“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.

You’re my GATE kids (minus the pink drink). LMK what you think!

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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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If you’d implied that the U.S. government intentionally withheld treatment from hundreds of Black men with syphilis to see how the disease would progress, people would have called you a monster. When a whistleblower exposed the Tuskegee experiment, the only thing more horrifying than the allegations was the realization that they were true.

You’d have been laughed out of the room for believing that America quietly recruited former Nazi scientists after World War II… until the government admitted to recruiting former Nazi scientists and Operation Paperclip became one of history’s worst-kept secrets.

And if you had suggested our own Department of Defense exposed American service members to chemical and biological agents without their knowledge or consent, you’d have been referred for treatment. It would take forty years of official denials before a mainstream news investigation blew the lid off Project SHAD and vindicated you.

The older I get, the more “crazy” just sounds like shorthand for “pending declassification.”

The latest “crazy” government-themed horror story making the internet rounds involves millions of elementary school children, unorthodox testing sessions, mysterious pink drinks, strange audio tones piped through gigantic headsets, and glaring, unexplained memory gaps. It’s tied to an official government program that was marketed and sold as advanced instruction for bright young minds—but more than a few former participants believe it was actually a secret CIA training or indoctrination program.

On a scale of your-phone-is-spying-on-you to Nicolas-Cage-is-a-Civil-War-era-vampire, this one doesn’t even make the podium.

At the bottom of this Reddit rabbit hole is the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE or G&T) program—the one where the “smart kids” disappeared for an hour every Tuesday while the rest of the class was diagramming sentences and learning what a swell guy Christopher Columbus was. The seeds of this educational fig leaf were initially planted in the 1958 National Defense Education Act, passed in direct response to Sputnik.

SOVIETS: “We have conquered space.”
WASHINGTON D.C.: “Quick! Find the nerds!”

That’s not wild speculation. That’s the actual origin story.

@elle_poohIf you were a part of the GATE program in school— do you remember it being like this?! 😭😭😭😮🤯 #gate #gateprogram #strange #giftedandtalented #school

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School districts began testing children—sometimes as early as kindergarten or first grade—and those who qualified were periodically pulled from their classrooms for “enrichment.” The stated goal was simple: challenge gifted students, prevent boredom, and help develop the next generation of scientists, engineers, inventors, and leaders. The problem is, the “stated goal” and the “real-life experiences” don’t really track.

There’s no mental gymnastics required to wager that the intelligence community would be interested in identifying whiz kids. The recruitment infrastructure is well documented. The NSA has sourced talent from high-school competitions for decades. DARPA routinely funds gifted education research. The military uses the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test to screen millions of teenagers and pinpoint candidates for specialized roles. The CIA and NSA run scholarship and internship programs explicitly targeting high-cognitive-ability students. It’s not just public. They advertise it.

The question isn’t whether someone was running a talent acquisition pipeline through the American school system. They were, openly. The question is what else the pipeline was being used for.

This is where the “it’s crazy” crowd loses the argument.

During the exact window that GATE was making its way into classrooms, the same government that brought us MK-Ultra, Paperclip, Tuskegee, and SHAD decided another a terrific use of taxpayer dollars would be to launch something called Stargate Project—a classified psychic espionage program designed to determine whether people could be taught to “remote view.” I promise, I’m not making that up.

From 1977 to 1995, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency spent millions testing and training recruits to “see” distant locations—military installations, hostage sites, enemy movements—using nothing but concentration and a set of coordinates. The premise was simple enough to sound almost reasonable until you say it out loud: put a supposed psychic in a room, give them numbers tied to a target, and have them describe what’s happening hundreds or thousands of miles away. Somewhere in Washington, there was an actual federal employee whose job consisted largely of saying, “Okay, Gary. Sit quietly and think really hard about Soviet missiles until something comes to you.”

Stargate didn’t spring from nowhere. It borrowed heavily from the Monroe Institute, founded by radio executive Robert Monroe, who believed he’d discovered a way to nudge the human brain into altered states of consciousness using carefully engineered audio frequencies. Monroe called his technique “Hemi-Sync”—binaural beats delivered through stereo headphones, designed to synchronize the brain’s hemispheres and guide listeners into deep meditation, sensory expansion, and allegedly, heightened perception. Apparently the line between “hippie meditation tape” and “national security asset” was a lot blurrier than most of us realized.

The CIA was interested enough to produce a formal assessment. In 1983, an Army intelligence officer submitted a declassified document known as the Gateway Report, analyzing Monroe’s “Gateway Process” as a potential tool for intelligence gathering. The report describes audio patterns intentionally concealed beneath ambient sounds—ocean waves, wind—engineered not to be heard, but to rewire how the brain processes reality.

So the idea that the government would never explore ways to develop and exploit psychic abilities falls apart pretty quickly when you realize they already did. Deliberately. For nearly two decades. With a budget.

The name overlap—Gateway and GATE—might just be serendipity. (Don’t even get me started on you-know-who.) Hilariously, or tellingly, the Monroe Institute denies being “directly” involved in GATE programs. Note the adverb. Because their technology, their tapes, their methodology, their terminology, even the structure of the exercises all show up in accounts from former GATE students. At some point, “coincidence” should start collecting overtime.

To recap: you’ve got a government running psychic research programs beginning in the 1980s. You’ve got a pool of the highest-IQ children in the country, gathered in school buildings once a week, with roughly zero parental oversight. You’ve got a documented willingness to experiment on civilians without consent. You’ve got an ex-CIA officer admitting that the agency had a program for tracking alien DNA and openly questioning whether GATE was part of it. And now you’ve got adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who were in GATE programs as kids comparing notes online.

And the details are… disturbing.

They’re recalling a pink liquid administered before “testing sessions,” described as chalky and sweet, followed by drowsiness or transient amnesia. Oversized headphones playing tones—not music, not white noise, but strange, pulsing beats—marketed as a “hearing test.” Zener cards: the five-symbol ESP testing cards that have zero legitimate educational application. Activities that included cracking codes, plotting graphs, and learning sign language, Morse code, and Russian. Covered windows. Meditating in the dark. Unfamiliar adults with clipboards who never introduced themselves and were never seen again. Massive memory gaps. An instruction, reported across independent accounts, not to tell their parents.

Let that last one marinate for a minute. An academic enrichment program—supposedly designed to challenge miniature Einsteins and accelerate their learning—told those children to hide what they were doing from their parents. That’s not research integrity. That’s damage control. An educational program with nothing to hide doesn’t issue gag orders to eight-year-olds.

“Why do most of us only ‘faintly’ remember any of it,” someone questioned.

“Completely blocked that out for decades until just now,” another said.

“Why don’t I remember a single thing except the building and entryway?” someone else asked.

One of the most detailed attempts to investigate the GATE program comes from an anonymous researcher writing under a pseudonym. “J. Whitfield” has compiled hundreds of pages of testimony, FOIA responses, procurement records, archived corporate filings, recovered audio recordings, and other documents into what he calls The GATE Investigation. Whitfield argues that between roughly 1983 and 1993, a Virginia contractor called Annex Research Group operated a covert program inside the GATE framework on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education. According to his investigation, select children underwent undisclosed auditory testing using binaural frequencies, received an unidentified chemical compound disguised as a fluoride treatment, and were evaluated for what internal documents allegedly called “perceptual access.” He further alleges that children who demonstrated certain characteristics were funneled into a secondary program—“Protocol Series C”—whose purpose remains unknown because the relevant documents are either redacted, missing, or, according to the investigation, destroyed.

Whitfield’s investigation goes far deeper than a Reddit thread or a viral TikTok. It’s a sprawling body of work built around specific names, dates, procurement records, FOIA requests, corporate registrations, audio analyses, and claims that can, at least in principle, be independently scrutinized rather than simply believed or dismissed.

What can’t be denied is that the nearly-identical accounts from participants have surfaced independently across multiple states, spanning the 1980s into the early 2000s, from people who have never met. Critics argue it’s false memory formation, amplified by social media suggestion. That’s a real phenomenon… but a spectacularly inadequate explanation in this case. Borderline lazy, if we’re being honest. False memory formation requires a cultural source—a news report, a book, a documentary—that implants the narrative. But until recently, there was no GATE-related conspiracy circulating. These people weren’t primed. They were remembering. And false memories don’t explain the physical artifacts: the worksheets, the audio recordings former students preserved, and independent contractor procurement records. You can’t suggest your way into a paper trail.

Plus, “maybe a stranger planted the idea in your head” is doing a lot of heavy lifting when you’re talking about a network that only ever cops to its nefarious deeds when documents get declassified or whistleblowers come forward—usually decades later.

Here’s what nobody has a good response to: What educational purpose does binaural audio through headphones serve? What does a Zener card teach? How do you explain the selective amnesia experienced by nearly all of the participants? What’s the purpose of the blackout windows? Why would an academic enrichment program need children to drink anything?

It wouldn’t. Everyone knows it wouldn’t. And the people telling these stories aren’t selling books or running monetized channels. They’re disturbed adults trying to understand fragmented flashbacks from their childhoods. Strip away the headphones and the Morse code and the pink drinks and one fact remains: Behavioral data is the new oil. Today we voluntarily hand Silicon Valley every heartbeat, Google search, grocery purchase, and late-night Amazon impulse buy. Compared to that, longitudinal cognitive profiles of America’s brainiest children would be like discovering the Fountain of Youth inside a Dairy Queen.

The receipts will come. They always do. MK-Ultra took twenty years. Tuskegee took forty. If the pattern holds, Protocol Series C will get declassified right around the time the last GATE kid turns ninety and can’t remember their own name.

When you tell me how you voted and why, please remember that there’s always an “other” option (I wasn’t a GATE kid, so I have no refined or advanced psychic skills). Also if you or your kids were part of GATE, I’m especially interested in your thoughts!

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On Wednesday night I attended the Brownstone Supper Club and got to hear the amazing team that is Cyndi Collen and Mary Parker talk about the insanity swallowing the mental health world. Then—because the event was an hour away and I’m old and hate driving at night—I had a sleepover with one of my oldest, dearest girlfriends, where we stayed up way too late and drank a tiny bit too much wine.

Still I got up at my usual unholy hour (4:30 a.m., true story), drove home, worked out, and attempted to create.

It was not going well. I started a story about the latest—of many—murders allegedly perpetuated by a member of the deranged vegan trans death cult (I swear I am not making that up) known as the Zizians, and another about the 21-year-old who went mega-viral for admitting she’s perfectly content watching TikTok in bed eight hours a day. I hated them both. I scanned headlines for hours, searching for something that spoke to me. My muse was apparently taking a personal day.

When dinnertime came and went—and no, there was no nap in there—I realized I had two options: 1) publish something crap, or 2) dust off an older piece that pairs perfectly with yesterday’s discussion about the Islamification of the West. I went with Door Number 2.

Today’s post was previously behind the paywall, but I’m shamelessly hoping that giving you a glimpse of what you’re missing out on every Wednesday might gently nudge you toward your wallet. Again, this is my only job—and thankfully some people think I’m pretty good at it. :)

When my daughters were little, American Girl dolls were all the rage. They were far from cheap—back then, pushing $100 apiece, but they came with a book!—so each daughter had exactly one. Of course the clothes and accessories cost as much as full-size human gear, so I’d do my best to find those, pre-loved, on eBay.

In theory, I was all in. A doll that actually looked like the child playing with it and not an anatomically impossible pin-up girl with a lifelong commitment to stilettos? Novel. Refreshing. Sign me up! The fact that the company managed to sneak historical lessons into playtime like literary carrot muffins was a Clinique gift-with-purchase-level extra.

For not the first time this decade, I’m on my knees thanking the Lord that my babies are grown. Because it’s entirely possible they would have asked for the American Girl Eid a-Fitr Celebration Outfit for their birthdays—the thing comes with a hot pink rhinestone-studded headscarf, for crying out loud, of course they would have asked for it!—and then we’d be having an ugly conversation not about historical oppression, but oppression that is very much alive today and extremely busy weaving itself into the fabric of our society.

And obviously, you’re a jerk if you say that last part out loud.

The outfit isn’t new. It actually debuted in 2021, when most of us were probably too busy stockpiling toilet paper and trying to figure out how to get our hands on some ivermectin to notice. (Or maybe Islamification just wasn’t on our collective radar yet? IDK, maybe a combo.) But this week, American Girl decided to promote the ensemble in honor of Ramadan, and the internet… noticed.

In addition to the Eid al-Fitr getup—which gets 4.9 stars, you might want to know—American Girl sells Kwanzaa, Día de Muertos, Hanukkah, and Diwali Celebration Outfits. (The Hanukkah set comes with a Star of David necklace, but you have to purchase the mini menorah and dreidel separately.)

What’s odd is that even though 62 percent of Americans describe themselves as Christians (down from 78% in 2007, thanks open borders!), the company does not sell a Yuletide or Easter Celebration Outfit. There’s no nativity scene or advent wreath or cross necklace either. There’s no First Communion veil, no baptism gown, no Ash Wednesday smudge kit, no confirmation dress, not even a modest denim skirt and youth group retreat lanyard. But looking for a bindi or a bedazzled hijab or a calavera mask? You’ve come to the right place.

For a brand literally called American Girl, it’s an interesting play.

The uproar over Islamic attire isn’t rooted in xenophobia; it’s what the hijab in particular represents. After all, the primary purpose of headscarves is to minimize sexual attention. You know, because men can’t be expected to control their carnal urges, so it’s your responsibility to not arouse them. (Muslim girls generally don’t wear hijabs until after puberty—which is an interesting point, given the target demo here.)

Proponents will insist hijabs are also about humility and devotion and cultural identity… but if that’s the case, why are only the women doing all of the humbling and devoting and identifying? Why are they the ones walking around swaddled like doomsday mummies? Don’t the dudes need some way to prove their piousness and instantly recognize their Muslim brothers besides “being covered from navel to knee,” which is basically what 99 percent of men in the world do anyway?

I know some women claim to cover themselves voluntarily and insist they’re simply more comfortable that way. Maybe they do and maybe they are. And many of them face harassment and discrimination for it, which is also wrong. But for countless women, the hijab is not optional—and refusing will get them arrested, beaten, or worse. But here you go, little Mary Catherine, enjoy playing with your new celebration-of-oppression outfit!

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the American Girl boardroom when this meeting of the minds went down.

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: “Okay, team, let’s review our cultural classics. Pioneer girl. Check. Colonial girl. Check. Polio survivor? Love her. Hippie girl—timeless. Hawaiian girl—strong, culturally rich, great visual merchandising. Anyone see any gaps?”

HEAD OF DEI: “Well, since you asked…”

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: “Yes?”

HEAD OF DEI: “It’s just that everything in our current line-up is just so… American. And frankly, America isn’t even American anymore. I mean, I have to ‘press two to hear this message in English’ when I call my credit card company. We’re diverse! We have freedom of religion right in our Constitution! We welcome all cultures with open arms—even the ones who shout ‘death to America!’ What’s more American than that?”

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: “So… what’s the product?”

HEAD OF DEI: “A hijab! Did you even know that Muslims are projected to be the second-largest religious group in the U.S. by 2040? Let’s get ahead of the curve by representing the most persecuted women on the planet. It’s iconic.”

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: “Can we make it pink and sparkly?”

To be fair, American Girl didn’t invent this particular flavor of “representation.” Mattel has been workshopping it for years. After decades of being criticized for its ultra-thin, blue-eyed, gravity-defying Barbie, the company pivoted—rolling out “diverse” dolls, body-positivity dolls, neurodivergent dolls, Black presidential candidate dolls, and eventually in 2017, a hijab-wearing Barbie modeled after Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad. The messaging was familiar: inclusion, empowerment, visibility, expression, inspiration. And as you might expect, a lot of people applauded it.

But what companies like Mattel—and Nike, and Lululemon, and H&M, and every other brand that “suddenly” discovers multicultural fashion—are really selling isn’t just a product, or even a feeling. It’s a version of reality that’s been carefully edited for retail. Whitewashed, in the most figurative and predictable way imaginable. Take something complicated, culturally loaded, and—depending on where you are—not always optional, strip out anything ugly or uncomfortable, add a little glitter, and present it as empowerment.

Now it’s not a conversation. It’s an accessory.

And that’s incredibly convenient. Because the harder questions—the ones about control, coercion, consequences, and conquest—don’t fit neatly on a hanger next to a $42 celebration outfit.

To be clear, the concept itself isn’t the issue. Dolls from different backgrounds? Great. Kids seeing themselves reflected in their toys or being exposed to other cultures? Well done. No notes. But I keep coming back to the fact that we’re asking a doll to do a lot of emotional heavy lifting here. Since when does a child’s play toy need to be made in her exact likeness? Barbie was never a mirror for any child—she was an idea. A caricature. A cartoon. Little girls also play with unicorns and dragons and sock monkeys and rubber snakes without the need to identify. You don’t exactly hear men out here demanding a ‘body-inclusive’ GI Joe with a potbelly and a podcast.

When I moved from California to Texas, I saw the same T-shirt, billboard, and bumper sticker over and over: Keep Your CA Out of My TX. And honestly? I got it. It wasn’t about hating California—it was about not wanting the policies and ideas that drove people out in the first place to follow them here. You left for a reason. Don’t recreate the same conditions you were trying to escape. Pretty basic concept.

And that’s precisely the point people are dancing around here. I support religious liberty—truly. Practice what you want, wear what you want, believe what you want. (*I do draw the tolerance line at “Death to America,” I won’t lie.) But there’s a difference between individual freedom and normalizing ideologies that don’t extend that same freedom back. You can call it representation or diversity or inclusion, but at some point I think it’s fair to ask whether we’re celebrating something, capitalizing on a cultural moment, or pushing a terrifying agenda.

Don’t hold back! Do what you do best (respectfully, OFC) in the comments. :)

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Except, increasingly, America.

Should any of my readers require proof of that last statement, I present to you this week’s viral grocery store showdown. A massage therapist named Dasha Kilpatrick allegedly confronted two Muslim women wearing hijabs in a Texas mega-market and—in language that was considerably less diplomatic than I might’ve chosen—informed them they weren’t welcome. Not in that H.E.B. specifically or even Texas in general, but in America, period.

“You worship a terrorist who is a warlord and a pedophile,” Kilpatrick told them. “You need to go back to your Islamic country where you came from.”

The father of one of the women filmed the encounter. The internet did what the internet does. Within days, Kilpatrick had been identified, fired, doxxed, and transformed into the latest contestant in America’s favorite reality show: Who Can We Destroy This Week?

(The filming dad was reportedly doxxed in return, because clearly all of the adults have left the room.)

Before we go any further, let me just say that accosting strangers who are peacefully shopping for olives and requesting their immediate self-deportation is not my idea of productive civic engagement. Unless someone attacks you or has personally appointed you Secretary General of Produce Aisle Immigration, I’d recommend leaving the other shoppers alone.

The problem is that not everyone seems to agree on exactly what happened in the Kilpatrick case. But there’s video showing her verbally attacking the Muslim women, you insist. There sure is—but is it the whole story?

“An elephant is a hard, smooth spear!” declares a blind man as he touches a giant tusk.

“Are you mad? An elephant is a soft, velvety fan,” says his blind best friend, stroking the pachyderm’s ear.

English class isn’t the only place I’ve seen that play out. When my daughters were little, if one of them came running to me and said, “She hit me!” my very first question was always the same: “What exactly were you doing five seconds before she hit you?” Without fail, that part mattered.

Forty years ago, The Guardian built an entire advertising campaign around the idea that a partial view is rarely the whole truth. In the famous “Points of View” commercial, a rough-looking skinhead comes sprinting down a city sidewalk, grabs a well-dressed businessman, and tackles him to the ground. Viewed from that angle, it can’t be anything but aggravated assault. Then the camera cuts to a wider shot, revealing a pallet of construction bricks falling from a crane overhead. The story quickly changes from “violent attack” to “heartwarming rescue.”

That’s why I’m always a little skeptical of thirty-second viral clips.

Some say Kilpatrick is a racist troll who initiated a rude and unsolicited verbal attack on two women who were minding their own business. The Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations openly condemned her. Her haters are gleefully celebrating the firing and doxing as the “consequences of her Islamophobia.”

The other team is high-fiving and throwing money at their bold new mascot. They claim the Muslim women provoked Kilpatrick and only started filming once they’d successfully engaged enraged her. Kilpatrick’s GiveSendGo—because of course—is only a few bucks short of its quarter-million-dollar goal. Congresswoman Nancy Mace expressed public support. “I stand with Dasha,” she wrote on X. “Do you?”

Kilpatrick may have instigated the entire exchange (we won’t know until the circulating clip is put into some sort of context), but there’s no question the Constitution protects her right to do so. Like it or not, freedom of speech includes rude opinions, insensitive tirades, and comments that make decent people recoil. That part is baked right into the Constitution.

Here’s the other part the media is allergic to: Hero or villain, her position is hardly fringe. The conversation she was trying to have—badly, in a grocery store, with cameras rolling for posterity—is one that Europe has been having for twenty years and that America keeps refusing to have at all: What happens when a nation built on free speech, individual liberty, and equal rights imports scores of people from cultures where women are considered property, an amputated hand is the punishment for pickpocketing, enjoying a happy hour cocktail will get you flogged, and heresy is a literal death sentence?

They aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re playing out in real time. Britain spent years ignoring the grooming-gang scandal because officials were terrified of being called racist. France has “no-go zones” where the government seems to have all the authority of a substitute teacher. Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands ridiculed anyone who questioned mass migration—until voters started electing politicians who made it their central issue. In Dearborn, foreigners are openly chanting “Death to America.” Dearborn is in Michigan, in case you missed that part. As in America. If that doesn’t at least warrant a conversation, what exactly would?

The Great Replacement is not going to announce itself. (I know; we’re not allowed to say that, even though according to the Pew Research Center, by 2040 Muslims will replace Jews as the nation’s second-largest religious group after Christians.) It’s not like we’re all going to wake up one morning to discover every City Hall in America has been converted into a mosque. It starts with a prayer room at the airport; it’s just basic accommodation. Next, a school quietly removes pork from the cafeteria menu because a handful of parents complained. No big deal; the kids prefer chicken nuggets anyway. Then a public pool introduces women-only swim hours, a city council member suggests renaming the Christmas parade a “winter celebration” to be more inclusive, and a university cancels an art exhibit because some of the pieces are considered blasphemous. Each individual concession seems trivial. Reasonable, even. But quiet revolutions are still revolutions, and death by a thousand cuts is still death.

The reality is that mass, unchecked migration has transformed much of the West into a grim, unrecognizable hellscape—child sexual abuse happening in plain sight while authorities tut-tut about community cohesion, entire neighborhoods in European capitals where police need an armored escort and a permission slip to enter, and migrants literally attempting to decapitate locals in the streets. Twenty years ago this would’ve been shelved in the dystopian fiction section. Today it’s filed under “Europe.”

The part that should make everyone uncomfortable is that the very tolerance that makes America worth immigrating to is increasingly being weaponized against it. Hospitality is a wonderful quality—until you wake up one day and realize your houseguests have quietly moved into the master bedroom and you’re sleeping on a lawn chair out back.

Yes, America is a nation of immigrants. My people came from England, Ireland, Italy, and Cuba. The difference is that historically, generations of settlers understood the assignment. They learned English. They celebrated the Fourth of July. They became Americans. They didn’t move here expecting their host country to start observing Guy Fawkes Night or make fried plantains the nation’s officially-recognized snack.

The two hijab-wearing women at H.E.B. may be perfectly lovely people who appreciate this country, feel lucky to live here, and want nothing more than to watch fireworks, pay taxes, and spend way too much money at Costco one Saturday a month. Assuming they don’t antagonize locals for sport, they most certainly deserve to be left alone.

Maybe Dasha Kilpatrick was rude. Maybe she was baited. Maybe she was both. Until someone releases the director’s cut, none of us will know for sure. What I do know is this: Americans need to get a little more comfortable saying “It’s okay if the United States remains recognizably American.” Because “Oh, that could never happen here,” is the last thing people say right before it does.

P.S. It’s already happening.

I for one am very happy to live in a country where I can express my dangerous and radical opinions. Exercise your right to do the same below!

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KARMA JAR

If you want in, you can upgrade below (an annual subscription works out to about 30 cents a post and comes with a free signed book). If you can’t swing it or you aren’t sure if you like me that much, no worries. Free content will resume tomorrow.

Imagine your boss texts you on a random Tuesday morning and says, “You know what? You’ve been crushing it all month. Why don’t you take today off?” There’s no end to the many ways you could spend those eight to nine glorious, unexpected free hours. You could organize every junk drawer in your house. Rewatch Season 3 of Suits. Visit your grandparents. Treat yourself to a massage. Finally check out that new museum in town. Gather some friends and drive over to the National Mall to wave your pom-poms for the algae that’s slowly swallowing the Reflecting Pool.

This week, to the surprise of literally no one familiar with leftist lunacy, a group of unhinged, rainbow-haired, TDS-addled libs chose the last option.

(In the protestors’ defense, they likely don’t have jobs, so that part was probably a stretch.)

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Apparently... not a red wave.

I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw that headline. Voters in New York City were fed up with the Democratic Party! Finally, I thought. It’s about time. Maybe they’re realizing that decades of progressive leadership haven’t exactly transformed the Big Apple into the dazzling paradise they were promised. Maybe they’ll adopt the radical policy of electing people who don’t actively make things worse.

Then I made the mistake of reading the article. Nope. They’re not moving away from the left. They’re moving even farther left.

Instead of rejecting progressive policies, they’re embracing the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) like it’s the stuffed kitten they lost in second grade. Because evidently if a little government doesn’t solve your problems, the obvious solution is... all the government.

“People not only want change, but they also want their elected officials to focus on the middle class and break up a system that currently favors the rich and powerful,” political strategist Doug Sosnik, former senior adviser to then-President Clinton, told The Hill. “That has been a consistent pattern throughout the primaries so far.”

For decades, it felt as if history had settled the debate over socialism. We’d all seen how it played out around the world, and while every system has flaws, putting the government in charge of literally everything has never exactly left folks shouting, “Let’s do that again!” Now, every time housing gets expensive, grocery prices spike, and Gen Z concludes home ownership is a fantasy up there with a 30-hour workweek and landlords who text back, someone pops up promising free buses, free childcare, free college, rent freezes, and the utter delight that is the city-owned grocery store. (If you’ve ever wondered what the DMV would look like if it also sold produce, wonder no more.)

Republicans think—with no small amount of sarcasm—what could possibly go wrong?

Democrats think—with no apparent knowledge of history—take my vote!

And here’s the thing: socialism as an ideology is one thing; socialism as a protest vote is another. A lot of newly-minted collectivists aren’t sitting around craving centralized medicine or state-run daycare because they spent a weekend reading Marx. When they can’t afford to go to a doctor or send their child to preschool, they reach for the loudest possible rejection of a system they think has failed them. That matters, because the appeal isn’t necessarily “this is brilliant.” Sometimes it’s just “anything is better than what we’ve got.”

Conservatives ignore that distinction to our peril. Because it’s easy to call everyone who votes far-left idiots. It’s easy to post memes about Venezuela. But people generally don’t embrace radical alternatives out of boredom or curiosity or even ignorance. They do it out of desperation.

If you’re 28 years old, drowning in student loans, living on Ramen, and hearing pundits on television tell you how fantastic the economy is, you’re going to start listening to anyone who promises to blow the whole thing up. Some people arrive at Donald Trump. Some people arrive at Zohran Mamdani. The bumper stickers are different. The middle finger aimed at the establishment is exactly the same.

Like a lot of capitalists, I wanted to believe Mamdani was a fluke. A weird New York City hallucination that would remain safely contained somewhere between SoHo and Park Slope. Then Seattle picked DSA darling Katie Wilson. Next came Los Angeles, where democratic socialist Nithya Raman trampled over Spencer Pratt to advance to the mayoral runoff. (I mean, we all know the whole thing was rigged, but still.) Bernie Sanders is routinely packing arenas on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Alexandria “Tax the Rich” Ocasio-Cortez. Washington D.C. appears poised to join the cult. This isn’t one eccentric guy in Brooklyn handing out “work less, get more” pamphlets. It’s an epidemic.

Obviously, I don’t believe socialism is the answer. History has been spectacularly unkind to that particular science project. The anti-market model has become the political version of the ex-boyfriend everyone warns you about. Every generation thinks: “Yeah... but this time it’ll be different.” Somebody should open a museum dedicated to failed socialist experiments. The gift shop could have one mug, three pencils, and a six-hour line.

And yet here we are. Again. What’s especially fascinating is that this isn’t happening because Americans suddenly woke up craving bread lines and government-issued cheese. It’s happening because faith in institutions has collapsed.

Young people don’t trust Washington. They don’t trust Wall Street. They don’t trust corporations. And increasingly, they don’t trust capitalism to deliver the American Dream they grew up believing they were entitled to.

Whether that assessment is accurate is almost beside the point. Politics runs on perception. If enough people conclude the current system isn’t working for them, they’ll start entertaining ideas that have their parents reaching for the Beefeater at three o’clock on a Tuesday.

The irony is that many of the cities now flirting with democratic socialism have spent years under progressive leadership already. Voters increasingly seem to believe that when housing is unaffordable, public services are deteriorating, and inequality is growing, the answer isn’t to reverse course—it’s to conclude they haven’t gone far enough.

WOMAN: OMG I cut bangs and I hate them!

NO SANE PERSON EVER: Maybe try cutting them shorter?

And that’s the strangest part of all. When a business fails, we question the business plan. When a dish is inedible, we question the recipe. When your house is on fire, the winning solution is hardly ever more gasoline.

Here’s what worries me. The left has an answer. I happen to think it’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad answer—but it’s an answer. And the way to beat terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ideas isn’t just by reminding people those same ideas have failed brilliantly before. It’s by offering something better. Because if the only people promising change are the ones selling socialism, we shouldn’t be surprised when more people start buying it.

I know you have thoughts. Don’t be stingy. Share them in the comments!

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p.s. In my meme search, I came across one that had me LingOL. DO NOT click this link if slightly-vulgar humor isn’t your thing. (You were warned!) Otherwise, enjoy. :)

P.P.S. I was reading my comments yesterday and I’ll just say what I’ve said a hundred times and thought a million more: I absolutely have the greatest readers on the planet. You drop in there just to give me props. You commiserate with and offer prayers and support to one another. I ask you to kindly like and share my work, and you do. From the bottom of my optimistic little heart, please know how grateful I am for each and every one of you.

Nevertheless, social media has become one long, unbroken orgy of “WE GOT THE LITTLE WEASEL!” and “THE TRUTH IS FINALLY OUT!”

And maybe I’m the weird one here, but I keep waiting for someone to answer the Dumbo-sized question in the room: If this is literally the smoking, fingerprint-stained gun we’ve all been hunting for... why did these people stuff it in a drawer labeled “nothing to see here” and move on?

Seriously. It feels like watching a coworker rage quit in a blaze of glory, storm toward the exit, and then turn around at the last second and announce loudly, “Oh, by the way, Janice in accounting has been putting arsenic in the coffee for years.”

Even though—as regular readers are well aware—my glass is typically overflowing, celebrating the gotcha feels… a little naive. Because we’ve been here before. We know how this goes:

• Step one: Reveal shocking misconduct.

• Step two: Trend for 72 hours.

• Step three: Share a bunch of memes.

• Step four: Move on.

It’s like someone discovering a cure for a plague that stopped existing in the Middle Ages. Congratulations on your findings, I guess.

Depending on whom you ask, Fauci is guilty of funding deadly gain-of-function research and lying to Congress about it under oath—twice; shaping the false “natural origins” narrative; pushing lockdowns that caused catastrophic collateral damage; championing worthless mandates that fractured the country; overseeing guidance that damaged an entire generation of children; greenlighting lethal hospital protocols that likely killed more people than the virus he helped create; and somehow becoming a millionaire while insisting, with a straight face, that he was just “following the science.” (Which is a weird thing for the guy who claimed he was The Science™ to say, but whatever.)

If Gabbard’s document haul truly establishes the sort of misconduct she’s alleging, shouldn’t the rest of us be furious? Not just at Fauci—although make no mistake, he deserves all of the universe’s collective ire and also to spend the remainder of his years wearing ankle shackles in a moldy, windowless cave—but at every official who had access to this information and apparently was planning to wait until Elon Musk’s descendants colonized Mars to release it?

It’s one thing to get something wrong. It’s another to form what appears to be the governmental equivalent of a middle-school blood pact where everyone agrees nobody’s going to tell the teacher who broke her apple-shaped mug.

I know, I know. There are protocols. Declassification procedures. Interagency reviews. Legal exposure. People with families and mortgages and retirement accounts who decided that being right isn’t worth being destroyed over. I understand all of that. I do. And I’m tired of understanding it. Because at some point “the system made it impossible” stops being an explanation and starts being an excuse. Americans simply want the truth. We deserve the truth. The truth, apparently, operates on its own timeline. And that timeline seems to involve waiting until absolutely everyone responsible is either gumming pudding in a memory care facility, irrevocably pardoned, or dead.

Like the Twitter Files, the Epstein Files, the Durham Report, the Snowden leaks, JFK assassination records, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and pretty much every last thing related to CONVID, this “bombshell” raises a crucial question: WHERE—AND WHEN—IS THE ACCOUNTABILITY?

A thousand-page PDF isn’t accountability. A press conference isn’t accountability. A declassification stamp isn’t accountability. Those are a starting point… a place you begin when your goal is justice.

Likewise, document dumps aren’t justice. Justice is what happens after the documents. It’s the subpoenas. Indictments. Trials. Tribunals. Sentences… fully executed.

Apparently accountability and justice now consist of uploading a really big stack of papers and hoping somebody else takes it from there.

The near-complete media blackout would be comical if it weren’t so consequential. The highest-ranking intelligence official in the United States accuses the highest-paid public servant in all of history of essentially causing a pandemic that decimated the global economy and killed millions of people around the world and, oh yeah, the federal spy machine was fully aware of it the entire time, and also former President Obama is under criminal investigation for his role in the conspiracy and… crickets?

If you’re a member of the press and none of that keeps you up at night, the internet is filled with free mental health diagnostic tools you may wish to explore.

Maybe there are perfectly good reasons the documents weren’t released sooner. Maybe it’s part of a broader strategy that will be revealed… eventually. I certainly hope so. But if the big accomplishment turns out to be, “We finally let you read what we already knew,” forgive me if I leave the cork in the champagne bottle.

Seriously, tips mean EVERYTHING.

After the security failures that preceded the Butler attempt on Trump, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, nobody was eager to test whether the government had learned anything. Every security agency in the country had spent the past year being accused of missing warning signs, failing to communicate, and generally dropping the ball. If there was one place in America you’d expect to be wrapped in more layers of protection than a Soviet nuclear briefcase, it was the South Lawn.

According to federal prosecutors, five men allegedly decided to test that theory. The plan, as described in court filings, sounds less like a real-world scheme than a Tom Clancy novel brought to life: launch explosive-laden drones to create panic. Funnel thousands of fleeing spectators into predetermined sniper kill zones. When peak chaos is reached, send in a “second wave” to storm the White House gates. Just your standard-issue, meticulously planned catastrophe.

If that account is accurate, we’re not talking about a couple of disgruntled cranks sending a message. We’re talking about a plot that could have become one of the deadliest political attacks in modern American history.

Fortunately, someone’s mom called the cops.

And really, that may be the only sane part of the whole story. According to court documents, the alleged scheme began falling apart when a 19-year-old blew his graduation money on an alarming cache of guns, ammo, body armor, and tactical gear. He also quit his landscaping job, locked himself in his room for long stretches to chat with his mysterious “online friends,” and was overheard discussing hit-and-run missions. His mother looked at all that and, unlike half the internet, decided maybe this wasn’t just a quirky phase. America may owe her a bouquet the size of a Buick.

The alleged cast sounds like a crew straight out of a Scooby-Doo episode: four Americans and, according to DHS, a ringleader from Mexico who overstayed a visitor visa decades ago (i.e. a “Dreamer”—thanks, Obama!) and decided to run a domestic terror operation from an apartment in Nebraska. They met this past March in a TikTok group called “Vanguard of the Old Republic” and then moved to supposedly-secure Signal chats to coordinate their deadly coup. (Turns out end-to-end encryption can’t trump beginning-to-end stupidity.)

The new buddies reportedly bonded over shared frustration around bureaucratic corruption, billionaires, the Epstein files, “secret elites performing demonic infant-sacrifice conspiracies,” AIPAC, data centers using too much water, and an assortment of “other government actions.” It’s less an ideology and more like somebody accidentally printed an Alex Jones YouTube chat.

It’s the data centers that got me.

MENTALLY ILL MAN #1: “Have you even seen how much water those server farms are sucking up? It’s an outrage.”

MENTALLY ILL MAN #2: “I can’t even. We need to do something about it!”

MENTALLY ILL MAN #3: “Let’s murder the president.”

MENTALLY ILL MAN #4: “And maybe Joe Rogan?”

MENTALLY ILL MAN-CHILD #5 [to self]: “I can just tell my mom I’m sleeping at Kyle’s.”

Their operational planning wasn’t much better. Prosecutors say the aspiring assassins reportedly couldn’t figure out how to make explosives, discussed robbing a U.S. Army ammunition plant instead, and even tried crowdfunding part of the operation. Apparently even overthrowing the government requires friends willing to Venmo.

And then, because clearly this story wasn’t absurd enough already, a fight broke out.

Not among the alleged terrorists. Between federal agencies.

The Secret Service claims the investigation was intentionally being kept under wraps because agents were still trying to identify additional suspects. But FBI Director Kash “Spoiler Alert” Patel couldn’t help himself. He jumped onto X to announce that “this FBI” had thwarted a planned attack—turning an active investigation into a full-blown media circus.

The Secret Service was not happy.

“I’ll tell you a phrase I learned early in my career in the New York field office, and that’s ‘Don’t choke on your own smoke,’” Deputy Secret Service Director Matthew Quinn told reporters. “Anyone that believes that case was worked in a bubble (by the FBI) is naive. I’ll tell you, the Secret Service led that investigation from the beginning.”

Sufficiently spanked, the FBI issued what it said was a joint statement by the spokespersons of its own agency and Secret Service:

“The FBI and U.S. Secret Service are proud of our strong working relationship. This investigation highlights that continuous partnership and could not have happened without the great work and coordination between our two agencies. This weekend’s thwarted attack should be a message to any criminal actor that if you target Americans, you will be found and brought to justice.”

As of this writing, all five would-be revolutionaries remain in federal custody, facing conspiracy to commit murder charges that carry up to life in prison—which is a lot of time to think about whether the crowdfunding part was such a great idea. Investigators say roughly 19 people were in the original group chat and that more arrests “could be coming,” which is about as comforting as a smoke detector with a dead battery.

So, to recap: an Ohio mom allegedly suspected her son was up to no good, picked up the phone, and may have prevented what prosecutors describe as a potential mass-casualty attack.

Four grown men allegedly recruited a teenager who couldn’t hide a $3,000 tactical shopping spree from his parents and then tried to finance the rest of their little revolution with a GoFundMe.

And the FBI allegedly couldn’t hide a victory lap from the Secret Service.

Five men. One mom. The entire federal security apparatus. And the most effective counterterrorism tool in America is still a parent with a functioning alarm bell.

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(So is tipping.)

It seems as if the entire world has rediscovered America—and it likes it. I am not even making that up. Australians are going bananas over Buc-ee’s. Irishmen are reviewing Walmart like it’s the Louvre. The Scots have invaded Boston, where they’re packing pubs and exuberantly belting out The Star-Spangled Banner. Every word. Not mumbling along. Not politely standing there. Not crooning their own flag-waving favorites. They’re singing our national anthem like it belongs to them. I’d be shocked if I have five readers who could perform Flower of Scotland or Das Deutschlandlied flawlessly, tipsy or otherwise.

Meanwhile, Japanese fans are so happy to be here that they’re staying behind to clean the stadiums before they leave—showing more respect for the venue than many Americans seem willing to show for their own country. Europeans from every corner of the continent are sharing gushing tributes to American hospitality, American sports culture, American gas stations, canned cheese, Costco hot dogs, local customs, and a million other things we take for granted on the daily. They’re flooding our feeds with visions of what America looks like to hordes of outsiders: abundant, welcoming, free, worth celebrating.

If you only listened to our own media, you’d never know any of this.

We’ve spent the better part of a decade being told America is uniquely awful. Hopelessly divided. Irredeemably racist. A global punchline. Our history is shameful. Our flag is controversial. Our anthem is offensive. Loving your country has somehow become something you’re expected to immediately apologize for if you’re going to have the audacity to say it out loud. Other people loving our country? Oh, that doesn’t happen.

I know that many of my readers consider themselves proud patriots and feel no shame in openly championing our imperfect homeland. Most have lived or spent enough time abroad to realize that every place has potholes, politicians, and people who are convinced their system is rigged. I also realize there are some who believe America is a wildly corrupt, violence-riddled shill for Israel built on injustice and stolen land. (Yes, I read my comments.)

I’m not even saying they’re wrong. Is our history littered with shameful chapters? Too many to count. Is our present the epitome of what the Founding Fathers envisioned? Let’s just say they’d probably have a few notes. But criticism has somehow become our national pastime. Gratitude? Not so much. And if you can’t find anything to appreciate about the country that’s given you free speech, little lending libraries, and the ability to buy a kayak, a casket, and a rotisserie chicken at the same store, maybe the problem isn’t the country.

Because I think that’s the real divide. It’s not that one side thinks America is above criticism and the other doesn’t. It’s that one side is far more comfortable celebrating what we’ve gotten right, while the other seems hell-bent on cataloging everything we’ve ever gotten wrong.

It’s not even subtle. Fifty years ago, flying an American flag said, “I love my country.” Today, it basically says, “I’m MAGA.” We have teachers—actual people we entrust with the care of our children—bragging about removing American flags from classrooms and replacing them with pride flags and (different case) insisting that Old Glory—the one shrouded in rules and reverence—“stands for violence and menace and intolerance.” Yes, folks, people are out here looking at the Stars and Stripes and seeing a swastika. Is it any wonder a generation raised on that toxic messaging grew up associating their own flag with shame instead of sacrifice?

That’s an extraordinary cultural shift. And it didn’t happen because Republicans “stole” the flag (the way the LGBTQ+ crowd “stole” the rainbow). It happened because the flag literally represents American values—patriotism, freedom, opportunity, service, the Constitution—a laundry list the left routinely finds either offensive, oppressive, xenophobic, or only valid when it’s attached to a protest sign.

To much of the rest of the world, the American flag still means exactly what it’s always meant: Liberty. Optimism. Hope. Possibility. The land of the free and the home of the brave.

People don’t save for years to visit racist dystopias. They don’t immigrate to countries that are circling the drain. They don’t memorize another nation’s national anthem just to flatter the locals. They flock to places that are beautiful, welcoming, iconic, historic, adventurous, or otherwise unforgettable. Meanwhile, too many Americans have forgotten just how many of our international guests would trade permanent places with them in a proverbial heartbeat.

None of this means America is perfect. Even Pollyanna here realizes that it isn’t. We have real, profound, persistent problems. We have poverty and hunger and racism and crime and irredeemably crooked agencies, institutions, and public officials. Every nation does. Shangri-La isn’t a real place. But it’s striking that while so many Americans have been taught to view patriotism with suspicion, visitors keep showing up reminding us why the place was worth loving in the first place. The rest of the world appears to have skipped the “America Is Awful” tour, bless its heart.

I think that’s why the singing Brits have resonated with so many people. Because sometimes it takes hearing your own anthem belted out by a pub full of visitors to remember it’s actually a pretty powerful song about a pretty great country.

Maybe somebody should mention that to the Democrats.

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Well, it’s official. The Democratic Party has spent eighteen months wound-licking, soul-searching, rebranding, and engaging in the kind of deep institutional reflection that apparently leads you [*checks notes*] right back to Kamala Harris.

It looks as if the party of perpetual protest is not, in fact, going to be unburdened by what has been.

According to the latest Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll, the former vice president—the woman who routinely struggled to string together a coherent sentence and lost to Donald Trump by a margin that made network anchors visibly nauseous—remains the top choice for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, pulling in 27% support among left-leaning voters. (Who are these people? Like, do we know them personally? Are they in the room with us now?) Put a different way, Harris is “miles ahead” of her competition… and yet nearly three-quarters of Democrats would prefer literally anyone else. In most industries, that would get you a product recall. In Democratic politics, it gets you a primary.

The scariest part is that she may be the least awful option.

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It was loud, chaotic, unapologetically masculine, and exactly the kind of spectacle that makes the institutional nervous system of outlets like The New York Times immediately short-circuit.

“Money, ego, gore, vanity, hype and the flash of the camera, all mixing on the South Lawn of the White House,” the Gray Lady gasped. “Eruptions of casual cruelty.” “Cockfighting with men as birds.” “A raw pageant of pain.” “Fighters were filmed warming up, barefoot, in the Indian Treaty Room.” The piece read less like news coverage and more like a Yelp review of the apocalypse.

“The UFC was an apt metaphor for Trump’s pugilistic political style,” the AP declared. “He is as big a fan of cage-match-style politics as he is of cage-fighting itself.”

“Trump’s UFC White House birthday bash was a bloody, on-brand affair,” was the headline USA Today went with.

TIME alone deserves some credit here. The magazine praised the White House setting, the military tributes, the fireworks, and the production value, describing the whole thing as “a compelling sports production” before launching into the obligatory lecture. That’s bordering on journalism. At least they reported what happened before telling us how we’re supposed to feel about it.

To be fair, the event was a far cry from the beloved White House Pride celebration of 2023. You know, the one where the Biden administration draped the White House—the “People’s House,” as they love to point out; the most recognizable symbol of American governance in the world—in Pride flags, invited transgender activists onto the lawn for a bawdy dance party, and presented the whole thing as a proud expression of who we are as a nation. The coverage from these same outlets was uniformly glowing. It was brave. Historic. Joyful. A sunny reprieve from a fog of antagonism (which was an actual WaPo headline and not in fact the description of a candle on the TJ Maxx clearance shelf).

So to review: men in a ring battering each other—a sport I do not personally care for but also one that is enjoyed by roughly 60 million Americans and legal in all 50 states—is a desecration of the White House. Hosting topless “trans models” on the lawn and live-streaming the affair to every allied and adversarial nation on earth, on the other hand, is a powerful statement of American values. Got it. Fair and balanced. Straight from the source. Clearly, fit to print.

The Times was particularly horrified when a fighter named Josh Hokit gave a profane little speech that included praising his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and ended with “and lastly, Michelle Obama is a man.” It was a lot. The indignation is also rather rich coming from the same publication that spent four years largely ignoring the sitting president’s son conducting international business deals while the FBI sat on his laptop, insisting obvious signs of Biden’s cognitive decline were either exaggerated or imaginary, and eulogizing a White House that couldn’t tell you with a straight face who was actually running the country.

Biden invited his base to the White House. Trump invited his. Biden’s base likes watching men dress up as women. Trump’s base likes watching men pummel each other senseless. Drag is brave. Boxing is barbaric. The Ministry of Truth has spoken.

“President Trump’s 80th birthday Ultimate Fighting Championship stunt on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday night was a mass-media spectacle unlike any in the history of the presidency,” The New York Times wrote—implying that’s a bad thing—before discovering that writing about men punching each other involves a surprising amount of men punching each other. “On and on it went. More men beat each other up.”

Tomorrow: The Times Confirms Bears Remain Committed to Relieving Themselves in the Woods.

It’s the shock—always the shock—that gets me. Americans elected a fight promoter. Twice. They knew what they were getting. He’s been doing this since he brought Mike Tyson to Atlantic City in the 1980s. Trump Plaza hosted WrestleMania. Hulk Hogan spoke at the RNC. The throughline has been visible from space for forty years. And yet when the guy throws himself a boxing-themed birthday party, the press acts as if he campaigned on restoring the dignity of the White House through chamber music and watercolor classes in the Rose Garden.

Every time the media tries to psychoanalyze Trump, they accidentally reveal what they really think of his supporters. “Tens of thousands of people turned up to watch blood get sprayed across the floor of a cage in America’s honor and pretend it was appropriate,” the Independent sneered. “[Trump] loves the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber,” The Guardian wrote, contempt dripping from every character. “He loves the music of Bon Jovi and the Village People. And he loves the gaudy, clownish tokens of masculinity that appeal to very small children: big trucks, big muscles, and demonstrations of physical strength.”

You know who else loves those things, Guardian? America. Welcome to NASCAR country. Can I get you a Big Mac and a slice of apple pie?

Oh, and for the record: if the White House lawn is an appropriate venue for shirtless activists to be celebrated for who they enjoy doing kinky things with, it’s an equally appropriate venue for two consenting adults voluntarily exchanging concussions in front of a paying audience. At least one of these things is actually a sport.

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On Friday, Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in human history. SpaceX—the company that was supposed to fail, the rockets that were supposed to explode and stay exploded, the vision that was supposed to be the grandiose fantasy of a man who’d gotten lucky selling PayPal—pulled off the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion and pushing Musk’s net worth north of $1.1 trillion.

The champagne hadn’t even been poured before Elizabeth Warren had her hand out.

“The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth,” Pocahontas declared. “We need a wealth tax.” In peak irony, she posted this on X. The platform owned by the man she is attacking. Using infrastructure he built. To demand his money.

Bernie Sanders, who owns three homes including a lakefront vacation cabin in Vermont (purchased a decade ago for $575K and almost certainly worth more than a million today), declared the whole thing “grossly immoral.” Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner—yes, the guy with the Nazi tattoo—announced his intention to make sure Musk would be “the last” trillionaire. Because nothing says champion of the working class like promising to prevent the next SpaceX from existing.

Never mind that Musk has deployed Starlink terminals to hurricane, wildfire, and active war zones, often before anyone worked out who was footing the bill. Never mind the $100 million XPRIZE for carbon capture, the filtration systems he funded in Flint's lead-poisoned schools, the $50 million donation to St. Jude’s, or the disaster relief after every major superstorm nobody remembers because it might make him look good. Forget that he built a school for his kids because he thought American education was a disgrace and then opened it to children around the world. The man is “grossly immoral” for accumulating wealth despite having spent a meaningful chunk of it on other people—quietly, consistently, and without a Senate press release. Whatever you say, Senator.

The argument isn’t about wealth. It’s about whose wealth. Nobody said a word when Taylor Swift became a billionaire or demanded she convert her net worth into community gardens, bike lanes, and emotional-support peacocks. George Clooney sold his tequila company for $1 billion and got a profile in a glossy magazine. Hollywood celebrities with multiple climate-unfriendly private jets and football-field-size yachts are celebrated as liberal icons. Bill Gates (net worth $107.7 billion) is literally, relentlessly, enthusiastically trying to depopulate the planet and progressives name their buildings after him and put him on the cover of Time magazine. But a man—a Trump supporter, no less—who built reusable rockets, revolutionized electric vehicles, connected remote villages to the internet via satellite, and created hundreds of thousands of jobs becomes a trillionaire and we need an emergency congressional hearing.

But… but… a trillion dollars could fund Medicaid for a decade! A trillion dollars could provide free school lunches for 100 million kids for 20 years! A trillion dollars could house the entire U.S. homeless population (and you’d still have most of it left!). A trillion dollars could make college tuition free, repair every pothole in the country, and build a national grid that doesn’t melt when a squirrel sneezes. A trillion dollars could apparently solve every problem in America except our chronic inability to MOOB [mind our own business].

The question isn’t whether someone else’s money could help people. Of course it could. The question is why your money gets to be yours while someone else’s money is a community resource awaiting redistribution.

Here’s a fun game: take Warren’s “11 million years” logic and apply it downward. The typical Guatemalan family would have to work more than 400 years to afford Warren’s $4 million Cambridge Victorian. A subsistence farmer in Bangladesh could feed his family for a week on the $7 Americans spend on a single Starbucks latte. A market vendor in Haiti would have to work actual decades to buy a $60,000 SUV—assuming he put every penny toward the vehicle. The arithmetic of inequality is infinite—it just stops wherever the person doing the math happens to be standing.

If you’re wondering when “success” becomes “excess,” Warren has an answer: $50 million. That’s where her proposed wealth tax begins. It’s a remarkably safe and convenient place to draw the moral line when your own net worth is estimated at a mere $10 million.

The other thing worth addressing is the Scrooge McDuck characterization—the idea that Musk is sitting in a vault somewhere doing backstrokes through a trillion dollars in gold coins. He isn’t. His wealth is ownership of productive companies that millions of people voluntarily use every day. It’s not a checking account. SpaceX’s market capitalization currently stands at over $2 trillion. Musk owns roughly 40% of it. If he tried to “give it away” or liquidate it to fund Medicaid, he’d have to sell his stake—which would crash the stock, destroy enormous amounts of value, and leave everyone poorer. It’s a little like telling someone their house “could fund their retirement” while ignoring the part where they’re still living in it.

The other piece that Warren and Sanders routinely forget to mention is that this IPO minted 4,400 millionaires overnight—engineers, technicians, welders, and cafeteria workers who took a bet on a crazy rocket company and stayed. Four hundred of them woke up worth more than $100 million. The story isn’t just “Elon gets richer.” It’s “thousands of ordinary people who believed in something impossible got rewarded for being right.” Capitalism did that. Not a wealth tax. Not a Senate subcommittee. Not Bernie Sanders from the front porch of his lakefront cabin.

Reasonable people can disagree about wealth taxes, inequality, and moral obligation all day long. They’re legitimate debates that have been happening since ancient Chinese philosophers were writing about them on bamboo strips. But there’s something telling about the fact that the left’s immediate response to the first trillionaire in human history—a man who left South Africa as a teenager, was relentlessly bullied as a child, slept on office floors while building companies, nearly went bankrupt in 2008, and kept going anyway—was to start dividing up his money before the opening bell closed.

Elon gave us a free speech platform. Liberals use it to trash him. It’s the most American thing since paying rent to the government on a house you already bought.

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For lucky readers who avoid all lamestream media and are blissfully unaware, last year, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony fatally stabbed fellow teenager Austin Metcalf during a confrontation at a Texas track meet. Anthony is Black. Metcalf was white. You can guess where this is going.

Anthony claimed self-defense. Metcalf’s family—and dozens of witnesses—called Anthony the instigator. What followed was less a criminal case than a full-contact national psychosis involving cable news panels, social media prosecutors, racial narratives, competing fundraisers, and approximately 47 million people who somehow knew exactly what happened despite possessing none of the relevant information.

This week, after hearing the evidence, listening to the witnesses, and deliberating for several hours, a jury convicted Anthony of murder and sentenced him to 35 years in prison.

The internet, meanwhile, reached its verdict sometime around lunch the day the story broke. Within hours, everyone had chosen a team.

There was Team Self-Defense. Team Murder. Team Race Explains Everything. Team Race Is Irrelevant. Team the Media Is Manipulating the Facts. Team the Other Team Is Hiding the Truth. And, because this is 2026, Team GoFundMe. Actually, scratch that. There were multiple GoFundMe teams. Even the fundraising became a proxy war, with people debating donations, legal fees, representation, relocation expenses, and what financial support supposedly reveals about guilt, innocence, and societal decay in general.

One side—which included an outraged Cardi B—insisted the outcome would have been completely different if the races had been reversed. The other argued that race was being used to obscure the facts. Some saw a frightened teenager defending himself. Others saw a teenager who brought a knife to a school event and used it. Was the jury representative enough? Why was the jury suddenly the story? Every question immediately generated two competing answers, each delivered with near-religious conviction by people whose legal training consisted primarily of watching a few seasons of Law & Order.

At some point, the entire tragedy started to feel less like a criminal case and more like a football game where half the stadium is wearing one color and the other half is wearing another, except instead of arguing about penalties, people were arguing about race, fairness, identity politics, privilege, accountability, and every other cultural fault line we seem incapable of discussing without teeth coming out.

Here’s the part that doesn’t fit neatly into either team’s narrative: when I typed just Karmelo Anthony into X after the verdict, my feed wasn’t filled with white conservatives celebrating the conviction. It was filled—and I’m talking overwhelmingly—with Black users saying race had nothing to do with it. Like her. And her. And him. And him and him and him and him and him and him and him and him.

Black users calling Anthony a killer. Refusing to be “bullied into supporting a cold-blooded killer simply because we share skin color.” Insisting that the people making the murder about race in the first place are the actual racists and condemning them for celebrating the death of a white kid. Calling the “anti-white-attack-trend-in-the-name-of-Karmelo-Anthony (yes, it’s a thing) “sick”. Calling for justice for Austin Metcalf. In other words, the actual conversation was far more complicated than the version being peddled by the professional outrage merchants, who always seem eager to sort 330 million Americans into two tidy little newsprint-colored camps and call it analysis.

(Of course, there was also Jasmine Crockett, who looked especially pretty while pointing out that the knife that was used to kill Metcalf was small and that Anthony only stabbed him the one (fatal) time! This is an actual congresswoman. Lord have mercy on us all.)

The prosecution didn’t have to prove Anthony stabbed Metcalf—Anthony admitted it. Witnesses confirmed it. Four Black witnesses testified that Anthony was the aggressor, directly contradicting his self-defense claims. The real question was whether a push during a brief argument justified pulling a knife and driving it into someone’s chest. The jury concluded it did not.

Nevertheless, long before a single witness testified, millions of Americans had already decided the case from the comfort of their couch, phone, toilet, or wherever constitutional scholars gather these days. And the truly remarkable part is that the majority of them managed to maintain unshakable certainty after ignoring most of the trial. The jury deliberated for a few hours. Social media has been deliberating for more than a year. The official verdict, when it arrived, changed literally nobody’s mind.

People who believed Anthony was a cold-blooded killer before the trial believed the exact same thing afterward. People who believed he acted in self-defense before the trial believed he acted in self-defense afterward. People who thought race was the central issue were still positive race was the central issue. People who thought race was a distraction were still convinced race was a distraction.

It’s almost enough to make you wonder why we bother spending millions of dollars on courtrooms when everyone already has a fully operational legal system in their pocket. Because the modern American justice process increasingly looks something like this:

• Breaking news.

• A handful of facts.

• An avalanche of certainty.

• Months of tribal warfare.

• A trial.

• A verdict.

• Millions of people discovering that none of the evidence changed their opinion.

We’ve seen this before—George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Kyle Rittenhouse, Ahmaud Arbery. With each new tragedy, the online trial was louder, faster, and more definitive than the real one. This isn’t just about one case. It’s about what happens when the public’s legal system is built on clips, captions, and outrage cycles that never end. The courtroom becomes a formality, and the real trial is the one that lives forever online.

Within a day of the conviction, Anthony had already filed an appeal. He now claims he’s a “penniless, destitute, and indigent person, too poor to employ counsel to represent me on the appeal,” despite crowdfunding more than $625,000 prior to trial. His supporters will continue to support him. His critics will continue to criticize him. And the two sides will spend the rest of eternity arguing whether he was a victim or a killer.

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Defenders of that “process” are singularly focused on the counting—the painstaking care they’re taking not to miss a single ballot, the diligence of the poll workers, the “security” of the machines—as if they’re explaining how a Swiss watch works to a colony of goldfish. It would be like a bank showing you a slow-motion, high-definition replay of how perfectly they stacked the counterfeit bills they just handed you.

Because “look how transparent the counting is!” is the ultimate shell game. They’re desperate to keep the focus on the tabulation because they have no defense for what’s actually being tabulated.

You can have the most perfectly-calibrated, high-tech, blockchain-verified counting machine in the history of the world, but if the ballots you’re feeding into it were harvested from a port-a-potty in Venice Beach or purchased from a guy who pays a crew to drive around Skid Row with a van full of dollar bills and crack pipes, the “transparency” of the count is irrelevant. It’s just transparently processing garbage.

The media’s response to the backlash has been entirely predictable. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes assured viewers that counting ballots in glass rooms is proof positive that nothing fraudulent could possibly be occurring—as if the walls are the issue and not the piles of questionably-sourced envelopes inside them. CNN explained patiently that late ballots favor Democrats largely because Trump turned Republicans against voting by mail. Which is a real phenomenon worth acknowledging—and also completely beside the point. The question was never whether Democratic ballots arrive late. The question is whether all of those mail-in ballots represent actual eligible voters casting actual legal votes.

BUTCHER: This meat is only four dollars a pound!
YOU: What is it?
BUTCHER: It’s meat!
YOU: I mean, where is it from?
BUTCHER: From this very secure, climate-controlled display case!
YOU: Can you at least tell me what sort of animal it is?
BUTCHER: It’s an animal that costs four dollars a pound! Jeez, what’s with the third degree?

And here’s where California’s “nothing to see here” argument starts to decompose. The Golden State allows voter registration with a gym membership card. A utility bill. A prescription bottle. A Blockbuster card (probably). Documents that would not get you onto an airplane or into a casino or authorize you to drive a car, open a bank account, or check into a hotel. When the DOJ asked to audit the voter rolls—to simply verify that the people on them are real, eligible, and alive—California refused, citing privacy laws. Apparently the state that knows precisely when you turn onto a toll road, the date of your last COVID booster, and exactly how many ounces of water your showerhead dispenses has finally found a category of information too sensitive to verify.

Meanwhile, we have dogs and 126-year-olds casting ballots. We have people convicted of—not just charged with—paying homeless people to vote with fake addresses. Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. Attorney for D.C., is publicly asking for similar evidence of fraud—and the media is reacting like a blackjack dealer who just got asked to show the deck. “There are rules!” “This is sowing distrust!” “Who does that?” (That’s a direct quote.)

And every time someone raises a question about any of this, the response is the same: But January 6th!

“Just five years after the violent Capitol insurrection, MAGA is pushing another equal parts deranged and idiotic election conspiracy theory,” Hayes scoffed.

“Trump has made election denial a central part of his political movement,” The Guardian explained before invoking—naturally—”the insurrection.”

“More than five years after his supporters, fueled by lies about a stolen election, stormed the Capitol to stop the transfer of power… he can sow substantial chaos [in California] simply by trying to convince voters that the results were fraudulent,” The New York Times blustered.

The not-at-all-subtle message: asking questions about election integrity is dangerous rhetoric. Dangerous rhetoric leads to violence. Therefore questions are violence. If that logic sounds familiar, it should—it’s the same framework they used to shut down curiosity about COVID lockdowns, vaccine safety, and Hunter Biden’s laptop. The implication is hard to avoid: the approved narrative is fragile, and the only way to protect it is to make inquiry itself the crime.

Here’s what nobody in the mainstream press seems curious about: Nithya Raman lost in her own district. The candidate who supposedly surged past Pratt on a wave of late mail-in ballots couldn’t carry the neighborhood where people actually know her. She had effectively conceded the race. And yet somehow the ballots kept coming, and somehow they kept breaking her way, and somehow the media finds the suggestion that this warrants scrutiny to be self-evidently deranged.

Former Mighty Ducks actor (and apparent mogul*) Brock Pierce is so confident the fraud is there that he’s willing to hand over a million dollars to anyone who can prove it. His Cure the Vote initiative is offering the reward for credible, verifiable evidence of election misconduct—not from MAGA Twitter, but from election workers, government employees, contractors, and whistleblowers. Not a single legacy media outlet felt that was worthy of coverage because, apparently, Cure the Vote doesn’t have glass walls. (I’m speculating.)

And then there’s Gavin Newsom, who—when asked about the possibility of ending up with two Republican candidates for governor and no Democrats—said:

“We all have agencies. We can shape the future. I don’t anticipate this being the case, but there is a ‘break the glass scenario.’ There are many people who have a deep understanding of what it would look like if Democrats were locked out, and we’re going to do everything to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’ll leave it at that.”

He actually said that. The governor of California said he has a break the glass scenario for when Democrats get shut out of elections. Yes, he was talking about the other highly contentious race where two popular Republicans were running, but the message is clear: California has a contingency plan for undesirable election outcomes. Nobody in the press asked him what that meant. Nobody followed up.

So basically California’s got glass walls to ensure election integrity and a governor with a hammer. What could possibly go wrong?

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If he weren’t busy being President of the United States, Donald Trump could be hosting a hit streaming show called Extreme Makeover: D.C. Edition. First it was the Rose Garden. Next came the Kennedy Center. After that, the golden ballroom. Oh, and the reflecting pool. It seems the man has never met a national landmark he didn’t want to give a little Botox to. This week, the press pool insists, he apparently set his sights on the mother of all monuments.

“THE STATUE OF LIBERTY HAS BEEN A TOTAL DISASTER FOR YEARS,” POTUS wrote on Truth Social. “Nobody wants to say it, but I will. Tremendous maintenance costs, terrible harbor views, and frankly, the torch is VERY outdated. After speaking with many of the best people, I have decided that it may be time for a BEAUTIFUL replacement. Bigger. Stronger. More luxurious. People are saying it could be the greatest statue ever built. They’re calling it ‘the Statue of Luxury.’ The Radical Left is already melting down. They said I couldn’t build a ballroom. Now they say I can’t do this. WRONG! Nobody loves liberty more than me. Nobody has done more for liberty than me. STAY TUNED!!!”

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Instead, we got a software update.

This week, security researchers discovered that Meta has been quietly shipping facial recognition code to millions of smartphones since January—buried inside the Meta AI app that pairs with its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. The feature, called NameTag, is not currently enabled. Meta would very much like you to find that reassuring.

I do not find that reassuring.

Here is what NameTag does, or will do, the moment someone flips the switch: it scans faces through the glasses’ cameras, converts them into biometric data, and matches them against a database of stored faceprints. In plain English: a complete stranger at the grocery store, your gym, the park, or your kid’s swim meet can look at you through a pair of sunglasses and within seconds know more about you than your neighbors do—without your knowledge, without your consent, and with absolutely nothing you can do about it. Oh, and they can record the moment for posterity.

Think about what “identifies you” actually means for a second. It’s not just your name. It’s everything attached to your name. Your address. Where you work. Where your kids go to school. Your social media profiles—including the ones you thought were private. Your daily routine, reconstructed from public check-ins and tagged photos. If you were a stalker, an abusive ex, or a garden-variety predator, NameTag wouldn’t just be a useful tool. It would be the single greatest gift technology has ever handed you, wrapped in a Ray-Ban case and available at your local Best Buy for $224.

Oh, and don’t think you’ll just pay extra attention to whether the potential perv you’re talking to has a flashing recording light on his temple. The same species that immediately taught itself to jailbreak iPhones, pirate Netflix, and cheat at Wordle quickly figured out how to disable that feature, too—and is out there offering free lessons. So that’s terrific. (Lawmakers are already trying to get ahead of the workaround, but good luck enforcing that.)

Meta’s response to all of this? “Nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made.” Which is roughly as reassuring as your kidnapper telling you “the gun isn’t loaded yet.”

And here’s the part that makes a lean-to in the woods start looking like a reasonable life choice. An internal Meta memo reviewed during reporting revealed that the company is interested in launching NameTag during a “dynamic political environment” because “civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

Read that again.

Meta didn’t just build a secret facial recognition system and quietly push it to millions of phones. They admitted in writing that they’re just sitting on it, waiting for the perfect political moment to flip the switch—specifically, a moment when the people most likely to fight back will be too distracted to notice. That’s not a technology company trying to optimize a product launch. That’s a backroom surveillance operation with tinted lenses and an agenda.

For context, Meta shut down Facebook’s facial recognition system in 2021 and deleted more than a billion faceprints after mounting criticism from privacy advocates and regulators. The company was ordered to pay $650 million to settle a class action lawsuit over biometric data. So they’ve done this before, paid an enormous fine, solemnly promised to do better, and then apparently spent the next five years building a smaller, sneakier version and hiding it in a glasses app. Pharma would be proud.

The official reassurance is that Meta is “not building a central face database.” Central doing the work of an entire legal department there. Because what they’re building is millions of individual face databases—on your phone, connected to their servers, worn on the faces of people standing next to your children at the park, the pool, the school pickup line. But definitely not a central one, so we can all relax.

And lest you think the facial recognition and the dude in India watching you undress are the only glaring neon problems with these glasses, let’s talk about something else that’s already happening, right now, without NameTag even being activated.

Women leaving the beach, walking into shops, attending their kids’ sporting events, or simply existing in public are being filmed by men wearing Meta Ray-Bans without their knowledge or consent. The women only discover the footage exists after it goes viral. When one woman asked the person who posted a secret recording of her to remove it, she was told that doing so was “a paid service.” So, yeah, you could be charged to have your own face taken down from the internet. That’s where we are.

Meta markets its glasses under the tagline: Designed for privacy, controlled by you. Which begs a host of questions: Designed for whose privacy, exactly? Not the ladies unknowingly being filmed in Walmart. Not the drive-through employee being pranked. Not the gal who realized in the middle of a Brazilian wax that her aesthetician was wearing a pair. (And if you’re not familiar with the waxing world, a Brazilian is the Telly Savalas of hair-removal treatments.) Not the folks whose faces are being converted into biometric profiles and stored on strangers’ phones.

And “controlled by you” is doing some of the heaviest rhetorical lifting in the history of consumer electronics: you, the wearer, control whether you record people without their consent. You, the wearer, control what you do with that footage. You, the wearer, control whether you use NameTag to identify strangers. The person being recorded controls absolutely nothing, and Meta would really appreciate it if you didn’t dwell on that part.

Researchers expect as many as 100 million people will buy smart glasses in the next few years. Apple is developing its own version. So is Snap. Google is trying again—and if you’ll recall, the reason Google Glass failed a decade ago was that the public collectively looked at a bunch of strangers wearing cameras on their faces and said, "Absolutely not." We apparently needed ten years to forget why.

At some point we have to stop whining about the legality of it and start addressing the consequences. The creep at the playground has always existed. Meta just gave him Ray-Bans and a user manual. It looks like—once again—it’s up to us to protect ourselves.

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