says good things about the depth of their love that they are willing to give up so much to rescue their people.

But strategically, it has backfired in the past, and it’s almost guaranteed to do so again in the future.  It incentivizes evil people to take hostages, and makes a mockery of the Israeli judicial system, since giving terrorists harsh sentences means nothing, when they can be set free every time more Jews are kidnapped.

For evidence, I point to the famous case of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier taken hostage in 2006, and ransomed by Israel five years later in exchange for 1027 Palestinian criminals and terrorists, including 280 who were serving multiple life sentences for terrorist acts.

Among those were terrorists who participated in bus bombings and other massacres; many had more than one life sentence, and one had 36!  One of those scumbags, with 4 life sentences, was Yahya Sinwar, who became the head of Hamas and chief architect of the October 7th terrorist attack.   

Which means that rescuing Gilad Shalit partially contributed to the deaths of thousands of Jews since October 7th, and over 100 more Jews being taken hostage and subjected to death or torture for two years.   That’s a very hard truth to say or to hear, and I don’t know what the solution is, but I don’t think it involves continually trading thousands of violent and guilty men for handfuls of innocents, whose numbers are only going to grow in the future.

(I feel like I should point out that the Jews don’t have our frustratingly self-sacrificial “new” testament.  Normally I am very grateful for the Gospels and all the rest, but I have to admit that there are times when it would be a relief to just have the OG “eye for an eye” rule still in place and operational.  And post October 7th would definitely be one of those times!)

But such thoughts are for another day.  Today is a day for celebrating, and basking in the relief and joy of families reunited, and a national wound salved in Israel.

Not to mention a time for enjoying the schadenfreude-tastic spectacle of our leftists grinding their teeth and rending their garments in frustrated outrage over watching Trump be lauded as an international hero!  Oh, shoot it straight into my veins!

I can’t help but think of Tolstoy’s line, “Every happy family is alike; every miserable one is unhappy in its own way.” 

And boy do our seething leftists have a thousand ways of being miserable today!  Most of them decided on trying to ignore this international triumph.  Lefty streamers and talking heads who can’t quit yammering about how Trump is a moron, and responsible for the ongoing disaster in Gaza, have suddenly gone radio silent.

Many other sour souls – like a certain Barry O, who never met a foreign crisis that he didn’t inflame – felt duty bound to put out a positive statement, but then – hilariously enough – couldn’t bring themselves to mention the Orange Elephant in the room who brought about the spectacular deal that they are grudgingly praising. 

But the idiots occupying the deepest circle of the Democrats’ Dantean Inferno are those who ridiculously tried to take credit for Trump’s accomplishment, which was only achieved because he did the exact opposite of everything they did.

Grandma Squanto cast a certain fetching Indian maiden in the starring role (#wemustneverstopmockingher), beginning her comment – which didn’t mention Trump – with self-congratulation: “For two excruciating years, I have called for the return of the hostages brutally kidnapped on October 7th and held in Gaza.”

Yes. And for two excruciating years, your nagging produced exactly nothing.  Because if foreign policy results were achieved by sending out a super-white harpy to obnoxiously hector people, Hillary Clinton would have achieved world peace when she was SecState. 

Sidebar: JD Vance proves once again that he’s got a black belt in trolling, with this reaction to Lizzie Warren’s tweet: “The president told me he did this on Indigenous People’s Day in honor of you!”  Perfect!

Speaking of incompetent SecStates, Tony Blinken laughably claimed that Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza was based on one developed by the Biden administration! 

Which is weird, because every Biden plan had only 9 points: 1. Try to make it down the stairs intact. 2. Watch out for that sandbag.  3. Look at the picture cards the nice girl gives you when taking questions in a press conference.  4. If the teleprompter goes down, fake a stroke and Roomba your way off stage.   5. Don’t ask if any dead people are in the room.  6. Don’t talk to any dead people in the room.  7. Don’t do that creepy whisper.  8. Or that frightening yell.  9. Don’t poop on the Pope.    

And on his best day ever, Biden went 2-for-9. (And that’s spotting him 1 on the vast majority of occasions when the Pope wasn’t present to be pooped upon.)

Speaking of Corn Pop’s nemesis, in addition to not knowing whether he’s afoot or horseback, Joey Gaffes might actually believe that he had something to do with Trump’s triumph: “The road to this deal was not easy.  My administration worked relentlessly to…end the war.” 

But even Joe had to give Trump credit for “getting a renewed ceasefire deal over the finish line.”  

As if Biden had engineered a drive down to the one-yard line and left it to Trump on first-and-goal, rather than playing for 50 minutes, throwing 4 picks, lining up behind the left tackle instead of the center, then falling and breaking his hip, after which Trump was called in, down by 4 touchdowns with 10 minutes left, and somehow pulled off a miracle.

You’ve got to love those Dems!

On a more somber note, a substantial plurality (if not an outright majority) of the elite left has revealed their true selves, and it’s been an ugly sight.  First, Charlie Kirk got murdered, and not only could they not at least feign sadness, they openly celebrated.

And now, after years of theatrically beating their breast over the terrible “genocide” happening in Gaza, it took them three days after the announcement of a settlement to even grudgingly put out the most tepid acknowledgment of the horrific tragedy’s end.

Which means that either they never gave a damn about the “Palestinian” lives they pretended to agonize over, or they never believed that a genocide was happening in the first place.  Or both. 

The smart money is on both. 

Think about what they’ve shown to the world!  When a good man was murdered, they gloated, and when a terrible war was ended, they pouted.

What’s wrong with these people?!    

Never mind.  It’s a great day, and for the sake of their own pinched hatreds, they’ve banished themselves to the cold and miserable darkness. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us are inside the warm, glowing mansion, feasting and toasting and partying with the Jews, and with all people of good will everywhere.   

L’chaim, CO nation! 

But still…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!

Continuing Our Stroll Through Political Psychology (posted 10/8/25)

In previous columns I discussed projection and habituation.  Today’s psychological topic is learned helplessness, which can be seen as a negative and maladaptive type of habituation.  It is a state that results when a people’s past experiences teach them that their decisions cannot change their situation, so they adopt a helpless passivity.

The concept originated in some very depressing animal experiments, which I don’t like to think about, since I like most dogs more than many people.  The short version is that dogs in a partitioned cage were given electric shocks that affected both sides of the cage, so that moving to the other side wouldn’t help.  After enough of that, even when the other side of the cage was not electrified, the dogs wouldn’t attempt to move in order to escape the shocks. 

What does that teach us, other than that some psychologists should be put in cages and randomly shocked?

Heartbreakingly, once the dogs learned that their decisions made no difference, their will was broken, and though they could easily escape the shocks by crossing the cage, they would no longer take those simple steps. 

Clear similarities to human behavior abound.  Sometimes external forces can push people toward learned helplessness.  A society that is racist or sexist or religiously bigoted can tell you that nobody of your race or gender or religion can ever get an education, or be financially successful, or amount to much.   Bad or abusive parents or spouses can tell you that you’re stupid or worthless.  Many people give up after they are told that – and experience that – often enough.

Sometimes internal forces can do the same.  An instinctively pessimistic person will look for obstacles and problems rather than opportunities or solutions, and you tend to find or notice what you are looking for.  Since there are always plenty of obstacles around – and plenty of people to agree that they cannot be overcome (or just that YOU cannot overcome them) – it can be very easy to hunker down and stop trying.  

Self-sabotaging behavior creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, which then reinforces the pessimism and helplessness.  If I tell myself I’m the kind of dummy who doesn’t do well in school, I don’t study very much (because what’s the use?), and then I fail the test.  Which proves that I’m stupid and destined to drop out. 

The end result is often depression, substance abuse, and a self-reinforcing spiral of negativity and failure.  As I once heard a fellow Midwesterner say of someone in this condition, “He’s got a lot of quit in him.”

The best path out of learned helplessness usually involves a combination of strategies to create positive habits.  Cognitive therapy can help, as can setting defined goals, become more consciously grateful, and learning to be more optimistic.  (There’s a reason CO started a site focusing on optimism!) 

As a Christian, I also find that it helps to meditate on the fact that God made me in His image.  So I have that going for me!

It also helps to think about inspiring people who overcame negative circumstances.  Take JD Vance, for example.  His early life had “learned helplessness” written all over it: absent dad, addict mom, raised by eccentric grandparents in Appalachian poverty, the deck stacked against him six ways to Sunday.

Never did the phrase “white privilege” sound so hollow and ridiculous.  (Spoiler alert: it usually is, especially when being wildly exaggerated by naïve elitists who’ve never been within 100 miles of a holler or a trailer court.)

What picture of himself would society paint for a young JD?  Toothless hick, Hillbilly, white trash.  Bound for a life of coal mining or a Dollar Store or prison, with stops at bar fights and corn-liquor-involved DUIs along the way. 

(By the way, racial slurs are supposed to be bad, right?  But can you think of a more insultingly dehumanizing term than “white trash?”  Anybody in polite society would sooner cut their own tongue out than be caught using the N word, but you can call poor whitey “trash” in any faculty lounge or posh dinner party, safe in the knowledge that you’ll get knowing nods or condescending smiles all around.)  

So what does all of this have to do with my usual focus on politics and culture?  A lot actually.  Learned helplessness is devastating to individuals, but it can be very useful to politicians. Especially if those politicians are leftists, skilled at inculcating and profiting from the anger, pessimism, and depression of most lefties.

(Side-bar, chicken-and-egg question:  Does leftism make people depressed and angry, or are depressed and angry people naturally drawn to leftism?  Discuss amongst yourselves.)

Such leftist pols cleverly set up an ecosystem of identity politics in which the most valuable currency is victim status.   (“Victim” is practically a synonym for someone with learned helplessness.)  Then they set about trying to convince voters that they are all powerless victims trapped in a cage built by evil conservatives, even as they themselves are the mad scientists conducting a heartless political experiment.

They see some black and brown people, and they hit them with a relentless sequence of rhetorical “shocks” to teach them to see themselves as impotent:  Amerikkka is a racist society, built on slavery and stolen land and immigrant labor.  The leading cause of death for black men is being shot by white cops while unarmed and black, and for brown people it’s being “disappeared” by Gestapo ICE agents.  The white power structure has been keeping you down for 400 years, and it’s never going to stop.    

They see women and they pull out the verbal cattle prods: The patriarchy has been brutally oppressing women for 4000 years.  Sexism is in the air you breathe and the language you speak, and men want to force you all into handmaid costumes.  All heterosexual sex is rape, and it’s called “the battle of the sexes” because brutish men are going to fight you to the death, and beat you if you don’t submit.

They see poor people and they attach the connected electrodes of communism and socialism to their cage: Capitalism is the evil force beneath all of your troubles, and capitalists are voracious slave-masters who will exploit you for their bloodthirsty greed and profits until you are worked to death in their infernal mills, factories, and cubicles.

They see sexual eccentrics and they attach the electrified nipple clamps of gender re-education: All of those hetero-normative cisgender bullies want you to conform to their Aryan beauty standards and engage only in pregnancy-producing sex in the missionary position because their small, bigoted minds can’t appreciate the appeal of your many piercings and body-modifications, your unidentifiable genitalia, and your erotic squirrel and raccoon outfits.  They prudishly refuse to accept that you can be healthy at any weight, and want to body shame you out of their ignorance of how good transgressive sex can be, especially when it requires the deployment of a forklift and a complicated system of chains and pulleys to lower you onto each other.

Okay, sorry about that “nipple clamps” thing and that last image.  Got a little carried away there, and it’s too late for a trigger warning.  So mea culpa.

Anyway, you can see the results in the generational dependence among those who have listened to the left’s siren song.  They’ve been in that cage for a long time, and they’ve learned that they can’t get themselves out.  They get their housing, their food, their education, their health care, and their spending money from the government, and they’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for the party who promises to keep taking care of them in their box.    

You can also see it in the mostly younger people – whose depression has turned into anger – in the nihilistic riots of Antifa and BLM, and in the pro-Hamas thugs on campuses, and in the murderers of Charlie Kirk, and of the Christian kids in Nashville and Minneapolis. The armies of the left have been miseducated in thousands of Skinner Boxes on campuses and chatrooms, and they’ve internalized all the wrong lessons.

They see America, capitalism, free markets, stable families, and the Judeo-Christian West as oppressive forces.  They see themselves as oppressed victims, powerless in the face of a threatening, fascist omni-enemy, cowering in the corner of a small box…

Until some manipulative, authoritarian leftist leaders come forward and promise them a way out, and a moral crusade that directs their anger at a demonized enemy, and recasts their insurrectionist violence as a noble, anti-Nazi “Resistance.”

They don’t have to feel guilty when they’re assaulting cops and shooting at ICE agents who are just doing their jobs, enforcing our democratically passed laws, and wanting to go home to their families at the end of each day.  Because they’re ACTUALLY bravely stopping the Gestapo from rounding up and killing salt-of-the-earth, undocumented Americans.  

Meanwhile, we conservatives are offering them a very different way out of the Skinner Box they have been manipulated into.  We’re telling them the truth, that America is not a capitalist dictatorship, and that there is no white, patriarchal “system” that is hell-bent on keeping them down.  That this is still a land of opportunity, and that their fate is in their hands.

We’re trying to show them that the left has lied to them about the cage they’re in, and that it’s not really electrified, and that the door is open.  They can walk out any time they want, and breathe the free air, and take advantage of the possibilities and opportunities all around them. 

We’re praying that they’ll do it, for their own good, and for America’s.       

Hopefully in time for the mid-terms.  

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Welcome to Psychology Corner, with Dr. Simpson (posted 10/5/25)

In a continuing series of columns featuring psychological themes, today’s topic is habituation – the process by which an organism decreases its response to any stimulus after repeated or constant exposure.

Disclaimer: I’m not a real doctor.  Unless you consider “Dr.” Jill Biden a real doctor, in which case I am the wisest, most esteemed doctor in the world, by comparison.  If you’d like to review my extensive experience with psychology, you can read my column from last Friday, now up at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  (Summary: I’ve watched Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting and several episodes of Frasier, and I dated a few crazy young women in college – alcohol and some deceptive attractiveness was involved – before I met my smokeshow wife in grad school and became the paragon of mental health that you see before you.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah.     

Like most psychological phenomena, habituation is often functional, helping one to navigate through daily life.   For example, if you couldn’t “tune out” a loud air conditioner in your room, you’d go crazy.  If you’re in a stuffy apartment, or standing near flatulent Fang-Fang-banger Eric Swalwell, going “nose blind” to bad odors is a good thing. 

I experienced habituation from a very young age.  When I was a kid, we moved to a house that backed up to railroad tracks – the Simpsons were never far from being in a country song, as regular readers may remember from Uncle Bob’s wild ride driving a tractor with flaming tires out of a smoking barn a few months ago. 

Anyway, dad parlayed his great real estate instincts into buying a house with a train track in the back yard, and as it happened, a train came through every night at about 2 in the morning.

Because of course it did.

For the first week there, I woke up every night.  Within a month, the train never woke me up again.  

It’s a flexible phenomenon.  Big city dwellers are habituated to street noises and ambulances.  If they’re living in a one-party, Democrat-run city, they are quickly able to block out constant gunshots and pained screams of, “I’m dying!  Why do we keep voting for this sh*t?!  F**k Pritzker!” followed by agonized death rattles. 

Put that same urbanite in a rural setting – if he manages to get out past the feral violent mobs bred by leftist crime policies – and the quiet will keep him awake all night.

But sometimes, habituation becomes a dysfunctional strategy; people get used to negative circumstances, and come to accept them as normal.  When I was a kid, almost all the adults I knew smoked, and so did everyone in the movies, so when my parents gave us candy cigarettes as treats, we thought nothing of it. 

I’m not making that up, you youngsters who don’t know how good you have it, and won’t stay off my lawn.  We’d get little white candy sticks with a red tip on them, and we’d pretend to smoke them, as we prepared for an adult life of looking very cool, and then having a lung removed. 

We were habituated.

Today, poor benighted souls who live in Dem-run cities drive past miles of filthy tents, walk past hundreds of supine junkies, and hop over mounds of dirty syringes that they don’t really see.  They walk through wisps of vomit smells and clouds of slightly dissipated urine stench that they don’t really smell.  And to them, that’s just a normal Tuesday.   

They’re habituated to leftist rule.    

I thought about habituation when I saw Pete Hegseth’s speech to the assembled military brass last week.  Strong militaries thrive on functional, positive habituation.  Quality training and discipline teaches soldiers to heighten their situational awareness, while at the same time shutting out negative distractions like fatigue, pain, and emotional stress. 

Under our previous Cadaver in Chief (and several administrations before his), many elements of our military had become habituated to maladaptive behavior patterns.  Bureaucrats and social justice warriors in uniform undertook idiotic pursuits such as understanding white rage, promoting DEI, and encouraging LGBTQ recruits to join, and focused more on fetishes than fighting.  They produced recruiting videos featuring soldiers in drag, and others with a “the corporal has two mommies” theme.

They emphasized privates, more than training privates, and corporals, and sergeants.

When Hegseth came in, all service branches had been missing their recruiting goals for quite some time.  Unexpectedly!  And he has the tough job of re-habituating some of our military personnel. 

He pledged to rip out the politics, and to focus on high standards that everyone would have to meet.  “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris….We are done with that sh*t.” 

In what a good psychologist might consider a rough translation of the kind of cognitive behavioral therapy needed to counter-act negative habituation, Hegseth said, “It’s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture…. An entire generation of generals and admirals were told that they must parrot the insane fallacy that, ‘our diversity is our strength.’  Of course, we know our unity is our strength.”

If you haven’t read the transcript of his speech, you owe it to yourself to do so, because it was such a bracing dose of the truth, and a roadmap to a renewed, functional military, after years of watered-down social experimentation.

Hegseth has only been in his position for 8 months, but all of the services have already reached their yearly recruiting goals.  Unexpectedly!  

Because it’s Monday, I thought I’d leave you with a couple of feel-good news stories to start your week.

It’s been fun watching the good guys start winning again in Portland and Chicago, as Trump has deployed some National Guard troops in to protect ICE agents and facilities against the violent hoards of “mostly peaceful” protestors.  Once again, the Dems have jumped onto the “10” side of a 90/10 issue.

I can’t see this ending well for them, because video is coming in daily, and showing who the good guys and the bad guys are.  And that’s going to be an easy call for most Americans.

When the antifa thugs surrounded and rammed an ICE vehicle in Chicago, agents shot Miramar Martinez, an evil hag with a history of doxxing federal agents and inciting violence against them.  Tragically, she survived the shooting, but was later arrested at a nearby hospital she had driven to for treatment. 

One of the other drivers in the attack, Anthony Ruiz, was also arrested.  Looking at his and Miramar’s mug shots puts you in mind of a dumber and less charismatic Charlie Manson and one of his homelier groupies. 

Meanwhile, in Portland another antifa idiot got a little hilarious justice, but hopefully has a lot more coming to him. Or possibly her. 

Let’s just go with “it.” 

It’s a weirdo named Seth Todd, who identifies itself online as Apollo Toad, “just a lil gay non-binary toad and proud Antifa terrorist.”  (Wait ‘til it finds out from leading Democrats that Antifa doesn’t exist, and is just an idea!)  Todd’s pic looks like either an effeminate dude or a unsettlingly butch gal; either way, you can understand why it attends protest events dressed in an inflated frog costume.

(Let’s just say that there are no princes, or princesses, or pronoun-less prince-adjacent creatures lining up to kiss this frog.) (The judges would also have accepted, “This is one froggy that’s not likely to go a-courtin’.”  Or at least not successfully.)

So Todd is toddling around outside the ICE facility with a clot of other miscreants and ne’er-do-wells and wastes of their parents’ tuition money, when a cop notices that the back of the frog costume contains a round vent with a fan drawing air into it.  So the cop gives the air vent a very hearty shot of pepper spray.

And in about three seconds, that frog started hopping like it’d never hopped before! 

I can only hope that an hour later – it’s eyes still burning and the frog costume ruined – it finally made it back to where it had parked.  Only to find that it’s car had been…wait for it… toad!

I’m here all week, people.  Happy Monday!    

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Psychology Corner, + A Jihadi Named “Jihad” Can’t Stab His Way Out of Trouble (posted 10/4/25)

When I first got to college, and before I embarked on the lucrative path of majoring in English, I briefly considered majoring in psychology.  Until I learned that most psych majors – and virtually all psych professors – were as crazy as outhouse rodentia. 

That’s been my “lived experience,” anyway.

But I’ve still retained a fascination with the way the mind works, and various psychological phenomena.  My forays into thinking about politics quickly showed me how much cross-influencing goes on between psychology and politics.  (And I’m not just referring to the way that political extremists of various stripes all seem to be primarily an amalgam of various psychological dysfunctions.)

Of course I’m biased, and think that conservatives as a group are generally mentally healthier than leftists, mostly because operating with the truth at your back is a lot more conducive to life success than swimming upstream against truth, normality and the way our Maker set things up.

(Sometime soon I’m going to write about happiness studies that consistently find that conservatives are much happier than leftists.  Even though my first instinct was that such studies should be gathered in a volume called, “Duh!: A Collection of Studies Proving Things that Everybody Already Knows,” the details proved interesting, IMHO.)

After taking a few classes and reading around a lot, I think I can recognize many psychological maladies common on the left.  I’ll save some for future columns, but for now, here are two that come to mind:

1. Projection, the tendency to criticize your opponents for behavior that you actually display, is a big one.  The entire left is a pack of Pavlov’s dogs when it comes to accusing us of doing exactly what they actually do.

The most virulent whitey-haters you’ve ever seen are constantly calling us “racists” for saying such offensive things as, “Can we just stop fixating on race, and judge one another by the content of our character and not the color of our skin?”     

The same group of miscreants who spent four years using the FBI, CIA, DOJ, KGB, IRS and the Fish and Wildlife Service to go after Trump in an illegitimate effort to bankrupt him and cause him to die in jail, are now hollering “YOU’RE WEAPONIZING THE GOVERNMENT!” because the GOP is investigating Pencil-Neck Schiff and Joe Biden’s autopen.

The cabal of censors who kicked Trump off of all social media, and canceled anybody who suggested that masks might not stop covid and men can’t become women are screeching about “FREE SPEECH!” because Disney took Jimmy Kimmel’s unfunny screech-fest off the air for a few days.

The excuse-making, riot-justifying leftists who have created a permission structure for the 95% of political violence that comes from their side is clutching their pearls over the “tidal wave of right-wing violence” that is as real as Wakanda, Jasmine Crockett’s tough childhood in the ghetto, and Grandma Squanto’s full-blood Commanche maw-maw.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

And never forget: NOBODY IS ABOVE THE LAW!  (except for Creepy Comey, Letitia James, Tony Fauci, Lisa Cook, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden…)

2. This one’s a throw-away, and you’d think it would be beneath me, unless you’ve read my columns before.  But it’s one of Freud’s most controversial diagnoses: p*nis envy. 

As a college kid, I thought this one was hilarious, probably cause of an argument I saw a friend have with his girlfriend – alcohol was involved – in which he suggested that she was suffering from PE.  (Life lesson learned, vicariously: don’t offer that diagnosis to a lady unless you’ve taken a few steps back and covered your crotch with both hands first, especially if your reflexes have been slowed by a pitcher of beer.)

I wasn’t impressed by Freud, and I didn’t think PE was even a thing.  But then I saw the White Guys for Kamala… and I started looking around.  And saw Ken-Doll Newsom.  And Lil’ Davy Hogg, and Cryin’ Adam Kinzinger.   

And I thought hey, maybe Freud wasn’t wrong about EVERYthing.  But he missed one important detail, since he thought PE was a condition affecting females.  But at least when it comes to Dems, I’m not seeing it.  Because their women…don’t seem the slightest bit interested.

Michelle Obama, on the other hand, seems quite happy with hers.  So…

Okay.  If this is the first column of mine that you’ve read, right about now you might be saying to yourself, “This guy is hard to figure out.  Is he a borderline smart dumb guy, or a very dumb smart guy?  I mean, he used ‘rodentia’ correctly…but then the juvenile p*enis jokes?  What gives?” 

If that’s what you are thinking, watch me pull out of this skid by turning to one of my strong suits, which is foreign policy and international diplomacy.

For that we’ll go across the pond to England, where, since it was just Yom Kippur, there was a knife attack outside a synagogue in Manchester.  (Unexpectedly!) The murderer has been identified, and you’ll never guess which violent, Jew-hating religion he hails from.  (And if you said, “Mamdani-ism” or “Ilhan-Omarian,” or “Democrat,” you get half-credit.)

Here’s a clue.  His name, which I swear to you I am not making up, is “Jihad Al-Shamie.”  My Arabic is a little rusty, but I think that translates to, “Jihadi the Shameful.” 

Fortunately, Mr. Shameful has now been given the new middle name of “ex-“ because British cops arrived and helped him win the mosque-temperature challenge.  When the Bobbies got there, he’d stabbed at least five people, killing two, and was in the process of trying to stab a window to get into the synagogue. 

You read that correctly.  He was stabbing a window. 

Because for shameful jihadis, the answer to every question about how to behave in any given situation is always the same: stab!  Stab your way into every problem, and then stab your way back out.  If at first you don’t succeed, stab, stab again.  Stab outside the box. Stab a cold, stab a fever.  When in doubt, get to stabbin’.     

Which actually works pretty well if you’re practicing jihad in a Dem-run crime-ridden American city, where after your mass stabbing attack you’ll likely be confronted by a social worker with an armful of good intentions and a notebook full of phony gender pronouns. 

And THAT’S a situation from which you can definitely stab your way out.

Unfortunately for Stabby McShameful, the British cops who showed up were the rare ones who bring guns to a stab-fight.  As a NY Post story put it, “[The cops] gave him a couple of warnings, he didn’t listen, so they opened fire.  He started getting back up, and they shot him again.”

YES!  Cracking job, guv’ner!  Or whatever the few native Britons say in such an instance. (As best I can tell from recent reports, what they mostly say in London lately is, “Allahu akbar!”)

In other news of the Jews, I was glad to see Trump’s Peace Plan for Gaza.  It’s not the Simpson Peace Plan for Gaza, which I’ve cribbed from the Manchester plan: “Give them a couple of warnings, and when they don’t listen, open fire.  If they get back up, shoot them again.”

And I’m not glad to see it because I think it will bring peace to Gaza.  But step one is for Hamas to release all the hostages and surrender, which Hamas will never do.  (Because: Hamas!) 

When Hamas refuses, the Trump plan skips the rest of the steps and goes straight to the last step (which, if anybody had asked me, should have been the first step): Cry havoc, and let the IDF off the leash to mow through the terrorists the way JB Pritzker, Michael Moore and Rosie O’Donnell mow through a 40-foot-long, food-laden table at the International House of Pancakes.

And lo and behold, no sooner had I finished the shameful Jihadi story in the NY Post, than I saw another story about Hamas’ top military leader in Gaza, a dullard named Ezz al-Din al-Hadad.  (Arabic translation: “A waste of two hyphens.”)

Of course, “top military leader in Gaza” isn’t what it used to be, since the top six layers of military leadership in Gaza are gone, having been on the receiving end of the ol’ “kosher ka-boom” in the last couple of years.

So now they’re down to Ezzy al-Osbourne, who used to clean the latrines and manage the goat brothel for Hamas.  By the way, his picture in that story pretty much debunks the “Gazans are starving” narrative, all by itself.  Ironically enough for a Muslim, he looks a little…porky.

Anyway, he’s already calling for Hamas to reject Trump’s plan, because he wants to keep fighting. Perfect!  Bibi will give his guys a short speech which amounts to whatever is Hebrew for, “Saddle up!” 

And then Izzy can assemble his arsenal of stabbing implements and weapons-grade body odor, and the IDF can gather their war planes, tanks, drones, Uzis and big-arse Desert Eagle pistols.  

Annnndddd…then Ezzy will get to join Hasan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar in whichever circle of hell where all the rectal pitch-forking goes on. 

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Wondering About the Line Between Free Speech & Incitement to Violence (posted 9/29/25)

Like most Americans, I’ve been thinking a lot about free speech and its limits lately.  I wrote about hate speech a couple of columns ago, and from the comments, it sounds like most of us are on the same page about that: “hate speech” is a slippery and politicized idea that usually boils down to “speech that I hate.”  As such, hate speech laws should have no place in American politics. 

All of the lying that the elite left has done about Charlie Kirk – before and after his murder – has made that point obvious.  Most of us already thought that the next edition of the DSM would have to make room for Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I think that KDS (Kirk Derangement Syndrome) might be an even more virulent mental disorder.  Because if THAT guy could be accused of hate speech, who among us could go unscathed by that same accusation? 

Would ANY nationally prominent leftists be left standing, were that standard enforced?  Everybody who has called half the country Nazis or fascists would be out instantly.   And that’s what, 95% of them, right off the top?

That’s not to say there’s no place in a healthy society for “consequence culture.”  Normal people wouldn’t want their kids being “educated” by evil trolls who celebrated Charlie’s killing.  Nor would they want to be treated by doctors or nurses who did that, or patronize any businesses whose owners or employees did that. 

The exception to free speech protection is speech that “incites violence or poses an immediate threat to public safety.”  I’m going to read some SCOTUS precedents to get a better idea of what that looks like, but I’ve come across two much-discussed examples that I think might in the running, and I’d like to see what CO nation thinks of these.

The first comes from a popular leftist streamer named Hasan Piker, Cenk Uyger’s nephew, and a hugely popular streamer on Twitch, and also an angry, hateful leftist, IMHO.  Two particular quotes of his have been making the rounds in the wake of Charlie’s murder. 

I’ve seen the first one but haven’t been able to find any context for it, so take that into account as you read it.  (I’ve substituted a different “f” word for his favorite one.)

“I’m sick and tired of it.  Left-wingers, liberals, you need to be friending showing your opponents’ guts.  You need to be gutting them.  You need to be shanking these motherfrienders and letting their friending intestines just writhe on stage…. Slice ‘em up!  Slice ‘em and dice em’!” 

Piker says that the second one came from 2019, during a conversation about landlords in Berkeley who had decided not to rent their properties out.  (I saw a discussion elsewhere about landlords not being willing to rent their places to homeless people on city grants, but I don’t know if that’s the context here.)

“Kill those motherfrienders!   Murder those motherfrienders in the streets.  Let the streets soak in their friending red capitalist bloods (sic) dude.”  

In both of these videos, Piker appeared to be totally serious.  He was shouting and shaking his fists.  When he talked about gutting people, he made a stabbing motion with one hand.  There was no comical voice, or winking or sarcastic tone.  He came across as an enraged radical, totally sincere in his beliefs.

After Charlie was murdered and an Aussie news presenter asked him about the “kill the landlords” quote, he showed himself to be a total wuss, probably because he got some legal advice.  He waved away any assertion that his authentic-appearing rants were actually authentic.

He said, “My insincere statements don’t reflect on any of my beliefs whatsoever,” and repeatedly called his statements “obviously insincere” and “obviously hyperbolic.”

The second example comes from another popular leftist political streamer, a very unhappy dude named Stephen Bonnell II.  He has given himself the stupidly self-aggrandizing name “Destiny.”  Which I won’t use, because it’s ridiculous. 

Simpson’s First Law of Names: if you give yourself an inflated name, you’re a gigantic douche.  Examples include “Charlamagne tha God,” whose real name is Lenard Larry McKelvey.  And I sort of get it, because who wants to be called Lenard Larry, especially when your dopey parents managed to spell “Leonard” wrong?

But his nom de stupid is even worse!  It’s composed of three words, the first two of which are misspelled, and the third is blasphemous.  (So good job, Lenny!)  The offense is compounded by naming himself after a truly great Medieval character, Charlemagne. (His name is cool in at least three languages, since Charlemagne is French for Charles the Great, and his Latin name was Carolus Magnus.)         

First Corollary to Simpson’s First Law of Names: If you EARN a great name, you’re immune from charges of douchiness.  See the original Charlemagne.  Also, Alexander the Great and William the Conquerer, who were great and a conqueror, respectively. 

Sidebar: I remember that years ago, Dennis Miller (one of my comedy heroes) had a bit about the first time that Gordon Sumner showed up to the pub with his friends and said that from now on, he was going to be called “Sting.”  Miller mocks the idea, but apparently Sting was one of the rare people cool enough to pull that off.   Lenny McKelvey and Lil’ Stevie Bonnell are definitely not. 

(Even I am not.  I called myself “Martacus” as a joke, to poke fun at Cory Booker for calling himself Spartacus, and that has caught on around here a bit.  But only as a funny, self-referential goof that no one would take seriously.)

Anyway, Steve Bonnell is a big influencer on the left, and also something of a broken person.  But I repeat myself.  He’s allegedly had a disordered private life that has included allegations of bisexuality, revenge porn and two quickly failed marriages, the second of which he proudly touted as an “open” marriage to a Swedish gal… which ended when she publicly cuckolded him and left him for another guy.  Unexpectedly! 

(I know: I’m a stick-in-the-mud, 19th-century Roving Correspondent who has not kept up with the times.  But isn’t the whole point of an “open marriage” – which is to say “not a marriage” in normal-speak – that you both try to bang anything that stands still long enough?  And yet it ended badly?  Imagine that.) 

But I digress. 

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Bonnell went on Piers Morgan’s program, and said many stupid and hateful things that do not constitute incitement of violence.  He denied that Charlie’s killer was a leftist motivated by leftism to kill him. (D’oh!) Piers asked him that if that is eventually proven, “Would you condemn that?” 

Bonnell showed who he really is: “I won’t condemn anything until the President of the United States [says that all of us need to calm down].”  Moments later, he said, “Leftists and Democrats have been condemning and turning down the temperature for a decade.  Donald Trump can’t go on tv and say all of us need to calm down.”

So obviously, Bonnell is a delusional idiot. But here is where he may have crossed a line.  On his own podcast five days after Charlie was murdered, Destiny said, “You need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events, so that they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature.”

He also said, “If you [conservatives] wanted Charlie Kirk to be alive, Donald Trump shouldn’t have been president for his second term.” 

Clearly, both of these morons illustrate the vast moral gulf between us and them.  Hatred and anger spills out of them, as they sneer and swear and insult anyone who disagrees.  I only spent an hour looking through some of their videos to write this column, and I feel like I need a shower. 

Compare them to Charlie Kirk, whose default setting was humor and compassion and the desire for dialogue.  By now we’ve all heard the half-dozen comments of Charlie’s – cherry picked from thousands of hours of his speeches and debates – and the best they could come up with was that small number of out-of-context but logically defensible statements, and the time when he called a career violent criminal a “scumbag.”  (Fact check: true.)

Charlie at his “worst” was a million miles away from the bitter malevolence of Piker’s and Bonnell’s calls for pain, violence and death to be visited on their political opponents.

My gut instinct has been to reject calls for the government to pursue and charge people for political speech, no matter how wrong-headed or offensive their speech is.  But as the left has gotten more and more violent these last 5 years, I’m taking a second look at that question.

Both Piker and Bonnell have millions of low-IQ, socially failing leftist followers, many of them with more than a dusting of mental illness.  When Piker tells them directly to kill landlords and to disembowel their political opponents, does that constitute incitement?  When Bonnell implicitly tells them that they need to make conservatives afraid for their lives, and blames Charlie’s murder on the people who elected Trump, does that constitute incitement?

What do you think, CO nation?

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we’re not like them.

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

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, scene. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Trump is waging a WAR on drug traffickers. 

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

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!