The media narrative is that people are protesting the cost of living, gas prices, and education. I was under the impression that socialist countries take care of these things. And why are there so many “Free Palestine” flags and “Eat the Rich” graffiti?

This French woman tries to explain it outside the false narrative. I bet you won’t hear this on the nightly news.

That made me wonder: why are they so insistent that the message is only about the high cost of living and gas? And why are so many protests erupting right now? Could there be some connection between these protests and the midterm elections? No, that couldn’t be. That’s crazy, right?

At the same time, a story was breaking on X from an account called DataRepublican. It released tapes and documents from a small group of self-appointed people who have hatched a plan for a new America if things get bad here amid the election.

It’s a complicated tangle of a story, which makes it hard to land as clickbait news. I even asked Grok to help me understand it.

Grok summarized it this way:

DataRepublican (Jennica Pounds) released a large archive of internal recordings, transcripts, and documents—hundreds of calls and thousands of files totaling hundreds of gigabytes—under the titles “The Democracy Files” and “The Illegitimacy Playbook.” These come mainly from networks of former USAID Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) staff and related progressive activist and NGO groups after DOGE shut down USAID.

The core claims are that after USAID’s shutdown, former DRG officials formed the Democracy Renewal Group (same initials as their old office). Their stated goal was to apply the overseas “democracy assistance” and color-revolution playbook—previously used in places like Serbia in 2000, Georgia’s Rose Revolution, and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution—domestically in the United States. This evolved into Renew American Democracy (RAD), organized around the “4 B’s”:

- **Block**: Use protests, lawfare, and non-cooperation to hinder the Trump administration.

- **Bridge & Belong**: Shape dialogue and narratives.

- **Build**: Use a crisis as the opening for “structural reform” or a “refounding” of American government. One quoted line from Danielle Reiff (a DRG lead): “We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment.”

As I watched the violent riots expand throughout Europe and tried to understand this group’s planning to essentially incite a revolution should Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, it started to look all too familiar. Another group of unelected activists deciding in advance that things would go wrong, then planning how they would respond, reminded me of this:

I remember as a Democrat and Biden supporter thinking he could win the old-fashioned way—by campaigning. But as 2020 unfolded, with COVID and then the protests, I began to notice unseen hands orchestrating things from above.

They decided in advance that Trump would not accept the election results, and they decided there would be an “insurrection” long before January 6th. Everything they did to push the media and social media to engage in acts of sabotage against Trump was propped up and justified by the plan they hatched long before COVID hit our shores.

They thought they were “saving democracy,” but really they were orchestrating a rigged election. Had Biden won the old-fashioned way, Trump might have still contested it. But everything they did—from suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop, to tying Trump up in court, to preventing large gatherings, to changing laws, to lying about the summer of protests—was done in an effort to stop him, not to “save democracy.”

So here we are again, with another group that literally says they’re attempting to “save democracy” by planning a coup and roping in weak-minded governors like Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker. Here’s a video explainer:

Talk about your Fourth Turning.

That brings us back to the riots in Europe. Is it possible—just possible—that some of this is being pushed, supported, or instigated by the same forces to bring those protests here? Is this what they secretly want for America: to push Trump toward the Insurrection Act? We saw some of it in the war on ICE in California and Minnesota, but are we going to see these same kinds of violent riots here?

What caught my attention was how the media was covering them. It seems they aren’t telling the whole truth or getting the full story. Why? I can’t say for sure, but it seems designed to support their pressure on Trump about the economy and to ask Americans, “Why aren’t you that mad?”

That may sound paranoid, but I’m honestly at a loss as to how we could see the same thing happen again. They insist it’s about students and the economy, but come on. Are they that mad about no toilet paper in the bathroom and high gas prices? No, that’s not what this is.

True, we see protests like this erupt all the time, this was just four years ago.

Much of that is due to the rise of social media. Still, what interests me is what DataRepublican uncovered: a plan to overtake the country and reshape it through shadow forces who don’t want to “save democracy” so much as wrestle it under their control.

Another explainer on color revolutions ties it to the same kind of mindset in 2020. The whole thing is worth a watch:

I remember that in 2020 it was the first time I saw the media either lying or driving a narrative someone else was orchestrating because it didn’t match what we were all seeing on our streets or on social media.

“Mostly peaceful protests,” they famously said. They seemed to want to taunt Trump into a fascist-like crackdown even then, and when he mostly backed off and let the governors control their states, they didn’t really know what to do—except that the protests made the Democrats look bad. And that’s why they had to lie about them.

In Michelle Obama’s very well-written and well-delivered speech, she blames Trump’s win on those who did not vote in 2016. She lies about the protests and riots, and she does it with calm sincerity. For the Obamas, it’s all about fixing a “racist” country, and for the Democrats, that’s still what they believe. They think democracy is attacking them.

She repeats the lie about the “peaceful protesters” for a “photo op.” She repeats the lie about Charlottesville. They use these lies to justify the extreme actions they’ve taken to attempt to subvert democracy.

She sells the lie that the other half of the country is “racist” and that’s the only reason they would ever want to vote for change.

These lies have hurt the entire country, but they’ve hurt the Democrats most of all. If only we had an honest press, but we don’t. They are as afraid of the mob as everyone else. They too want to be accepted and loved inside utopia. And so they lie too.

And now, it could be happening again.

They’ve arrived at an endgame where all they have left is a militarized totalitarian takeover of the country to enforce their utopian worldview on everyone else and punish the “ists” and the “phobes” once and for all.

They pretend January 6th was bad. In truth, it was exactly what they wanted and needed to make their closing argument about Trump and MAGA. It should shock them all that Trump won again despite it. Why? Because the public knew they were not telling the truth.

That was nothing compared to what we could see if MAGA ever really did decide to rise up. That’s what the Left does, not the Right. But you have to wonder what that would look like, what it would take, and how bad it could get.

Flagstaff, Arizona, 10 a.m.

My road trips are rarely just for fun. I never get to do all the things I want to because of the time crunch. If I’m not driving, I’m working. If I’m not working, I’m walking my dogs. If I’m not doing any of these things, I’m probably zoning out on YouTube.

This one will be super quick, though I’m not sure how long it will take. I used to drive because my beloved departed dog, Jack, couldn't fly on airplanes, but now I just like the chance to get out of the house and see the country. I will be writing dispatches from the road. I hope to see what it’s like in a few swing states if I can - who has signs out, test the mood.

So many of you have kindly offered lunch, dinner, or a meet-up, but I am always flying through and rarely have time to stop, even to see the sites. But thank you for even wanting to meet me at all. That is a high compliment. I hope to set up a “meet my dear readers” tour at some point and go from state to state. That will have to be a trip unto itself, however.

I will offer the travel dispatches behind the paywall for paid subscribers or those who leave a tip. If I haven't marked you as paid so you can read them, please let me know. I have tried to keep up, but it isn’t always easy because Substack goes by email, not name.

That’s all for now. We’ll see you on the other side. Hope you have a great weekend.

I used to be just like you. I, too, thought that there was no bottom in how I spoke to people on the other side of the aisle. I too felt like an eternal victim lashing out in increasingly hate-filled rants that were very popular on the Left. I too was “in the club.” I was beloved, like you are. And I was as ugly inside as you are.

Who else but a soulless, shallow, ignorant [word I should not write because it is too offensive] would post something like this:

He let it metastasize into hate? Show me the hate, Jojo. You can’t because you don’t know the meaning of that word or any other word. Hate is what defines you. Look in the mirror. Look into your own eyes. Look at what you just wrote. THAT is hate.

Trump roughed up a reporter in the Oval Office? Aw, poor guy. That’s the job. It’s been the job for ten years. You don’t like the job, find another. The truth is that they love being trashed on air by Trump because it goes viral and they get their fifteen minutes of fame. Trust me, I know the game. That’s exactly what you’re doing now. You’re desperate for JD to notice you because you know it would be good for your brand.

And hey, you got 8K likes and 285 bookmarks. Well done! All you had to do was sell your soul for a tiny bit of attention. Just don’t lie. JD Vance came from nothing and made something of his life despite the negative voices in his head telling him he was worthless, like you’re trying to do now.

You are the bully, Jojo. You call them “maggots” and screech at them every second of every day because what else would you be? What else could you be? The answer is simple: nothing.

When I read your timeline with your 1 million followers, I know there is no saving the Left. If you are what we all have to choke down, your power will remain limited. You can get there, but you can’t stay there.

It’s not possible to match your level of ugliness and I would not want to. I don’t have the energy to hate that hard. I could not and did not want to live that way. You look sad to me, Jojo. More than anything. All that matters to you now is power. And look at what it’s done to you. Look at what it’s done to the Left.

Believe it or not, I have tried to humanize even you, Jojo. Why? Because it’s good for the soul. It’s good for the country, too. I tried to see what could make you this way and maybe find a way into what looks like a typical monster of the Left to me now.

You're probably a little worried about brand now that the Wicked Witch of the Left, Jennifer Welch, is getting all the viral attention. You’re probably feeling like she’s been stealing your thunder lately.

She’s meaner, she’s uglier inside, and where does that leave poor Jojo from Jerz? You had to up your game. A race to the bottom. I think Welch is probably “winning” as more people know her. But you’re getting there, Jojo. You’re almost as bad as she is.

JD Vance’s mom is a hero for overcoming a life of chaos, abuse, and addiction, and now spends her time trying to help people in similar positions. This is the woman you called a “drug addicted whore.” Watch it. Maybe you’ll find your humanity. Then again, you’re probably beyond saving. There is no saving the Left. That much I know for sure.

I hoped that all of you would find your way out of it as I did. Even if you wanted the Left to win, you could still be decent. But no, you can’t. Every time Trump or anyone on the Right does something you disagree with, you see it as your moral duty to fling monkey shit on X.

This is what makes the GOP and MAGA far more attractive to people like me who fled the firehose of hate on the Left.

I remember at the GOP convention when JD Vance took to the stage to announce that his mom had been sober for ten years, and everyone in the crowd chanted “JD’s mom, JD’s mom.”

That was the kind of love that I found when I escaped the Doomsday Cult of the Left and made my way to MAGA. I found happy people who looked a lot like the People of Whoville in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

There we were on the Left, the people with all of the power, everything you could ever want — a whole utopia we built online — and we were miserable. We were angry. We were depressed because we did not have total control of the country.

We took everything away from MAGA. They still have almost no cultural representation. They are demonized by the ruling class and treated like human garbage. So what’s the lesson of the Grinch? He takes everything away from Whoville, thinking that they will suffer as he suffers.

But of course, he sees they're still singing. They were still dancing. They were still celebrating. Christmas isn’t something you find in a store, and humanity isn’t something you’ll find winning back power in politics.

JD Vance and his mother’s story is the kind of American success story we should all cheer on, no matter what side of the Civil War you are on. Coming from nothing and making something of yourself is what America is all about.

I’ll take Trump and MAGA or any Republican any day of the week rather than ever vote for the likes of you terrible people ever again.

Halperin has been telling a story about the midterms, and the protests don’t fit exactly. The Democrats are all cleaned up and sane, so the story goes, and they’re making a “something better” pitch to the people. They’re not crazy, not crazy at all, so why would they bother protesting? They’re winning.

Ah, Mark clearly doesn’t know the Left the way I do. They couldn’t stop even if they wanted to. This is a deep, pathological disorder that didn’t even stop when Trump was voted out in 2020. It won’t stop once they are back in power (MAGA beware) and will probably last two more decades. That’s how deep this goes.

So, for Halperin’s education, I made a compilation video of scenes from the run-up to the midterms.

Language warning: I didn't bleep the F-bombs.

It’s emotional blackmail, Great Feminization-style all the way. But it’s also part of their ongoing strategy that has been at play for ten years.

Remember 2015? Violence against Trump supporters went on all through Trump’s first term. There has never been anything quite like this, certainly not in my lifetime unless you count the Jim Crow South amid desegregation. The media cherry-picks things Trump says, dumps them into the psychotic churn of the Doomsday Cult every second of every day, and this is the result.

That’s what eventually caused me to escape the cult and try to find out who they all really were. Did we really share our country with rapists, racists, and Nazis? Of course not. Shame on the media for what they’ve done to all of us, but there is no turning it around.

Obviously, these protesters are performing for their own cameras and to go viral. But you have to watch TikTok to see how these narratives are shaped, though it’s nothing new. This has been going on for a decade.

When Trump was elected, this was the scene:

The worst it ever got was the summer of 2020, which no one really talks about much. January 6th, of course, was treated like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor—imagine that. But this was seen as justified, even if it was also a strategy by the Democrats to create chaos to vote Trump out.

Trump was almost assassinated three times. The reason is the ongoing dehumanizing language of the Left—every word they chant in unison, spittle flying out of their mouths, eyes wide and deranged, is a permission structure for violence: RACIST, RAPIST, FASCIST, DICTATOR, PEDOPHILE, HITLER.

That’s why none of it has registered and why they dream of his death and make videos about it. It’s the “When it Happens” trend on TikTok. They all know what it means.

It’s also why Tyler Robinson etched “Hey fascist, catch” on the bullet casings. If Charlie Kirk is called a fascist, then what’s the problem with killing him?

The new movie sensation *You Can See Everything* has a surprise appearance by actress Amanda Seyfried, who plays Elizabeth Holmes in *The Dropout*. Seyfried famously suggested that Charlie Kirk brought about his own death with this Instagram post:

As though Charlie Kirk incites violence, or that Trump ever did, when these folks are obviously the violent side.

Seyfried doubles down any time anyone asks her about her Charlie Kirk comments and calls him “hateful.” By that, she means he says things she doesn’t like. On the Left, “hate” is defined as disagreeing with them about various identity groups, DEI, gender-affirming care, abortion, etc.

When You Can See Everything screened in Telluride earlier this year, the audience burst into applause when Seyfried called Kirk a “p*ssy.” She’s a hero to the Left, someone for whom the assassination of a MAGA hero made the world a better place.

This is not what Democracy looks like. It’s what fascism looks like. You know, the actual definition? Conform or else. I keep waiting for them to turn this madness around, but ten years on, it is only getting worse.

One has to marvel at this moment. The Democrats, by all accounts, will dominate the midterms in what Halperin suggested (but didn’t predict) would be a “blue tsunami,” yet here they still are.

Everyone needs a better education on the kind of people we’re dealing with on the Left. Good luck with that. Legacy media just doesn’t cover it, and never has. They’ve never reckoned with their part in it. The Democrats have never atoned for it, or even apologized. They don’t think they should—and it’s depressing to know they’ll soon be back in charge of our country, our schools, our institutions, and AI.

[I’m packing and getting ready for my trip back east to help my daughter move, but there will be podcasts soon!]

I haven’t been portraying Democrats as “totalitarian enemies”—I am telling the truth about what they are based on ten years of experience as a former Democrat who was swarmed, bullied, attacked, and ultimately canceled and unpersoned just for things I thought and believed and said. But you don’t need me to make that point—just look around. Look at Hollywood. Look at culture. Look at how insane you all are.

There is no safe space ruled by the Democrats that has remained untouched by their totalitarian rule. The Democrats have always been the side with all of the power, and thus it’s up to them to thaw out and realize that they have to share this country with people who do not agree with their utopian fantasy. Instead, they’ve been at war with half the country for ten long years, mostly at the behest of Obama.

It took me a long time to even criticize Obama. I was as faithful a supporter as there could be. I never loved a politician before, but I loved him. I know why so many on the Left do and why they can’t let go. They like how they are with a guy like that in power—we projected all of our progressive fantasies about what America could be onto him. But it’s white saviorism at its absolute worst.

After all of these years, I see Obama very differently. I see a man who cannot walk away from the love of the people. He’s been treated like a god, not just here but worldwide. That has to mess with your head. He believes Trump’s rise is due only to racism, and that has been the “witchcraft” of our time, the “spectral evidence” that some of us might be afflicted with an ism or a phobe.

I helped build our utopia online. I was right there, ground zero, on Twitter with Obama following me back after I followed him. I was part of the army of blue checks doing the Democrats’ bidding. We’d just closed ourselves off from the rest of America. I didn’t realize it at first. It took me a while. I had to get to know the country we’d left behind.

Trump’s rise was proof of how we’d abandoned so much of the working-class half of America, those not yet online or living in big cities. Dissent became “racism” and bigotry. And before long, it was disenfranchisement and dehumanization. What Obama has done is assume power that does not belong to him and orchestrate—or attempt to orchestrate—the demise of a duly elected president.

I have taken a hit for everything I have said on social media or written here. I lost a great income and a career that took 26 years to build for a joke on Twitter — no kidding. I am still attacked on a daily basis online. Of course it’s totalitarianism. Otherwise, there would be no cancel culture, no mob rule. I wouldn’t be exiled from utopia.

So yes, you’re lucky you have a shot at gaining back power. We should all worry about what you guys might really do to this country with Obama as your leader still—yes, still—and your constant impulse to point fingers and accuse everyone of being “racists” or of perceived thought crimes. That isn’t the free America any of us wants.

This isn’t “blaming Obama,” you fool. This is much bigger than that.

Then again, maybe you don’t know my work, and you’ve sailed in as Rachel Maddow’s biggest fan to do a drive-by. Just in case, here are some stories you might have missed.

Walter Kirn and I have missed talking, and missed all of you. On Tuesday night, November 3rd, we’ll get together for an election night livestream to watch returns come in, and maybe also take some time to rap about this year’s bumper crop of political lunacies. We’d love to have you join us for what should be a fascinating night. The Democrats are expected to secure a huge majority in the House, while most polls — whose infuriating inutility was always a rich theme in America This Week discussions — portray the Senate as a jump ball.

Racket News

Tune in to America This Week on Election Night!

Walter Kirn and I have missed talking, and missed all of you. On Tuesday night, November 3rd, we’ll get together for an election night livestream to watch returns come in, and maybe also take some time to rap about this year’s bumper crop of political lunacies. We’d love to have you join us for what should be a fascinating night. The Democrats are expected to secure a huge majority in the House, while most polls — whose infuriating inutility was always a rich theme in…

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5 days ago · 327 likes · 170 comments · Matt Taibbi

I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed these two. I always knew we were really lucky to hear from them every week, sometimes twice a week and of course, I knew it could not last. Then they stopped doing it. Now, they’re coming back! At least for one episode.

Things are looking up!

And thanks to all of those who have stuck around, as I have had a few dark nights of the soul. True, many have fled, but I appreciate those of you still here. God bless.

This November might mark the end of the Virtual Civil War we’ve been fighting for ten years. Or rather, Barack Obama and the establishment government’s war on half the country. The Democrats could take both the House and the Senate, effectively ending the Trump presidency and the MAGA movement.

On the Right, they’re calling me a “Debbie Downer” or a catastrophist, just as they did on the Left when I tried to tell them Trump would win in 2016. But I worried a year ago, when the Trump administration cut Medicaid, millions lost their health insurance, and many saw their monthly premiums rise.

When I spoke up about this, no one wanted to hear it. It wasn’t my job to tell the Right what to do with their power, but from where I sat, as a former Democrat, it felt like the beginning of the end.

We don’t talk much about how that COVID era gave Americans financial relief and, for a time, free healthcare; some didn’t even have to pay rent. We got fat unemployment checks through the CARES Act, and under Biden, the spending went through the roof.

No matter the Trump administration's intentions to cut spending, clean up fraud, and attempt to fix our broken system, once everyone felt the pinch of inflation, gas prices, the war in Iran, and healthcare costs, they'd finally be ready, I believed, to vote blue.

I know I’m not the only person who feels like I’m living in the Twilight Zone. None of us understands what has happened to us in the age of the internet and social media, Obama and Trump. How can I have thought Trump was the ultimate evil in 2016, only to turn around and vote for him in 2024? And now spend my time warning about my former side?

I was hoping that after the indictments, the impeachments, the assassination attempts, and the felony conviction, Trump’s second win would be the moment the delusional bubble burst on the Left and we could all go back to the way things were before the war.

But that didn’t happen. They just got meaner and more radicalized, all the while learning how to hide that side of themselves, to lie to voters that they really aren’t as extreme as they were in the past.

Even as some candidates have learned to lie better about “gender affirming care” or radical Islam to tamp down the widespread, mainstream radicalization that has overtaken the party, all one has to do is look at what’s happening in France to see that, in the midst of a Communist-like takeover, moderate liberalism won’t cut it.

They don’t just want some of it. They want it all. And if France was the model the DSA in America pointed to as a socialist utopia, how do you explain a violent revolution unfolding on the streets?

That won’t just happen here. It already has happened here. It wasn’t Islam; it was Black Lives Matter, but the forces of social-justice revolutionaries and the oppressed/oppressor doctrine rage on.

I wake up every day confronting the cruelty of the Totalitarian Left as, even now, they try not just to destroy me and my business, but to wipe me out, erase me, unperson me. I feel it everywhere, not just online.

I live in a town that would turn on me in an instant if they saw me in a MAGA hat. I know them. I live among them. They smile and chat with me on the street, and I hope they don’t get close enough to figure out who I am, that I’m scorched earth among their kind online.

As of now, in the real world of my very small, very liberal town, I am a complete unknown. But if real life mirrored the internet, there would be wild-eyed fanatics putting up posters of me all over town that say TRUMP SUPPORTER.

Because they were never held to account, nothing has really changed. They’re better liars, but no one has any plans to change how they treat the other half of the country they’ve thrown away like human garbage.

They still see the evil in this country as racism, Islamophobia, sexism, misogyny, bigotry, transphobia. And now, they’ve married it to socialism, but even in France, that’s not enough, so Communism it will have to be.

Barack Obama still leads the army on the Left. In many ways, his presidency of the ruling class half of the country never ended. He couldn’t walk away, not from the party, not from the country, because he could not stand to leave it in the hands of Donald Trump and to allow him and his movement to redirect the future of America, out of the hands of the totalitarian cult the Left has become.

Today, he tweeted the most astonishing thing about Ilhan Omar:

This, after they used the FBI and the CIA to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop while Trump was the sitting president, weaponized the government to frame Trump as a Russian asset, raided the home of a former president, indicted him four times, and convicted him of a felony on a ticky-tack charge. Tried to throw him off the ballot in several states - tied him up in court to keep him off the campaign trail.

And all of that before you get to the debanking scandal, where ordinary Americans were cut off from their financial institutions on their political beliefs alone, throwing Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro in jail for Contempt of Congress, hunting down anyone who might have attended the rally on January 6th, throwing many of them in jail with no due process, not to mention the toll it took on their everyday lives as the media painted them as criminals.

They held a lengthy show trial with Liz Cheney lying to the American public about Trump without him having any chance to defend himself or make his case to the people, with a full-court propaganda press doing their bidding.

I’m not a fan of lawfare. I don’t think they should be raiding the home of Ilhan Omar, but the Democrats have done far worse and have gotten away with all of it. If Republicans can’t see what’s about to happen to them if they allow these folks to take back power, then I don’t know what to say anymore.

Everything Trump did for them, all of these years, the lies spread by the media, the ways the government took power that did not belong to them to go to war on the American people, the lengths they went to destroy Trump and anyone who voted for him is the scandal, and it is the war.

Trump is as good as it gets for MAGA. They will never have anyone that rich, that tough, that famous, that tenacious, that dedicated to fight for them again. Never. This was a once-in-a-generation opportunity, with a Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning attempting to stop the totalitarian takeover of this country and bring back a freer country to those of us who don’t want to live under the boot of tyrants.

If MAGA allows their resentment over Israel and their temporary dip in finances to open the door to the Democrats, they will not know what hit them. They will once again be ordered to comply, or else.

Their speech will be censored, especially if Democrats get control of AI. They will finally have Big Brother and a surveillance operation that already knows too much about all of us. With that power, they'll create Orwell’s nightmare of 1984.

How do I know? Because I was one of them. I became a target for them. I was attacked, policed, and punished for thought crimes long before I ever became a Trump voter. They have changed nothing. They never had to change. No one has ever held them accountable except us voters.

All I can hope is that I’m wrong. I can only hope that no one cares what Marjorie Taylor-Greene or Tucker Carlson thinks. I hope people laugh at my pessimistic outlook after November.

But I watched everything I loved become captured in a totalitarian utopian cult - movies, books, science, education - they had the hearts and minds of Americans from preschool through college through the workforce. There was no escape. Their mandated ideology was and remains everywhere.

And I know that if the Democrats take the House and the Senate, they will not only undo everything Trump did, but they will rig the system so they never lose another election ever again. We already saw them do it in 2020.

Obama’s War

The collective hate that now defines and consumes today’s Left is rooted in the lie that America is infested with racists, misogynists, transphobes, and Islamophobes. Trump and his supporters have been systematically dehumanized for ten long years, and the Democrats have never backed off even a little bit.

Their hatred is so deep and profound that they might never snap out of it.

There are already no limits to what they’ve done. They see themselves as justified, believing that this country belongs only to them and that they should eradicate the bad people by any means necessary.

This is where they still are. They haven’t changed because their leader, Barack Obama, encourages it. He has never tried to help the country unite. His ego can’t handle losing to Trump twice. This is all payback for one man’s vanity.

And so now, with the end in sight, it’s time to take a good, hard look at the America the Democrats want. It is an America where thought and speech are monitored and controlled. It is an America that does not allow dissent. It is an America that doesn’t even want to be America anymore.

How can you rule a country when you hate half of its people, its founding principles, its silent majority? This can’t be business as usual; this is war.

The polls may be wrong. Republicans might turn out in greater numbers than anyone predicted, as Frank Luntz explains:

Harry Enten reminds everyone that the race is close enough that a robust MAGA turnout will close the gap and at least hold the Senate.

The 2026 midterms might be the last battle in Obama’s war. It was never his intention to allow Trump to lead or to govern, and now he’s going in for the kill. It isn’t that Trump hasn’t made mistakes, and it isn’t that I agree with every decision he’s made, but I know what will happen if the Democrats, in their current state, regain power, and that scares me a lot more.

There is no saving the Left. There is only saving the country from them.

All I can do is hope. I hope that the Democrats come to their senses soon because we can’t live like this anymore - we have to learn how to share the country with people we don’t agree with. I hope MAGA will vote as if their lives depended on it, because they do. Most of all, I hope that when this war finally ends, we still have one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Here is an ongoing livestream:

They’re masked, they’re emboldened, and no one seems able to stop them. Another livestream:

The footage might as well have been from the city of Minneapolis or Portland in 2020, and there isn’t even a high-profile murder pushing them onto the streets. This is just public unrest, a real uprising and/or revolution.

According to Grok, the Yellow Vests aren’t left or right, but rather anti-elite, wanting more taxes on the wealthy, though not explicitly anti-immigrant.

Coincidentally, the No Kings protests also begin today, and there is a chance they will also devolve into violence and chaos, considering the Left mirrors what’s happening in France. The Democrats are uniting their voters ahead of the midterms, just as Trump and Vance are rallying across America.

Whether No Kings becomes violent or not remains to be seen. The Democrats have the advantage heading into the midterms and would not want to screw it up so perhaps they will behave.

I’m working on a couple of podcasts I hope to post this weekend, but I thought you might want to know about this if you didn’t already.

Don’t worry, I’m sure Saturday Night Live and others will not leave her alone because it’s too juicy to ignore. I guess we’ll see who is next up. I’d go with Scott Jennings if it were me.

Onward and upward.

Every so often, I have to remind paid subscribers that if they’d like to unsubscribe they can do it without initiating a dispute. There are a few of them coming in now and I just take issue with the idea that these charges would be fraudlent. I would never do that to you. I promise.

You see, they charge me every time for these and it doesn’t seem fair when it wasn’t my fault. I offer up nearly everything for free, although I will be traveling again to Ohio in about a week and that will be behind the paywall as a thank you to subscribers.

Anyway, here is how you can manage your subscription or cancel or whatever you’d like to do.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

We were mad we lost the election, and since we controlled all of American culture and most of its media, we decided the usual rules of decency no longer apply. All was justified in our war on Trump. Something bad had been done to us, and we would use every weapon in our arsenal to destroy them all and punish them for winning an election.

Anyone who worked for him was fair game.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders was mocked repeatedly for the way she looked because of those You Go Girl feminists, you know, the ones caterwauling about a Shane Gillis joke about whores at the gym? Yeah, those same women suddenly thought it was perfectly fine to mock her clothes, her accent, and her makeup.

They thought this was supposed to pass for comedy as they painted Sanders as someone covering up for the Russian collusion story, all of which turned out to be a lie. Did that matter to SNL? Of course not. They just wanted to depict her as a fat girl because they knew it hurt her and hurt Trump.

They really loved trashing the women, and their ratings were never higher. All of the women are here: Melania, Kellyanne Conway, Ivanka Trump.

The idea that Sanders was overweight was the funniest thing to the people who pretend to be offended when anyone even says the word “fat.”

I’m sure if she looked like she does now, they’d find another way to destroy her. They just picked the easiest thing: her looks. Really, it wasn’t just about her or even Trump. It was about his voters and how they weren't allowed inside our bubble.

But Michelle Wolf's take woke me up to the blatant double standard on my side because, by then, I was starting to call them out for being bullies in the exact ways we used to condemn.

And maybe that’s why they went at it with such lusty vigor. Maybe they were just sick of being told what they could and couldn’t say, or how they could never suggest women dress like whores at the gym! So instead, they found targets that no one would dare protect or defend.

It got so bad that ABC News actually had to do a story on their cruelty. Shocking, I know.

It wasn’t just in culture. Their cruel form of humor was matched by how they behaved toward his administration — calling them fascists — and Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant.

By Trump’s second term, Karoline Leavitt proved mostly Teflon to SNL. Out was Russiagate and in was Epstein. This was the best they could do.

Maybe they lost their taste for blood. Maybe they were exhausted and spent after all of those years feeding at the trough. Who knows. Either way, Vanity Fair decided to do the dirty work instead.

All of those Good People of the Left loved watching a major magazine attempt to destroy a woman they call K-K-Karoline.

So I already know what’s coming for Katie Zacharia, whose first press briefing was a little awkward. This is the Series Finale of the Trump Show, after all, and she just got a starring role.

The Left can’t believe it’s luck. A fresh hunk of meat tossed into the lion’s den.

They’ll all be giddy at the prospect of attempting to take down another Trump press secretary and, in typical Leftist fashion, their attacks will break all of their supposed rules of decency.

And in the end, after ten years, what do they really have to show for it? A long trail of media lies they ran out of desperation, hoping one last attack, one last scandal, would bring it all down.

Even now, when it looks like they have a chance to take back the midterms, they can’t help but still be this woman now and forever:

Michael Tracey posted this video of insane protesters who are trying to tie the Cornell 7 story into a Me Too No Kings anti-Trump rally.

He wrote, “These people are utter lunatics -- just a complete freak show.”

What I’ve learned coming out of this dark period is that most people on the Left aren’t strong. They are overly fragile and too easily undone.

MAGA, especially the women, are strong. Kellyanne Conway just went out and made herself look better. Sarah Huckabee Sanders got in shape. Karoline Leavitt batted away bullying taunts with a smile. That’s why Trump chose them. I hope the same is true for Katie Zacharia.

What did he say that was so bad? He made a joke that women dress like whores at the gym. It’s the kind of joke you laugh at without thinking too much. If you think about any joke, it’s not funny anymore. But if you hear it come out as he said it, it’s funny. It’s also funny because everyone knows it’s true, especially the women who dress like whores at the gym.

I watched his monologue and laughed. Now I’m surfing the manufactured controversy that SNL wanted to create. Let’s face it: imagine how hard it must be for them now. It’s non-stop Trump and MAGA jokes, and no one laughs at those anymore. They’re not funny.

Mixing it up, trying to pretend they still have the courage to be controversial and funny? That they can do. They knew his jokes were coming. They let him tell them to provoke the exact response they got from the self-righteous, empowered victims.

Listen for yourself:

Shane Gillis, once fired by the uptight, newly puritanical, cowardly SNL, is brought back and thrown in as a bloody hunk of meat into the churn because these folks have nothing better to do than clutch pearls and pretend any of it matters.

On Saturday Oct. 10, Gillis hosted “SNL” for his third stint and did two things: He said a four letter word on-air and called women “whores.” At a moment in which the country is reckoning with the reality of misogyny and sexual assault after the alleged “Cornell 7” gang rape became national news in September, everyone seems more concerned with the f-bomb than the very popular man denigrating women and promoting rape culture on live television.

He said a four-letter word on-air? Is that what we’re suddenly mad about? Take a look around lately, lady. There are no protections for kids anymore, not anywhere. Hearing an F-bomb on SNL would be the least offensive thing they hear or see online on an average day.

She can’t help but reference the Cornell 7 story, piling one lie on top of another, and so many of them just go along with it. The reaction pattern is so familiar and predictable by now, I already knew how the media would react before I even looked at the headlines. The story seems to exist just to feed the churn.

I feel foolish contributing to the “rinse/repeat” of it all. It’s rage-bait for those who were offended and those who weren’t, and all the while, SNL can still pretend it’s relevant and funny, even though it isn’t anymore and hasn’t been for a long time. Every so often, I find a skit I think is funny, but I always hold my breath wondering if they’re going to cross the line and offend one group or another.

I thought this was kind of funny:

They will likely never make fun of her size. Just her casting alone helps them be inclusive and representative but it is still funny.

And of course, it’s funny to say women dress like whores at the gym now, whether it’s true or not (it’s true). But they don’t just dress like whores at the gym. They’re practically naked on the red carpet now. Do they expect that people aren’t going to notice or say anything?

Music videos (and this has been true for a while), most are are too vulgar to even post here. Trust me. They look like porn set to music.

This has 380 million views:

They just can’t handle the word “whore” if it comes out of Shane Gillis’s mouth because they think he’s MAGA-adjacent (he’s not). He’s not afflicted with a crippling case of TDS. Most of his jokes were aimed at himself. He toned it down for network television and even that is too much for these fragile, coddled, unhinged scolds.

Even still, it wasn’t meant to be literal. It was meant as a joke. Of course, not all women who go to the gym dress like whores, but it is a thing now to show off for attention in real life and mostly online. Are we going to pretend this doesn’t happen?

Since when were we so fragile we couldn’t handle words? Oh yeah, I forgot. That’s the New Woke Order destroying all formerly great culture one mass-hysteria overreaction at a time.

We’re tough as men, they proclaim! We want to be treated as equals! But if you stop treating us as shrinking violets and helpless victims, how will we ever get our power back?

We used to think it was funny, especially the word “whore,” because almost no one uses it literally anymore. It is almost always used as a metaphor or a punchline.

Comedy has only one requirement: to be funny. How else do you get this scene in Terms of Endearment?

When I saw this scene in the movie theater, I laughed so hard that tears streamed down my face. When was the last time a movie or a late-night monologue was that funny?

I can’t imagine how Jack Nicholson would manage in today’s suffocating, oppressive atmosphere, or any great actor or writer or director.

Jamie Lee Curtis is hilarious in *A Fish Called Wanda* because she plays with the idea of how women dress to get male attention.

The reason the Left has lost their collective minds is that they don’t even know what comedy is anymore. To them, laughing just means making fun of Trump and MAGA. On repeat. And that isn’t funny anymore, if it ever was.

Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, these are not comedians. They’re puppets for the Democrats and that’s all they are. But the Left is so comfortable with a culture that is afraid of them throwing yet another fit, that they can’t deal with the one joke that somehow managed to get away.

And of course, SNL knew this would be the reaction. They knew it and they need it because Hollywood is dying on the vine. I want them to be more brave than even this. I want them to tell the scolds to POUND SAND. I’ve wanted that for ten years.

I really don’t want to give SNL any more attention for this rage-baiting stunt. I realize I’m playing right into their hands, but you know, it’s like women barely clothed at the gym. It’s harder than you think just ignoring what is impossible to ignore.

At least we know Shane Gillis won’t apologize. He’ll make it into yet another joke and it will be hilarious.

James Talarico disappeared for two weeks. No one knew where he went. Rumors began flying. Trump was saying he ate meat as a “vaygan” and then threw up all over the place and got very sick. Some suggested he might be orchestrating a major psych-out for the Right and that he was flying around in his invisibility cloak raising money for the Democrats.

Now he has emerged and said he had the flu. He is a diabetic and that flu took him out, so the story goes.

Here is how local news covered it in Texas:

It’s a tough fight for the GOP, which is kind of amazing considering Talarico is, to me, an Obama clone. He talks the same way. Acts the same way. Delivers his speeches exactly the same way. I know the Democrats need their Obama clones wherever they can find them - Ossoff in Georgia, Shapiro in PA - but Talarico is the most like Obama of the bunch. Either way, Trump is trying his best to hold the state for Team Red.

It is odd that someone that young would be taken out for that many days; estimates are 10 to 13, in the midst of campaign season.

They discussed this on 2Way, and Mark Halperin condemned Larry O’Connor for suggesting the media was covering up something much more serious, saying Paxton disappears all the time and no one asks questions. Oh, on the contrary. The Democrats show no mercy when it comes to exploiting any story or rumor about any candidate. So, by all means, GOP, have at it.

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Home Raided by Feds

Rumors have swirled forever that Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother to grant him citizenship. Is this why they raided her home, or is there something else there?

Tim Pool dives into it.

On the one hand, I oppose lawfare on principle. On the other hand, why is it that the Democrats always get to stretch the rules, and the Republicans are expected to always follow them? For her part, Omar’s statement:

I doubt they would go this far if they didn’t have the goods. Then again, the game the Democrats played in raiding Mar-a-Lago and prosecuting Trump on ticky-tack charges backfired greatly on them. It mobilized the Right and brought people like me in as new voters. If it is an October surprise, it best flip in the right direction.

Ben Shapiro Goes Viral

I’ve never had a clip go viral this big on X but it already has 1 million views.

If you’re interested, here is the clip. It’s kind of crazy, but Ben handled it well.

Mamdani Continues to Cosplay as President of the Other America

As usual, the media ran with a lie about a shooting of an illegal immigrant by ICE. The true story doesn’t matter. The Mamdani cosplay is all that matters, and he’s yet again bringing the fight to Trump to “abolish ICE” but also Medicare for All (over the world).

And of course, protests.

So this is how it went down, per Grok:

What in the world are ICE officers to do in such a case? Mayor Mamdani wants ICE out of New York just as Gavin Newsom demanded they leave California. That’s the pitch by the Democrats in the last act of the midterms: we won’t keep you safe. We won’t keep our borders safe. We don’t care about you, America. And yet, all polls indicate they will win the House and maybe the Senate.

I’ll keep doing these updates when I can as we head into the midterms.

Ashley St. Clair is everywhere. They’re spreading her thick like frosting on a birthday cake all over The New York Times, CNN, and all of the left-leaning podcasters as she attempts to build a platform on being a tell-all tattletale.

They proclaim she didn’t take the $40 million, without the ugly chaser — that she couldn’t get famous as Elon’s baby mama without being able to name Elon.

What else you got, Ashley? Can you do anything except bat your eyelashes at the latest adoring lens? Can you build anything? Make anything? Invent anything? Of course not. She wanted the baby, the money, and the fame.

All Elon wanted was privacy. No way, said the vampire. What good is having the richest man in the world’s baby if you can’t brag about it, build a name from it, become a living legend?

The vampires come at Elon from all sides, every second, every day. A once semi-respectable documentarian, Alex Gibney, lost his mind over Trump and turned his brand into a full-time GET TRUMP operation, but he sets his sights on Elon, of course. His four-hour documentary is getting rave reviews because, of course, it is. Inside the Doomsday Cult of the Left, that’s all they want.

Four hours of pumping even more hysteria into the already unhinged Doomsday Cult - what could possibly go wrong?

Think of what else Alex Gibney could be doing with his time. Think of the documentaries that might examine what is really happening in America, not the unending toxic cloud of fear. But no, it’s still the “resistance,” and in their fantasy world, they have to bring down the mighty beast because they think he’s about to rig the midterms.

Every day has to be the end of the world, and they will go to war until they have reclaimed their cultural and political dominance, even if they destroy everything they ever were or built. And destroy it they have. They enjoy all the luxuries billionaires give them, yet spend their days screaming at them.

This insane, hypocritical dynamic is beautifully illustrated in the new film Digger, which calls out the Left and especially the global elites for their hypocrisy. It’s no wonder critics trashed it, and it bombed at the box office.

It seems at first like it’s yet another Leftist screed against the Right, but it turns out to be one of the few films made by Hollywood that can turn the camera around for once to the people who see themselves as morally superior to the other half of the country, and to the richest man in the world.

Most of the caterwauling, wild-eyed Elon haters have no choice but to get their message out on the app Elon owns, the one he lets them use for free to build their own platforms, spread news, or even earn money if they choose. I mean, imagine going to war on the guy who built the most successful electric cars in history? What are we even doing here, people?

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, Trump gave Elon a richly deserved National Medal of Science.

I hate Elon, they scream on X. I hate Starlink, they scream while getting online in their vans in the middle of the Utah desert. I hate Elon, they screech, even as they pretend to want more EVs. The truth? They want to use emotional blackmail to win them over to their side, and then the storm will finally end.

All he’d have to do is be like Ashley St. Clair, turn himself over to them, vow to support them, and he, too, could get glowing coverage in The New York Times and on CNN!

I walk around my town, and I see Teslas everywhere. Yes, some of them have those stupid bumper stickers:

He gets attacked by his transgender child, who has instant fame just for being transgender and for attacking Elon. It’s the perfect weaponry for a generation that does not seem to have gotten the message that in America you can get the life you always wanted but, to quote Jack Nicholson in The Departed, “nobody gives it to you. You have to take it.”

Elon is just out there doing Elon things. He’s tweeting. He’s inventing. He’s thinking. And all the while, a nonstop campaign of destruction continues apace. They aren’t burning Teslas anymore, but that hasn’t stopped them from using whatever weapons they have to lob their ineffectual slings and arrows.

Elon is not perfect. No human is. But in casting him as a supervillain, the Left has once again left themselves with no wiggle room when their futile war finally exhausts itself. Maybe they’ll take the house, and their caterwauling in Congress will be on full display for all to see. They need to snap out of it, but ten years later, that still seems impossible.

As for Elon Musk, he will still be out there doing, not screaming, not throwing a tantrum, just the man in the arena, dragging humanity into the future, ready or not.

I think I’m like a lot of people in America, just trying to figure out which side is less crazy. Well, after the past year, I can say with confidence that the crazy side is still on the Left - the Democrats - and the rising radicalization that has overtaken the party.

I will confess there have been moments when the Right seemed to be heading in a crazier direction. Certainly, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor-Greene and others have lost the plot and sided with Radical Islam and Iran even over the United States. But then something interesting happened. Most Republicans rose up and openly defied them.

No one was afraid to go after the biggest podcasters or influencers, or even their own potential voters. They did not flinch. They did not back down. They stood up for what was right. I’m not saying siding with Israel is Right, necessarily, but shutting down the dark path many on the Right have been taking, including pushing conspiracy theories about the clear-cut assassination of Charlie Kirk, was brave.

Even if I still have left-leaning policy preferences, the days of the old Democrats are gone. I’ve been waiting ten years for all of them to snap out of their Trump Derangement Syndrome, to come out of the Doomsday Cult they’ve been trapped in, and to just let us be one country again, despite our differences. But that day never came.

I have seen the greatest minds of my former party flinch, back down, and cower in the face of an out-of-control mob of zealots and activists. I once believed Hillary Clinton was brave. That could not be further from the truth. She could not even stand up for women to play fairly in sports or to protect children from the harms of “Gender Affirming Care.”

Like Erin Friday, those of us who still care about the fate of children will still vote Republican, even though some Democrats are suddenly saying they are against surgery for minors and support biological women to play fairly in sports. Surgery does not include the medicalization of children, the seeds of which begin early at the hands of the Left, going all the way back to preschool and kindergarten.

Nothing terrifies me more than hearing Zohran Mamdani push universal preschool. They want them early. They want them young. And we have to try to stop them.

I watched Gavin Newsom crater and cater to the mob in chasing one mass hysteria wave after another, most recently, buying into the lie that Trump was suggesting Iran would nuke San Diego and Los Angeles. Newsom’s reaction to that alone proves he’s not just a coward but a liar. He knows Trump was not saying that, and even if he was, he’d be joking. Remember jokes?

It’s Newsom’s henhouse hysteria here that is disqualifying. He, like Hillary Clinton, like all of them, still has to feed the beast. They have to placate and validate the ongoing and unending hysteria in a party ruled mostly by Liberal white women. They just don’t realize how scared they look to people like me.

On my Nextdoor app, a guy is running for City Council. There was an actual witch hunt to uncover whether he voted for Donald Trump or not. They haven’t thawed out, even after Trump beat them again.

Their intolerance, their collective mania over Trump, has destroyed them. They might seem nice outwardly, but they have no plans for an America that includes people like me. I’ve been cast out, like everyone else who voted for Trump.

The party's leaders are too scared to lead. They’re so scared that even after Zohran Mamdani spent whole paragraphs going after Israel for the war in Gaza on October 7th.

He chose that day to placate the mob of fanatics, and they still weren’t placated. Some of them still punished him just for showing even the tiniest bit of sympathy to the victims of October 7th.

Some Democrats did condemn Mamdani, but notably, none of the major party leaders - not the Clintons, not Chuck Schumer, not Nancy Pelosi, and not the Obamas. Why not?

From Grok:

Barack Obama is now hitting the trail to stump for Abdul El-Sayed, even though he refused to name Iran as the greater threat to America. Yes, that’s the leader of the party now siding with a guy who is as radical and extreme as any political candidate in recent memory, certainly any on the Left. What is going on?

I can’t help but see a parallel with what’s unfolding in France now. A socialist system buckling under the strain of mass migration looks like America’s future all of a sudden. We were mostly there already in 2020.

Now, we have a DSA that has the full backing of Barack Obama and all major Democrats because they can’t win any other way. They had only two paths forward: become less crazy or become fully radicalized. We see where they’ve gone. They have now fully surrendered to the fanatics and the radicals.

The DSA is in full support of “gender affirming care” for minors.

They want to abolish ICE, open the borders, and provide Medicare for All.

And all of that before we even get to what they’ve done to culture, to Hollywood, to books, to libraries, to science.

There is something to be said about the Great Feminization, the way women have responded to the Lindsay Clancy case, and how they’ve tried to redeem female villains of late, like Lizzie Borden, Cathy in East of Eden, and Carrie. They have to erase the past and rewrite their woke origin story, even now.

I live in California. My vote won’t count for much. I see the fracture on the Right and how people like Tucker Carlson and others want to see Trump and MAGA punished over Iran. All I can say is: think bigger.

Just as Charlie Kirk was assassinated for his views and Trump was almost assassinated, the forces that now control the Left are the most extreme of my lifetime. They’re lucky. They have the media and Hollywood, which counts for a lot. But I know them. I was one of them. Now I want to do everything I can to stop them.

Marco Rubio gave quite the speech in Athens, Greece, and lays out this moment better than anyone ever has. You can read it for yourself at the State Department Substack (yes it has a Substack). Transcript to follow.

There are great ruins all across the world. In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself: remnants of distant cultures that have long passed beyond living memory.

But the Acropolis is different.

For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world. Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it – they’ve looked to it with wonder and they’ve looked to it with awe.

Now time has a tendency to dull the senses: great victories and catastrophic defeats, they seem to shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook, another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget. But the Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory. They call us back to them, again and again.

480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch. Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island. But there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home. So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of the age at bay for days. They were eventually overwhelmed. The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the Acropolis to the ground but when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood. And decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon.

For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow. And the progeny of the men who built it – the sons of Athens and Rome – have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the Earth.

Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now – I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic, and a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain – I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish.

The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born – Philadelphia – is itself a Greek name.

The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well-read in history – they were vividly aware of their unique place in it – but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity. Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist. No, the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s great men.

Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American Founders – and, for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them. Most of us are familiar with the basic history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states. Even much of our political vocabulary – words like democracy, tyranny, the word “politics” itself – found its origins here.

Now, all of that is true. But the things we owe to this place – as Americans, and as Westerners – are actually far far deeper. These institutions and ideas – these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks – qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system or theory.

Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristic of a people – expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.

To know them is to know ourselves.

What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man. The Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself. Much about – much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn’t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outwards to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world.

Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait – it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.

But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown can be known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood – and that there is a rational order to the cosmos, governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand.

This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine. Our philosophy, ethics, and religion. It paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology – of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law.

It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture, it was marked by a common anthropology – a common view of man and his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue; of destiny and fate; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of a code that dictates how men ought to live; of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle – to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction – from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization. And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.

Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.

The word “nationalism” became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.

And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.

But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left – the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.

And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.

Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Now for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive. They understood that nations have interests. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy, but they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail. They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.

This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump Administration hopes to reclaim – reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.

We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.

There are already signs.

Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginnings of a generational shift: skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague.

Greece has been at the center of this shift. The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike, on everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally.

And it’s our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example.

Though passions may, at times, have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them. Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting threats of our age.

And we can. Because we do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum. Quite the opposite: our vision is of an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a vision we saw in action just last month, in an unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland – an agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO. All three partners in that deal emerged victorious. All of Europe – and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger, and more secure because of it.

We want to win together. We must win together.

Now it’s has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people. And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.

They believed – fiercely – in the ideal of the great man: the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds. But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself. The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.

We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life. We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans – surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia – who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty. And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life – but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.

These – these are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination. From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country; from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country. Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.

This is wholly different from what we see, even now, for example from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.

Our heroes – our heroes may be willing to die for their cause; but our heroes do not worship death. It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles. Now, we take the West’s conception of these things – heroism, honor, duty – we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it. A civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence. The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo. The Greek philosophers’ search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, and then Galileo, then Kepler, and in Newton.

The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon. And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne, and Cortes.

And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew. An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition. The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit. The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.

The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers – born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.

Together, we must now rediscover that spirit. We are at an inflection point – an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization.

The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.

National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power.

And now, there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.

And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together – understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them; it is to defend them. And that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.

We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece. In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe’s borders from the threats of mass migration.

Our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation. When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle. Three years later, the great American statesman Daniel Webster, he delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American republic.

And he began by calling their attention to everything around them. This is what he said in his speech; he said: “This free form of government, this popular assembly… this practice of free debate, and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind… even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors.”

Those words are as true today as they were when he said them. And all of us – not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West – must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history.

The history of Greece – the history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse – it does not offer a glimpse of our institutions in their earliest forms. The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves.

It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud – that we should be intensely proud – of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West. From them – from them – we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.

Thank you.

If interested, have a listen.

The Honest Disciple

October 7: Israel, Palestine, and the War for Truth

Three years after October 7, the conversation surrounding Israel, Palestine, and everything that has happened since somehow feels more divided than ever…

Listen now

19 days ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Jerm and Sasha Stone

I always knew growing up half-Jewish meant hiding. I figured out early on that it wasn’t something you were supposed to be. My mother isn’t Jewish and, if anything, has never been a fan of Jews — especially now. It’s just the kind of thing you know growing up, even if you don’t talk much about it.

Hollywood rarely presented Jewish people to American audiences, even if Hollywood was run by Jews. That left me wondering why not. Did I look Jewish? Was that bad? As a young woman, I knew it meant I didn’t fit either place. I didn’t fit in the Jewish community, and I didn’t fit outside of it.

But somehow I just knew the shame that came with being born half-Jewish, or Jewish enough for the camps. A boyfriend once said, “They have to have done something…” Meaning: why were they so hated and persecuted? I can’t say I ever knew the answer, because I never knew the history.

I didn’t think about it much because my heroes, many of whom were Jewish, also didn’t talk much about it — Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen, or the Coen brothers. Steven Spielberg would finally address it in Schindler’s List, and that movie would help keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. But that was 1993. A lifetime ago.

How is it that it could be 2026 and we’d be living through a moment in history where they have turned “Zionist” into a slur? Was it always? And how easy it is now to see the word “Jew” hurled on social media as an insult so casually.

How could it be that Tucker Carlson, like so many others, could be so soft on Hitler now? He assumed, wrongly, that it was not Hitler’s fault we went to war.

With Jacob Reese-Mogg:

Here is Victor Davis Hanson:

Whole thing here.

It was so ignorant and dangerous of Tucker to spread these lies about Hitler that even Poland’s embassy in Washington had to issue a statement.

And every time I post about this, I know I will lose subscribers, especially paid ones, because Tucker Carlson has about 5.8 million subscribers on YouTube, not quite 6 million but getting there. And me, well, let’s just say I don’t have that many.

Undeniable tension is building within the MAGA movement as we head into the midterms. There are so many angry people on the Right, resentful that we bombed Iran “for Israel.” Foreign wars quickly became Israel’s war. Then it became about the money sent to Israel. But now, it’s anger at Trump for siding with the Jews.

I tried to stay neutral on the war in Gaza and have not talked much about what is happening on the Left and the Right. But it is getting too big to ignore. We are at a dramatic inflection point where the word “genocide” is hurled as both a weapon and a struggle session. SAY THE WORD, say it! Say it’s genocide!

It’s the last worst word. The rest of the words have been tossed on the scrap heap: fascism, Nazi, dictator, racist, rapist, bigot, sexist, homophobe, transphobe. What do words even mean anymore? They’ve been twisted, co-opted, and reshaped to control how we think about ourselves in the world and how we define what we believe.

If you say “it’s a genocide,” then you are in. If you deny it, you’re one of the bad people. They say it on the Left as emotional blackmail. They say it on the Right to imply intent. Those evil Jews just want to kill Palestinians when everyone knows the opposite is true.

Genocide

Every day, images flood social media of what Gaza looks like now after it was bombed by Israel. That’s proof of genocide, they said. How can it not be genocide? But the word they are looking for is war. That is what losing a war looks like. It is also what winning a war looks like.

World War II was beyond anything most people alive today could ever imagine. They can’t remember, and no one will tell them what war looks like. But here is what it looks like.

The Allies bombing Berlin into rubble.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki after getting nuked:

Is that “genocide”? No, that’s war. Genocide is the attempt to kill a whole people based on their ethnicity or their religion. That’s not what the Allies did in World War II, and it’s not what Israel has done now.

If anything, the opposite is true. Hamas, like much of the Islamic world, wants not just to kill Jews but to wipe them off the map. That’s genocide. They just don’t have the wealth or the weaponry to carry it out.

Here is Bill Maher:

Trump hit Iran to castrate a genocidal regime before it could nuke Israel, yes, but also other countries too. Death is nothing to jihadists. They have no problem using children as tools of propaganda and weapons of war as long as it serves a higher purpose.

October 7th was meant to be so bad that Israel had to respond, and then they would have their holy war to turn hearts and minds against Israel all over the world.

The footage from the war is their proof to the world that Jews are the bad ones, the Nazis, and Israel therefore must be destroyed. From the River to the Sea…

Antisemitism is nothing compared to genocide

For a time, it was bad to be antisemitic. Now, it feels like yet another word that has no power. Anyone who is charged with antisemitism can deflect it much more easily than being called a rapist or a racist. It’s a way out for Jews who do not wish to be hated or shunned for being Jewish but not a Zionist, or Jewish but not approving of what Israel has done, Jewish but not really.

But the problem is that Israel is the only place left where Jews could reclaim their homeland. As Jeremy Boreing said so eloquently, they have nowhere else to go. The war against them has lasted thousands of years. It won’t stop any time soon.

Whole thing here.

I can see the fight now, too. It’s not Left or Right. It’s not blue or red. It’s a fight for Western civilization. Israel represents not just democracy but civilization in an uncivilized part of the world.

Forcing women to cover their faces and bodies, marrying 9-year-olds, throwing gay people off rooftops, and stoning women to death is not civilized, and no amount of woke ideology will change that.

It is not civilized to fly airplanes into buildings and mass murder thousands of Americans. It’s not civilized to wear a suicide vest and blow up a building. It’s not civilized to paraglide into the Nova music festival and rape, torture, and murder Israelis for Allah.

We are fighting a war here, too. It’s a war for the truth. We’ll have politicians winning elections now who will push the lies, some in office already do. And they will try to distort and co-opt October 7th.

The woke white liberals desperately want this to be a story about white supremacy and oppressed brown people, but at some point, there is no saving the entire world. There is saving civilization.

This Claude AI video beautifully illustrating Western civilization went viral last week, and nothing has put things into perspective better than this.

So here are some hard truths:

War isn’t exactly civilized either. It’s the worst thing human beings can do to each other, but we’ve been doing it almost as long as we’ve been around. But if someone starts a war, they’d best be prepared to fight to the death. One side or the other will win. And one side will lose.

Hitler would not have stopped. He had to be stopped. Hamas will not stop, and they have to be stopped. Gaza looks that way not because of genocide, but because of war. Hamas can surrender any time. That would not be true if this were a genocide.

If Israel walks away from finishing the job, they will lose the war, and Hamas will win. They are fighting for the civilized world they built. So are we. We will lose our country if we do not understand that.

I would fight for Israel’s right to keep its home even if I weren’t half-Jewish. It isn’t my home. But it is theirs.

My father was Jewish and went to Hebrew school. I wasn’t raised with any faith at all, except for the times I spent at my grandmother’s house, where she would celebrate the traditional holidays, both Christmas and Chanukah. She died a long time ago.

I think of her now, what she would think of me, what she would want me to fight for, what she would want me to stand for. She kept her portrait of Bill Clinton taped to her kitchen wall until the day she died. She was a lifelong FDR Democrat. How proud she must have been to have a president who knew what a monster Hitler was and moved mountains to stop him.

I can’t imagine what she’d think of today’s Democratic Party, who have no courage left to fight for people like her and have lost their perspective because none of them know the meaning of words. They are afraid of their own voters and they have no spine. So they allow Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker to take over the party and tell them what to think and say.

I could probably do much better, make more money, be more popular on the Left and the Right if I just said two words: “Free Palestine.” But I can’t do that. My grandma would expect more from me. A little bit of courage 80 years after a real genocide that killed off much of her family is not too much to ask.

The Executive Order didn't get nearly as much attention:

But how to whip people into an existential frenzy ahead of the midterms? It couldn’t be business as usual, no.

It’s hard sometimes to understand what Trump says amid “The Weave.” He is always half-joking and often skipping around various ideas, a method his audience always understands, and it’s the kind of thing you have to watch the entire rally to really get.

They had to cherry-pick something Trump didn’t say and blow it up into a much bigger story. And here, Trump teases the audience with what might happen if Iran had a nuke: “let them take out Los Angeles and San Diego.” Meaning, all of those “Dumocrats” who call this a useless war might not see it that way if one of their cities were taken out.

It’s easy enough to understand if you know how Trump speaks, but millions of Americans don’t. And now, of course, this is all the media wants to talk about.

When they say “take Trump seriously but not literally,” we know that on the Left the opposite is always true. They seem to bob and weave between various incarnations of Trump: he’s idiotic, he’s a clown, no, he’s Hitler, no, he wants to nuke Los Angeles! No, he can barely walk! No, he died last weekend! Wait, no, he’s terrifying!

He is everything they need him to be to fulfill their fantasies of what defines their immediate threat. It makes me sad to see what has become of a once-thriving utopia. It makes me sad to see people this easily manipulated.

And all I could think was that it seemed like old times. I believed them. I trusted them. Why would CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, or the LA Times lie? That’s my entire life of building faith in the media establishment. They couldn’t be lying. Oh, but they could, and did. They don’t really see it as lying. They see it as batting for the home team, even if deep down they know they are passing along something exaggerated or false.

John Nolte of Breitbart has been writing about this for years, compiling list after list of hoaxes (list compiled by Grok):

• Russia Collusion Hoax

• Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax

• Smollett Hoax

• Covington KKKids Hoax

• Very Fine People Hoax

• Seven-Hour Gap Hoax

• Russian Bounties Hoax

• Trump Trashes Troops Hoax

• Policemen Killed at Mostly Peaceful January 6 Protest Hoax

• Rittenhouse Hoax

• Eating While Black Hoax

• Border Agents Whipping Illegals Hoax

• NASCAR Noose Hoax

• The Georgia Jim Crow 2.0 Hoax

• Trump Assaulted Secret Service Agents and Grabbed Steering Wheel of Beast Hoax

• MAGA Assaulted Paul Pelosi Hoax

• COVID Lab Leak Theory Is Racist Hoax

• Hunter Biden’s Laptop Hoax

• Joe Biden Will Never Ban Gas Stoves Hoax

• COVID Deaths are Over-Counted Is a Conspiracy Theory Hoax

• Mass Graves of Native Children in Canada Hoax

• The Trump Killed All the Fish Hoax

• Hamas Hospital Hoax

• John Fetterman Is Healthy Hoax

• If Reelected, Trump Will Execute People Hoax

• The Alfa Bank Hoax

• Libs of TikTok Murdered Non-Binary Teen Hoax

• The Aaron Rodgers Sandy Hook-Truther Hoax

• The “Bloodbath” Hoax

I would bet most people on the Left believe all of these things are true, even now. They are like I used to be. To question any of it is an existential threat. If one thing isn’t true, then maybe nothing is true. That’s where I ended up in 2020, after I watched the New York Times hesitate in its reporting on the violence in the summer of 2020.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. There are so many that it’s hard to keep up. We now have the “pedophile hoax,” alongside the “Natalie Harp hoax,” though neither is true except inside the minds of those in the Doomsday Cult.

It’s no wonder they are all so insane now. Who can function like that? These are people who are more terrified by “something Trump said” than by bullets whizzing through the air and hitting Trump or Charlie Kirk.

The problem was that Trump’s rallies helped him and the GOP because when voters hear from him directly, they are reminded of the false reality the media presents about who Trump really is and who his supporters are. A hard lesson for me, that’s for sure, in who was telling the truth and who was lying.

So when I see all of them out there, like sleazy opportunist Gavin Newsom, riding the wave of a false media narrative, my heart sinks. It isn’t just that I want the Left to snap out of it.

But you see what a nice reach-around you get from the most prominent news outlets in the land? So why wouldn’t they? Nothing makes me feel more like the bottom has dropped out than seeing what the legacy media has done to all of us.

The legacy media should never have become propaganda for the Democrats, and yet, here we are.

I keep wishing we could have a shared reality, that there weren’t two Americas fighting a futile and pointless war just over the media narrative.

We should all be able to agree on what is true. I just want truth and reality to enter the chat. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.