Funny how that happens.

The guy was good. Not Trevor Noah-good, but I’d give his performance a solid B for timing and the accordion-hands alone. (Since he was lip-syncing, I can’t judge his voice—but I’m guessing based on enthusiasm the full impression isn’t half bad.)

As a publicity stunt? A-plus, sir.

The poor media must have been in the world’s most agonizing pickle.

EVERY NEWS EDITOR IN AMERICA: “We have a guy viciously trolling Donald Trump at a Georgia rally! This is epic. It’s priceless! Clear the home page.”

NAIVE INTERN: “But… but… he’s talking about Trump Accounts. I thought we were going full blackout on that?”

EVERY NEWS EDITOR IN AMERICA: “Dammit.” [TORMENTED PAUSE] “Run it anyway.”

Here’s the part they accidentally advertised: under POTUS’s eponymous savings plan, every eligible child (read: legal citizen) under 18 in the U.S. can open a Trump Account, and every baby born (again, to legal citizens) during Trump’s second term will get a $1,000 “seed money” bonus to get it rolling. Parents, grandparents, employers, and random future fans of these kids’ TikTok accounts can contribute up to $5,000 a year—which could easily grow into a six-figure nest egg by the time today’s newborns turn eighteen. (If nobody ever added another penny to the seeded accounts, the recipients might triple or quadruple the initial gift—which still isn’t an awful deal, considering it’s free and all.)

According to The New York Times, only about a quarter of eligible newborns have been enrolled—a lapse the Gray Lady attributes to folks not even knowing the accounts exist at all and unhinged lefties intentionally refusing the complimentary cash because it has Trump’s name tied to it. (Liberals! Turning down free stuff! If we renamed unemployment “Trump Assistance,” we could probably wipe out the national debt by Labor Day.)

The irony deserves its own exhibit in the Smithsonian. These are the same people who’ve spent years lecturing everyone about how the poor can’t possibly lift themselves up without government handouts, how every child deserves a fair start, how only monsters would oppose universal programs for kids. And then when someone tries to hand their baby a thousand-dollar check, they rip it up because the name on the envelope gives them the ick.

USA Today addressed the latter in a hilariously earnest opinion piece titled Trump Accounts are free money. Don’t let politics stop you. “The question isn’t whether you support Trump,” writer Nicole Russell attempted to soothe queasy Democrats. “It’s whether you’re willing to let politics stand between your child and a financial head start.” (In other words, plug your nose and swallow that nasty orange pill, a parent’s sacrifice truly knows no bounds.)

The funniest bit is, I only know any of these details because of the random heckler—the one I assume was actually anything but random. After all, you don’t wind up sitting directly behind the commander-in-chief at a televised event on accident. You’re chosen. You’re wearing the FREEDOM shirt or the red tie or the flag hat. You agree to wave the sign. Maybe you joke about that time your MAGA boat parade video went viral. Either way, if you’re front and center when the cameras are rolling, you went through some sort of vetting process. I’d bet my beloved leopard-print bathrobe on it.

Nevertheless, the terminally triggered TDS crowd is convinced DJT just got trolled, bigly. They think a guy tilting his head back and forth and using exaggerated hand gestures is Trump being destroyed on the global stage. It’s embarrassing. Sad-in-all-caps. The beginning of the end.

The red team, on the other hand, thought the whole thing was comedy gold. They called the impressionist a legend. A patriot. A super MAGA fan nerding out. And the delicious part is that Trump himself has made it clear he considers being mimicked a compliment. He starred as his own narcissistic self on The Tonight Show and praised Jimmy Fallon’s portrayal of his mirror reflection. He told the Times during his first presidential campaign that the proliferation of people parodying him was a “great honor”—even when they depict him as cocky or arrogant. “I know the business,” Trump said at the time. “I know the game. I’m not offended.”

POTUS, the progressive press should realize by now, chases the spotlight the way a cat chases a moving red dot: tirelessly. Instinctively. Joyfully. And as much as they loathe him, they can’t stop letting him catch it. It’s almost poetic.

We’re now forty-eight hours out, and the mystery mime has yet to be identified. In an age of internet sleuths who can identify anyone in the world from a single fuzzy shoelace photo, that’s… curious. As of now, we’ve got a guy who got his fifteen minutes of viral fame, a media machine trying to spin it into yet another career-ending humiliation, millions of Americans discovering that Trump Accounts exist, and an attention-loving president trending on X. I think it’s pretty obvious who got the last laugh.

no commitment, one-time tips

I guess a lot’s changed over at “America’s Attic” in the last 40-plus years.

Congress figured that out before I did. This week, the House Oversight subcommittee held a hearing titled “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past,” which is a very official and unsubtle way of saying, “What the hell are you people doing over there, anyway?”

The subcommittee—part of the House Oversight’s Delivering on Government Efficiency panel, led by Rep. Tim Burchett—hauled in Smithsonian director Dr. Anthea Hartig to answer that question and more. And while congressional hearings have gotten increasingly circuslike in recent years, this week’s spectacle should have come with clown shoes and juggling pins—somehow managing to cram BDSM, Mickey Mouse, the Founding Fathers, white supremacy, “Latina Power merch,” abortion, body dysmorphia, radical race politics, and transgender activism into a single afternoon. Even the Ringling brothers might have called it a little over the top.

Republicans’ basic argument wasn’t exactly complicated: if taxpayers are footing roughly two-thirds of the Smithsonian’s bill, it’s not crazy to ask why the nation’s history museum feels less like a celebration of our past and more like a semester-long seminar on Why America Is Irredeemably Awful.

The timing wasn’t random. Earlier this month, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report titled Saving America’s Story, arguing that the Smithsonian has drifted from reflecting America’s history to reimagining it through the trendy filter of oppression, identity politics, and social justice. Among other things, the report revealed that every single museum exhibit, no matter the topic, must be linked to at least one of seven “core issues of the day:”

• race and identity

• gender and sexuality

• environmental change

• immigration and migrations

• economic inequality

• technological change

• nationalism and globalism

If Rachel Maddow were a musician, that lineup would essentially be her Greatest Hits album. But sure, the Smithsonian is an entirely nonpartisan organization with zero political agenda. Okay.

“The museum does not take sides in America’s political debates,” Hartig testified, explaining that the goal is simply to broaden the story by including voices that have been overlooked. Which would have been comforting—if lawmakers hadn’t then spent the next several hours pulling up exhibits with all the political neutrality of a Pride parade float.

Rep. Nancy Mace displayed images from exhibits featuring sexually graphic material—including photos of nude young women and “a chrome and rubber crotch harness designed for sadomasochism”—and asked a fairly obvious question: is this really appropriate for kids visiting the National Museum of American History? Dancing around the question like Muhammad Ali in his prime, Hartig explained that some exhibits are temporary, some aren’t designed for children, and parents should ultimately decide what their kids see.

Yes, Ms. Hartig, they should. They also shouldn’t stumble across a fetish exhibit in a federally funded history museum and find themselves having to have the world’s most awkward conversation, in public, with their eight-year-olds.

Mace wasn’t done. She zeroed in on the “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” exhibit, which ran from 2020 to 2023 and featured a diary from a 13-year-old wrestling with body dysmorphia and gender confusion. The exhibit also informed visitors—children included—that “gender isn’t always revealed at birth.” The congresswoman demanded to know whether that belonged in a family museum. When Hartig deflected, Mace cut through the fog with a question so direct it required a PhD to dodge: “When was your gender revealed?”

And that was just the warm-up. An extra-spicy Rep. Brandon Gill raised concerns about materials tied to the MASS Action Toolkit—a widely used framework that suggests traits like “objectivity,” “individualism,” and even “being polite” are features of “white supremacy culture.” You read that correctly: the Smithsonian’s apparatus apparently includes training materials that teach museum staff—and by extension, the public—that being polite and objective might mean you’re a closet Neo-Nazi bigot.

Hartig was quick to explain that the Smithsonian didn’t create the toolkit—which would be like a bank robber insisting he didn’t build the shotgun he’s waving in the teller’s face. If you’re using a weapon, its origin story is sort of irrelevant.

Things got especially awkward in the gift shop. Rep. Brandon Gill pointed to merchandise like “Latina Power” mugs and tote bags sold through Smithsonian channels, questioning whether a taxpayer-supported museum should be in the business of pushing identity-based slogans at all. What he didn’t ask—and I would have—was if identity pride is so important to the institution, where are the I ♥ THE CONSTITUTION hoodies? The ABE LINCOLN FAN CLUB tees? The MAGA hats? The DON’T TREAD ON ME stickers? Where’s the line for inclusivity anyway? And why is it always somewhere just above patriot?

In reality, this wasn’t about the merch. It was about the fact that an institution created to chronicle America’s past has quietly become another activist institution promoting left-wing messaging—including support for abortion and replacing the traditional Flag Day celebration with Pride Month programming—masquerading as cultural preservation.

But the deeper rot, the thing that should genuinely anger any American who walks through those doors expecting to see their country’s story, is what’s missing. The White House report found that the National Museum of American History—the United States of America’s official recordkeeper—had no exhibit on George Washington. Or Thomas Jefferson. Or Alexander Hamilton. Or the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, or the Second Continental Congress. The museum only scrambled to open a 250th anniversary exhibit this past May after the criticism started rolling in. That’s not expanding the narrative. That’s erasing the main characters and calling it “inclusion.”

The report also flagged educational programming designed to “indoctrinate” teachers and students, illegal-alien activism dressed up as historical inquiry, and a pervasive DEI framework that appears to govern everything from what goes on the walls to who gets hired to curate it. Adding new voices is one thing. Firing the original cast and replacing them with a blue-haired HR-mandated sensitivity band is something else entirely.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that America should pretend drag shows, identity politics, climate protests, or debates over gender never existed. They did. They do. They’re part of our heritage, just like slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, and Kamala Harris as an actual presidential contender are. But do we really have to pretend that every chapter of our existence deserves equal billing on the highlight reel?

Unsurprisingly, critics denounced the White House report and subsequent hearing as an attempt to force Trump’s politics onto a treasured national institution. But that objection only makes sense if you believe the Smithsonian has been politically neutral all along. Judging by the exhibits Congress presented this week, that’s a pretty hard case to make.

The Smithsonian can insist the shift is simply a broader, more inclusive telling of American history. But when lawmakers have to ask why a family gallery features BDSM imagery, why educational materials flirt with labeling politeness as oppression, why a 13-year-old’s private gender confusion journal is presented as educational content for children, and why identity politics gets more exhibition space in “America’s Museum” than the Founding Fathers themselves, it’s not unreasonable for taxpayers to wonder whether the Smithsonian is preserving history—or trying to rewrite it.

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toss a few pennies in the tip jar!

If you know anything about Substack, you know the math is brutal. Attrition is real. Subscribers come and go. The competition isn’t just fierce and never-ending—it’s constantly multiplying. There’s no health insurance. No splashy benefits package. No overtime or PTO. No HR department to complain to when the algorithm decides to stop showing your work to the people who actually signed up to read it. No meaningful way to reach the ones who would if they knew you existed.

Still it’s the best job I’ve ever had (I swear I’m not just saying that) and I literally couldn’t do it without the support of generous readers.

If you want in, an annual subscription works out to about 30 cents a post and comes with a free signed book, which probably isn’t even the worst deal around.

If you can’t swing it or you aren’t sure if you like me that much, no worries. Free content will resume tomorrow. :)

There are, roughly speaking, two kinds of people who would demand millions of dollars from the sitting president for emotional distress: those who have been illegally and catastrophically wronged by the highest office in the land, and convicted murderers who are upset because everyone keeps calling them convicted murderers. Brandon Ortiz-Vite is not the first kind.

Ortiz-Vite is a 27-year-old illegal immigrant currently living rent-free in a Michigan prison after pleading guilty to the second-degree murder of his girlfriend, 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. He’d been deported to Mexico in 2020 following a drunk-driving arrest but somehow—one can only guess, really—he made his way back into the United States. Four years later, in the midst of a heated argument with his significant other, Ortiz-Vite responded the way any man who would later claim to be the victim of reputational harm would: he shot Garcia in the head, dumped her body along a Grand Rapids highway, and drove off in her car.

Instead of using his time in the slammer to find God or work on his cross-stitch skills, Ortiz-Vite has been busily preparing a federal lawsuit. The inmate, who I will again remind gentle readers is a self-confessed killer, claims that Donald Trump caused him immeasurable pain and suffering, for which he would like a tidy $75.5 million in compensation. And it’s not just boatloads of money Ortiz-Vite is seeking. In fact, the details of his demands are so spectacularly ballsy I had to read the whole thing twice to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

Read more

So naturally, the World Cup final was blaring loudly as we cooked dinner on Sunday. When Spain clinched it, the broadcast went full cinematic melodrama: agonizing close-ups of crushed Argentine players staring into the middle distance like someone had just put down the team dog, cut with jubilant Spaniards screaming, sobbing, and launching themselves into a delirious dogpile. The stadium went wild. Strangers hugged each other like long-lost relatives. When Trump strode onto the field to hand out the hardware, several Spanish players broke into the Trump dance. It was sweet and wholesome and exactly what I imagine international sporting events were designed to do: bring people together.

Apparently, I did not see what I saw.

Within minutes of Spain lifting the World Cup trophy, the headlines were locked and loaded: “Trump booed by World Cup final crowd.” “Most universally hated president in history.” “Not a mixed reaction.”

The weirdest bit is that for the most part, the soundtrack to the “MASSIVE BOOS for Trump at World Cup” lineup doesn’t sound like an overwhelming chorus of disappointment. It sounds like… stadium noise. Clapping. Whistling. Stomping. Shouting. Music. The sort of sounds you’d expect in the immediate aftermath of a hard-won victory from a crowd that’s half euphoric, half heartbroken.

According to the internet, I also need to get my ears checked.

“I am sorry but seeing MAGA cope after Trump was mercilessly booed at FIFA is the funniest thing on the planet,” X user @CalltoActivism wrote (profile tagline: “Founded to expose MAGA corruption, defend democracy, and uplift those fighting for truth and justice.”). “They are denying he was booed when at the end of this clip it is abundantly obvious the entire world hates Donald Trump’s f***ing guts.”

Do I doubt there were people at that game expressing audible disdain for Donald Trump? Not for one skinny minute. There is one snippet making the media rounds where the displeasure is undeniable. But when the entire press corps latches onto the same cherry-picked phone clip featuring one random dude and his five friends yelling into the void, that’s not news; it’s the same tired narrative spin the Fourth Estate’s been putting on POTUS since 2016.

Meanwhile, dozens of broadcasts—ones with actual professional audio rigs covering the whole venue—didn’t seem to pick up some deafening, universal cascade of hatred. What they picked up was a mixed crowd at a sporting event reacting to a man who inspires devotion and disgust in roughly equal measure, followed by the winning team celebrating.

THE ENTIRE MEDIA INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: “80,000 people loathe Trump!”

Rodri, the captain of the Spanish national team, shook Trump’s hand warmly. Multiple players grinned and posed with POTUS. Maybe they were genuinely excited to meet him. Maybe they were all faking it. Maybe they were just world champions who would’ve grinned next to a parking meter at that particular moment. Maybe Argentine fans were booing Spain. Maybe half the stadium was booing Trump. Maybe it was just five guys with excellent lung capacity. Maybe the Spanish team was honoring the American president with their little dance moves (and later, their Make Spain Great Again hats). Maybe they were mocking him. Maybe they were just a bunch of ecstatic athletes being goofy after winning the biggest match of their lives. Maybe they don’t think about Donald Trump at all. Maybe all of these things contain an element of truth. Most likely, they do. I have no way of knowing how much—and neither do the people confidently informing us that every decibel and dance move emanating from that stadium was a referendum on Donald Trump.

Because here’s the thing about crowd noise at an 80,000-seat stadium: it’s never one thing. Never has been. And it’s never just about one clip. But when it comes to the reporting, it’s the same formula every time: find the most hostile angle, crop out the rest, declare consensus. Because “mixed reaction at sporting event” doesn’t give New York Times readers the affirmation—and the dopamine fix—that’s guaranteed with their subscription. So here we are.

The funniest part isn’t the booing or the cheering. It’s the desperation. The hysteria. The manufactured certainty. These outlets and commentators need viewers to believe that the world hates Trump as much as they do. That the verdict is in. That the planet has spoken. That this time—finally—the public rejection is total and undeniable. As if convincing Trump supporters that all of humankind is pointing and laughing might finally shame them into admitting they voted wrong—and make damn sure they don’t do it again.

And then there’s the team photo—the one that Spain cropped or edited or Photoshopped Trump out of (depending on who you listen to). Imagine getting so giddy over your own exaggerated “TRUMP IS A PLANETARY ABOMINATION” narrative that you have to pretend not wanting a guy with no connection to the team in your group victory picture is some grand statement of global revulsion.

The media, alas, will never stop mediaing. A stadium packed with 80,000 people produced cheers, jeers, whistles, whines, applause, arguments, celebrations, sore losers, triumphant winners, and scores of spectators behaving as if they had personally just won or lost the World Cup. The press took all of that messy, contradictory humanity, found the twelve seconds it liked best, and handed down a unanimous verdict on behalf of the planet.

My take? If you need one angry guy with an iPhone in the nosebleed seats to prove the entire world agrees with you, I’m pretty sure you’re the one coping.

buy me a coffee!

Want to know why a substance you’ve probably been told belongs somewhere between antifreeze and rat poison on the “things you absolutely should not ingest” list has become one of the most sought-after—and fiercely suppressed—medical treatments in the world? Tune in to hear my co-author Dr. Pierre Kory discussing our latest book, The War on Chlorine Dioxide, with the lovely Dr. Tara Perry.

But actually.

It seems Olive Garden, home to scratch-made soups and the “Tour of Italy” coma, has implemented security measures that would make a TSA agent blush.

America’s second most popular dining spot recently brought back its iconic Never-Ending Pasta Pass—a golden ticket to thirteen glorious weeks of unlimited pasta, sauce, and toppings for the ridiculously low price of $100 plus tax [dine in only; i.e., there will be witnesses]. Unlimited as in literally without limit. You could theoretically eat there three times a day for ninety-one consecutive days, packing away 273 meals at a per-meal cost of around 37 cents. (*At that point, you’ll need the money you saved for new pants and Ozempic, but I digress.)

Don’t get any crazy ideas about sharing your card with your carb-loading neighbor, either. The passes are personalized and non-transferable, and according to Olive Garden’s rules, passholders must present a valid photo ID matching the name on the pass when ordering.

Which seems reasonable. I mean, we can’t have people roaming the country impersonating one another for infinite Alfredo!

The irony of having to show an official, government-issued ID to your OG server—and not to, say, your local poll worker—did not go unnoticed.

“Olive Garden requires ID to use their never ending pasta pass but most Democrat-run states don’t require your ID to vote,” conservative activist and influencer Robby Starbuck posted on X. “So in America, our pasta deals are literally more secure than our elections.”

“Ten thousand people had zero problem proving who they are for pasta,” wrote user @Sionainnagins. “Yet millions of Americans are told basic voter integrity is somehow discriminatory. Make it make sense.”

“I’m really glad Olive Garden was able to implement the SAVE America Act before the Senate,” political commentator Priya Patel quipped on Fox News. “The fact eating pasta requires an I.D. before voting is pretty ridiculous.”

And just like that, a pasta promotion became the most effective ad the election-security movement never paid for.

The timing couldn’t have been better, to be honest. President Trump just used his Thursday night address to urge Americans to pressure Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, legislation that includes voter ID and citizenship-verification provisions. And now here comes Olive Garden, demanding that you show your papers before they’ll plate your angel hair.

At this point, my list of things Americans need ID to do needs its own ZIP code. Serious, grown-uppy stuff like board an airplane. Rent a car. Purchase a firearm. Check into a hotel. Open a bank account. Buy a house. Legit. Sensible. No notes.

But we’re also routinely asked to prove our identities for things so spectacularly inconsequential they barely register. UPS holding your cat litter hostage? ID, please. Opted to pick up your Hamilton tickets at will call? Better bring a plastic card with your face on it. Like to borrow a book from the library? Kindly prove that you are, in fact, the person attempting to gain unfettered access to Goodnight Moon. Thinking about surprising your BFF with a birthday cupcake at work? The security guard at the front desk is gonna need your vitals. Want to check into a campground, pick up a gym membership card, replace a lost apartment key, or grab something from a storage facility? Odds are someone may very reasonably ask you to demonstrate that you are the human being whose name appears on the reservation, account, lease, or package.

Nobody calls this suppression. Nobody screams that requiring identification to prevent unauthorized access to a discounted plate of noodles marginalizes anyone. Nobody launches a federal lawsuit demanding that Olive Garden accept a utility bill and a solemn pinky promise. The concept itself—that occasionally, in situations where access to something is limited to a particular person, you might need to prove that you are that person—is apparently completely uncontroversial.

Until you get to voting. Then everything gets weird.

Reasonable people can debate what good voter ID laws look like. You can argue that states should provide qualifying identification free of charge. You can make accommodations for the elderly, the disabled, people born at home with paperwork that basically says “trust me,” or married women whose last names have changed more times than their Netflix passwords. Fine. Solve those problems.

But no. Instead, the left lands on ID is racist, ergo we should eliminate it. Respectfully… really? If identification is difficult to obtain, make identification easier to obtain! If a person can’t afford it, make it free. If someone is physically unable to get to the DMV, figure out a way to bring the process to them. I know scores of conservatives who would gladly volunteer for that job. Sign me up.

The idea that verifying someone’s identity is itself an outrageous demand becomes increasingly difficult to take seriously in a country where you have to prove your personhood to rent a carpet cleaner.

And the strangest part is how there’s not a single secondary instance where folks get offended by having to prove who they are. Nobody standing at a hotel desk says, “HOW DARE YOU QUESTION ME?” Nobody arrives at will call and gasps, “Oh, so now you don’t even trust me?” Nobody is organizing a march because an apartment manager refuses to hand a replacement key to some dude who wandered in off the street and announced, “Yep, 3B. That’s me.”

We understand instinctively why those rules exist. Fraud happens. People lie. Things have value. And when something belongs exclusively to one person, or when one person is entitled to use something exactly once, confirming that person’s identity is not generally considered fascism.

For as long as we’ve had systems that grant access to something finite and worth having, you’ve had to prove you’re the person entitled to it. Never not ever could you stroll into Olive Garden and expect unlimited spaghetti on the honor system. That’s not a new standard. That’s the baseline.

@iceice5361#danbongino #danbonginoshow #bongino #bonginoreport #america #usa #us #news

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In the overwhelming majority of the developed world, showing ID to vote is about as controversial as wearing pants in public. In America, the man-on-the-street reaction to the subjugation argument is pure confusion: “Of course I have an ID. Is this a trick question?” Democrats claim to oppose proof of identity because it disenfranchises minorities—yet they have no problem insulting them, stereotyping them, and lumping them into one massive, incompetent mob. Funny how that works.

States have always run their own elections—everything from registration forms to which IDs “count” has been decided locally, with only a few broad federal guardrails like “you can’t deny anyone the right to vote based on race, sex, disability, or number of body piercings,” and “you have to let 18-year-olds vote, even if they’re wearing LEGALIZE IT t-shirts.” That’s how you end up with one state that wants your fingerprints and dental records before they’ll hand over a ballot and another that’ll give you one if you flash a Blockbuster card and a warm smile.

The SAVE America Act isn’t aiming to federalize elections, to be clear. It’s trying to set a pretty reasonable floor: prove you’re a citizen to get on the rolls, and prove you’re you when you cast your ballot. That’s it. It doesn’t erase state control, it just says that when you’re choosing a president or a member of Congress, everyone from Seattle to Savannah has to clear the same basic bar—no more “honor system” for something more important than unlimited breadsticks. The only reason you wouldn’t want such a radical rule is if closing loopholes interferes with your business model.

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the tip jar/bookstore is open!

[*adds psychopath to resume*]

Somewhere along the line, I transformed into the kind of person who wakes up before 5:00 a.m. every day without an alarm. I don’t know exactly how this happened. Or why. Or when. I assume sometime between menopause and my first passionate, unsolicited opinion about mulch. All I know is that the sun hasn’t beaten me up in years. Drinking my third cup of coffee in the dark is all I know anymore.

Now Congress is actually taking steps to make daylight saving time (DST) permanent. If the Sunshine Protection Act passes, come December, the sun wouldn’t peek over the horizon until nearly 9:00 a.m. in some parts of the country. Nine o’clock. Millions of Americans would commute in the pitch dark. School children across the country would need flashlights to find their bus stops. My morning walk would basically become my mid-afternoon walk.

The pitch: No more driving home from work in the dark. No more miserable semi-annual wrestling matches with the microwave. No more complicated mental math to try to explain your bad mood. (“Wait, the clock says it’s three but we just fell back so technically it’s four OMG now it all makes sense.”) Just bright, sunny evenings all year long. It’s called the Sunshine Protection Act, for crying out loud. What could be more wholesome, more harmless?

The thing is, we’ve already tried this little experiment. It did not go well. In January 1974, during the energy crisis, Congress put the entire country on permanent DST. At first, Americans loved the idea. Polls showed nearly 80% support. Backyard barbecues without sweating through your underwear? An after-dinner pickleball match at a temperature below the surface of the sun? Watching a sunset without SPF 50 and an electrolyte drink? Say less.

Then winter showed up.

As it happened, parents did not enjoy waking their children in what felt like the middle of the night and sending them off to school in the cloak of darkness. Some literally wrapped their kids in reflective tape just so drivers could see them on the streets and at bus stops.

Tragically, that particular trick didn’t always work. During the first weeks of the experiment, several children were struck and killed by cars in the pre-dawn darkness. Whether permanent daylight saving time was to blame is still debated by researchers—but politically, the damage was done. Public opinion flipped and Congress repealed the law before the two-year trial was even halfway over.

It turned out as much as people wanted long stretches of sunlight in the evening, they really didn’t want long stretches of darkness in the morning.

I think sometimes folks forget that part. (One gal on X actually wrote, “Kids having longer time in the evening to spend playing after doing homework is a good thing.” Y’all realize nobody’s handing out extra hours here, right?)

The reality is, there was (and is) no have-it-all option. Essentially, there are three mediocre ones: make the switch to permanent daylight saving, get rid of daylight saving altogether—yes, permanent standard time, meaning shorter days even in summer—or stick with the hybrid system we’ve got now. None is perfect. Patio restaurant owners, retailers, athletes, commuters, and happy‑hour enthusiasts are pounding on door number one. I get the argument; when 5 p.m. looks and feels like bedtime, the days can start to resemble a sad parade of grind, sleep, repeat.

Parents, teachers, farmers, delivery drivers, pediatricians, and sleep scientists are all clinging to door number two. Morning sunlight is what sets your body’s internal clock. That means better sleep. Better mood. Fewer people stumbling through the day like caffeinated raccoons. Sure, your brain tells you it wants endless daylight. It also tells you it wants to lie on the couch and eat Doritos sometimes. Neither is great for you.

Door number three always felt like the worst of both worlds. I can’t believe I’m even typing this, but now I think it might be a pretty decent compromise. Forget my pathetic little first-world problem about having to wait a few hours to take my morning walk. Imagine trying to drag a ninth grader out of bed when it still looks like 2 a.m. outside. It already takes an iron will and solid hostage negotiating skills to get a teenager to first period. Sure, we have a few confusing days in March and November; in exchange we get late sunsets in summer when we’re actually outside enjoying them, and brighter winter mornings just when we’re trying to convince our circadian rhythms that life is worth living. It could be worse. I certainly don’t want standard time year round.

While we might love springing forward for hedonistic reasons, DST wasn’t created so we could sip rosé at 8:30 p.m. It was adopted during World War I (and again in World War II) as an energy-saving measure, based on the theory that more evening daylight meant less artificial lighting and lower fuel use. Whether it actually worked is… still a matter of debate. But it’s stuck around, well, mostly because changing it requires a literal act of Congress.

For years, I assumed the only people fighting against DST were vampires and the sort of neighbors who call the HOA because your garbage can was visible for eleven minutes too long. Now I’m reading circadian rhythm research. Life comes at you fast.

The House actually just overwhelmingly passed the Sunshine Protection Act (308-117); from here it goes to the Senate, where its prospects of passing are entirely up in the air. Hilariously, when a nearly identical bill went through the Senate back in 2022, it passed unanimously—and then died in the House, which couldn’t be bothered to vote on it. For once, I find myself rooting for Congress to keep doing what Congress does best: absolutely nothing.

Godspeed, gridlock. Don’t let me down now.

***I write about vaccines, assassination plots, socialism, surveillance, stolen elections, Islamification, fraud, pharma, censorship, climate change, chlorine dioxide, and high profile political murders, and somehow I feel like this is the piece that’s going to get me hate mail. Remember, it’s just my opinion—and you’re welcome to share yours! :)

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***About THE SPEECH***

If you want to know how nervous the media was about Trump’s address to the nation last night, NBC, ABC, and CNN preemptively refused to run it at all. This morning, they’re here to tell you that you missed nothing. “Old grievances.” “Rehashed.” “Common refrain.” “Exaggerated claims.” “Wild and baseless.” “Debunked conspiracies.”

To be fair, it wasn’t Trump’s most charismatic presentation. We didn’t get the perp walks and sealed indictments we were hoping for. And until I have time to dig into the newly declassed documents at the heart of it, I can’t honestly say if it was a game-changer or a 35-minute ad for the SAVE act.

But there were a few nuggets worth flagging: an FBI official allegedly wrote in her own words that she was running a shadow government to bury Chinese election interference. An NSA analyst admitted to “deliberately massaging” the president’s daily briefings to scrub any mention of election tampering. And the Obama-Biden transition team apparently left some burn bags—actual document destruction—behind that somebody forgot to burn. Oops.

So not quite a fireworks finale at this point—maybe more like a smoke bomb—but hardly “nothing to see here” either, providing POTUS can produce the receipts. (The White House website literally crashed under the traffic after the doc dump was announced.) Stay tuned. :)

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We’re talking about a system that historically produces food shortages, forced labor, censorship, wealth confiscation, economic stagnation, mass surveillance, and widespread, government-induced famine. And yet proponents continue to peddle the failed business model—one that hinges entirely on collective amnesia and Robin Hood economics.

Because the “we’re building utopia” pitch pretty much goes like this:

HOPEFUL DICTATOR: “We’re going to provide free childcare, subsidized housing, no-cost college, expanded public transit, state-funded legal services, universal healthcare, and a complimentary goldfish for every family in the district! Bowl and freeze-dried bloodworms included, of course.”

LAZY PROLETARIAT: “That’s fantastic! How are we paying for all that?”

HOPEFUL DICTATOR: “Rich people.”

LAZY PROLETARIAT: “The rich people we’re constantly calling greedy parasites, soulless oligarchs, tax-cheating dragons hoarding stolen wealth, and the root of literally every problem on Earth?”

HOPEFUL DICTATOR: “Yup!”

LAZY PROLETARIAT: “Okay... but what if they don’t want to pay?”

HOPEFUL DICTATOR: “They don’t get a choice.”

LAZY PROLETARIAT: “Well, what if they leave?”

HOPEFUL DICTATOR: “They won’t.”

That’s it. That’s the entire plan. There’s no secondary revenue source. No sensitivity analysis. No “if the math stops mathing” Plan B. Just absolute confidence that the guy you pickpocketed today on the train will let you do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after. For the rest of ever.

If you pitched that business model on Shark Tank, Mark Cuban would laugh you out of the building before Kevin O’Leary had a chance to call you a moron.

Because here’s the weird thing about wealthy people. They have money. And yeah, money can buy Louis Vuitton trash cans and pet lions and solid gold bathtubs, but it can also buy options. Mobility. Flexibility. If you’re a Rockefeller, you probably aren’t anchored by a mortgage you can never replace, a job you can’t take with you, or kids whose daycare center is also known as “Grandma’s house.” If your town starts charging extra for air, you can move to another town. So can all your other rich friends. Maybe not all of them and not overnight. But enough of them to turn the mayor’s five-year plan into a ten-alarm crisis.

The political far-left pretends this isn’t a thing. Just ask New York. Raise taxes another two percent on the people you’re already bilking the hardest? They’ll stay. Double capital gains taxes? They love it here. Jack up the estate tax? Central Park in the fall! Levy even more on second homes, investment income, and inheritances? You can’t put a price on Broadway. Bleed them until they’re giving the government nine bucks out of every ten they earn? They’ll never, ever leave.

Until they do.

The headlines coming out of the Big Apple since Mamdani moved into Gracie Mansion read less like a market analysis and more like a slow-motion breakup text from the city’s collective sugar daddies.

Just this week, the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission dropped an awkward report: New York’s share of the nation’s millionaires has shrunk from 12.7% in 2010 to just 8.7% today. Even worse for Albany’s spreadsheet enthusiasts, the rich aren’t just leaving—they’re sprinting for the exits faster than every other socioeconomic group. (Maybe they have nicer running shoes hahahaha.)

The very next day, Fox News covered “New York’s dramatic exodus of wealthy residents,” estimating the state lost nearly $11 billion in annual taxpayer income in a single year as scores of well-heeled Empire Staters packed up and found greener—and less aggressively taxed—pastures.

When rich people leave town, the other rich people can’t even move across the street because there’s nobody to buy their houses. “Manhattan’s luxury real estate market ground to a halt last week, with just one trophy home asking more than $10 million entering contract,” the New York Post reported the same day as the Fox bomb. (Normally, three to five pads in that posh price range change hands every week.) “Brokers told the Post that anti-wealth rhetoric from Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the controversial pied-à-terre tax are spooking affluent buyers.” Apparently, giving a six-figure surcharge a fancy French name doesn’t soften the blow.

Obviously, taxes aren’t the exclusive reason people move. Florida has sunshine. North Carolina has mountains. Texas has jobs. Kansas has the World’s Largest Ball of Twine (which inexplicably gets 4.6 stars on Google Reviews. I mean, why?). People relocate for family, business opportunities, quality of life, weather, schools, cute boys they met on spontaneous kayak trips. (True story.) But pretending taxes play no role in relocation is every bit as unserious as pretending they’re the only driver.

Here’s the part I can’t get past. If your entire governing philosophy depends on a relatively small number of highly mobile taxpayers continuing to generate an outsized share of your revenue... shouldn’t your first priority be making sure they don’t leave?

California floated a 5% billionaire tax. The media’s favorite reassurance? “Only six of the state’s 214 billionaires left!” Only six. No big deal. Except those six represented roughly $27 billion in tax revenue—about a quarter of what the entire plan was supposed to bring in. And that’s the part progressives keep forgetting to factor in: when your funding model depends on a microscopic number of people cutting microscopic numbers of enormous checks, “a few” departures isn’t a rounding error—it’s the entire balance sheet blowing up.

There’s a reason places that have tried aggressive wealth taxes keep running into the same problem. France scaled back its wealth tax after years of watching flush Frenchies flee with their fortunes to Switzerland and Italy. Sweden scrapped theirs entirely for the same reason. In the U.S., middle-class families are flocking to low-tax states in record numbers. This isn’t theoretical—it’s a pattern.

And when the cash cow moves farther out into the country, the bills don’t disappear—they multiply. Let’s say you determine you can fully fund Gimmeville by taxing everyone making $10 million or more. But when you do, a third of them leave. No problem. You’ll just lower the threshold to $5 million—and bump up the rate to make up the difference. More natives get restless and bolt. The local paper can’t go a day without another hand-wringing op-ed about “wealth migration.” This is not how things were supposed to go.

The good news is, Gimmeville’s population is booming, thanks to the newcomers streaming in daily for the freebies. The bad news is, almost none of them are hedge fund managers asking where to mail their first eight-figure tax payment.

Now you’re in a serious pickle. Suddenly, the people making $2 million start to look suspiciously well-to-do. Then it’s the folks in the high six figures. Because somebody has to pay for all this free crap! Funny how quickly “rich” becomes relative.

The term wealthy has always been a moving target. Consider that the federal income tax itself was originally sold as something only the affluent would ever pay. In 1913, it applied exclusively to incomes above $3,000—a fortune at the time and a threshold fewer than one percent of Americans met. A few decades later, the majority of ordinary Americans were forking over healthy chunks of their paychecks to the IRS (which quickly and conveniently rolled out automatic withholding so citizens couldn’t spend their money before the government could steal it).

Thanks to New York’s aggressive tax structure, the top 1% of earners pay roughly 46% of all state income taxes. Think about that. That’s an astonishing amount of fiscal weight resting on a very small group of individuals. Most people would look at that ratio and think, “Wow, we’re awfully dependent on that tiny clique.” The modern socialist looks at it and thinks, “They can probably cover a little more.”

Which is fine—until even a fraction of the Waltons and the Du Ponts decide they’d rather spend their winters—and their tax dollars—somewhere else.

That’s what makes this less of an ideological debate and more of a spreadsheet problem. You don’t have to believe rich people deserve tax breaks. You don’t have to think billionaires are heroes. You don’t have to like anyone who owns a 200-foot yacht or adds guac to their Chipotle burrito ($3!) without even thinking twice about it. You just have to recognize that building an entire financial strategy around the permanent cooperation of people you’re actively incentivizing to leave might not be the World’s Best Business Plan.

Buy me a side of guac!

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Trump is set to deliver a primetime address tomorrow night, and word on the street (a.k.a. Avenue X and also the president himself) is that the main event won’t be an update on Iran or a tribute to Lindsey Graham or a boastful report about the economy, but a scathing exposé on election “irregularities.”

The rebuttals have been pre-written. The fact-checks are already halfway through their victory lap. The headlines—“baseless,” “debunked,” “without evidence,” “conspiracy theories”—somehow beat POTUS to the podium.

Trump, for his part, is being comically coquettish.

“It’s just going to be a speech like a lot of my speeches,” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt coyly. “We do pretty well in that regard.”

Here’s the curious thing. A new White House task force has been reviewing thousands of pages of classified intelligence and law enforcement documents for evidence of election fraud, particularly in 2020. MSNBC Senior National Security Reporter David Rohde called the declass concerning. Unprecedented. Unconstitutional. Alarming. The first of a bunch of efforts we’re going to see between now and the midterm elections to sow doubt.

“The president could use the address to press his long-standing allegations of foreign interference in the 2020 election, the results of which he has never accepted,” WaPo fretted.

The panic is palpable—which alone is revealing. Imagine your child claiming she has proof that unicorns exist and feeling the need to viciously preempt it.

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BREAKING: Health officials this week confirmed that a mysterious parasitic infection called cyclosporiasis is sweeping across the nation with all the subtlety of a TSA pat-down. Investigators say the culprit appears to be “raw produce,” though in a predictable twist, they cannot specify which fruits or vegetables are suspect, instead advising Americans to avoid “anything that exists largely because of photosynthesis.”

Grocery stores are reportedly responding by stocking shelves exclusively with Pop-Tarts and existential dread, while consumers grapple with the realization that “triple-washed” may just be a marketing term with no legal meaning whatsoever, like “artisanal” or “now with up to 20% less sodium!”

As of this writing, officials have tallied roughly 3,000 cases across 31 states, a number expected to rise as Americans continue their brave, foolhardy quest to consume plants.

That last part sounds both widespread and serious, until you bother to do some fourth-grade math. That’s when you discover we’re talking about something that is affecting roughly 0.0009% of the population. Even if that number doubled or tripled with underreporting, we’d still be talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent.

To be clear, this particular bug isn’t fun. It can cause severe diarrhea (the word “explosive” is working overtime this week), stomach cramps, nausea, bloating, fatigue, and flu-like symptoms. Eighty-six people have been hospitalized, mostly for dehydration. That’s about one in every 4,089,214 Americans, or less than two in each state. There also have been a grand total of [*checks notes*] zero confirmed deaths linked to this outbreak—or any outbreak, in all of history, anywhere in the world. Cyclosporiasis is also easily treatable with common antibiotics.

But sure, let’s give this 6,789 times more media coverage than, say, vaccine injury or human trafficking.

The problem is, no single food, farm or supplier has been identified as the source, so there’s no recall. Just general, commonsense precautions: wash hands and produce thoroughly, cook high-risk items (apparently the parasite perishes the minute a food hits 158 degrees), and consider calling your doctor if Montezuma is exacting prolonged revenge on your intestines.

[I’d add: grow as much of your own produce as possible—or at least buy local—and maybe have some ivermectin on hand. Wink-wink.]

Business Insider went a bit further, advising readers to avoid lettuce until investigators can pin down the source of the illness. Oh, and cilantro. And basil. And raspberries. And green onions and snow peas and bagged salad. Basically, they suggest steering clear of any produce that hasn’t been baked, boiled, or broiled into mush. That’s the public health guidance: until we can figure out what vegetation is causing this, you should probably just skip edible foliage altogether. In unrelated news, Highway Patrol is advising all Americans to stay off the roads until police track down that Honda in Cincinnati that ran the red light.

“The other night, I found myself in the unenviable position of trying to cook a salad,” The Atlantic’s Nicholas Florko wrote. “And I mean cook a salad: I spread fresh, delicious-looking gem lettuce in a pan and watched it wilt away into a sad, heated blob.”

I’ve got to believe the guy was being dramatic for effect. Because—and this may be shocking to some folks—there are plenty of veggies that taste downright delicious when you cook them. Why would you torture yourself with stewed salad greens? That’s not a food safety tip, that’s a cry for help.

USA Today quietly blamed the outbreak on “pared-down staff at both CDC and FDA thanks to budget cuts and firings,” which probably isn’t even the first time somebody tried to pin a pandemic of loose stools on Trump. But here’s where the budget-cut narrative falls apart: cyclospora surges in the U.S. are almost always traced to imported produce—berries from Mexico, cilantro from Central America, snow peas from Guatemala. Which means this isn’t really a story about underfunded inspectors at home. It’s a story about a global food supply chain where American consumers eat whatever shows up on the boat, traceability is a joke, and let’s just say the sanitation practices in some growing regions make a Coachella porta-potty look like the Mayo Clinic. The agencies responsible for catching contaminated imports have been failing at this for decades—long before anyone in the current administration touched a budget line.

And since no public health panic is complete around here without a rousing round of “Follow the Money,” let’s consider who actually benefits by framing fresh produce as dangerous. Spoiler: It’s not the farmers. It’s the processed food industry, which would love nothing more than for you to look at a head of romaine the same way you’d look at a used needle. Make it sound scary enough and maybe you’ll replace your nightly salad with something shelf-stable, profitable, and engineered in a factory. (The chronic disease industry gets a nice downstream boost, too.)

It would appear that somewhere between “wash your produce” and “cancel things that grow in dirt” lies a thing we seem to have misplaced in recent years: perspective. The CDC estimates that 48 million Americans suffer a foodborne illness every year. Forty-eight million. Roughly 128,000 are hospitalized, and about 3,000 die. Norovirus alone—the delightful stomach bug famous for tearing through cruise ships, schools, nursing homes, and family gatherings every winter—strikes tens of millions of unlucky souls in the U.S. each year, and nobody is out there suggesting we all forsake broccoli over it.

Compared with those numbers, a few thousand cases of cyclosporiasis, while worth investigating, barely registers statistically. Yet somehow the coverage manages to create the impression that your next forkful of arugula is a medical emergency in the making.

After all the warnings, the restaurant speculation, the produce blacklist, and several paragraphs devoted to urgent, Jackson Pollock-style bowel evacuation, the Business Insider piece ends with this unintentionally hilarious correction: “An earlier version of this story misattributed a Chipotle spokesperson’s statement to Taco Bell.”

Can you imagine getting that call?

CHIPOTLE SPOKESPERSON: “Are you kidding me? We’re the ones who said ‘we don’t believe the ingredients we source are associated,’ not Taco Bell! I demand a retraction!”

I’m not suggesting food safety doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. Investigate outbreaks. Identify contaminated products. Recall them quickly. Inform the public. But if we could get to a point where health coverage also includes that little element known as context, that’d be great.

Three thousand sick people is news. It’s just not “everyone burn the contents of your crisper drawer and panic” news. Sometimes people spend a few miserable days chained to a toilet. Just because the symptoms are… explosive… doesn’t mean the headlines need to be.

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*Also I feel like this is going to turn into its own subreddit, so I’ll add here that they’re even better if you roll them in crushed pistachios for color and crunch and sprinkle them with flaky sea salt because flaky sea salt, you’re welcome.

When we left off, the preliminary hearing to decide whether there’s enough evidence to send Tyler Robinson to trial was just wrapping up after five days of testimony (the actual decision won’t come until the judge hears oral arguments on September 1). But as firsthand accounts of the courtroom drama began to trickle out, it became immediately and painfully clear that the spin machine was already in full swing.

The coverage—from people who were actually there—ranges from “we saw previously unseen high-def video of Robinson firing the deadly shot” to “we saw nothing but the same grainy clips that have been circulating for months and heard repeated testimony that no such evidence exists anywhere in the universe.”

I’m not calling anyone a liar here, but clearly someone is lying.

It’s who’s saying what I find the most fascinating. Because there’s a quirky little pattern playing out in conservative media, and I don’t think enough people are talking about it with the appropriate level of what-the-hell outrage.

(And as always, don’t shoot the messenger. I merely report on what I see.)

You know the names. Benny Johnson. Jack Posobiec. Nick Sortor. Allie Beth Stuckey. Glenn Beck. Liz Wheeler. David Harris, Jr. Conservative influencers who built massive, loyal followings by questioning the official story. These are not “benefit of the doubt” folks. These are “if Uncle Sam’s lips are moving, he’s lying” types. Their audiences don’t just like that about them—it’s the fundamental reason they’re there in the first place.

Apparently every right-wing podcaster on the internet was in Utah this past week to watch the hearing. Roughly thirty seconds after court was adjourned, they collectively rushed to X to announce the foregone conclusion.

Johnson went live on Fox News to call the hearing “an overwhelming and demonstrable evidentiary bombshell for the prosecution.” He proceeded to trot out the familiar talking points—the DNA, the alleged multiple confessions—and demanded “a swift end to the trial.” Yes, folks, let’s hurry up and get a death sentence! That’ll make everyone feel much better.

“My question to anyone still doubting whether Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk is ‘what more do you need?’” Johnson repeated on Fox.

What more do we need? I don’t know, Benny—maybe the same level of skepticism you’ve applied to literally every other tale the government has ever told (including this one, initially at least)? Maybe the same instinct that made your audience trust you in the first place? Because that instinct seems to have vanished the moment you got proximity to the process.

Same with Posobiec, who apparently sat in the room for the ballistics testimony, absorbed it all firsthand, and somehow arrived at the exact same conclusion as the institutions he’s spent years warning were as trustworthy as a Nigerian prince who can’t remember his bank PIN.

These aren’t middle-of-the-roaders. Collectively, they’ve probably spent a podcast decade dissecting single inconsistencies in mainstream news reports. And now they watch a one-sided prosecution presentation and handily declare the case airtight? The same intrepid activists who’d spend three hours breaking down why a CNN timestamp doesn’t add up are now looking at government surveillance footage and saying “yep, that checks out”?

Yep, that doesn’t check out.

I know what some of you are thinking right now: Smart, evolved people change their minds when new information is presented! And you’re absolutely right; they do. (If you’ll recall, I was a dutiful vaxxer for decades.) The problem is, according to other people who were also physically present at the very same hearing, roughly [*checks notes*] zero new information was presented.

None.

So these truth-seeking talking heads watched a week of conflicting testimonies and just… sided with the state. No parsing of inconsistencies. No probing questions about chain of custody. No suspicion about narrative convenience or the cars that don’t quite seem to match. Nothing whatsoever about the site being scrubbed or the approximately eleventeen thousand other quirks of the case. Just: the evidence is strong, the case is clear, great job everyone.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice the pattern. Because this is hardly new.

Take Kash Patel. (Please! Ba-dum-bum.) In 2023, he appeared on—wait for it—Benny Johnson’s podcast and said outright that the FBI was protecting the Epstein client list because of “who’s on it.” No hedging. No qualifiers. Straight up: powerful people are being protected, and that’s why you’ll never see those names. Trust score? 10/10. This guy is a shark. The pedophiles are going down.

Patel got his shiny new FBI Director badge in February 2025. He promised transparency. “No cover-ups, no missing documents, no stone left unturned.” If I were a bobblehead collector, I would have raced out to buy a dashboard Kash Patel.

And then there’s Bongino. Former cop. Former Secret Service agent. He had seen all the BS and he was ready to expose it on his massive media platform. For years, his position was that Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. He said it on his podcast. He said it on Fox. He promised, passionately, that he was “not ever gonna let this story go.” He laid out the blackmail angle like it was obvious. He positioned himself as someone who would sever his own limb and feed it to sharks before he’d fold to the institutional party line.

That summer, the FBI and DOJ released a memo: their “systematic review” found no incriminating client list, the death was ruled a suicide, and no further disclosure was “appropriate or warranted.” Is it just me, or is it highly sus for a man to insist the list was hidden because of who’s on it to abruptly declare such a list is nonexistent?

RANDOM GUY YOU TRUST: “Wait until you see pics of the 750-pound blue marlin I caught in Cabo!”
YOU: “Cool, yeah! Can’t wait!”
NARRATOR: “Five minutes later…”
YOU: “Can I see those pics now?”
RANDOM GUY YOU NO LONGER TRUST: “Actually I don’t know how to fish and I’ve never been to Mexico.”

Suddenly the Johnson/Posobiec moment doesn’t look like an outlier. It looks like an echo. Because that’s exactly what it is.

Liz Wheeler, the former OANN host, Turning Point insider, and Queen of Question Everything, made a name for herself for her relentless skepticism of state talking points. The tidier the packaging, the harder she pushed. But oddly, with this single story, she’s parroting the Official Narrative™ like it came laminated.

Same with Megyn Kelly. KanekoaTheGreat. Veteran-turned-podcaster Graham Allen. All of them became “go-to sources” by blabbing about the dangers of trusting federal messaging. And now every single one is out here serving up the identical canned slop. But only about Charlie Kirk, mind you. You can still side-eye everything else Washington ever told you to. It’s almost like there’s some secret script out there or something.

The big, burning, bright orange question is: why? And the sad, sorry, somber gray answer is: I wish I knew. Maybe proximity changes people. Maybe there are institutional pressures I can’t appreciate. Maybe they’re being bribed or blackmailed or pressured or threatened. Maybe they knew Charlie personally and intimately and want closure more than they want truth. Maybe they really did see something mind-blowing in that courtroom that we haven’t seen and the other side is lying. I don’t know, and unlike a shocking number of people on the internet, I’m perfectly comfortable admitting that. But I do know this: when your whole schtick is urging millions of people to interrogate the orthodoxy—and then every curious bone in your body disintegrates overnight in perfect sync with a whole bunch of people exactly like you—that shift is the thing that needs interrogating.

BEFORE: “The deep state is hiding something, question everything, trust nothing—except me.”

AFTER: “Now I trust the deep state! And you can trust me because I used to distrust them. We good?”

Bongino saw the Epstein footage. Johnson saw the courtroom exhibits. Posobiec heard the testimony. Patel reviewed the files. (Wheeler and Kelly appear to just be retweeting their brunch buddies.) And in every case, the questions they trained their audiences to ask—about motive, about gaps, about convenient narratives—just disappear. Their followers aren’t furious because they’re incapable of accepting evidence. They’re furious because they’re watching capture happen in real time.

I understand—I truly do—that not everything is a conspiracy. I’m not so far gone that just because they say it, it’s obviously false. I mean, I’m close—but I’m not totally there yet. If I saw or read or learned something tomorrow that changed my mind, I’d put out an emergency APB about it. I certainly wouldn’t waste a hundred hours and seventy-seven column inches trying to share a belief I didn’t sincerely hold. And my sincerely held belief is that there’s a massive, coordinated effort to push a single, neat, and utterly unbelievable narrative—one that could end in an innocent man losing his life.

Here’s the slippery slope in all of this: if highly influential commentators are already telling millions of people that the case is essentially solved—and that is absolutely what they are doing—what happens when this actually goes to trial? If the public has been primed to believe the evidence is overwhelming before a jury ever hears it, maybe the goal isn’t to win the trial—it’s to make the trial irrelevant.

Food for thought. Or don’t think about it. That seems to be the preferred response.

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As it happens, there’s another Charlie Kirk story worth talking about—and you may be relieved to know that this one’s not about patsies, projectiles, or preliminary hearings. It’s about paydays. Eye-popping ones. Because it turns out that being an absolutely repulsive human being is the new winning Powerball ticket.

You may recall that in the days and weeks following Kirk’s senseless murder, an alarming number of people responded with the warmth and humanity of a rusty wood chipper. Social media was a repulsive sea of celebrations, crass memes, celebrity backpedaling, and tweets about karmic retribution. (For… engaging. Make it make sense.) Several of these lovely specimens lost their jobs after their employers decided that publicly cheering a man’s execution maybe wasn’t aligned with corporate values. Many found sympathetic donors eager to help cushion the blow—because if it doesn’t immediately inspire a GoFundMe, did it even happen?

Now, some of those poor, unemployed “victims” are cashing in bigly.

According to NBC News, at least five educators who were disciplined or fired after posting unthinkable comments about Kirk following his assassination have collectively received more than $2.7 million in settlements from public institutions. One former professor alone is walking away with $1.9 million after calling Kirk a “disgusting psychopath,” insisting Erika is “a sick f*ck for marrying him,” and putting in print that his children were better off as orphans.

The words themselves are ugly and shocking enough, but the most disturbing part is who’s saying them.

Again, these aren’t anonymous trolls lobbing grenades from burner accounts. They’re not even liberal influencers hoping to go viral on TikTok. They’re educators. Administrators. College professors. A high school teacher. People entrusted with shaping young minds, modeling civic discourse, and—at least in theory—teaching students how to engage with ideas they find offensive without wishing death on anyone.

And yet here we are.

An assistant psychology professor in Kansas framed Kirk’s murder as “karma” on Facebook. Another called his death a “blessing.” Another unloaded a laundry list of insults so over-the-top it reads less like political commentary and more like a psychotic break. As a result, they were relieved of their professional responsibilities. Seems fair enough. What doesn’t seem fair is rewarding them with six and sometimes seven figure checks. But I don’t make the rules.

The very best (as in absolute worst) part? Those settlement dollars didn’t come from a handy “Consequences for Saying Disgusting Things” insurance fund. They came from public institutions—which means, in plain English, taxpayers. You. Me. Erika Kirk. Charlie’s parents, colleagues, and friends. Because nothing says “justice” quite like asking the victim’s family to help finance the payout.

If you’re already racing to the comments to type “BUT ACADEMIC FREEDOM!” in all caps, allow me to save you the keystrokes. Academic freedom protects your right to teach controversial ideas, challenge students, and hold unpopular political views. It was never meant to shield “This man deserved to die and his kids are better off” as a profound or even acceptable scholarly contribution. That’s not a hot take. That’s not rigorous discourse. That’s just being a horrible person with a captive audience of 19-year-olds. It’s precisely the kind of statement that should end a career, not fund a beach house.

As much as I’d love to call this a cancer that only affects the left, I cannot. When Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer in his home in 2022, Fox News hosts Rachel Campos-Duffy and Pete Hegseth laughed about it on air. (Campos-Duffy’s exact quip was that Pelosi “needs the hammer, not the medal,” which is only slightly less funny than root canal surgery during a Jimmy Kimmel monologue.) Campos-Duffy is still employed by Fox. Hegseth is now Secretary of War. Similarly, when Minnesota Sen. Melissa Hortman was shot and killed last year, Sen. Mike Lee posted that “this is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way” before quietly deleting it. Nobody lost their job. There were no lawsuits. No settlements. Just a quick spin through the internet outrage cycle and then business as usual.

The circumstances aren’t identical—but the inconsistency in consequences is hard to ignore. Some people say abhorrent things and slink away untouched. Others make equally grotesque statements, get fired, and saunter off with a jackpot. And we’re all just supposed to shrug and pretend that makes sense.

People of every political persuasion, it turns out, are prone to being awful. That’s not just not a crime, it’s a constitutionally protected right. But what about my rights as an employer? If I find your words or behavior reprehensible—and believe they could damage my company or my sanity—and I’m paying you actual money to represent that company, doesn’t my ability to fire you fall under my own right to pursue happiness?

To be crystal clear, this isn’t an argument against free speech. I will fight for your right to say monstrous things without the government throwing you in jail even if I despise you. Yuge First Amendment fan here. But you don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to recognize that “the government can’t imprison you for your opinion” is not remotely the same thing as “taxpayers should cut you a million-dollar check after you express it in the most indefensible way possible.” Free speech means you’re free to say it—not that you’re free from any and every possible consequence of your verbal vomit.

Courts could sort out whether these firings checked every procedural box, but apparently it’s easier—and cheaper—to settle than to defend the idea of basic decency. The problem is, settlements aren’t neutral; they’re practically permission slips. And it seems people are increasingly picking up on the grift.

The pattern is hard to miss. Spew something breathtakingly cruel after a politically explosive moment. Get fired. Sue. Cash in. Repeat.

That’s not just a legal loophole—it’s an incentive structure. It tells people that the worst possible instincts aren’t just tolerated; they might be profitable if you play your cards right. (GoFundMe, anyone?)

And if that’s the system we’re building, we shouldn’t bank on better behavior. We should expect it to get even worse—louder, uglier, and even a little more calculated—because now everyone knows there might be a check waiting at the end.

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Forty to fifty exhibits. Livestreamed proceedings. Daily courtroom updates across all major media. The grieving widow in the gallery. The machinery of justice, grinding forward with solemn purpose and majestic precision.

Because we have rules in this country. The judge can’t simply skip to sentencing. The justice system still has to look like the justice system. There must be motions, witnesses, exhibits, objections, and grave reminders about impartiality. Someone has to swear on the Bible that they’re going to tell the truth about whether they murdered someone—as if cold-blooded killers draw the line at lying.

In my rarely humble view, the verdict was handed down the moment Donald Trump went on Fox News and declared, “I hope he gets the death penalty.” The statement carried zero legal weight but packed incalculable political punch. Everything since that moment has been theater—the dramatic pageant of legal proceedings necessary to satisfy the masses that due process was upheld.

To be clear, this isn’t a trial. It’s a preliminary hearing—the legal equivalent of making the varsity team, not winning the championship. There’s no jury, no verdict, no determination of guilt or innocence. The question before the court will be simply whether prosecutors have presented enough evidence for the case to proceed.

The governmedia wants you to think it’s open-and-shut. Let’s walk through what they expect you to swallow here without chewing:

1. The Ghost in the Machine: Tyler Robinson was already sitting in a jail cell when a damning confession message was sent from his Discord account. Read that again. Someone—or something—was confessing to murder using his digital identity while he was in custody. Discord itself has publicly stated their platform was not used to plan the killing, directly contradicting the prosecution’s narrative.

THE MEDIA: But the Converse!

2. The Bullet That Wouldn’t Match: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF)—the federal agency with every incentive to nail down ballistics in a high-profile assassination—admitted they could not definitively match bullet fragments recovered during Kirk’s autopsy to the rifle the state is positive ejected the deadly shot. Not “it was difficult.” Not “we need more time.” Couldn’t definitively match. In a death penalty case. With a confession they’re hanging their entire theory on. That’s… not a good look.

3. The Sheriff Who Disappeared: Sheriff Nate Brooksby, the guy who facilitated and accepted Robinson’s voluntary surrender, resigned out of the blue. No announcement, no press conference, no retirement party, no explanation that would pass a laugh test. Just... gone. The first official point of contact with the accused after the alleged crime, a 30-year veteran elected sheriff, just gets the urge to play more golf in the middle of arguably the most high-profile murder case of the decade? He probably didn’t know anything anyway. #RetiredSuddenly

4. The Footage That Vanished: Crucial, close-up surveillance video? Doesn’t exist. In 2025, with redundant cloud backups, body cams, campus security systems, and thousands of phones recording—the footage that matters most is conveniently unavailable. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and they’re not even embarrassed to use it.

5. The Swift, Meticulous Site Clean-up: The DMV wants six weeks to process a name change. The city takes nine months to fix a pothole. The IRS needs eighteen months to answer a letter. But a crime scene of this magnitude? They didn’t just clean it. They excavated it. Within days. That’s not hyperbole. Every square inch of earth that might have held inconvenient evidence—gunpowder, blood, DNA, take your pick—was promptly hauled off to wherever inconvenient evidence goes to die. And then they paved over the wound like it never happened, before any outside investigator could set foot on the site. A thinking person—one who believes in due process and diligence and unicorns that poop pure glitter—might ask: why the rush?

6. The Confession Written by a Failed, Middle-Aged Screenwriter: The hilariously convenient alleged text messages from Robinson to his furry transgender lover read like a parody of a fake confession. (“Remember how I was engraving those bullets?” Really?) Steve Bannon called them “too much like a script.” Matt Walsh agreed. Even left-wing commentators like Joanne Carducci and Majid Padellan (collective 2.3M followers) said “No one is buying these text messages.” Not the right. Not the left. Nobody. When people who agree on literally nothing else all smell a rat, there’s usually a rat.

That’s just the first page of the Doesn’t Add Up list I detailed in earlier posts here and here and here. The all-you-can-eat buffet of security failures. The rifle that was apparently quickly and successfully assembled, disassembled, and reassembled—after leaving behind the screwdriver necessary for that job—under extreme duress. The lack of toxicology reports, medical examiner’s findings, and autopsy results. The weird signaling in the crowd (more than once). The sketchy dude right up front—a retired cop, reportedly—with zero ties to official security who showed up to “volunteer” and became part of the body-moving crew. The SD cards being swiftly removed from the surveillance cameras. The dead bodycam battery on the first officer on the roof—a “never event” in law enforcement. The speed at which the “lone wolf” narrative was locked in. It’s… a lot.

If those are loose threads around the edges, audio and video from the moment itself are where the official story starts to really unravel. Video analysis shows Kirk reacting to something at his chest before any visible external impact. The trajectory, the wound pattern, the body mechanics—none of it cleanly matches a rifle round from a distance. Multiple people who analyzed available audio recordings say the sound appears to come from somewhere closer. Oh, and from a different direction. They also note the conspicuous absence of the distinctive crack you’d expect from a high-powered rifle. And just for fun, the timing between the audible shot and the impact doesn’t line up with the supposed distance either. Other than that, the case is totally watertight.

And then there’s the crowd. Apparently nobody got the memo they were supposed to react like people in the path of sniper spray. Instead of ducking, scattering, or whipping their heads toward the rooftop, many simply stood there looking around like someone just dropped a tray in the cafeteria.

Last but not least, the persecution [that’s a joke—and that would be me] would like to present the smoking lavalier microphone. The one containing a lithium-ion battery, worn directly against Kirk’s body. Body armor and explosives expert Jon Bray has been analyzing this piece with the tenacity of a terrier after a tennis ball. His ballistic tests show a shaped charge—a small explosive designed to direct its force in a single direction—concealed in a lav pack would perfectly match the wound pattern and the puff of smoke captured on video. The findings are compelling enough that the exploding mic theory refuses to die, despite a coordinated fact-checking campaign to memory-hole it.

None of that closes the case—it just reopens the mausoleum of questions the media, police, intelligence, Erika Kirk, every narrative-drunk finger-wagger on social media, and even the president himself stubbornly refuse to ask: Who placed that mic? Who had access to Kirk’s person in the minutes before he took the stage? Why was the site scrubbed? Where did the surveillance footage go? Is it possible that Tyler Robinson believes he was the actual killer… but wasn’t?

Because that’s the thread that unravels the whole sweater. Hear me out: a patsy who thinks he pulled the trigger. Not a fall guy taking a dive, but someone who was positioned, conditioned, radicalized, and—critically—given a rifle that was never going to fire the lethal round.

The mechanics of that aren’t even exotic. A rifle can be modified to look, sound, and feel like a real shot without launching anything lethal. The shooter gets the full Hollywood experience—the kick, the bang, the adrenaline—so he assumes he’s the one who fired the fatal shot.

It’s almost too brilliant. Because once someone says, “I did it,” the evidence almost stops mattering. “Oh yeah? Prove it!” replied no one ever. The case is effectively closed. Not legally—that’s what trials are for—but psychologically. Emotionally. Materially. Investigators stop chasing alternate leads. The press stops asking who else might have been involved. The public files the story under “solved.” A confession doesn’t just add evidence to a case; it removes the need to look for more.

So essentially we have a mountain of weirdness… and a hearing that’s supposed to make sense of it. In court yesterday, the state’s own witness conceded a critical gap in the prosecutorial arsenal: there is no video showing Robinson firing a weapon. Investigators allegedly have footage placing him on the roof, in the stairs, in the crawl space, and at the exit—but not a single frame of any shooting. They also recovered no bullets or shell casings from the rooftop in question—although a bullet was found on top of a different building, which is… awkward.

At the same time, the defense introduced evidence undercutting a claim long pushed by Tyler-deniers (including, famously, Candace Owens) that Robinson “never even set foot on UVU’s campus.” Apparently, he did—including multiple times on September 10. I never even realized we were arguing about his physical presence there, a now-confirmed fact that ultimately proves [*checks notes*] exactly nothing.

Finally, prosecutors unveiled the forensic centerpiece of their case: FBI testimony that Robinson’s DNA was found on a towel wrapped around the rifle they say was used in the shooting. (The one that couldn’t be matched to the bullet, but who’s keeping score?) The defense countered that “finding DNA” doesn’t establish when it was deposited, argued it could have been transferred or contaminated, and challenged the FBI’s testing procedures. In other words, touching a gun is not the same thing as killing someone. (Good to know!) So basically, another bombshell-turned-nothingburger.

If the case moves to jury trial, the prosecution’s aim is to prove—beyond a reasonable doubt—that Tyler Robinson murdered Charlie Kirk. The defense doesn’t have to convince anyone he didn’t; they just have to argue that the receipts don’t add up to airtight certainty. I’m not saying I have answers. But obviously, I have questions.

And the internet does not like questions. They really, really like the official version of events and think that anyone who doesn’t should immediately go to confession and pray for discernment. That is a direct quote. I am one hundred percent not making that up.

Needless to say, I’m not the only skeptic on X. This one had me LingOL (and if you’re listening to the audio version of this Substack, you’ll want to pause to watch).

This part below is lifted from a post I wrote just two weeks after Charlie’s murder. Nothing has changed for me since then, and to be honest, I couldn’t say it any better today.

Theories outside of the safe, clichéd “radicalized shooter” narrative naturally leave you reeling: If it wasn’t some kid who was “fed up with hate” (make that make sense), then who was it? Whose idea was it? Who plotted it? Who executed it? Who knew about it? Who didn’t stop it? Who’s covering it up? And why?

I guess that’s why I can’t let it go. A man I respected is dead, and the lies they’re using to explain it aren’t even elegant. Or convincing. Or remotely consistent. They’re sloppy, obvious, practically duct-taped together. It’s like watching a kindergartener forge their mom’s signature on a field-trip permission slip. You don’t need a PhD in forensics to see it.

Which makes me wonder: do they even care if we notice? Or is the whole point to see how much nonsense we’ll swallow before we choke?

The hearing wraps up tomorrow; a ruling on whether the case will advance is expected immediately or soon after closing arguments. Enjoy the bread and circuses, peasants. And maybe don’t hold your breath waiting for any real answers.

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The headline alone tells you exactly where this is headed:

“Lunatic mom.”

Not “grieving mother.” Not “distraught parent.” Not “woman who claims.” Lunatic. And if sneering came in punctuation marks, it would be those two single squiggles flanking ‘vaccine injuries.’ The New York Post doesn’t even pretend anymore. They’re not reporting; they’re sentencing. In print. Before a trial.

They’re not alone.

The gist is horrific: In May of 2025, Andrea Shaw took her 18-month-old twins Dallas and Tyson for their flu, Hepatitis A, and DTaP vaccines. The next day, the children experienced such severe reactions that she rushed them to the emergency room. A week later, she found them dead in their shared bed.

The critical part the headlines casually omit? The official hospital diagnosis was a vaccine reaction. Documented by a doctor. Not an herbalist. Not an Amish “energy healer.” A licensed ER physician who watched two infants crash after their shots and wrote it down.

And yet, somehow, more than a year later, murder.

Let’s compare the actual record to the Corporate Script™, because you could drive a herd of buffalo through the canyon separating them.

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Apparently Innocence™ is now a Premium upgrade requiring at least 20 terabytes of cloud storage.

The most terrifying example of this involved Chrisanna Elser, a Colorado woman who was accused of porch piracy after police used automated license plate reader technology to identify her Rivian in the vicinity. Armed with that rock-solid evidence, investigators reviewed a grainy video, concluded Elser was exactly as blonde as the thief, and charged her. The problem? She was completely innocent. What ultimately cleared her wasn’t a diligent police investigation or a dramatic last-minute confession. It was Elser’s own dashcam footage, which proved she had never actually stopped at the crime scene.

Think about how insane that is. The government accused Elser based solely on surveillance technology. She defended herself with... more surveillance technology. It’s hard to know whether to be comforted or horrified by that turn of events.

Today, “Flock cameras” are popping up on telephone poles across the country like pimples on prom night. Flock Safety is a private tech company that contracts with police departments, homeowners associations, businesses, and entire cities to install AI-powered security cameras. The cameras don’t record people, per se; they photograph passing license plates, along with the vehicle’s make, model, color, and distinctive features. (Congratulations, your “MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM” bumper sticker is now a permanent identifier in a police database.)

The result is a searchable catalog investigators can use to trace exactly where a particular vehicle has been. That database is accessible to any officer in a participating department, typically with no warrant requirement and no meaningful audit trail—the honor system, but for stalking. (Retention policies vary, but 30 days is common, and some agencies hold the data far longer.)

In practice, this means a cop having a slow Tuesday can run your plate, pull up a tidy little map of everywhere your car has been for the past month, and nobody—not even you—will ever know they did.

When Flock’s Chief Communications Officer was pressed on Elser’s case and asked if he wanted to atone for her ordeal, he replied, “Should I apologize for somebody misusing a tool? I don’t think so. It’s not Flock’s job to police the way police do their work.”

He’s not wrong. It’s not Ford’s job to enforce speed limits. It’s not the gun’s fault when someone pulls the trigger. Which is why guardrails matter. Powerful tools demand powerful rules.

Supporters point to the very real crimes the cameras have helped solve—murders, kidnappings, car thefts, human trafficking. It’s a powerful argument. If someone snatched my daughter out of her bed at 2:00 in the morning and police could pull up every vehicle that passed my house that night, I’d hardly be worrying about my neighbor’s privacy rights. That’s what makes this so difficult. The same surveillance system that might save your child can also quietly spy on everyone else’s.

The Colorado case wasn’t a one-off. Police have used Flock’s database to help ICE locate immigrants. A Texas officer reportedly searched it while looking for a woman suspected of obtaining an illegal abortion. The company is now expanding into AI-powered searches and products that connect license plates to commercial “people lookup” databases.

Funny how quickly “We’re just trying to find stolen cars” can turn into “Let’s see how many times Jenna’s been to the gym this week.”

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The argument has gotten so heated that people have started taking matters into their own hands. Across the country, vigilantes are climbing utility poles with baseball bats and bolt cutters, treating property damage as political protest. They looked at the same math everyone else is looking at—a private surveillance grid growing faster than any meaningful regulation—and concluded that the only real opt-out involves a ladder and a pair of vice grips. (A GoFundMe for an Air Force engineer facing charges for sawing down more than a dozen Flock cameras has raised more than $25,000, because “don’t tread on me” is apparently no longer just a sweatshirt slogan.)

Civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. Some police departments are backing away from the technology after public backlash. A grassroots effort called DeFlock now crowdsources the locations of the cameras across the country, arguing that if surveillance is going to be everywhere, the public ought to know where “everywhere” is.

The Supreme Court recently stumbled into that very argument, ultimately ruling that police generally can’t scoop up the cellphone location data of everyone who happened to be near a crime scene without an actual probable cause warrant. The case wasn’t about Flock cameras—but it sets a precedent by basically declaring sweeping digital dragnets unconstitutional. The question has never been whether the state can collect more information. It’s whether it should.

The Flock debate isn’t black and white. I like criminals getting caught. I like kidnapped kids being rescued. I like murderers going to prison. I also don’t particularly enjoy the idea that I could accidentally be arrested for the offense of owning a car. And “but it helped catch some real criminals” is also the exact sentence every new layer of surveillance in history has used to justify itself. The tech works. That’s precisely what makes it worth worrying about.

What’s unsettling isn’t just that Flock cameras are everywhere. It’s that they are quietly rewriting the burden of proof. Not in a courtroom, but in real life, where being near something nefarious is the same thing as being responsible for it. Where proximity becomes suspicion, suspicion becomes accusation, and accusation becomes your problem to defend—like the Florida man who was arrested for trying to lure a child at a McDonald’s after AI facial recognition incorrectly flagged him as a match.

We’re building a world where the official record is whatever the system says happened—unless you can produce your own competing archive. Your alibi isn’t your word. It’s your data. Preferably timestamped, backed up, and stored in the cloud.

@attorneystephanie_On my way to flip off a Flock camera… allegedly. 😂 In all seriousness, these cameras have become a major topic of debate. Some people see them as a valuable law enforcement tool. But a LOT of people worry about privacy and government overreach. What do you think? Are Flock cameras making communities safer, or are they collecting too much information on everyday people? #blackfemalelawyer #flock #privacy #legaltiktok #flockcamera

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Here’s the part that will likely keep me at night: that dashcam defense only works as long as footage means something. We already exist in an age where AI-generated video is good enough to fool a jury—and where real footage can be dismissed as a deepfake. So the woman in Colorado got lucky—her timestamp still meant something. Give it a few more years, and “I have footage proving I wasn’t there” and “they have footage proving I was” will carry exactly the same evidentiary weight, which is to say: none. Your fate could be decided by a single stranger willing to swear they saw you not murdering anyone on the night of February 4.

I’m not telling anyone to go grab a ladder and some Silly String. I’m just saying I’d rather have this conversation now than after everyone’s walking around with a GoPro strapped to their head just to establish probable innocence. Somewhere between “the government thinks you did it” and “good luck proving you didn’t” there has to be a better answer.

I was going to add another poll (“What’s the solution?”), but like I said, I don’t have the answers. If you do, please drop them in the comments!

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Still my only job, just saying.

Downtown looked like an Old Navy ad come to life, with liberty lovers swaddled in crown-to-sole stars and stripes, glitter clinging stubbornly to their sweaty cheeks. I lost count of the Happy Birthday America caps and “two fiddy” T-shirts (only in America could 5,000 Etsy sellers be cashing in on the same bit). The whole scene landed somewhere between a Norman Rockwell painting and a tailgate party; the kind of all-in Americana that made you realize—despite what the media would very much like the world to believe—that proud to be an American isn’t just a Lee Greenwood song.

In the evening, we did what you’re supposed to do on the Fourth: we barbecued with friends, watched fireworks, and went to bed feeling fat, fulfilled, and fortunate to live in the land of the (presently) free and the home of the (historically) brave.

First thing Sunday morning, I watched Trump’s speech celebrating America’s 250th birthday—but not before playing a quick little game. I wondered how long it would take the collective press to find a way to turn one of the most patriotic celebrations in our nation’s history into a Donald Trump takedown.

It turns out, not long at all.

Here were just a few of the headlines waiting for me:

“Trump, in July 4 speech, says he ‘wasn’t treated that well’ despite American right to equal justice.” (The Hill)

“Trump throws jabs at Dems in 250th speech but says ‘best is yet to come’ for US.” (NewsNation)

“Mount Rushmore to the Mall, Trump praises America’s 250th — and himself.” (USA Today)

“At July 4 speech, Trump stumps for controversial SAVE America Act...” (Fortune)

Needless to say, I was ready for a Trump-style parade of personal successes; bloated boasts about THE GREATEST ECONOMY EVER, THE BEST POLLS, RECORD-BREAKING EVERYTHING, NOBODY’S EVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT. Instead, I got a passionate, unapologetically nostalgic, 40-minute history lesson.

POTUS kicked things off with the Declaration of Independence, the “miracle” of America’s founding, and a reminder that 56 men once signed a document with the full understanding it might get them hanged—arguably the last bipartisan act of courage to come out of Washington.

From there, he moved through the birth of the republic—Lexington, Saratoga, the Constitution—with the enthusiasm of a man who genuinely believes the Founders nailed it. Freedom of speech. Religious liberty. Equal justice under the law. The whole dusty old bundle of rights we keep pretending are optional whenever they become inconvenient.

Then came the flags. So many flags. A Stars and Stripes greatest hits album. The Yorktown flag. Lincoln’s casket flag. Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Checkpoint Charlie. Picture the Smithsonian launching a TikTok account and doing a live unboxing and you’ll have a solid visual.

Trump honored Medal of Honor recipients, Pearl Harbor survivors, D-Day veterans, Korean War heroes, and Gold Star families before working through an all-star roster of American icons: William Carney, Theodore Roosevelt, Francis Scott Key, Davy Crockett, Annie Oakley, the Wright brothers. He spoke of the Second Amendment and Venezuela and the Brooklyn Bridge. It was optimistic. It was earnest. Above all, it was unmistakably pro-America.

I kept waiting for the narcissism. It never came.

Did he dip into politics? Of course he did. (He is, after all, the President of the United States addressing the planet, not Billy Crystal hosting the Oscars.) He praised the SAVE America Act. He celebrated military recruiting. He touted the economy. He blasted the growing embrace of Marxism here.

“America will never be a communist country,” Trump promised. “Won’t happen. The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked. It’s like a cancer. You’ve got to cut it out. You’ve got to cut it out fast.”

He joked that maybe this was his “third term” before quickly adding he didn’t want any controversy. He made a brief crack that he “wasn’t treated that well” under our system of equal justice—34 felony convictions later, it’s a fair point—then wisely moved on with a good-natured “but we won’t get into that.”

Maybe that’s worth a mention; maybe not. But if that’s what you lead with after watching a monologue overwhelmingly dedicated to celebrating America’s history, heroes, symbols, and founding principles, you’re not covering a speech. You’re reducing forty minutes to forty seconds and praying nobody bothers to check your math.

Up until the very moment Trump took the stage, the media was gleefully predicting, exaggerating, and celebrating the many ways the event could and would go sideways. The epic heat. The thunderstorms. The evacuations. The artists “bailing en masse.” Low turnout. Empty booths. Boycotts. Production chaos. A stage ceiling that literally fell on the show. They didn’t even try to hide their delight. Imagine watching thousands of Americans turn out and deciding the real story is how badly you want them to be miserable.

The Comedic Spin of the Week Award goes to USA Today, though, for solemnly informing readers that Donald Trump—you will be shocked to learn—completely flouted decades of presidential custom with all of that rah-rah-go-U.S.A.-we’re-so-great nonsense.

“For 200 years, on the notable birthdays of one of America’s founding documents, Trump’s predecessors have taken a more solemn tone,” the outlet wrote. “They made almost no mention of themselves and often cited the tasks the nation still faced.”

Two-hundred years sounds like a sweeping historical consensus—until you realize the “precedent” consists of a group of guys who could share an Uber. In all of history, there have been precisely three previous “milestone anniversary” addresses. Three. Ulysses S. Grant in 1876. Calvin Coolidge in 1926. Gerald Ford in 1976. That’s the entire sample size. Apparently, three speeches spread across two centuries now constitute a sacred 200-year Oval Office tradition.

So no, it wasn’t some unhinged victory-lap. It wasn’t an angry, defensive, live-streamed diss on the Democrat party. It was closer to your grandfather taking you around the living room and pointing triumphantly at photos on the wall—except the photos were flags that had witnessed some of our country’s most punishing moments, and the framed medals were living veterans being honored for their service and bravery. You’d have to be a tiny bit dead inside to not be moved.

Could he have addressed the world without a single self-congratulatory aside? I mean, I’ve toilet-trained three cats in my lifetime, so I’m hesitant to speak in absolutes. But expecting Trump to give a speech with zero Trump in it is like getting mad that your cupcake has frosting. That’s kind of the deal. If you only like crumpets, maybe you should move to England.

The media wants you to think Trump’s birthday toast was a preening back-pat session. They’d be thrilled if you skipped tuning in yourself and just took their word for it. I watched it. It wasn’t. I bet if you watch it too, you’ll come away feeling proud, grateful, and convinced this is the best deal going anywhere on Earth—clickbait, catfights, and all.

Happy birthday, America. You’re not perfect—but you look pretty good for 250. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

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LESS PERMANENT WAYS TO SUPPORT ME

“All my friends are on that team,” Mattingly told reporters, kicking at a clod of dirt. “It’s not fair. I just want to play my favorite sport.”

It’s heartbreaking. I mean, what’s next? Division I basketball recruiters refusing to even consider second-graders? The Boston Marathon banning electric scooters? NASCAR discriminating against blind drivers?

Oh, right. Competitive sports have rules. There are qualifications. Standards. Minimum requirements. That’s sort of… the entire point.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled that West Virginia may continue limiting girls’ school sports to… girls. The response from much of the media was exactly what you’d expect: another heartbreaking story about a transgender child who “just wants to be herself and play the sport she loves.”

The poster child du jour is Becky Pepper-Jackson, whom I will hereafter refer to as BPJ because I refuse to spend the next seven paragraphs playing Pronoun Twister. BPJ is a 16-year-old transgender girl (i.e. biological male) and—according to the adults who have made BPJ the public face of a federal lawsuit—“a leader in the fight for trans kids’ civil rights.” (While BPJ is quietly relieving cis girls of theirs. Peak leadership.) When the future “mostly peaceful” protest organizer was 11, legislators passed a law blocking biological males from participating in girls’ scholastic sports. BPJ sued the West Virginia State Board of Education, seeking to overturn the measure and compete on the middle school’s girls’ cross-country and track-and-field teams. Last week, the Supreme Court sided with the actual, assigned-female-at-birth girls.

Judging from the coverage, you’d think the court had ordered the removal of the tampon machines from the boys’ locker room or something.

I’m genuinely confused by the outrage. Nobody said Pepper-Jackson couldn’t run. Nobody confiscated any track shoes or outlawed wind sprints. The dispute wasn’t whether this student could participate in sports. It was whether s/he could compete in exactly one specific category whose defining criteria s/he did not meet. In a stunning act of common sense, SCOTUS said no.

What’s never even hinted at—let alone acknowledged—is the fact that sports are built entirely around competitive categories. We separate athletes by age. By weight. By skill. By disability. By sex. You can’t box a featherweight if you tip the scales at 323 pounds. You can’t play Little League if you shave. You can’t suit up for varsity swimming at nine years old because you took an online emotional IQ test that pegged you as 17. Nobody calls those restrictions “hate.” They’re called... sports.

Imagine the op-eds.

“My son simply wants to play football with his friends.”

He’s 63. His friends are the Kansas City Chiefs.

Or this:

“My daughter has dreamed of Olympic gymnastics her entire life. The judges savagely informed her that her inability to perform a cartwheel was an automatic disqualification.”

Or perhaps:

“My eight-year-old was denied the opportunity to compete in the Senior PGA Tour despite having an absolutely delightful backswing.”

Every athletic competition on Earth has eligibility rules. Not because organizers hate anyone, but because without them, competition stops meaning anything. What’s noteworthy isn’t that rules exist. It’s that only one of them has been successfully rebranded as bigotry.

Nobody argues that able-bodied athletes should be allowed to compete in the Paralympics just because they’re having an off season. Nobody accuses the NCAA of height discrimination because there aren’t any 5’1” centers. Nobody suggests eliminating age groups so kindergarteners can experience the character-building opportunity of being flattened by high school linebackers. But sex? Apparently that’s the category we’re all expected to pretend doesn’t exist.

It’s not the legal arguments that interest me so much as the language. So-and-so has been “banned from sports.” His/her “athletic dreams have been crushed.” He/she has been “denied the chance to play.”

Actually, no. They’ve been deemed ineligible for a single division. Refusing to cast a 55-year-old Black man as Annie on Broadway isn’t an act of prejudice. It really isn’t. There are probably at least a dozen other roles homie could land—but the freckled fifth-grade ginger isn’t one of them.

If the PGA rejected my application to compete on the Champions Tour tomorrow, nobody would report, “Local Woman Prohibited From Playing Golf.” They’d write, “Lady Who Was Once Kicked Out of Golf N’ Stuff for Accidentally Hitting the Birthday Kid Displays Admirable Self-Confidence.”

You know what you never see? A seventeen-year-old girl demanding the right to compete on the boys’ cross-country team. Yes, girls have historically fought to play with the boys—when no girls’ program existed. When moving up to a more physically demanding category, at a clear competitive disadvantage, was better than not playing at all. Everyone understood the distinction, and no one pretended the biological differences didn’t exist.

@thehumorhiveAs Log As The Bettings Allowed I'm Okay With It 😂🤣 #funny #Trans #meme

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Anyone who’s been reading me for more than five minutes knows I’m not a monster or a hater or a transphobe. I genuinely sympathize with any child caught in the middle of a national culture war—even more so, one whose parents enthusiastically embraced puberty-blockers in fourth grade. That can’t be easy. But I also deeply, achingly sympathize with the girls who spend years training and sacrificing only to be repeatedly pushed off the podium by athletes who couldn’t cut it in the boys’ division. The girls whose entire category exists for reasons rooted not in bigotry but in the basic biological fact that males and females do not compete on equal physical footing after puberty. That’s why women’s sports were created in the first place. Not to exclude boys. To include girls. If we’re going to rewrite the rules, let’s at least be honest about which rule we’re rewriting.

Because this was never about whether sports should have categories. It was always about whether one category still counts. Every other difference gets its own lane—age, weight, ability, experience—carefully defined so competition means something. Gender isn’t a suggestion. It’s an objective reality, and it’s the foundation of women’s sports. You don’t get to blur it out of existence. If you want additional classifications, create them. Build a new lane. Call it the Open Division. Call it Mixed Club. Call it the Nonbinary All-Inclusive Harmony Party. But the female category isn’t up for revision. Because that’s not inclusion. It’s subtraction.

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P.S. If this topic is important to you and you’re not following , you’re going to want to fix that. Besides founding XX-XY Athletics, is smart, funny, fearless, and one of women’s sports’ loudest and most unapologetic cheerleaders.

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So you can thank a generous cadre of patrons/patriots who decided getting this one in front of as many eyeballs as possible was more important than preserving their VIP status. If you’ve ever skipped a primary, this one’s for you. :)

This week, Congress spent hours discussing CIA mind-control experiments, notorious killers with suspicious government ties, and the deliberate destruction of federal records. At this point, C-SPAN might be one alien autopsy away from becoming Netflix Conspiracy+.

The centerpiece was MK-Ultra—the CIA’s infamous Cold War mind-control program. For all its bizarre and depraved details, MK-Ultra doesn’t fit neatly into this lineup of formerly-forbidden topics. Yes, it’s taboo. But it’s not taboo because historians disagree about whether it existed. They don’t. It’s taboo because the people who ran it did such a spectacular job covering their tracks that nobody can confidently prove it ever really ended.

The House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, billed its Tuesday hearing as an effort to “examine the history and timeline” of the program that secretly dosed unwitting Americans with LSD and exposed them to hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture. That’s no longer tinfoil-hat territory. The Church Committee established it. The CIA has acknowledged it. The only reason we know as much as we do is because seven boxes of records escaped destruction after then-CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the rest of the files burned in 1973.

The surviving boxes weren’t discovered this week or even this decade. They were unearthed in 1977—the year Star Wars was released, for perspective—and left to sit like a pile of dog poop on the carpet that the entire bureaucratic apparatus pretended not to see. And they might have gotten away with it… if it weren’t for a handful of meddling journalists and historians who assigned themselves to the case. Thanks to them—plus an administration and a Congress that seem determined to pry open every dusty filing cabinet in Washington—one of the CIA’s darkest chapters is getting the second look it never wanted.

Frank Olson was in those files. In November 1953, the Army biochemist was dosed with LSD without his consent during a CIA retreat in rural Maryland. Nine days later, he fell from a thirteenth-floor window of a New York hotel. His death was ruled a suicide. “In all my years in the hotel business,” the hotel’s manager later said, “I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.”

Decades later, at his sons’ insistence, Olson’s body was exhumed. A forensic examination revealed he had suffered blunt force trauma to the head and chest before the fall. The government wrote the family a $750,000 apology card. That’s a remarkably expensive way to say, “It wasn’t us.”

They tried to burn the evidence. They forgot about the body. Peak competence. No notes.

ANGRY NEIGHBOR: “Why did you ding-dong ditch my house?”
KID: “I didn’t!”
ANGRY NEIGHBOR: “I have the proof right here on my Ring camera.”
KID: [swallows Ring camera]
ANGRY NEIGHBOR [to self]: “Rats.”

The coverup didn’t just hang over the hearing; it was the hearing. Investigative journalist Tom O’Neill traced Charles Manson back to CIA-funded programs. He suggested Jack Ruby’s connection to the agency hadn’t been fully explored. Assets? Who knows. That’s the point. Helms didn’t just burn files—he burned the bridge between suspicion and proof. We’re not left with conspiracy theories. We’re left with a smoking filing cabinet and a government asking us to believe it was empty.

That’s a hell of a legacy.

At one perfect point in the hearing, the past collided with the present in real time. Former NIH Scientific Program Director Elizabeth Ginexi was asked a straightforward question: would she acknowledge what lawmakers characterized as her agency’s efforts to cover up harmful vaccine side effects and misconduct surrounding COVID-era public health? She could have said yes. She could have said no. She could have said “I’m not familiar with those allegations.” Instead, she reached for Tuskegee—a scandal the government has already conceded—and explained how protections for research subjects have improved dramatically since then.

It was a masterclass in institutional judo. Use the momentum of an old confession to deflect a new accusation. Ginexi wasn’t testifying about Tuskegee because Tuskegee was relevant. She was testifying about Tuskegee because it was safe. Because everyone in that room already agrees Tuskegee was bad. Because the NIH has a pre-written script for Tuskegee and it ends with “and that’s why you can trust us now.”

But the COVID coverup didn’t wander into the hearing by accident. It wasn’t a detour. It was the destination. When you’re holding a hearing about government agencies that conduct unethical human experiments, destroy the evidence, and then demand public trust—you’re not talking about two different scandals separated by decades. You’re talking about the same institutional reflex expressing itself in a new decade with new tools and the same contempt for consent.

When pressed again on whether she acknowledged a cover-up, Ginexi replied, “I’m sorry, that’s not my understanding.” (Translation: “I acknowledge that your question exists and respect its journey.”)

And there it was. The intersection of America’s two biggest trust problems.

THEM: “Look how far we’ve come!”

LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE: “How do we know you’re not still doing it?”

THEM: “We have ethics boards now.”

LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE: “You had ethics boards then! They signed off on dosing people with LSD and throwing them out windows.”

In an important way, the hearing wasn’t really about MK-Ultra. It was about credibility. Government officials’ insistence that today’s safeguards are much stronger than yesterday’s is like an airline announcing that only half as many planes are falling out of the sky this year.

The problem is, yesterday’s officials said the same thing. They assured Americans that everything was ethical. That oversight existed. That our elected leaders would never use U.S. citizens as lab rats—don’t be silly. Until decades later, when Congress was forced to admit that unsuspecting Americans had in fact been exploited in gruesome, profoundly damaging ways. The country’s premier intelligence gathering-service swallowed the Ring camera—and expected us to take their word about what wasn’t on it for more than 50 years. And once history teaches citizens that institutions are capable of extraordinary deception, every administration that follows inherits the trust hangover. That’s not paranoia. It’s cause and effect.

The restaurant that poisoned its customers doesn’t get to write its own Yelp reviews. But that’s effectively what Americans have been asked to accept for decades—that the same institutions that burned the recipes and swore no one was cooking in the first place should be trusted to tell us the new menu is perfectly safe. Now, someone’s finally turning on the lights and opening the freezer. After seventeen consecutive seasons of Nothing Ever Happens, it’s a start.

“The victims and their families deserve acknowledgment,” Luna wrote in a statement. “No one went to prison. No victim was ever formally compensated by the government for the harm they caused. These are crimes against humanity. And this Congress has a constitutional obligation to ensure that full declassification is not delayed any longer… and that the CIA never does this again.”

Whether this hearing leads to genuine accountability or just another thick stack of redacted PDFs is anyone’s guess. But at least somebody finally took the caution tape off the crime scene.

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P.S. The Jenna’s Side Subscriber Directory briefly flatlined (turned out “winging it” has consequences), but she’s BACK! Yuge thanks to for flagging the near-death experience—and helping bring her back to life. If you’d like to connect with other delightful dissidents, check it out and add your name. :)

As you are surely aware, DSA candidates swept a string of New York Democratic primaries last week. The coverage was swift and predictable. This wasn’t presented as a handful of victories in deep-blue districts with embarrassingly low turnout. No, it was the beginning of a profound political shift. A reimagining of the Democrat Party. The reshaping of America itself.

But here’s the funny part. The press would have you believe that America elected these people. America didn’t elect them. Hell, New York barely elected them. The 276,593 early votes statewide came out of New York’s roughly 6 million registered Democrats. Put another way, the collective voting bloc deciding the state’s fate could fit inside a mid-sized IKEA, while the ones who sat this one out could populate an entire Scandinavian country.

Here’s why they don’t want you doing that math.

Imagine your HOA has 200 homeowners. They send out a survey of proposed property improvements. Ten people actually take the time to fill it out. A majority—six—vote to ban gas grills because climate change, bulldoze the swimming pool and replace it with a nonbinary reflection circle, convert the clubhouse into a multi-faith meditation room (prayer mats included), and require two weeks of anti-bias training before anyone can reserve the pickleball courts.

The next morning the community newsletter reports: “Neighborhood Embraces Bold Progressive Vision.” Except… it didn’t. Six weirdos embraced it. The other 190 were too busy alphabetizing their spice racks or trolling Pinterest for air fryer recipes to fill out a form.

That’s increasingly how American politics works. Radicals sweep elections not because they’re a majority. They dominate because radicals vote. Everybody else complains on Facebook.

And it’s not just conservatives looking around like someone spiked the kombucha here. Bill Maher christened the newly elected turbo left “really crazy” and warned that Democrats are “well on their way” to blowing the midterms. John Fetterman described the movement as an “orgy of socialism,” calling it “anti-America” and “anti-Western civilization.” James Carville basically told congressional Democrats to cross the street if they see these people coming.

Think about that for a second. When Bill Maher, John Fetterman, and James Carville all look around the room at the same time and collectively ask, “Has the entire coalition lost its ever-loving mind?” it’s clear the tail is officially wagging the donkey.

Take far-left darling Darializa Avila Chevalier. Chevalier is one of New York’s freshly minted Democratic Socialist primary winners whose deleted tweets read less like the feed of a congressional candidate and more like the required reading for Communism 401.

Among the greatest hits: Chevalier all but endorsed communism outright, reposting a quote from Assata Shakur—the convicted cop-killer and FBI Most Wanted terrorist who fled to Cuba. She wants to abolish deportations, police, and prisons entirely. She called Sheryl Crow’s Soak Up the Sun “bootstrap capitalist propaganda.” She lamented that politically left-leaning bookstores rarely stock The Collected Works of Josef Stalin. Not a stray Lenin pamphlet. Not a dog-eared copy of The Communist Manifesto for the aesthetic. Stalin. The man responsible for somewhere between six and twenty million deaths. She wants his entire body of work on the shelf next to the fair-trade coffee and David Sedaris paperbacks.

When President Trump called her a communist, she didn’t deny it. She didn’t clarify it. She didn’t even pivot to “issues that matter to working families.” Instead, she coyly announced, “That framing is one I’m very proud to say I don’t respond to.”

That’s not denial. It’s not even a dodge. That’s a wink.

And somehow, the national conversation has become: “Wow… I guess this is what Americans want now.”

No. It isn’t. Darializa Avila Chevalier is not what America wants. She’s what a few thousand motivated primary voters in a single blindingly-blue district wanted and got—because the people who didn’t want her were too lazy or too jaded or too drunk on uniparty Kool-Aid to participate in the electoral process. Yeah, I said it.

The average American doesn’t want Joseph Stalin’s collected works on the staff picks table at their local Barnes & Noble. The everyday American doesn’t describe anarchism as “intriguing pyromania” and then giggle about it. The median American doesn’t retweet convicted cop-killing terrorists.

But Joe American also didn’t vote in that primary. And that’s the entire ballgame.

Chevalier didn’t win because her ideology has mass appeal. She won because the people who share her ideology showed up, and the people who think she’s unhinged were busy doing literally anything else. That’s it. That’s not a movement. That’s an attendance sheet.

And I know what some of you are thinking/screaming/gearing up to comment (hi, !): “Politicians aren’t elected. They’re selected. It’s all rigged. Voting is consenting to be governed!”

Fine. Let’s pretend that’s a bulletproof argument for inactivity for a second. Then why does every political machine in America spend literal fortunes trying to get people to vote? Why do unions, activist groups, PACs, billionaires, volunteers, campaigns, and every cable news network on Earth care so much about turnout?

I’ll answer myself: Because turnout matters. It matters more than the candidates themselves! If ninety-five percent of normal people stay home, the five percent who get off the couch don’t just get a vote. They get your vote. They decide what gets taught in schools. Who enforces immigration laws. How much you pay in taxes—and whether those dollars fund drag shows or domestic energy production. Whether your city prosecutes criminals. Whether police departments expand or disappear. Whether your kids will inherit the America you grew up in—or one you don’t even recognize.

So you stay home on Tuesday, and then you wake up Wednesday morning, stare at your phone over coffee, and wonder how on earth we’ve become a socialist country. Maybe we haven’t. Maybe we’ve become an apathetic one. There’s an old saying that evil triumphs when good men do nothing. I’d update it. In 2026, radical politics triumphs when ordinary people decide that they’re “just not that into primaries”—or that their vote doesn’t matter anyway.

Here’s a thought: If you don’t like the direction your city, your state, or your country is heading, stop blaming the six percent who got out of bed and start blaming the ninety-four percent who didn’t.

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Four days a week, I work for absolutely nothing because I’m generous like that. The fifth post goes behind a paywall because I have this weird habit where occasionally I like to eat. An annual subscription works out to about 30 cents a post and comes with a free signed book. Just saying. ;)

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Thanks to a uniquely eccentric teacher named Mr. Snyder, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are permanently burned into my brain. Which is remarkable, considering I can never, ever remember where I left my glasses, why I walked into the kitchen, or what the actual lyrics are to Blinded by the Light, even though I’ve looked them up a thousand times. (I even wrote an entire book about that.)

Democrats have been navigating this course for the last decade.

First came denial. Donald Trump won’t really run for president. Oh, he’s running? Hahahaha well, he won’t win. He won? No, he didn’t—Russia did. He certainly won’t win again. Maybe he’ll die in office?

Then came anger. He’s a fascist. A racist. A rapist! And his supporters? Deplorables, insurrectionists, grandma killers, garbage, science deniers, domestic terrorists, and blindly, irrationally devoted to a tyrant. MAGA isn’t just wrong—it’s reprehensible. The political equivalent of finding out your neighbor has a jar of human fingers on his nightstand. Impeach him. Convict him! Put him in prison and throw away the key. Do whatever it takes to get that man as far from the White House as humanly, legally, and constitutionally possible.

Now, at long last, we’ve arrived at bargaining.

For years, the left has been trying to figure out how to win back working-class voters. Thanks to Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, the party has landed on raising the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour. Murphy calls it a “unifying issue” that could “bring Trump voters over” to the jackass Donkey Party.

To be fair, since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been parked at $7.25 an hour—a number so outdated it feels like it should come with an S&H Green Stamp booklet and a Blockbuster membership application. Reasonable people can disagree about what the minimum wage should be and also agree that it’s currently absurd. They can also debate whether tripling it would lift workers up, automate them out of a job, or bankrupt the neighborhood diner. I’m not here to referee that argument. I’m here to laugh at the logic being employed here.

Because the funniest part of this push is the apparent belief that millions of Americans will immediately abandon their deeply held convictions for the carrot (again!) of a few more bucks an hour. (Not the actual delivery of a few more bucks an hour—the promise. From the same people who’ve been promising it for years, with the same solemn faces, on the same campaign trail, to the same voters who are still waiting.) That “watch us run on this failed idea again” is the magical policy unicorn that’s finally going to make a rancher in West Texas or a homeschooling mom in Tennessee say, “You know what? I was totally on board with secure borders, keeping biological males out of women’s sports, protecting parental rights, defending the Second Amendment, deporting illegal criminals, ending DEI mandates, and restoring energy independence... but twenty-five bucks an hour? Somebody get me a Democrat registration card and a pronoun pin.”

From a consultant’s perspective, it makes perfect sense: if voters are struggling, offer them relief. If they’re drifting, give them a reason to come back. And of course, self-interest does move election needles. Money talks. Throw enough money at me and I’ll probably at least listen to your PowerPoint. But the idea that morals and ideals can be bought with the promise of a fixed hourly rate suggests Democrats still don’t understand why many Republicans are Republicans in the first place.

“We have to accept into the coalition people that may have voted for Donald Trump,” Murphy explained on NBC News’ Meet the Press, adding that “[Democrats] have probably been too judgmental of some of these voters on the right because they don’t share our cultural and social views” (before scrambling to reassure triggered liberals that does not mean changing their views on gun control, climate change, and abortion—heavens no).

Translation: We still think you’re racist rednecks. We just need your votes.

It’s sort of like your ex-wife announcing she’s willing to take you back—as long as you agree she was right about everything, apologize to her mother, repaint the kitchen, convert to veganism, and admit her affair was technically your fault because you didn’t validate her enough. I’m good, sis.

Critical to the comedy here is the small matter of recent history. When Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House simultaneously, they tried to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour—not $25, just $15—and couldn’t get it done. Eight Democratic senators voted against their own party’s amendment. The wage stayed at $7.25. So the same gang that couldn’t clear a far lower bar when conditions were nearly perfect is now using $25 as a Trump voter recruitment tool. Why not throw in a Scandinavian snowball ring and an extra set of Ginsu knives, too?

There’s a word for what Murphy is describing, and it isn’t “coalition building.” It’s bribery. Come join us—not because we share your values, or your concerns, or your vision for the country, but because we’ll pay you more per hour than the other guys. It’s the Washington version of a struggling restaurant replacing the booths, the menus, and the flatware—but keeping the same lousy food.

That’s become the Democratic playbook. If voters aren’t buying what you’re selling, don’t rethink the recipe. Offer free dessert.

Free groceries. Student loan forgiveness. Universal childcare. Guaranteed basic income. Government grocery stores. Baby bonds. Paid family leave. Free four-year college. Triple the minimum wage! It’s political QVC. But wait... there’s more! Vote in the next fifteen minutes and we’ll throw in another entitlement absolutely free!*

ANNOUNCER [read at approximately 847 words per minute]: “Offer void where prohibited. Delivery not guaranteed and may require a constitutional amendment, unanimous Senate approval, unlimited taxpayer funding, and/or a functioning relationship with reality. Not valid after polls close. Batteries not included. Actual results may vary.”

Oddly enough, nobody ever campaigns on “We’re going to make life more affordable.” That’s hard. It’s much easier to promise everyone more money than it is to lower energy costs, cut regulations that drive up prices, or eliminate a few hundred billion dollars in waste, fraud, and government programs that exist solely to keep consultants employed. It would be like “solving” the obesity epidemic by buying everyone bigger pants.

The good news for Democrats is that the next stage is depression, and if anyone’s got the résumé for that one, it’s the party that spent four years mainlining Rachel Maddow highlights. The bad news is that after depression comes acceptance, and acceptance would require acknowledging that the voters they’re trying to buy might not actually be for sale.

At that point, we can expect a pivot right back to bargaining. I’m thinking they’ll float free internet, a federal puppy subsidy, and all-you-can-eat guacamole. What do you guys think? I know you’ll let me know in the comments.

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