It was the best of times and the worst of times.

In one America, Trump has erected a UFC staging event on the White House lawn. Only the best satirical novelists could have conceived of such a thing. It’s the Gonzo Presidency that always keeps the plot unpredictable, shocking, and above all, entertaining.

In the other America, po-faced women with their piercings and blue hair will march, and caterwaul with No Kings signs to ensure America has a hangover headache every second Trump is in power. A Festival of Karens whose idea of fun is dreaming of how much they hate Trump and MAGA.

It reminds me of that line from The Silence of the Lambs, “Oh, Clarice. Your problem is you need to get more fun out of life.”

Perhaps that’s a bad comparison since on a good day, the Left would see Trump as worse than Hannibal the Cannibal. He’s all of the things they hate and fear wrapped up in one man - a heterosexual white man who does things like hold UFC fights on the White House lawn. Are you not entertained?

Oh, and in case you might be bored by the caterwauling Karens marching with their No Kings sign, Jane Fonda has signed into the chat.

You can just hear the giant sucking sound of emptying testosterone from the soul of America. Future generations should thank Trump for bringing it back. Yes, we need it. No, not injected into adolescent girls but coursing through the veins of men.

To say they need to get more fun out of life would be the understatement of the year. They don’t even know fun. Misery is all they know. Trump was elected again, and that has brought them to the brink of hysteria, so they’ve taken it out on all of us.

No one is allowed one minute of fun if they had their way. From the French throwing a hissy fit:

To the celebs making jokes:

To a desperate last-minute lawsuit:

But it was struck down, so suck on that.

They’re even hoping it rains.

We’ve been hectored, lectured, sneered at, screeched at, scolded, canceled, judged, and all for what? So America can go back to the kind of fun you can only have with parents hanging around as chaperones?

Jonathan Lemire’s piece in The Atlantic, which he has “gifted” to social media users, because who would actually pay to read it, illustrates how dull, lifeless, and boring the Left has become in the Trump era.

They can march, scream, and throw fits. They can do what they’ve been doing for a decade now, unite in blinding hatred for Trump and his supporters. What they can’t do, what they’ll never do, is top it because who could?

They got Trump wrong in 2016, and they still have him wrong. They know it, too, deep down. Trump could have obliterated Iran and taken over the entire country if he wanted to. Instead, he emerges as more of a dove than he ever gets credit for. He isn’t a guy who fights. He’s a guy who likes watching the fights. No, he doesn’t like it. He loves it. It is his happy place.

I mean, come on.

Trump is the ultimate troll to the virtue signaler army, and his supporters love him for it. I know the feeling. He’s always there to scratch that itch for the powerless who often have to just sit there and take it, their agonizing marches and protests for ten years now over everything he does.

And just to drive the troll factor up to 11:

Even if I’m not exactly into the UFC, or even if I thought it was tacky and garish and a bad look for America, I know it doesn’t compare to a ten-year hate-filled odyssey of miserable people who have gutted a once-thriving culture, couldn’t take a joke if their life depended on it, and have stuck us with their decade-long temper tantrum because they will not be ignored, Dan.

It’s not exactly a mystery that when Trump enters the UFC arena, it’s like entering a different world, one where the people cheer him on. They might boo him at the Knicks game, but they love him at UFC. This is a birthday present to himself and a way to show the rest of America what he loves.

Trump identifies with Teddy Roosevelt, and indeed, they have much in common. Both were shot and then went on to give record-breaking 90-minute speeches afterward. Both have decided to bring fighting to the White House for fun — yes, people, for FUN.

No, Trump isn’t actually fighting like TR did, and his politics are a little different, but both are men in the Arena all the same.

It’s crazy for me, a former caterwauling Karen, to now say Trump is the greatest president of my lifetime. But I can’t think of anyone who was better - who stood up to a massive alignment of power, was shot in the head, and came back to win again. There is no one who comes even remotely close.

I realize that this has ruined much of the life I built, terrified many of my friends and even my family. It’s confused those closest to me and has made me a target of many an attack. Not a day goes by that I don't feel that cold breeze of hate.

But Trump stood there, and he took it. That, to me, is what makes him a hero. He bounced right back up with a smile, raised his fist in the air, and got on with things. I wish him nothing but the happiest of birthdays.

I’m glad he has lived to celebrate his 80th birthday, and if you can’t celebrate a guy like that, who has survived what he’s survived and who put everything on the line to serve this country his way, then you might as well not celebrate America’s 250th either.

Trump is very much a symbol of America at 250. It’s a hot mess but a glorious one. A scrappy survivor, full of contradictions. Bombastic and miraculous. Offensive to many, loved by more.

God willing, Trump makes it through his second term and then retires to play golf with his granddaughter. I hope for him a peaceful return from his Hero’s Journey. We will miss him, that’s for sure. And more than that, we’ll miss the fun.

Those who have spent the last ten years consumed by hatred can marinate in misery in their America. I’ll be over here in the other America with the deplorables watching history unfold as I crack open a can of beer.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

“The Battle of Antietam!” I said to my daughter as we cruised through Maryland. “We have to go see it.” My daughter enthusiastically agreed. Or if she wasn’t enthusiastic, she is the kind of person who would want me to think she was. Of all of the ways my life has felt like one mistake after another, I know I did right by that kid.

I felt a little embarrassed being a middle-aged woman geeking out over the Civil War, but that’s just something that happened to me in life. I geek out over things. Wars especially. At the moment, it’s The Civil War and World War II, two of the last Fourth Turnings.

We were in the area because I wanted to see Harper’s Ferry, the site of John Brown’s rebellion before the start of the Civil War. I didn’t realize how lovely the town itself was. Next time, I plan to walk around and spend some time there.

Driving across America, you can’t avoid these wars. They left big footprints on our history and our landscape. There are monuments to generals, those that haven’t been torn down anyway, or you pass through the birthplace of Abe Lincoln or Herbert Hoover. I always try to map out our history as we drive from state to state.

Antietam, known as the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, is a sprawling landscape of vast green fields, cannons, monuments, and memorials. It’s the kind of thing you can really only absorb in real life, not something that would ever captivate someone in the virtual world. I suppose you can find YouTube videos if you’re interested.

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It’s been a while since the Democrats have seen anything like Graham Platner. Imagine, if you will, an island full of women. Not just women, but progressive women. They spend their days looking after the marginalized groups who populate the island, making it a better place.

There they all are, with their feminist bona fides, their acceptance of their real, whole selves, with no need to ever pander to the male gaze, doing what they want to do—yoga, making the island a better place by keeping it clean and sustainable. Book clubs, knitting clubs, social media, and airdrops of Whole Foods orders.

It might be utopia, but it’s also boring. Sooner or later, these women were gonna need a real man. They would never admit it, of course, but that’s what is going on with Graham Platner. He’s a real man.

Why do you think his wife has stood by him even as he sexted and hit on women while they were newly married? That goes in the same pile as the Left calling out Trump for sleeping with Stormy Daniels while Melania was pregnant. Okay, fine, Democrats—shall we call a truce?

Platner is exactly the kind of man they would have canceled, called toxic, or written endless op-eds about over the past ten years. Well, not anymore. They’ve been on the island too long. They almost forgot what real men look like. The gruff voice, the burly chest, the quiet hint of rough sex, maybe down the road—even if just a flirtation with danger? You can’t lie to me, ladies. I know you too well.

Like Zohran Mamdani and AOC, he is appealing to people with money, not those without. He appeals to the rich who desire absolution. They’re happy to be represented by Democratic Socialists because then they don’t have to feel guilty about their wealth, which is why Stephen King voted for him.

I imagine that not too long from now, the other famous Maine resident, Tucker Carlson, will invite Platner on his show, if he hasn’t already. My guess is that Platner and his handlers will turn him down, but you never know. They could bond on hating Israel and Nazi tattoos being no big deal.

Look at this interview with Mika Brzezinski. Sorry, Joe, Graham has Mika wrapped around his finger. The dude straight up admits he’s a sex addict, but is that such a bad thing for women stuck on an island with no real men? I mean, the dude’s got coffee cups and a toaster behind him.

Platner appealing to the Right could mean votes, but it could also alienate the women of the island for whom Tucker Carlson is a dealbreaker. As long as Platner says all the right things—and he does—and stares at them with those puppy-dog eyes, they’re a goner. Take it from me. I was one of those women. But they would draw the line at Tucker.

The only thing that might hurt Platner is if they find he flirted with minors on the app Kik. I’m not sure he could survive that, although the Democrats have obliterated any meaning of the word “pedophile,” so I’m sure they could find a workaround. What does it even mean anymore?

Since the Democrats own the media like they own everything else, they can find their way out of their own double standard by pointing their finger in the right direction.

And no, I’m not saying Graham Platner is a pedophile. I do not tell lies as they do. I do not distort the meaning of important words either. It just doesn’t matter to me as much as it matters to the tribe I used to call home. Power is all they care about, not the truth, not the meaning of words.

What makes Platner such a threat is charisma. You don’t see this discussed on the Right, just as you don’t see Trump’s charisma discussed on the Left, but that’s what makes any candidate Teflon when it comes to scandals.

So what doesn’t work is the Me Too stuff. First off, there is nothing really that bad beyond his behaving like an alpha male. I’m telling you these women have deep, dark fantasies about being dragged by the hair and thrown on the bed. They can look the other way with the weak New York Times piece that seemed to only boost Platner’s profile rather than hurt his image.

It has to be frustrating to the Right, who have been called Nazis for ten years, and here we have someone who might actually, deep down, be a Nazi or at least have been a Nazi once, and they don’t care. Stephen King doesn’t care. The truth? They never believed any of it. They used it as yet another crisis to scare voters to the polls.

They have all of the power. They make the rules. They decide who is a Nazi, misogynist, or pedophile. Graham Platner is too promising a political candidate to care. Think: Bill Clinton and Paula Jones. Or Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels. It matters until it doesn’t.

Platner is exactly the kind of REAL MAN the Democrats need. He’s this guy:

Most of the men in their party are the kind of guys who write sneering tweets as a way to express their masculinity. They’re soft. They’re feminized. They’re not going to drag you by the hair and throw you on the bed. Come on, ladies, you can’t fool me. I know you too well.

And besides, what do they care about Nazis? It’s Israel that is the real threat. All that screeching for a decade about Nazis, the “good people on both sides,” the moral preening about Elon Musk doing the Nazi salute? They didn’t mean any of it. Welcome to the Democratic Party. It’s okay when they do it because they own the headlines.

Here you go, the entire Democratic base in one video:

They don’t care. They hate Jews so much right now that Kamala Harris couldn’t pick Josh Shapiro as her Veep. Rahm Emanuel can’t find a place in any primary. A macho dude with puppy-dog eyes and a Nazi tattoo is not going to be a problem for them.

They might not have even realized how much power masculinity has until they saw it wearing a flannel shirt and speaking to them in that low voice that signals somewhere deep in their lizard brains that this guy could populate a whole village.

But do I think his marriage will implode? Maybe. Is there more oppo? Probably. The Democrats are still desperate enough to stand by their man.

We’re not that complicated as it turns out. Just don’t let the Democrats hold the moral high ground anymore. They can’t. Never again can the Wicked Witch of the Left, Jennifer Welch, call Stephen Miller a “Nazi” or the GOP “pedophiles,” not when they’re standing by their man.

Welcome back to the land of hypocrisy and double standards, Democrats. I always knew who you really were, but you put on a great act for a while, didn’t you? Now it’s time to drop the pretense. You can have your man candy and eat it too.

There were chants of “USA” in the crowd too, but the headlines will be only about the boos. We know the game, don’t we? They make their own reality, and nothing has obsessed and consumed them more than their collective hatred of Trump.

All of that hate, all these years, splashed back on them like dirty water from an outhouse at Coachella. That’s the kind of stink you can’t wash off. It’s all America sees—not how awful Trump is, but how awful and obsessed they are. They only make people like me remember why we left and why we still can’t stand any of them. They’re petty tyrants who think all of American society belongs to them.

In ten years, the Left has never gotten it, even after he owned them a second time in 2024. They’re the sneering ’80s high school bully who thinks he’s cool, but everyone watching the movie can’t stand him.

Trump, by contrast, comes off as the guy who survived all of it: impeachments, indictments, bullets whizzing past his head, and boos from wild-eyed cult members who have lost touch with reality, booing him at a Knicks game. We the people are SICK OF IT. Take your decade-long hate, swallow it, and choke on it.

They show us how they feel with every pointless No Kings protest (coming soon to a street corner near you), every time they boo him, and every dumb, unfunny late-night joke by Jimmy Kimmel or SNL. We’re over it. We want a less divided America, thank you very much.

This message didn’t say “We love President Trump,” it said f*ck Trump. And we’re supposed to what, break bread with these people or vote for them? No thanks. You couldn’t pay me.

I kept waiting and hoping that things would change, that they wouldn’t decide that half of this country and the guy they voted for didn’t belong in their “sacred” spaces. That day never came.

Instead, I watched them do stuff like this as a power flex to say to the rest of America, “we own all of this and if we don’t want you here, keep out.” It’s so gross. It’s so un-American. I wish it would end.

The more they do stuff like this, the more it drives people away. Not sure why they haven’t figured that out in all these years. They’re the ones who make every day miserable. They’re the ones who have sucked all of the fun out of everything. They’re the ones who ruined comedy, sports, movies, and music.

I’m not saying they won’t win elections, but that doesn’t mean they’ll win hearts and minds. All they know how to do is lose them.

This is all we’ve gotten from them for ten long years, and by now it feels like that one belligerent drunk party guest who refuses to leave and can’t stop talking about the guy who dumped her once. WHAT ABOUT ME!?? WHAT ABOUT MY NEEDS!??? Get over it. Move on.

Like it or not, Trump is and will always be a New Yorker. He loves the city, and he’s always loved the Knicks. Suck on that, losers.

Knowing LA as I do, I didn’t dare hope that a guy like Spencer Pratt actually had a chance of winning and becoming Mayor. But I must admit, I let my guard down, and I began to care about how the race turned out. Well, now we know.

Pratt’s pitch was personal. It’s rare to see any candidate care that much, especially not his two opponents, Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, who will now compete against each other.

Raman is the real threat here, picking up the momentum on the Left from the socialist wing, following in the footsteps of Zohran Mamdani and perhaps Graham Platner. There’s no doubt that is where the energy in the party is now. The problem is that neither Bass nor Raman made any kind of case to the voters. They let the system win the election for them.

How do I know? They backed out of a planned debate with Pratt because they knew the more the public saw of them and watched Pratt hold them accountable for their terrible records, the worse they would do.

Call it the Biden Basement Strategy. The system is populated by energetic, cult-like fanatics, and they can win the election for you if ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots are in play.

For Democrats, the less they say, the better. If ballot harvesting really did decide this race, with Raman picking up the majority of her votes from mail-in ballots, then it’s more important to have a D by your name than to openly campaign for votes.

It shouldn’t be that way. Ballot harvesting should be banned. In California, they loosened the rules in 2016 so that anyone can pick up anyone’s ballot, and there is no limit on how many they can return:

In 2016, the law changed again thanks to Assembly Bill 1921. Now, anyone could return another person’s ballot and there was no limit on how many ballots a person could return.

This is why there is such an unsettling feeling about many of the elected officials on the Democratic side. You wonder, what are they doing there? They don’t really have to campaign because their voters are so determined to push through even the weakest of candidates.

Yet that is what democracy depends on: candidates make the best case to voters, and voters do the hard job of walking down to their polling place and voting. That’s how it should work, but on the Democrat side, it doesn’t have to.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Being a white guy running for Mayor in Los Angeles against two women of color was always going to be a heavy lift, despite his winning personality and great campaign. He was the only one of the three who cared about the dogs on Skid Row.

There will be many hot takes from the Left - Trumpism is over, Spencer Pratt’s campaign was limited to X and YouTube. None of that is true. The election for Mayor proves that the Democratic machine can often work wonders, especially with bland candidates about whom no one knows anything.

The world got a little less bright watching Spencer Pratt lose. He had a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington quality about him, going for the big win with all the odds against him, doing so because his house burned down due to the terrible management of Karen Bass.

But Pratt was hit with some dirty campaign tricks, with an overt smear campaign pushed out by TMZ - that he didn’t live in a trailer but instead at a hotel, or that he lived in Santa Barbara. They just needed to give voters a reason not to be swayed by his charm and brilliant campaigning.

It was fun while it lasted, but then the Democrats did what they always do: Suck all of the fun out of the room. The world just got a little less bright. Even still, Pratt has a political career if he wants one. Maybe not in California, but somewhere. That kind of talent is rare.

Now the contest will be between the moderate and the socialist. The way things are going, my money is on the socialist.

Charles Manson famously said, “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.” I thought about that quote as the 60 Minutes scandal erupted, with a conversation between reporter Scott Pelley and newly hired producer Nick Bilton. From the NYT:

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” [Scott Pelley] said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

Mr. Bilton responded: “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.”

Needless to say, it didn’t exactly go as planned. Several sanctimonious “don’t you know who I am” statements later, Pelley was out.

60 Minutes isn’t quite dead, but it is a relic of the past. In the 1990s, it was pulling in 20-30 million viewers. That dropped to 14-16 million in the 2000s. By the 2010s, it was down to 10-12 million. Now, just 9 million people tune in every week in a country of 340 million. Much of that is due to the changes in technology, but still.

There is no doubt that 60 Minutes, like all of legacy media, is trapped inside the same bubble that thinks Jimmy Kimmel’s nightly monologue is still relevant, believes the Oscars still represent the majority of moviegoers, and that the New York Times has its finger on the pulse of everyday America.

Like so much of what we might call “resistance era culture,” there doesn’t seem to be a place for 60 Minutes in our culture now, beyond being a propaganda tool for the Democrats, which explains why so many of them feel a profound sense of loss now that Bari Weiss was brought in to give them a refresh.

Pelley’s statement to call out the new management at 60 Minutes was the hissy fit heard round the world. The irony is that his statement is itself bad journalism. He throws around serious allegations without offering any concrete examples:

Pelley has since talked to the New York Times to explain what he means by some of this, but even still, these are all examples of his own bias, one he can’t see and refuses to admit even exists. Instead, he insists that 60 Minutes is now showing bias simply by representing the other point of view.

In the interview, he explains how Bari Weiss wanted him to portray the other side of the story in the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. He says he did not think she drove her car into the officer or that Pretti was in any way violent. While that doesn’t mean they should have lost their lives, there is no question that they were at war with federal officers in a way we’ve never seen since the last Civil War.

His bias was front and center at a speech in 2025, where his mass delusions about what this country has become were laid bare. This guy was willing to give Bari Weiss a chance, come on.

Already a legend in his own mind, Pelley is writing his own legacy now as a self-made hero who stood up to the fascist regime.

Here is Michael Moynihan:

A Woketopia, if You Can Keep It

Some say 60 Minutes never recovered from its biggest scandal, when CBS Corporate forced the show to censor an interview with Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, as depicted in Michael Mann’s brilliant film The Insider.

The Hollywood of today would never make a movie like that unless it somehow blamed Trump and the Republicans. Not only wouldn’t they make it, but they couldn’t make it, no one inside the empire would allow it because, contrary to their own mass delusions, the fascism was always coming from inside the house — all sticks of wood bound together as one, where no dissent is allowed.

I look around now, and I see relics of the old empire. They’re frantic and wild-eyed. They’re terrified that it all came crashing down. They don’t know why America turned away. But I do.

We never set out to build an empire. For us, it was riding the wave of new technology, new social media, a new computer in our pockets, and a brand new president to bring us into the promised land.

It was not Donald Trump's fault that our empire collapsed. It was the old cliche about how power corrupts. We acquired too much of it. Every company, institution, celebrity, movie studio, publishing house, and ordinary person has a social media platform. If you controlled social media, you could control them. Our public humiliation factory kept everyone in line, lest they be “it” on social media.

That was true even before Trump won, but the tweak to the algorithm in 2017, Donald Trump becoming president and ruling over Twitter at the same time, sent those of us inside the empire into waves of uncontrollable mass hysteria.

Many of them would never come out of it and are still locked in the spell of the mass delusion that a “fascist dictator, racist, rapist, criminal, pedophile” won the election in America not once, but twice. Somebody had to be lying. Pelley simply can’t tell the story the other way because he can’t see it. He’s still inside of it.

I see them now, those who bought the dream like I did, befuddled as to what to do next. They just want their power back, their empire, their utopia. Use fear, that always works to drive lazy voters to the polls. Fear of what? Tax cuts for the rich? Fox News? No, fear of the big things, the existential things, like “fascism” and “democracy.”

How do you even come back from that and make a pitch to the people that you should be put back in power to rule over a country you believe is under a Nazi occupation? How does Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, not to mention every single Democrat politician, come back from that?

Maybe it’s the effect of the internet on our brains, but the so-called “resistance” seems to have lost touch with the tangible reality of history, of what it looks like to fight real fascism. What Nazis really were. When you can make any reality you want, why wouldn’t you?

They are fine with the guy who has a Nazi tattoo because to them, that isn’t real.

Of course, leave it to Salena Zito to do the job of a real journalist and remind us:

70-80 million people died in World War II fighting to save the world from a fascist dictator, a real one. How can these people live with themselves by spreading the lie that we are living through anything like that now?

And that, more than anything, is why the empire collapsed. It was built on a foundation of delusions and lies.

Bari Weiss and the Fourth Turning

I have Bari Weiss to thank for starting this Substack. Very few people had the courage or the moxie to stand up to the Twitter mob back in 2020, but she did. I was on Twitter the night the mob came for her.

The screeching scolds had already been nipping at her heels at the New York Times after she was brought in to shake up the ideological chokehold the Left had on the paper (and still does).

They hated her, gossiped about her, shunned her, and yet, there she was, showing up anyway. She is built of stronger stuff than the kind of person who would ever crumple under the weight of the mob.

Tom Cotton's essay, Send in the Troops, reflected the views of most Americans, that if the riots over the Summer could not be controlled, the military should be brought in. Their opinions did not matter to the mob or, apparently, to the New York Times.

While 60 Minutes spent many stories on January 6th, they barely touched the riots in the Summer of 2020. They didn’t talk about the false narrative of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. That was left to local reporters.

They never told the other side of the story because no one did until Bari Weiss tried and was smacked down in a way that woke me up. It was like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show.

It punctured the delusion at long last, and I realized that I was not getting the truth from the legacy media. They were lying to us and gaslighting us because Trump had to lose the election, and nothing else could matter.

But the truth still mattered to me. And it mattered to Bari Weiss. Eventually, she would launch a Substack revolution with and urge others to follow her. And so I did.

Weiss is a millennial, the generation that’s to take the baton from the Baby Boomers, per the book, The Fourth Turning. You can see this unfolding everywhere, but perhaps nowhere as profoundly as with what happened at the Times and now at 60 Minutes.

Here is how the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with Pelley went on how he came to know Bari Weiss:

Um, yeah, sure pal. That sounds like padding for an upcoming lawsuit, not the truth. There is no way the Scott Pelley, who gave that speech at Wake Forest, is going to give someone hired by David Ellison “the benefit of the doubt.” That he had never even heard of Bari Weiss or had no idea any scandal had erupted at the Times over the Tom Cotton op-ed says it all.

The Fourth Turning is like winter. The old must die to make way for the new. Trump didn’t collapse the empire on his own, but he’s a “Gray Champion” all the same. The one Baby Boomer who could tear it all down to make way for the millennials, like Bari Weiss, to reshape the future for the generations to come.

MAGA

In 2020, I escaped the Doomsday Cult our empire had become and was searching for signs of life, for truth, for something that felt real. I began driving across the country and saw an America that people like me had forgotten even existed.

It wasn’t a virtual world where we make our own reality. It was a tangible place, with things people built with their own hands. It was farms, churches, town squares, neighborhoods, highways, and factories. What we built online had no place for this America. If you never understand that, you’ll never understand MAGA.

From the hills, the backyards, and the fields, one name called out from this forgotten America: Trump.

Even now, in 2026, these signs still stand. Not just in one state, in nearly every state.

Trump is not in power because he’s a fascist. He’s in power because we, the people, put him there to fight for us against the mighty empire that was like a black hole, sucking all of American society into it.

Anyone who thinks Bari Weiss would do Donald Trump's bidding at CBS News is living in a fantasy. They don’t know her, they don’t know him, and they most certainly do not know this country anymore.

It doesn’t seem like it’s asking too much for guys like Scott Pelley to snap out of it at long last and to realize this is a big country with lots of different kinds of people in it. And all of them have the same right to representation. If the culture stopped speaking to them and the government stopped representing them, well, it’s all over but the shouting.

//

Dear Paul Krugman,

You used to be the kind of journalist I thought was telling the truth. I looked up to you, as I did so many writers at the New York Times. I was a different person then. That was before everything changed. The year was 2020, a summer of riots and a breakthrough moment when many of us realized for the first time that the Gray Lady was not telling us the truth.

I have been on the internet for 30 years. I watched the collapse of traditional media and the rise of opinion-based journalism, the kind you do, Paul. Do you mind if I call you Paul? Mr. Krugman sounds so formal, and really, I’d like for you to see me as a human being, someone worthy of your attention and respect.

Now that I have confirmation of what I’ve assumed all along, that people like you, Kara Swisher, Peter Baker, and Susan Glasser would like people like me thrown into re-education camps or gulags, I feel it’s worth the extra effort to get you to see real people again.

To the horror of many, you went viral last week for your comments on what all of you will do with Trump supporters and the system that elected him. It was ugly, Paul. As ugly as anything I’ve seen written by a high-minded journalist and certainly closer to what the Nazis believed about the Jews than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime:

“Purging of the United States, we need a de-MAGAfication. I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the de-Nazification that we pursued successfully after World War Two in Germany.

It’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible. It’s not going to be easy, but, and maybe it’s not going to be doable, but we have to try, because this is an absolute, this is a nightmare, this is the nightmare beyond, I think, even the worst fantasies of progressives, beyond the worst fantasies of conservatives, who still have a conscience, there still are plenty of those, but they’re no longer MAGA.

This has to be turned around, and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading, and if we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again.”

It can’t have been easy, watching Trump win a second time and this time the popular vote, or to admit you are no longer relevant and that the only value you have is in giving the base of the Democratic Party their daily dose of hate and fear. Why didn’t Americans listen to your constant bleating about the end of the world? That’s an important question to ask, Paul.

After all, they’re your most popular videos.

Your Substack, with over 500K subscribers, is no less alarmist:

It looks like your Substack is paying you more than you made at the Times, that’s for sure. So why not keep pumping it out, day after day, like a broken record — fear, hysteria, hatred, more fear, more hatred. What could possibly go wrong?

You all seem certain you’re about to take back power and put things back where they belong. The only question you seem to have on your lips is not how we can better address the needs of the people, but what you will do with all of those MAGAts.

You don’t even pretend there is a whole country or even half of a country that voted all of you out, not once but twice. You have no shame in admitting you see yourselves as better than the working-class half of America. You fully admit it. You bask in it. You know your power, Paul, and that’s maybe the only true thing you know about yourself.

So let me set you straight on a few things. You are not the Allied Forces after World War II, and Trump is not now, nor has he ever been, Hitler. The closest thing to Fascism this country has ever seen is with all of you in power. It became “all sticks of wood bound together as one,” a “fasci,” with all elements of our society mandating conformity or else.

Your side ruled through fear and violence, and still does. You violently beat Trump supporters and feel emboldened to do so, just like Hitler’s Brown Shirts. You probably never even knew that in 2015, Trump supporters were beaten and harassed and called Nazis.

On the Left, there is no such thing as free thought and speech, which is why cancel culture collapsed the empire and why Tyler Robinson had to silence Charlie Kirk. So who are the real fascists, Paul?

On your side, thought and speech are heavily policed throughout our culture. Everyone is tracked, monitored, and under constant surveillance lest they like the wrong tweet, follow the wrong person on social media, or read the wrong news outlet.

Just because people like you cosplay that ICE is the Gestapo doesn’t make it so. It took 80 years for the world to forget about the Holocaust. But no one should ever forget what that looked like, and it wasn’t mass deportations or even detaining a five-year-old or shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Shame on you. Shame on all of you for even suggesting that what we’ve just lived through is on any level the same as what happened during World War II. 70-80 million people were killed. 600,000 in America alone. Even the war in Gaza can’t compare, and shame on anyone who suggests it’s the same.

None of this should have to be said to a man who enjoys high status inside utopia, a well-educated elite who lives on the Upper West Side and enjoys a decent retirement while he’s discarding half of America like human garbage. You tell me who the real Nazis are.

You don’t have to tell me. I already know. I escaped the suffocating dystopia that you live in. I escaped the world that no longer knows the meaning of important words like fascist, Nazi, dictator, king, and pedophile, never mind man or woman. I escaped that world because the truth always mattered to me more than being liked, making money, or having status.

I can’t say the same for you, Paul, or any one of your former colleagues at the Times. We’re watching the destruction of legacy media in real time, just one of the pillars of your now collapsing empire. Trump won because ordinary Americans can’t stand living under the oppressive thumb of the high and mighty, like yourself.

I didn’t see what kind of power we all had until 2020. We had built a Shining Woketopia on the Internet that gave us complete control of all institutions of power - educational, cultural, corporations, and institutions. We thought we could shape the America we dreamed of. The problem was that there was a whole other America outside our bubble, and it took Donald Trump to ignite a populist revolt.

The idea that this was about racism and bigotry was a lie. It was never Hitler invading. You were never the resistance. You’ve been living in a dream world of your own making. You destroyed yourselves trying to destroy Trump. The real story of the last ten years will never be told by any of you, much less seen or understood.

I still see signs of the MAGA I know. I just saw one near the memorial site for the deadly battle of Antietam. From the middle of America, on the side of a store just living out their ordinary days near the ghosts of profound history, this:

I am no longer welcome in your world, Paul. Some days, that hurts more than others. But when I see what you have become, calling for a “purge” and “de-MAGAfication, I know you don’t know this country anymore. You’ve been isolated for too long, and you’ve been participating in a decade-long deception.

I also know I have the truth on my side, and that makes me the lucky one.

//

The pitch: 250 talented Americans from across the country showcasing their skills and brilliant ideas for the future.

It could be a young farmer in Arkansas who works with his dad every day.

A folk singer.

A rock band.

A teacher.

A cook who has been serving customers for 50 years.

A self-taught chef working out of his home kitchen, hoping to open a restaurant one day.

A truck driver.

A veterinarian.

A waitress (no tax on tips!)

A young gymnast who hopes to make it into the Olympics.

A singer who never made it on a reality show to become a big star.

A painter, a writer, a poet.

A budding young scientist who wants to showcase a new invention.

A YouTuber whose millions of viewers tune in every week to see them travel all over the world.

It could be the oldest living World War II veteran.

It could be someone who has lifted up young people in rough neighborhoods.

It could be a police force in a dangerous part of the country.

It could be a podcaster, a chef, or a dancer.

It could be a mother who has just set up her kids' Trump savings accounts.

It could be a young couple getting married.

It could be all of the people who show up at a MAGA rally. It can also be people who aren’t MAGA but who love this country and want to have a big party.

250 Americans who want to celebrate this country’s greatness, to celebrate that we are still the only country in the world where you can come from anywhere and make something of yourself. The best thing about America is the American dream, and millions of us are reaching for it every day. Here is a chance to celebrate them.

America is an open door. It’s the land of opportunity. There are 350 million of us out there. Why not celebrate those unsung heroes from far and wide and appreciate what America is really about?

Sure, half of them won’t have the courage to celebrate alongside Donald Trump, but the ones who do will exhibit an extra layer of courage.

America’s 250th isn’t about the special people or the “celebrities” — it is about those of us who live, work, and dream in this great country, all of whom want to make America great and greater every day. Let’s celebrate those who appreciate all they have.

What do you think?

The reason the fringe artists originally planned for America’s 250th celebration backed out is that they were told it was a partisan event for Trump and MAGA and not “bipartisan,” as though the word still exists in practice. It doesn’t.

The Oscars, the Emmys, even the Super Bowl, nearly every movie released in Hollywood, almost all late-night comedy — all of it is partisan, deliberately so. The Resistance, ring any bells?

The nerve of any of them to pretend that there ever could be such a thing as bipartisan now. To recap: after Trump won in 2016, the Democrats threw an epic hissy fit. Hillary wasn’t supposed to lose.

Our country paid too high a price for having politics and culture merge, as it did under Obama. Once Trump won, American culture was forced to take a side. I remember how Nicole Kidman’s career almost came to a skidding halt when she dared to suggest we should give the newly elected president a chance.

Take it from me. I lost a substantial income when a story about me appeared in the Hollywood Reporter, calling me a “MAGA darling” and exposing that I voted for Trump. One major studio pulled its ads that day.

As I watched every studio ghost me, every publicist stop contacting me, the Jane Fonda-owned Women’s Media Center fire me, and I became toxic to people I used to call friends, I could finally feel what Trump supporters have been going through for a decade.

It was never supposed to be this way. They never had any right to claim American culture for themselves because the legacy media lied to them every day about Trump and his supporters, whipping up a dark fairy tale everyone was forced to go along with, or else.

We didn’t just live through World War II. That was a lie. Trump isn’t Hitler. That, too, is a lie. And they most certainly aren’t the “resistance.” They have always been the empire. They just couldn’t let go of power. They had so much of it. In desperately clinging to it, they have destroyed every great thing they ever built.

The Left abandoned half the country as it claimed culture for itself, turning it into a massive propaganda delivery machine, 1984-style. Nothing was spared — not movies, not music, not comedy. How can they possibly throw a concert celebrating America’s 250th without caterwauling about Trump or singing their own praises about how inclusive and diverse they are?

So, by default, Donald Trump became the counterculture. Everything revolves around him. He’s the villain. He’s the subversive. He’s the challenge to the system that the Left could no longer ignore. He’s the guy who can tell jokes now that are funnier than anything on SNL or late-night. He has taken the place of art because the Left co-opted it and turned it into predictable dogma.

The only celebration they could offer was one of their agonizing lawn signs.

Their message to the other half of the country is this: you don’t belong here unless you go along with us. You don’t belong in our movie theaters, our restaurants, or at our concerts. Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver tell their jokes only to one half of the country. The other half is told that they will be treated like human garbage unless they learn to love Big Brother.

I remember a different America. I remember when movies, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, Johnny Carson, and even television ads were for everyone. Those who rule over our culture now do not believe it should be. A counterculture would often offend the status quo. It was thrilling and often very funny. The only place that exists now is on the Right and specifically, in Trump every time he takes the stage.

So it’s no wonder Trump offered himself up as the main act, just as he did with the Kennedy Center. If the ruling class aristocracy demands that all of America continue to treat Trump and MAGA like an unwanted contagion, then he’ll do what he’s always done - be the counterculture.

But still, there can be a celebration that isn’t about our hating each other. Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire has the better way forward.

There are so many talented people in America who might love the opportunity to play before a crowd, even if half of that crowd is hate-watching. They don’t even have to be country singers or well-known, just people who like playing music.

True, the Left will hang it around their necks like an albatross and threaten to end any career potential they might have, but if enough of them show up, they can send the message to the bitter, punitive, sanctimonious scolds that we all love our country and we are in need of a grand celebration to remember why.

America at 250 isn’t an America that needs to be handed back to the people who hate half the country. It doesn’t need to give itself over to Woke Totalitarianism. It can be a country that celebrates its survival, messy and chaotic though it may be.

The Democrats want the celebration to be a MAGA rally. That would confirm every delusion they’ve been peddling for ten years. But Trump should resist it. He should make a grand celebration for all of us who love this chaotic country, no matter who wins the election.

The Left is planning on taking back power. At best, they’ll do what Kara Swisher suggests in this video — reluctantly “let MAGA back in,” as if they get to make that call. Sorry, lady, ya don’t.

Trump will never win them over. He will never win their approval. They only want him out of the way. But he’s made history. He’s survived three assassination attempts. He’s won two elections. That is remarkable by any measure, and it’s worth celebrating. Not him specifically, but a country where something like that is still possible, where the people overcome the most powerful political and cultural machine in American history.

Love him or hate him, Trump represents much of what this country stands for. He can’t be controlled or tamed. He is unpredictable and bold. He is a survivor and a fighter. He is helping to clear the path for real art and real culture to once again flourish. What a time to be alive.

Just remember the words of the campaign:

“What will we do with this moment? How will it be remembered? Look at the opportunities before us.”

Let’s not throw it all away because a few two-bit acts backed out.

Remember this, MAGA, this is the MAGA I voted for. This is the vision I believe in. This is the party that can still be celebrated.

“The people dreamed this country, and it’s the people who will make America great again.”

Hang in there, Trump. We've got your back.

Ashley St. Clair is all of us. Well, she might not be you. She might not even be me. Although I see some of myself in her. But she is this mess we’ve built. Like all of us, she has played a role in this ongoing virtual Civil War between Left and Right, played out amid tangled algorithms, giant egos, hurt feelings, and cash flow.

She is the same age as my daughter, just 28 years old, but it feels like she’s lived five lifetimes. She has shapeshifted from MAGA to having Elon Musk’s baby, to a public fight over said baby, to throwing herself at the feet of the Left, branding herself as a one-woman confessional who will dangle all of the dirty details of “the MAGA cult” like bloody chum to hungry sharks.

She is smart enough to know two things. First, the Left still controls most of our culture. If you want book deals, successful podcasts with the top-tier advertisers, or stories about you in the New York Times, or even movie deals about your life, you have to be accepted by them. And second, they won’t accept you unless you bring the goods.

And boy does she ever.

What do you want to know, she says on her TikTok as she applies gobs of makeup she doesn’t need - contour, foundation, concealer, blush, more concealer, more contour, powder. Do you want to know MAGA is a cult? Here you go. Are they racists? Oh yeah, she says, as she dabs her eyes with a powder puff.

She might not realize it, but her makeup is a metaphor for the role she’s playing now, a real person hiding under layers and layers of disguise. Who is she this time? She’s the one talking to Jennifer Welch, the Wicked Witch of the Left:

She was on with the chipper lunatic Suzanne Lambert:

And Haley on the Go:

And the most cringey of all was a giggly appearance with our favorite Cartier Communist, Hasan Piker.

Baby Mama Blues

Ashley has not gone full Monica Lewinsky and claimed victimhood to excuse her role in becoming yet another baby mama for the Henry VIII of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk. She does seem to take some responsibility for agreeing to go to bed with him upon first meeting. He even asked her what name she liked. Elon was upfront about what he wanted from her, and she seemed fully on board.

As a hot conservative female who already had one kid in her early 20s, her ovaries were calling Elon’s name. He slid into her DMs before sliding into other places - yes, says Ashley, she joined the Mile High Club, courtesy of Elon’s private jet.

But one thing an influencer, however fluid in politics, must preserve is their platform. What good is having the richest man in the world’s baby if you can’t brag about it? Be known for it? Have instant status because of it? Not to mention the child having to wander around the planet, not being Elon’s son, while everyone knows he is, like that bastard son of Henry VIII.

St. Clair is throwing around the figure of $40 million to buy her off, but she doesn’t say exactly who is offering it. Musk had originally offered a deal with $15 million up front and then $100,000 per month to raise the child, money most people couldn’t imagine in an entire lifetime. But that came with an NDA. She refused.

Musk has said he gave her $2.5 million up front, then $500,000 per year. She has said he slashed her child support payments, causing her to sell her Tesla to cover expenses.

Either way, whatever she’s gotten is not enough, not in 2026 when the platform is everything. Ashley St. Clair wants more.

And in that way, too, she is all of us and this grotesque online machine we’ve all helped build, where a person can become a star overnight, then the object of scorn, with an angry mob attempting to destroy them as the entire internet watches. She was viciously attacked as a gold digger by MAGA, then they made AI porn of her, she says, even depicting her as an underage sex object, which is why she’s suing Musk.

How it started, how it’s going

Ashley St. Clair started her career as a blonde, appearing on Fox News pushing the MAGA line:

And at the Babylon Bee, making content like this:

Her past warring against the transgender community means it’s iffy whether or not she’ll ultimately get a pass, no matter the mea culpas she’s handed out like candy. This TikTok user says forget it.

After all, Ashley St. Clair wrote a children’s book in hopes of saving some of the young from destroying their bodies. It kind of seemed like she believed it, right?

Since then, however, she has found ways to get out of it. She’s thrown herself at the mercy of prominent Democrats like podcaster David Pakman:

She’s talked about how ignorant she was, how she fell into a cult and didn’t know what she was doing. She talks about her past of being locked away and home schooled, where she was isolated from other people, before going to college and hitting the party scene, and eventually, to hear her tell it, she ended up in a cult.

I know what it feels like to believe in a movement, then get chewed up and spit out, and find myself in a place where I’m telling all of the secrets of my former side, trashing them to the delight of the opposition. I know what motivates her and why she so badly needs affirmation and acceptance.

But confessing her sins wouldn’t be enough for people whose ultimate goal is to end Trump and MAGA forever and retake power. They need a lot more than just confirmation of their mass delusions about Trump (he’s Hitler!) and MAGA (it’s a cult!).

No, they needed a way to deny reality yet again and cast themselves as the real winners. How could they, the most perfect people in the world, have lost to Trump? Why did half the country reject them again? It’s a truth they still can’t face. Lucky for them, Ashley St. Clair has gifted them with the perfect way to explain the 2024 election. It was rigged by Elon Musk.

The Democrats have done everything they know how to do to destroy Donald Trump and his MAGA army. They have framed him as a Russian spy, called him a racist, a rapist, a bigot, a dictator, a fascist, Hitler, a king, and a felon. They impeached him twice, indicted him four times, and attempted to throw him off the ballot in several states. He has survived three assassination attempts so far.

They’ve obstructed everything he has tried to do, from cleaning up the streets to closing the border to bringing manufacturing back to stopping Iran from getting a nuke. He’s stood up for women who are forced to deny reality by competing against biological boys. He’s stood against “gender affirming care” that destroys the bodies of children who can’t consent.

If Trump is for it, they are against it. They have pressured all artists to take a side against half the country, in Hollywood, in music, at the Kennedy Center. They insist that supporting him is like supporting Hitler, even if he’s beating back his own right flank by standing up for Israel.

And yet, for the Left, he is the only thing standing in their way and for all of us the only bulwark against total societal control.

It all sounds great because it absolves the Democrats of any blame. See, they did everything right. It wasn’t a coup against a sitting president running for re-election or the installation of his Vice-President without a single vote. Or that she was a terrible candidate. No, it wasn’t their fault they lost. It was Elon’s space lasers.

Now that she has their attention, the warnings are getting more urgent, just in time to prepare for the midterms.

And that is the real gift Ashley St. Clair has laid at the feet of the side she hopes will embrace her, value her, accept her, and elevate her. If she can help them win elections, whether the midterms or 2028, she can destroy both Elon Musk and MAGA. Well, how could a $40 million payout even compare?

I would just offer her one word of caution as someone who came from the Left. Don’t tell them what they want to hear. Tell them what you know to be true because that’s what they need to hear. Confirming their mass delusion only sinks them in deeper.

They don’t realize it yet, but their empire is in a state of collapse, and not a moment too soon. The counterculture is rising to take its place. When that happens, Ashley St. Clair will want to be more than just a footnote hitching a ride on a sinking ship.

//

They cast Obama as everything good about America and Trump as everything bad. Then they set up a series of tests and struggle sessions to ensure everyone picks a side. You’re with us, or you’re against us. Every movie star, movie studio, rock star, and comedian had to comply. Or else.

250 years after its founding, Donald Trump is the President of the United States again. Trump came back and won the popular vote, even if he isn’t exactly popular right now. They impeached him, indicted him, almost assassinated him, and here he still stands - a representative of this chaotic, young country if there ever was one, a survivor, a fighter.

And yet, American culture, however, has been treating him and his supporters as if Hitler and the Nazis merged with the second Confederacy, going on ten long years. Trump has survived them by some miracle.

That is still the most remarkable thing that has happened in culture and politics in my lifetime. It’s quite a story, but it’s one that will never be told, as long as the powerful still have their grip on culture.

Culture should be for everybody, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Now that Trump is the thing they can’t destroy or get rid of, they continually remind all of us how little they care about the half of the country that voted for Trump.

Vote for us or else. Believe what we believe or else. Support our issues and our causes, or else. Talk like we do, think as we do, want the same kind of America that we do, or else.

To celebrate America’s 250th, Trump has come up with Freedom 250, which is different from just an official celebration of America’s 250th birthday:

And because of that, Martina McBride and other two-bit hasbeens who were invited by the Trump administration to perform have backed out, with many of them giving the exact same statement, almost word for word. In short, they say they were “tricked” into thinking it was a nonpartisan event. Is anything nonpartisan now? No.

Once they claim their scalps, they do a victory dance, showing us all once again how ugly they are and why culture made by them will never be any good. It is only good if it has access to the truth, and they do not.

The Left knows they own the culture, and they flex their power at every opportunity. But does Bret Michaels look like a hero here? He doesn’t to me. He looks like someone who is desperate and scared — no one wants to be shut out of the culture and, more importantly, the money.

Will the real fascists please stand up?

One of the reasons for the collapse of American culture is the oppressive ideological mandate on thought and speech. The best offerings are films like Project Hail Mary, or Taylor Swift when she can manage to keep politics out of it, but these are few and far between.

Mostly, the woke fascists insist that everyone agree with their ever-changing, strident rules, with the most important one being that they see Donald Trump as Hitler. Whenever a cultural event rises up, or Trump attempts to bring some culture to the side of America left behind, it becomes one big struggle session: you’re with us, or you’re against us.

We’ve seen them throw their dumb little hissy fits over the Kennedy Center, or anything Trump touches. The worst of them has to be Bruce Springsteen, who cosplays as the same working-class hero he once was, but is now as much of a member of the Royal Court as Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand.

Now, he dares to pretend he still speaks for the people. Yeah, no, Boss. Not anymore. He spits in the face of his fans and, as with McBride and nearly all of them, shows his disdain for the people of this country every time he takes to the mic.

Power to the People says Bruce, knowing that the people elected Trump twice. People? He cares only about those who voted for Obama and can afford the high-priced tickets to his shows. He stopped caring about the people long ago.

But they love these counter-programming events just to ensure the people who voted for Trump, because these folks abandon them long ago, feel much worse about their lives. They want those who did not vote for Obama and all of their candidates to suffer. There is nothing in this about love, peace, or unity. All it says to me is that none of them are worth a damn anymore.

And note the date and the timing, just before the midterms.

The saddest, sickest part of this whole ugly game we’ve been playing for ten long years is that people like Bruce and those on the Left who have treated the Right like human garbage are at fault, that they’re the divisive ones.

So, to that end:

The people of this country should feel no obligation to buy anything. Not a movie ticket, concert ticket, or streaming subscription — why spend a dime on any of it? Don’t. Save your money.

Matt Walsh has it right. Trump should stop asking. We should all tune out a culture that continues to participate in a mass delusion and refuses to respect the people’s vote. Instead, find real artists who aren’t so petty and make them famous instead. That’s how you build culture in a collapsing empire.

In other words, have some dignity when it comes to these folks. We know the answer by now. There is no saving the Left. A new counterculture will have to be reinvented, one that isn’t drawn down party lines and one that can celebrate all of America. We all need it. These folks blackmail Americans into compliance and, in so doing, have destroyed every great thing they ever did.

My mother would grow up believing Clint was her father. They were heavy drinkers, the kind who have vodka in their morning coffee. They would eventually move out to California, and my grandmother would die in the 1970s, way too young, while Clint would go on to marry wife #2.

No one in my family knew Clint was not my mother’s real father until the 1980s, when his second wife called my mother in a drunken stupor and blurted it out.

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The 2024 election was a disaster for the Democrats. They have never been held to account for any of it. That would ordinarily be the job of the legacy media, but they’ve long since abandoned any pretense of objectivity. They are part of the “resistance,” and friendly fire is not in the job description.

Do I sound bitter? I suppose I am. I once believed in not just the Democratic Party but the Obama coalition. I was a loyal, devoted soldier who believed we were all fighting the good fight, even before Trump won. We were the side that cared about climate change, women’s rights, the poor, and the marginalized.

It took me decades to go from being a cynical 18-year-old in the 1980s who didn’t think there was any point to voting to a person who believed my vote could change the world.

That cynicism would be polished off over time, as we headed into the 1990s with political correctness and therapy culture on the rise. We wanted to fix ourselves. We wanted — needed — to fill the void left by the doom spiral in the aftermath of the “Me Generation” and their counterculture revolution.

It was Bill Clinton, by way of Aaron Sorkin, who ultimately pulled us out of it and primed us for a spiritual revival under the euphoric, history-making win of Barack Obama. I believed in hope and change. I believed in a new America.

I believed my friends on Facebook who treated me with respect and love every time I fired off an impassioned plea for votes. I believed all of the women who made those signs for the Women’s March, the Climate March, and the Gun Control March. I, too, thought Trump’s win meant America couldn’t handle the first black president and the Confederacy was back for another round.

What I know now is that none of it was real. We were not the New Puritans leading the country into the promised land. We were like every other political party, seeking absolute power and total control. Any truthful autopsy would have to start there.

The Democrats have been lying to themselves and lying to their voters about what these last ten years have really been about: the refusal to relinquish power after losing an election. Democracy becomes a problem for a party that no longer believes in it if the wrong people win.

From Real Clear Politics podcast Andrew Walworth, Tom Bevan and Carl Cannon:

Any honest autopsy of the 2024 election would have to start back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was anointed by Obama, who leapfrogged Biden, meaning Biden would finally get his shot in 2020. They should have thought that one through because it would come back to bite them four years later when they pushed him out of office.

They practice top-down democracy, in which party leaders attempt to steer voters in the right direction rather than allowing candidates to make the case to the people. The problem with the Democrats is that they needed someone like Donald Trump to blow through their carefully laid plans.

The shame of what the Democrats did in 2024 is almost as bad as what they did in 2020 to orchestrate Joe Biden’s win. Both of these elections were rooted in the mass delusion that Donald Trump wasn’t just a political opponent but an existential threat, so anything goes - even censoring the Hunter Biden laptop, or pushing out a duly elected president.

That delusion gave them unlimited power in their minds, which made them the most corrupt political party in my lifetime, taking what never belonged to them, pushing “resistance theater” throughout American society, and coming up mostly empty anyway.

A real autopsy would require cleaning house on all of it, admitting everything. It would require admitting to their voters that they knew they were lying about Trump to cover up their own failures.

After all, wouldn’t it have been easier just to offer the people something better rather than treating Trump like a supervillain that could not be destroyed by ordinary means?

No, because their biggest problem is that their only vision for the future is to reach back into the past. They still want to undo the Trump presidency rather than learn from it. They are fighting to bring back the utopia we all built under Barack Obama, and that has been the Democrats’ fatal mistake.

Barack Obama’s grip on the party means they can’t move forward.

A real autopsy would have to talk about Obama’s ongoing influence and control of the party. Why do you think he’s making appearances with Zohran Mamdani and James Talarico?

He sees them as the party’s future because they are Obama clones, more or less. You don’t see him out there boosting Gavin Newsom, just as you don’t see many leaders on the Left rising to take Obama’s place. They must all be shadows of him, which is why it was Kamala Harris in 2024, Joe Biden in 2020, and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Obama couldn’t lose. He was treated like a god and king. He was never going to let Trump win this ten-year war. He couldn’t hand the country over to the guy who dared question his birth certificate, the guy they called a “racist” and a “rapist,” but more than that, he represented the undoing of the Obama Coalition and the worldwide movement it inspired. There was no way the Democrats were ever going to let that happen.

By 2016, they had control of almost everything, from institutions to universities to culture, so why not use it? Exiling and disenfranchising Trump voters was all done in the name of Barack Obama. You see, it had to be racism that gave rise to Trump because Obama couldn’t fail.

Isn’t it so much easier to blame America? To blame it on sexism and racism? Isn’t that what they tell themselves now about 2024? America wasn’t ready for any woman, especially a woman of color? Isn’t it easier to see it that way rather than address the real problem with the utopia we all built: it shuts too many people out?

The Culture of Silence and the Climate of Fear

The Vanity Fair story about how Democrats fear Kamala Harris running again is telling. Or rather, not telling.

They are too afraid to use their real names. It is still considered blasphemy inside the Democratic Party to criticize her, as she has attained Obama-level status. She campaigned for Obama back in 2008 and was once called the “female Obama.” Harris rode the coattails of making history.

Winning was easy for her. She was pretty and tough. She made the Democrats look good and won every single race as her star began to rise: District Attorney, Attorney General, Senator, and Vice President, next in line behind a very old Joe Biden.

Probably, he would have stepped aside and handed her the presidency had he won a second term. Either way, Harris was not the best choice for Vice President, and the Democrats knew that at the time.

The 100 people who signed a letter urging Biden not to choose Harris for “cosmetic reasons” were then shamed back into silence lest they be called racists and misogynists. The so-called autopsy vindicates Harris, which is all part of the same game. She is too big to fail and too popular to be cast aside, especially now after the redistricting fight has put Democrats back in “Jim Crow 2.0” mode.

A real autopsy would have to confront this: how they continue to fall back on the same blame game: it’s those racists over there. It’s not our fault. We haven’t failed our voters. We have to stop them. We have to keep fighting this war against them, our fellow Americans.

How can they even begin to confront who they are and what they’ve become? How can they reckon with all of the madness they’ve put the American people through for ten long years?

The January 6th show trials, the lies about Kenosha being a “Civil Rights” protest, the mocking and celebrating of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the raiding of Mar-a-Lago, the censoring of dissent via the FBI on social media, Russiagate, the collapse of a once-thriving culture, impeachments, indictments, and the unending No Kings protests.

If they want a real autopsy, they should talk to people like me, once loyal supporters who were chewed up and spit out by a political party that could not tolerate even simple questions about “cancel culture” mass hysteria, or the rising intolerance in the Left writ large, or why someone’s career would go up in flames just for voting for Trump. And forget about asking whether toddlers should wear masks or pre-teens should take medication that sterilizes them for life.

I walked away from the party in 2020. I couldn’t believe what I watched them do, what I helped them do, to drag Joe Biden over the finish line. I knew he was too old. I knew Kamala Harris was a ticking time bomb. I knew it would all blow up in our faces eventually. But lying was so much easier, especially with a full-court press serving as a propaganda front.

They have been lying for so long that they don’t even know how to stop. The biggest lie was that Trump was a “fascist.” They’re still telling that lie. They’re still scaring Americans into manic desperation every day. The lies are what drove me away. I couldn’t live with them. The truth matters, especially if you’re cutting up the body to find out what killed it.

The lies began in 2016 when Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and loyalists like me couldn’t face the truth about why she lost. It was one lie piled on top of another, and no one had the courage to face down the social media mobs to set the record straight. Any dissent was met with strict reprisals. Before long, everyone settled into a climate of fear and a culture of silence as the new normal.

Their problem goes back to the Art of War. If you don’t know yourself or your enemy, you will succumb in every battle. They should first try to understand themselves. If they could just see who and what they are, and why America would choose Trump a second time, they’d be halfway there.

Then, if they could understand Trump, who he really is, rather than the character they invented, they’d finally come back to the real world with the rest of us.

The Democrats are in love with the dream Obama sold, not the reality of what America became with the Democrats in power. There are too many truths left to face. There are too many ghosts haunting them. There is no point in performing an autopsy on a body with nothing inside but smoke mirrors.

//

My daughter was born on Memorial Day in 1998, so I always think of her when the holiday rolls around. Memorial Day has only fallen on May 25th a few times since it was named a Federal holiday back in 1971. This year, it falls on her birthday and Memorial Day once again.

Driving across the country, however, reminds me of the wars we’ve fought in the past. World War II has especially been on my mind since I’ve been searching for my mother’s biological father. There is no trace of him anywhere. All we know is that she was born in 1942, a year after America went to war. Her mother married another soldier instead, a decent man who raised her as his own. I am starting to think that her biological father probably died in the war.

Over 8,000 men from Missouri died in World War II. 400,000 American soldiers in all lost their lives. It’s controversial now to say it, but had Truman not dropped the nukes, it’s like many more hundreds of thousands would have died.

If 8,000 men died from Missouri, and most able-bodied men were sent to fight in the war, it makes sense that my mother’s biological father went off to war and never came back. That could explain why she didn’t marry him instead.

I’ll be talking more about my mother’s family in Missouri in my next travel dispatch, but for now, I’ll just say I hadn’t really thought about those numbers before. 8,000 from Missouri alone. 400,000 in all. Over 600,000 in the Civil War. There are very few Americans alive today who would understand that kind of sacrifice.

Obviously, the Revolutionary War was the biggest Fourth Turning that made America what it is. But the next two also left the biggest mark on the country, especially in their aftermath, once things were settled and America could be rebuilt, like the late 1880s after the Civil War and Eisenhower’s 1950s America after World War II.

There are more buildings, interstates, railroads, and highways from these two eras than from any other. You can see it as you drive from state to state. At least, that’s how it looks to me, but perhaps I’m focused on those eras more, so I notice it.

Our Fourth Turning now, I figure, is doing something similar, but probably it’s less about cities, buildings, and travel and more about the virtual world — with AI dragging us into the future kicking and screaming. The chaos and turmoil are meant to ultimately bring us together as a country, if past Fourth Turnings are any indication.

Evidence of a transforming world is everywhere, with goods shipped to our doorsteps via Amazon. Freight trains and warehouses emblazoned with the Amazon logo. We took a leap forward in 2020 and never went back.

It’s already apparent if you look at the emptying out of towns and cities, with more and more people doing everything online, from shopping to dating. Just as with previous Fourth Turnings, once you cross over, there is no going back.

We have to learn how to survive the internet, artificial intelligence, and everything that comes with it. Who will be in control of it, and how will it be used? Do we become part of a global world order, as in Orwell’s 1984? Or do we try hard to escape it and fight to preserve the America we know?

We still don’t know if there will be a great war this time around. We seem to step closer to it, but then it doesn’t happen. Trump has so far prevented a boots-on-the-ground war in Iran, and if he hadn’t, by now, we’d be looking at Memorial Day a little differently.

No matter what he does, however, Trump can’t seem to win. Too many people want to see him fail, even when it comes to fighting a war against America’s enemies. None of those 400,000 who died in World War II would understand that kind of disloyalty to the Commander in Chief.

That’s why he’s the Gray Champion. He’s the guy they said was Hitler who holds the line and protects Israel. But he’s also the guy who doesn’t want to see high numbers of American casualties while trying to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. All we know for sure is that those who prevail will write the history books.

We should all know the number of those who gave their lives in war. We should remember their sacrifice. We should also remember that the highest body count came not from fighting foreign wars, but from fighting each other.

From Statista:

We might not be fighting each other with guns, but we are more polarized now than we were during the Civil War. The Democrats are still attempting to topple the Trump administration. They’re just doing it virtually, with relentless attacks every day on social media, through the legacy press, and an assassin or two here or there.

Here is Elise Slotkin:

If the Democrats retake control of government, they will treat Trump and his supporters like the second Confederacy and the Nazis all rolled in one. I can only hope the truth finds its way out and that the better, more sane side prevails.

Perhaps we’ve evolved past fighting hot wars altogether, with boots on the ground and high casualties. Maybe our Fourth Turning, as we head into the virtual world, will be fought with AI—self-fighting warfare. No one in a Fourth Turning knows how it will turn out. We have to trust the process, as they say.

All I know is that it’s Memorial Day, a time to remember and give thanks. I send a crisp salute to my dearly departed father, my maybe biological grandfather, and the good man I knew as my grandfather, all of whom served this country well.

Happy Memorial Day, and to those in the military, thank you for your service to our country.

The other day, I saw a mother walking her baby in a stroller. The baby was awake, staring up at her and cooing. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining. Trees were all around with birds chirping. What was she doing? Looking at her phone. From that point on, that baby will know the phone is the most important thing in her life.

I didn’t want to be that kind of mother, but I’m betting I spent a lot of time raising my daughter focused on the online world, and I deeply regret it. It’s our world now, I know, as my daughter spent too much time staring at her glowing screen too - a laptop at first, then later a phone.

But watching that young mom with her baby gave me a sudden urge to run over to her and plead with her to put the phone down. I promise you, I would tell her, there is nothing on that phone more important or more interesting than the tiny baby cooing right in front of you. This is time you will never get back.

I didn’t plan on spending half of my life on the internet. It just turned out that way. The glow of the computer screen meant something fascinating every time I turned it on. How could anything ever compete, much less real life?

Now, as I spend more time in the real world, driving across this country for its 250th birthday, I find logging onto the internet a painful experience by comparison. Sure, real life is rough. I walked into a gas station in the middle of New Mexico, and the guy working there didn’t have a face.

A bandage covered most of it. His two eyes looked up at me briefly as he motioned to the bathroom, then quickly looked away. He didn’t make eye contact on my way out. I can understand why. He wouldn’t want to see the look of horror or pity on my face.

You only see real poverty if you spend time looking around America, just as you see real wealth. But most of it is just people trying to get through the day. A small business owner bringing supplies somewhere, a truck driver bringing goods somewhere, a waitress, a gas station attendant, a guy with no face.

Online, however, it’s an entirely different experience. Almost everyone lives in a fantasy world of one kind or another. I know that when I log on to X, my experience will be a frustrating and pointless exercise in trying to shake people out of this trance of unreality. It is impossible and a waste of time.

The writer John Nolte once told me that he used to think everything happening online and in politics mattered. He would spend every second of every day plugged in and online. At some point, he realized that it was ever-changing and ultimately, it wasn’t as important as it seemed. So he just disconnected.

Now, he spends his time camping, watching movies, reading, and only occasionally checks in. I think that’s the better way to go. It’s certainly my goal as I drive across this big, beautiful country of ours. I don’t always succeed, of course, but I try to keep that in the back of my mind — it’s not as important as you think.

The Start

My first stop was just a couple of hours outside of Los Angeles at a town called Barstow. The wind was so fierce, it almost blew my car off the road. It was so bad that we got this warning just after we arrived at our first hotel.

Read more

This reader disagreed with my take on Thomas Massie’s loss to Ed Gallrein in Kentucky, and finally closed it with this:

I always knew that stepping into the Israel debate on the Right would cause me problems. I avoided it as long as I could, trying to stay out of the discussion of the war in Gaza, as readers will remember. It would start a Civil War in the comments, so I tried to stay neutral. No, it wasn’t a genocide, yes, it’s a hard thing to see so much carnage and suffering, war is hell, etc.

But once Trump got involved and bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and then bombed the country in hopes of breaking them down to prevent their building a nuke, that’s when things got weird. And when things got weird, I had to take a side. And that side was not becoming the very thing that Trump and MAGA had been accused of being for ten years: Germany in the 1930s.

Yes, I am half-Jewish on my father’s side. I wasn’t raised with any religion, and if anything, I lean more toward Christianity at the moment. But there is no version of me that would go along with what I see happening on the Right, even knowing it will cost me dearly - with clicks and views, with subscriptions, with income.

All of that said, here is what I know right now. The gas prices ARE too high. I was going to cover that in my first travel dispatch, but I’ll mention it now. Here in Texas, where I am now, they’re down to $ 4.00 and change per gallon, which is $2.00 cheaper than in LA. This will kill Trump and MAGA in the midterms, and they’ll blame the war in Iran, and they’ll blame Israel.

So if Trump can’t refocus and turn the economy around (the window is tightening), the Series Finale of the Donald Trump show will end with his impeachment and removal from office.

Fine, I can accept that reality. What I won’t do is go along with the rising demonization and dehumanization of a whole group of people, whether that’s MAGA or now, people who support Israel. The Massie loss has torn off the scab, and the conspiracy theories are flying.

To me, that’s the cult. I left the Left because of their intolerance and hatred for half the country. The way they treated me just for dissenting was and remains terrifying. I always thought that was closer to Nazi Germany than anything I saw rising on the Right. Until now. Now, many of them have lived up to the stereotype.

That doesn’t vindicate the crazy Left, but they are forming a horseshoe:

I think they should all go out into the desert and build an isolated, Jew-free utopia where they can worship in the purest form of their faith, but I want nothing to do with them. Call me whatever you want.

I long for the old days when I had a solid income and didn’t have to worry so much about paying the bills, unlike now, when I have to worry about subscribers. That’s why my site has been free for so long. But oh well. That is the way the cookie crumbles. I still believe in Free Thinking through the Fourth Turning.

Trump has accomplished more in just one year than most presidents in my lifetime: Trump RX lowering drug prices, Trump savings to help young ones start a financial future, no tax on social security, and no tax on overtime. He’s helped end “Gender Affirming Care” and stood up for women in sports.

He closed the border and began mass deportations, which cost him in the polls and with Hispanic voters. Tariffs were an attempt to bring manufacturing back here, and they also created higher prices.

The problems we face are big, existential problems like the storm of AI, corporate monopolies, and the decline of the American worker. To keep prices low, we need cheap labor. Either we import it, or we send labor overseas, which is what Bill Clinton did to boost the economy and what the Democrats will do once they take back power. That, along with socialism and “managed decline.”

But let’s not kid ourselves. They don’t care about the economy. They’re mad about Israel, and they’re riding the wave, just like many on the Left, lying that it’s about “pedophiles and war.”

Yes, the economy has to come back for him to avoid a third impeachment. I hope and pray that MAGA can hold the line. The good side of MAGA, not the rising frothing Hitler-esque side.

I also got this letter, which I thought was a more decent way of looking at things:

There’s a good chance this is true. When his wife died, the wheels came off, and he was more susceptible to the darker forces that helped him find a scapegoat - and unfortunately, too many people are following him down that path. I won’t be one of them.

They do this without realizing that the Left still sees them as human garbage, and once they get control of the internet, these folks will be exiled to the virtual gulag. They’ll be debanked. They might even be thrown in jail, but hey, that’s how deep the rabbit hole goes. They can’t stop now.

I was mostly driving today from New Mexico through to Texas, so I wasn’t plugged into all of the drama, but I expect there was a lot of it. The blame that it was Israel that bought the election is just plain false. True, AIPAC (a group of Americans, by the way) donated, but so did a lot of other groups, making it the most expensive House race in American history.

But in the end, it wasn’t Israel. It wasn’t even money. It was Massie becoming a pain in Donald Trump’s ass and making a spectacle of himself without thinking of the people of Kentucky, for instance. How do we know? Because plenty of other primary candidates also lost because Trump endorsed the opposition. That is what we call FAFO.

Massie kept defying Trump at every turn, manufacturing a fantasy that there was some secret nest of Israeli pedophiles that Trump was protecting, or the “Epstein class,” a phrase now used by the Left and many on the Right, then transformed into a useful idiot for the Trump-hating media.

He kept creeping closer and closer to blaming Israel for all of the country’s problems. He became obsessed, probably because he got so much attention for it and before long, was a hero for what we call Podcastistan — or the Woke Right. By the end of his ongoing spectacle of self-importance, Trump was done.

And Podcastistan LOST. Their power is diminishing as we speak. At least for now. As Dan Bongino put it:

True, it was the over-65 voters, ever-reliable, who put him over the top, and Gen-Z has been indoctrinated into a rage fantasy, helped by unending propaganda from the Left and the Right on their social media feeds. But still, a loss is a loss.

Gallrein beat Massie in every precinct. It was a decisive victory throughout the state. In the end, Gallrein held the line with 10,000 or so more votes in an election where only about 100K people voted in a state of 4 million. It’s safe to say that those who turned out for Massie did so because of the internet.

If it were me, and I wanted to pull in votes for Massie, I would not have been online. I would have been door-to-door, on college campuses, etc. Maybe they did that. Maybe that’s why he did as well as he did. I don’t know.

Here is what I do know. It’s a lie that Israel rigged this election or bought this election. It’s as simple as this: Massie went to war on Trump. He FAFO’d.

But let Dana Loesch explain it as only she can:

In my opinion, from watching Massie this past year and becoming increasingly disgusted by his attention-seeking behavior, he fell in love with his rising star status and began to believe his own publicity.

He was backed by Tucker Carlson, Ana Kasparian, Megyn Kelly (I think), and everyone else otherwise known as the “Woke Reich.” He had lots of support from young people who are anti-war, anti-Israel, and very much creatures of the internet.

Things got a little heated today on the Megyn Kelly Show as RCP’s Carl Cannon called out Massie for his nasty sore loser comments in his concession speech:

Massie seemed like a decent, principled guy once upon a time. But the human ego is a funny thing. Most podcasters flying high on clicks and views have an outsized sense of their own importance and influence.

I think Massie had never gotten as much attention in his life as he did once he became the anti-Israel guy. Then he felt what so many of them no doubt feel, especially from the boosted hive minds of mostly Islamic countries, amplifying, liking, and driving up the engagement.

Someone posted this compilation on X:

In general, it’s healthy to have representatives who aren’t afraid to sometimes go against the party line, as John Fetterman does on the Left. But Massie went so much further than that, taunting Trump publicly. And he became a media darling.

I do think there are reasonable, sober conversations to be had about Israel. What I’ve seen unfold on the Left and now, on the Right, is anything but reasonable. It has become the fulcrum for a kind of mass hysteria. I can’t help but think Massie was caught up in it.

As for him being a guy who exposed pedophiles, it never happened. He took on the role of crusader but never produced any scalps. He fanned the flames anyway and pretended there was a conspiracy that had been covered up. My guess is that voters in Kentucky felt he ignored them to chase his own fame and glory.

I am not sure if I have any subscribers left who support Thomas Massie. I expect they’ve all long since fled. But if Massie had won, people like me would not be on X vowing to vote for the Democrats.

It would be one thing if Colbert’s version of late-night comedy were a show we all watched every night and laughed together about our shared problems, celebrated the culture we shared, and joked about the politics we more or less agreed on, even if we didn’t vote the same way. After all, our late-night hosts like Jay Leno, Johnny Carson, and David Letterman (in the early years) did not take sides.

But once Donald Trump won in 2016, American culture did take a side. They locked themselves away in their own little bubble and decided the rest of us just didn’t matter anymore. This is a story still mostly untold in mainstream media.

No joke, this is Dana Taylor in USA Today:

If the Peak Woke film One Battle After Another, which cost upwards of $170-200 million and pulled in only $70 million in the US, could still sweep the awards and win Best Picture, no one is going to sweat the late-night ratings slump. Maybe 3 million a night, the rest made up with viral clips on YouTube and social media. It all drives the same message - help the Democrats defeat Trump and MAGA. Whatever. It ain’t comedy.

Late-night “comedy” is not for all of America like it used to be. It serves only one leader — Barack Obama and his Royal Court. Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and John Oliver sneer at half the country every night and pat themselves on the back because the Rosie O’Donnell demographic falls at their feet.

Even when Stephen Colbert was funny, he was never really funny. He always took himself too seriously, even when he was playing the fake Conservative. He wasn’t mocking himself. He was mocking those people over there, the ones he dehumanizes on his now-canceled show night after night. The only sad part about any of it is that Kimmel wasn’t also canceled. In a perfect world, he’d be off the air, too.

Maybe it wouldn’t be such a glaring failure if the Obama class hadn’t also been the ruling class. You can’t be on the side with all the power and wealth and then sneer at the side with less power and wealth.

But if somehow it wasn’t the ruling class, the wealthy sophisticates who decided to use nearly all of American culture to push one ideology, maybe Colbert and Kimmel would have seemed more like heroes to the rest of us, instead of puny tyrants abusing what little power they had to keep America divided and hating each other.

The media, of course, has turned this into yet another grand battle against Trump. CBS and Paramount are the ones who sold the otherwise pristine network out to the “fascists.” Bari Weiss, they insist, has sold out 60 Minutes to Trump and/or Israel. The Paramount/Warner merger is yet another sign that Hitler is on the march.

And Bill Carter at the New York Times:

But it’s no secret what transpired in between that eager pitch to extend his run and that sudden closing notice: CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was on the verge of a merger. President Trump, who had been wounded by Mr. Colbert’s political satire, and who on many occasions had publicly called for him to be canceled (or “put to sleep” in one memorable social media message), had returned to office and was in a position to interfere with any deal.

Paramount had already taken steps widely seen as currying favor with the administration, most notably when it signed off on a $16 million payment to settle a lawsuit Mr. Trump brought against CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” even though legal experts said Mr. Trump had very little chance of prevailing in court.

The truth is that Paramount and David Ellison are trying to crash the Left’s chokehold on culture. This is obvious from the television shows on Paramount Plus, like Landman. They are at least attempting to reach the millions of Americans people like Colbert have thrown away like human garbage.

Wouldn’t it have been great if one of these court jesters of late-night had been able to see the truth? If they’d have been able to joke about the reality of what they’d become under Trump, how they’ve lost their minds for ten long years and destroyed themselves? What if Colbert’s last night was an apology to the rest of us for his repulsive, one-sided propaganda delivery device otherwise known as The Late Show?

That would have been something. As with Kimmel, he’ll be treated like a martyr without ever having to confront who and what he has become. Standing ovations, interviews, lavish praise, gold statues — all headed his way. As with everyone who worships the right people, he’ll fail upwards.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Colbert will never have to face himself in the mirror, not really. He’ll always get the reach-around by the mainstream outlets he cares about. But some of us know the truth. And knowing Colbert will be off the smells feels like … victory.

Good riddance, Stephen Colbert, you snide, smug, sanctimonious, intolerable partisan hack. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Every so often, a moment in culture arrives, a Sydney Sweeney ad, or Project Hail Mary.

Every time, we hear that the Woke fever has finally broken. Hollywood cares about the people again. Right?

The same reason Kamala Harris is likely to be the nominee in 2028, the same reason the Democrats are still selling the lie that any kind of attempt by Republicans to even out the redistricting is “Jim Crow 2.0,” is proof enough that on the Left, Woke is not going anywhere. It is who they are now. Not all of them, but the most powerful among them.

Early on, when Mark Halperin and others were insisting Gavin Newsom would be the nominee in 2028, I said there was no way the Democrats would get behind a white guy, no matter how passionately he genuflects to the Woke (“Anti-woke is anti-black!”). I know the Democrats. I was one. I helped build the modern-day party of the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening. I know what fires them up every day, and it isn’t just taking back power; it’s foisting their religion upon the rest of us.

They think it’s the opposite, that it’s the Right that is foisting their “Christian Nationalism” upon them. While it’s true that a faction of the Right has unmasked to become the very thing Rob Reiner warned about in his movie, God and Country, they aren’t the majority. Perhaps that’s true on the Left. But look around. Their religion is the dominant culture in America.

When news got out that Christopher Nolan had cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the “most beautiful woman in the world,” whose face launched a thousand ships, it ignited yet another culture war.

How you reacted was like whether or not you wore a mask outside in 2020. It was a test. You’re on one side, or you’re on the other. Notice it, comment on it, object to it, criticize it, and you’re one of the bad people to be purged.

And if that weren’t enough, Nolan brought back Ellen Page from Inception, now recast as Elliot Page, the male, as an act of affirmation and yet another test. These are Orwellian 2+2=5 and force people to choose between ignoring it and going to see a big-effects movie in IMAX, or not buying a ticket and boycotting the film.

Elon Musk took the bait, becoming the villain Hollywood needed to turn seeing The Odyssey into a righteous and political act. You can see them now: the bearded male feminists buying tickets ten times in a row. “Take that, Elon Musk!” The ladies of Blue Sky will go in groups, then fawn over how beautiful Lupita Nyong’o is and overuse the male pronoun for Ellen/Elliot Page. “Wasn’t he great?”

The game is becoming exhausting by now, as Hollywood demands the hard-working American public be impressed by them, lectured by them, and corrected by them. All audiences really want is the one thing Hollywood seems unable to accomplish: entertain them.

It isn’t that Nyong’o isn’t pretty. She is. It’s that Helen of Troy was white, famously so, even if Greek. Nyong’o is a unique beauty, not a universal one, a reality the Left wants to force, because Hollywood doesn’t care about its audience. They want to look good.

Probably the worst thing about the game Hollywood plays with the movie fans they helped raise is that Lupita Nyong’o is held out as a sacrificial lamb. She isn’t pushing any ideology, unlike Ellen/Elliot Page. They are putting her out there and expecting her to absorb criticism about herself, including whether she is pretty enough.

I met her once, back in 2013 in Telluride, before her career took off. She was too young to know how to act like a celebrity. She was so nice, I was won over. She would win an Oscar that year and become a big star in Hollywood.

Is it fair to put her in this position just so they can feel good about themselves? No. Does it change anything? No. There is still such a thing as truth and reality, even if that is the thing that is unfair.

The Woke Code and the Hays Code

The Hays Code (1930-1968) represented an era wherein decency and morality were mandated in all Hollywood films.

The Christian conservatism/morality mandated by the Hays Code reflected less a separation between art and governance and more a united effort toward a utopian society of goodness, especially as we moved through the last Fourth Turning, the Great Depression, and World War II, a time where the world saw true evil in Hitler and Stalin, not to mention the nuclear bomb.

That isn’t all that different from what the Woke Code is now. It’s roughly the same kind of thing: rigid rules to depict an ideal society. The difference is that Christian advocates have been replaced by progressive activists, and the villain is the white male patriarchy.

What is different now, amid our current Fourth Turning, is that the Woke Code includes only half of America. To the Left, they would rewrite this narrative to say that Hollywood depicted mostly White America, and that is what has changed. But really, if you respond to the box office, as Hollywood doesn’t anymore, you will always default to the majority. It isn’t rocket science — beautiful, sexy women and masculine men and a great story.

The end of the Hays Code was entirely due to economics. Television became so popular in the 1950s that there wasn’t much of a need to go to the movies if all you saw was the same kind of buttoned-up themes you could see on TV. That’s true now, too. Movies, then, had to break out of the Hays Code and become much more subversive, leading into the 1970s, which saw some of the best films ever made.

While it’s true that The Odyssey will be eligible to win Oscars under the new rules, it’s also true that the criteria could have been met in a way that didn’t make audiences play this same exhausting game that has alienated them from everything Hollywood puts out. The casting of Nyong’o and Page is less about Oscars and more about status.

Perhaps Nolan was under pressure to cast a non-white woman as Helen, or maybe he wants to be seen as a good person using his wealth and fame to make change, as the most famous white male directors reach for things money can’t buy, like Martin Scorsese making Killers of the Flower Moon, Steven Spielberg making West Side Story with a real Latina, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Peak Woke Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another.

No film has better exemplified Hollywood in the Trump era than this one. It says it all. ICE as the Gestapo, check. America is run by a cabal of wealthy white Nazis, check. A woman of color must save herself, check.

All of it is held together by a hapless white man, Leonardo DiCaprio, who represents the film’s beating heart. He’s the only good white guy, which is how those in Hollywood who make these kinds of choices would like to be seen. One Battle is actually a movie about them.

Had Nolan cast a blue-eyed blonde woman as Helen of Troy, all hell would have broken loose. When you go against the rules of the Woketopia, you aren’t just getting hit on X with lots of angry tweets by loyal fans who continually feel betrayed; they bring out the big guns - agonizing op-eds in the New Yorker, for instance. If you obey the rules, then you are praised. The problem is that it all feels so artificial, so pre-planned, so inorganic.

I used to write the Oscars report for Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center (who fired me after they found out I voted for Trump), counting the number of female nominees and winners. The statistics were always grim.

Every year, it was bad news. As things began to change for women after the Academy announced its DEI mandate in 2020, that change was forced. If before merit had made too many white men winners, now we were seeing something a little closer to gender parity. So then the line moved back, and it became not just about women but women of color and trans women.

Now, it’s all about Marxism disguised as art. If life isn’t fair, movies will make it fair. It isn’t just because the Oscars have it written into their new rules, and it isn’t just because activist groups like GLAAD breathe down the neck of every Hollywood studio, counting heads and making reports. It’s that this is a deeply felt belief system that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I have no doubt The Odyssey will make money. It’s a Christopher Nolan film, after all. Who doesn’t want to go see a giant visual effects epic filmed entirely on IMAX? If you can ignore the elephant in the room, the performative casting, you might have a great time. But if you were hoping that Woke is over, well, I think that was its own Hollywood fairy tale.

It’s why Kamala Harris was the nominee in 2024 and why she will once again be the nominee in 2028. This is how the ruling class in America wants to be represented. They want to force change, and they do that by elevating minority groups to high-status positions as symbols for the mostly white people who run things.

Culture, like the Democratic Party, will have to be built anew. That, more than anything, explains why AI is about to completely consume the business, becoming the subversive counterculture revolution Hollywood never saw coming. They can do it all and more without the millions of dollars necessary to mount a production.

AI artists don’t have to be held to the same rigid standards. They can be purely about bringing in eyeballs by showing what people most want to see, rather than what Hollywood wants them to want to see. In other words, they can make the women as beautiful as they want, and no one can cancel them for it.

I spent my life in movie theaters gazing up at the big screen and watching some of the best films ever made. The only way that makes sense is if you are escaping real life and finding your way into a fantasy world, and maybe for the Woke, seeing Lupita Nyong’o cast as the most beautiful woman in the world is its own kind of fantasy fulfillment.

After the movie comes out, we’ll have to see whether it works or not. At the moment, it feels like just another test to decide who gets to stay and who has to go.

Now that my beloved buddy, my travel companion and best friend, is no longer here, I have two dogs who really could theoretically fit in the crate in the cabin on a plane.

But I don’t know, the driving is maybe the best way to spend what remaining time I have left, because at least it sort of feels like living. You know? It’s the world as it is, which is far preferable to the virtual one.

I have decided, because of the recent fracture on the Right and my own destiny in this crazy ecosphere, perhaps not so secure, to put my travel dispatches behind the paywall. I hate doing it. I prefer to offer up all of my stuff for free, as I have for going on six years now, but with gas prices what they are and a less certain future, I figure I’ll just pull the plug or flip the switch, as they say.

My regular political podcasts will still be offered up the usual way. Because people have sent me donations in the past via Venmo, PayPal, or even paper checks, I don’t have a way to record them other than by email. If you have done that and find you are blocked from reading and would like to read, please email me so I can update your subscription. Hopefully, it will be worth it for you.

Thanks, as always. And until next time.