They don’t seem to know where the line is anymore. They believe they can say whatever they want, no matter how cruel or ugly, and nothing will ever happen to them. And guess what? They’re right.

So when Jimmy Kimmel joked that Melania was “glowing like an expectant widow,” he hoped it would offend Trump enough to prompt a Truth Social post. He desperately needs Trump’s attention because always telling the same stale Trump jokes to a room full of middle-aged women doesn’t make him feel important enough.

These aren’t jokes. They’re cries for attention. They’re not funny. They’re ugly. They’re Two Minutes of Hate disguised as late-night comedy.

They like the taste of blood, and they crave more of it. They never recoil in horror, not even after Trump was almost shot dead on live television, or after Charlie Kirk actually was, and certainly not now. To them, it’s just another inconvenient fact that is getting in the way of their endless war, their quagmire against Trump.

They can’t cancel Trump. They can’t shame him. They can’t punish in any other way except to dehumanize him, his wife and family, and his supporters. They don’t see themselves as the sneering upper crust in a John Hughes high school comedy, but that is exactly who they are.

Kimmel’s “joke” was made before the assassination attempt, but who are we kidding? He couldn’t even wait until Charlie’s body was cold before he let one rip. That got him tossed off the air for five seconds, which created such a media sensation you’d think he’d been captured as a prisoner of war in Iran.

For that brief moment in time, though, Kimmel’s life meant something. He was no longer a Friar’s Club reject/two-bit comedian entertaining the likes of Rosie O’Donnell and Barbra Streisand. Now, he was a martyr for free speech, deserving of lengthy applause and standing ovations.

Jimmy Kimmel is nothing without Trump, and probably somewhere deep down, he knows that. He wants those adoring looks from his insufferable, woke wife, and he wants people to see him as more than just a comedian. He’s a brave warrior of the “resistance!”

What Kimmel needs more than anything, what they all need, is for Trump to glance their way. It’s attention-seeking toddler behavior. None of it is real. They just want a starring role in history, and Kimmel thinks he’s that guy. He thinks books will be written about him as the one man who made Trump mad enough to get tossed from the airwaves (for like two seconds).

Trump should ignore Jimmy Kimmel. He should resist the urge to ever notice him, and by all means, never call for him to be fired. All that does is feed his greatest fantasy, that he matters, that he’s the guy who got to Trump. No, not with an assassin’s bullet, but with a joke that wounded deeper.

They know that there is a part of Trump who seeks acceptance from the cultural elite. They know it, which is why they keep that one thing from him, with their decade-long sneer.

It belongs to us, and you can’t have it. Fine, it’s collapsing anyway.

What Melania says is right. Kimmel should be fired, not so much for a joke because he does nothing but dehumanize Trump and half the country every single night. Why would they want that to be what defines the network?

Trump’s attention did nothing but ignite more bleating from the bloviating brigade of sanctimonious, self-righteous “journalists” and Jane Fonda. Always Jane Fonda.

These folks don’t care about speech in principle. They care only about their speech. They don’t care about freedom. They just want their utopia back. They pretend to be the moral side, the decent side, but they’re not. They can pretend all they want, but it’s obvious by now, with how they justify an ugly joke like pretending Melania wants Trump dead.

And of course, Jake Tapper had to cluck his tongue and lecture us all:

Does Kimmel deserve to be fired? I can’t care. To care would mean he mattered enough to bother, and he doesn’t. He’s not that important. He’s only important when Trump notices him, and then he becomes a story.

The truth is that he’s begging to be fired. He wants that permanent place in history as proof that Trump was an authoritarian after all, and there’s Jimmy Kimmel to prove it.

Nothing will ever be fair about this. Conservatives will be fired for much less. Offend the wrong people, and these folks will never come to your aid.

Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center fired me after I wrote their women in the Oscars report for ten years, just because the Hollywood Reporter announced I was now a Trump supporter. No one should take any of these people seriously.

My advice, Mr. President, ignore him. Nothing will bother him more than that. He needs you more than you need him. Let his jokes hang in the air like a stench that lingers long after everyone else has left the room.

“

As promised, my conversation with my friend Andy Schaalman who has a Substack called but does most of his work on his YouTube channel The Generation Report.

We are catching up on our current Fourth Turning. We touch on the assassination attempt, the war in Iran, Israel, the danger of the Left taking back power and what our future might be. We are at a crisis point and it could go either way.

This is the video from his channel recommended in the podcast:

I left the Democratic Party in 2020 because I couldn’t take it anymore. I am not sure what triggered my disgust, but all I know is that I could not go along with what the party had become and what I could see playing out every day on social media. I watched everyone I knew, every prominent person of power, justify their dehumanizing rhetoric, all aimed at one man and his supporters.

I recoiled in horror then. It felt like ice in my veins, or worse, dark sludge, something like evil. Why are we doing this, I wondered. Why have we abandoned all of our principles of decency and kindness? What of the lawn signs that say “everyone is welcome”?

I knew it was wrong. I also knew speaking out about it would be the end of my status online, many of my friendships, and eventually, by 2024, all of my income, as my business was destroyed and my reputation collapsed for the sin of voting for and supporting Donald Trump.

Now, we’re at the point on the Left where all the words — the extreme hyperbole—have been used up, and nothing has changed. There was ever only one place left to go, and that was to take up arms and start shooting people.

Cole Allen, who is Trump’s third would-be assassin, like Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson, is not a madman, not like the shooter who murdered Melissa Hortman. He wasn’t hearing voices. He wasn’t suffering from PTSD. He made a sober and calculating decision to do what so many have been begging “someone” to do ever since Trump won.

Here are some TikToks.

From Cole Allen’s manifesto:

Allen is a gamer, and he talks about his potential assassination as if he’s walking us through one of the first-person shooter games he might livestream. He sees himself as a vigilante out for justice against the world’s greatest evil.

How does he come to these conclusions about Trump? Oh, I don’t know, maybe ask the legacy media and the Democrats who have been pushing these lies about Trump for ten years. Cole Allen, like so many other would-be assassins, took them at their word. He doesn’t know it’s all just politics.

Allen said, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” which is not that different from what your average Democrat broadcasts on social media every day.

After ten years of dehumanizing language, they can’t see the reality of who Trump is anymore, much less see his supporters as their fellow Americans. They can only see the delusion - the mirage - the supervillain they invented. If he isn’t even a human anymore, then killing him is as easy as taking out the garbage.

They speak in mantras. They mirror each other. Their hysteria spreads from person to person and ultimately unites them. They are as aligned and of one mind as a cult. They must believe they are still the “resistance” going to war on an insurmountable evil force that can’t be defeated in any ordinary way. It requires something extraordinary, someone, to “just do it.”

When they are confronted with the reality of real-world violence, and they must reckon with who and what they have become, they go on autopilot, make their canned statements about generic political violence, but never atone for anything they’ve done to bring us to this point - all of them are culpable - the Democrats, the Never Trumpers, and the legacy media.

Cole Allen is a victim of the Doomsday Cult and its dehumanizing propaganda machine. He is consumed by the delusion that keeps them locked away and terrified of the monsters outside. But by now, shouldn’t they be asking themselves who the monsters really are? Maybe they should take a good, long look in the mirror.

As Nietzsche once warned:

If I thought I could save the Left, I would start by telling them to stop calling Trump and his supporters Nazis. I would tell them that dehumanizing language almost always leads to violence. It has nowhere else to go.

I would tell them it’s long past time to accept that Donald Trump won in 2016 and in 2024, and they lost. It’s time they reckoned with that too. Their lies, their rage, their manufactured helplessness have taken them nowhere good. Three assassination attempts on Trump and the death of Charlie Kirk should be enough.

I would tell them that we still have to share this country, even with —especially with—people we don’t agree with. I would tell them that they aren’t better than half the country. I would tell them they had no right to claim democracy for themselves. It doesn’t belong to them.

I would tell them that they’ve destroyed themselves trying to destroy Trump. They have wrecked families, relationships, marriages, friendships, communities, culture - and all for what? To cling to the democracy that was never theirs to begin with? I have so much to tell them, if only they would listen.

The violence against Trump supporters began in 2015 and continued throughout his first four years.

Is it really that surprising that nine years later, someone would try to assassinate him?

How was it that we as a nation were not brought to our knees after that? How is it that the Left could simply soldier on, with the same dehumanizing Nazi rhetoric as though none of this had happened?

It should have been the day that changed everything. But somehow, it wasn’t. To them, they always had the fallback of blaming guns. They’re all reading from the same script, and this is their only way out.

To humanize someone is to have the courage to see them as the complicated, flawed, imperfect people they are. To dehumanize them is to convict them of high crimes and misdemeanors in the Court of Public Opinion. We have built a panopticon that decides guilt, and it’s taken us all the way to this moment, where political violence is just more fodder for the churn.

So let’s get this straight once and for all. Trump is someone who is not afraid to say offensive things in a time when an entire movement believes words are violence, but violence is a way to stop the words.

Trump’s efforts to build a ballroom, transform the Kennedy Center, clean up the streets, end wars, protect women in sports, use the tariffs to bring back jobs, and protect children from the cult are all MAGA — Make America Great Again. People say he’s doing it for himself, but maybe he’s doing it because he loves this country. We give him the benefit of the doubt because it’s the right thing to do.

And if you can’t get all the way there, at least get halfway there. Get to the part where he’s the guy from The Apprentice, who built all of those gold buildings in Vegas. To see him for who and what he is will heal the pathology that has consumed the Left. But we know if three assassination attempts won’t do it, nothing will.

A part of me really did think that if Trump won again in 2024, the mass delusion would be punctured at long last. Maybe it would be like that moment in Salem in 1692, when the accusations became so ridiculous that the whole fantasy collapsed. But that never happened.

Instead, everything got worse. The hyperbole got worse. Detainment centers were concentration camps. ICE officers were the Gestapo. Trump wasn’t just a rapist, racist, fascist, dictator, felon, demagogue, criminal, but now, he was also a pedophile and, before long, a war criminal. They had nowhere left to go except to wish for his death, to manifest it, and make posts about it on TikTok.

There is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from them. I can only hope in those dark nights of the soul when I worry about the future - the future for this country, the future for my daughter — that the scrappy coalition known as MAGA can hold the line.

///

I had planned on posting a podcast tonight, but the timing’s not quite right, so I’ll hold off. I will be speaking to tomorrow, and I’ll be posting that conversation. We’ll discuss this event, plus more, regarding where we are in history with the Fourth Turning.

What I’ve read is that Trump will still give his speech, and the evening will continue. There is no more news on this at this time. I will update this post if I get any more.

At this early stage, it looks like this is the third assassination attempt on President Trump.

And from Bo Erickson of Reuters:

And from the White House Pool report, note the agent standing directly in front of Trump:

Trump just posted this on Truth Social:

Trump and everyone else are safe and sound, thank God.

You know, the President who wiped the floor with the oligopoly the Left has become by winning a second term in 2024 despite their 10-year war on him? The one they’ve called Hitler, a fascist, a dictator, a felon, a war criminal, a rapist, a pedophile? Yeah, that guy.

They should feel lucky they have a chance to break bread with the man who cleaned their clock and humiliated them on the world stage. But instead, as usual, it’s a cacophony of caterwauling.

They’re huffing and puffing about their manufactured delusion that they are under threat by a dictator, so now they’re planning on a “forceful defense” of “freedom of the press,” and to “toast the First Amendment.”

These are the charges leveled at him by the New York Times, wherein they end with the part where Trump seeks less bias in network television:

In the run-up to the 2024 election and then into his second term, Mr. Trump has sued ABC News, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among other news organizations. (ABC and CBS each paid $16 million to settle with the president; a judge recently dismissed Mr. Trump’s suit against The Journal; The Times is fighting Mr. Trump in court.) He has also threatened to strip TV stations of their federal broadcast licenses because of what he deemed biased coverage.

The only group more hated than Hollywood right now is the press. Self-centered and self-important, they lie to and sneer at the American people every day. So much so that a large swath of the public has simply tuned them out.

While some of them did make the pivot away from being full-time propagandists for the Democrats, too many of them are still partying like it’s 2016. It isn’t. The country wants to move on from the “resistance.” It’s exhausting. Shut up already.

Maybe if they could stop throwing temper tantrums every five seconds and tell us the truth rather than their ongoing campaign against one man and his supporters, the public might trust them again. As it is, no thanks.

They have failed us. They are not the heroes of this story. They are the villains. They are in no position to judge Trump or anyone who voted for him. They perpetuate the partisan divide in this country. They sell fear and hysteria every day. Most Americans can’t ever snap out of it because they still trust the corporate media and propaganda press to tell them the truth. And worst of all, they lie.

They don’t see it as lying. They see it as giving their audience what it wants, but they lie by omission. They tell their interpretation of events, cherry-picking the worst and selling it back to their readers and viewers. It’s tearing this country apart and keeping those who still tune into their messaging in a state of perpetual anxiety that every day is the end of the world.

Perhaps they would be in a position to judge if they hadn’t covered up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, looked the other way at the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop, transformed it into pure propaganda for the Democrats, and buckled under the pressure of the mob when cancel culture took hold such that they couldn’t even tell parents the truth about the transgender contagion that had gotten into the minds and bodies of children.

That’s all they know by now, so no wonder they see the WHCD like they see everything else, that it should belong only to them, and the half of the country that voted for Trump should be kept out.

At least some of them have the decency to boycott, so we don’t have to listen to the self-righteous bloviating:

Stephen Colbert:

And of course, the ladies of The View:

What the press needs is less Marc Elias and more Donald Trump. Sorry, but it’s true. Eat your vegetables. They might not taste good, but you’ll live longer.

—podcast still coming…watch this space.

The Left has decided to glom onto this narrative and pretend like, suddenly, Carlson and others are “waking up” to how bad Trump is. As in:

David A. Graham, known for such measured and objective pieces like this:

I didn’t pony up the dough to go behind the paywall and read this, so I don’t know if he mentions the ongoing rage against Israel by the podcasters, which is the story here. But I’m guessing he doesn’t.

Also not mentioned in this Variety story:

But if they are not leading with anger over Israel, they are not telling the truth. That is why Tucker Carlson feels betrayed and why he and his brother went on and on about how much they regret their vote. You can watch it for yourself. Here he is with his brother talking about how Trump was bought off!

It actually gets worse. They go on to say how there should be a Jew purge in the administration, with Tucker saying some of Trump’s staff are texting him and are prepared to resign over it.

So, naturally, they would think Israel capable of assassinating Charlie Kirk. What wouldn’t they do to grow their global empire?

And here is another one, but again, behind the paywall:

The reason the press can’t tell the true story is that they’ve been calling Trump Hitler for ten years. He can’t be both Hitler and the guy standing with Israel. That might paint a more sympathetic, heroic figure than the one they’ve been selling, and they can’t afford to see his poll numbers rise. It’s all going so well for them.

Ryan Clancy’s story on Real Clear Politics today talks of the horseshoe between the anti-war Left and the isolationist Right, and he believes that America should be a force for good in the world:

If America withdraws from the world today, does anyone doubt Russia or China would jump in to exploit the vacuum America left behind? Do any of us want to live in a world defined by Russian and Chinese values, and or to have global shipping and trade routes and energy supplies dictated by the whims of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?

Trump clearly sees America as a force for good and is making big, bold moves in that direction. While the podcasters who turned on Trump will say it’s because he’s not America First enough, they might forget everything he’s already done on behalf of his base to his own detriment.

—DOGE turned into burning Teslas and No Kings protests.
—Mass deportations by ICE led to two people being killed and a decline in support from Hispanic voters.
—The tariffs were meant to bring back manufacturing, and no one gave him any credit for it whatsoever, and they wanted him to abandon it.

They want him to magically fix the economy, and most people don’t want a war driving up gas prices right now when America isn’t back the way everyone hoped it would be. But none of that would have ignited such a passionate response from Tucker as to see Trump as a “slave” to Israel.

Somehow, in times of chaos and economic despair, it always comes back to the Jews. Before World War II, Hitler spoke of how the Jewish people had to be eradicated. They have no homeland, he argued, back before the end of the war and the formation of Israel:

I could never have followed these folks into that dark world. Half of my family on my dad’s side is Jewish. My granduncle fought at Pearl Harbor. Most of my uncles were soldiers who fought proudly for this country. It isn’t that all of us cared that much about Israel, but we knew enough to pay attention when all of this darkness begins to creep back in.

I find myself paying more attention to the wise Victor Davis Hanson:

The extremes on the Left and the Right are both arriving at the same place, so much so that you half-wonder if Hasan Piker will be Tucker Carlson’s next guest.

Working on a podcast, I hope to post tonight or tomorrow.

Trigger warning: Tolentino speaks the language of the progressive woke Left, and there is nothing more irritating on this earth, so proceed with caution.

I lasted about 12 minutes, when he started prattling on about Marxism, I was out. All of his talk about stealing from the rich got me thinking. Isn’t he rich?

So why shouldn’t someone steal from him? Maybe they need a new computer, a treadmill, a nice watch, or a new dog? Just because he’s moved the pieces around and decided who deserves it, doesn’t mean any random criminal out there can’t do the same. Maybe it’s all fun and games until you feel it for yourself.

This interview sounds like snotty college kids hanging out in the multi-purpose room at Oberlin, talking about a world they do not know. His message resonates somehow because there aren’t many places left to go in the insular world of the pampered ruling class, except to cosplay socialist revolutionaries.

As podcasters go, Piker’s YouTube is only up to about a mil and change. Small potatoes compared, but apparently, his Twitch is where he gets most of his traffic. After the scandal erupted over the possibility that he had shocked his dog to keep it in the camera’s frame while he bloviated about this or that, Walter Kirn said he immediately went into Column B. I agree.

He denies it, of course, but the story went that he needed the dog in the frame and the dog wanted to get up, so he shocked her to keep her there. It’s too horrible to imagine, and I have no idea if it’s true. The legacy media and the Democrats desperately want to rehab him, which is why no one talks about the dog incident much anymore.

When he isn’t into shocking his dog (allegedly), he says shocking things like he understands why healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered, sympathizes with Hamas and Hezbollah, and yes, believes it’s perfectly fine to steal from museums, corporations, and even intellectual property.

Ben Shapiro has a sharp take on this:

Hasan Piker is The Rich, whether he wants to admit it or not. He’s one of the many socialist socialites who feel comfortable screaming about billionaires this, billionaires that, all the while being on the side with all of the money and all of the power. They’ve adopted the religion of Wokeism to justify it. They borrow oppression.

How do you think the extremely wealthy Obamas preserve their cred?

I once tried to forge my mother’s check to buy food at a local fast-food joint. They told my brother about it, and he slapped me hard across the face. I can still feel the sting. It taught me a lesson, though. Don’t forge checks and don’t steal. I was hungry, and we had no food. I could have justified it per Hasan Piker. My brother did me the favor of punishing me for it. Who knows what might have happened to me otherwise?

Piker and these women are casually influencing young people to go down a path that might land them in jail one day - is jail cool? I don’t know, ask the Manson girls who followed Manson’s crazy cult in their 20s and spent the rest of their lives behind bars. It ain’t worth it, not even for a dude with pecs who shocks his dog (allegedly).

One thing’s for sure. None of the people listening to Piker are poor enough to justify stealing from anyone. His audience is mostly rich college kids whining about their privilege: why should I have to work at all? Gimme gimme gimme, I need, I need, I need, I need.

That’s the message from the Democrats - if you can’t get it for free, steal it.

The Democrats did nothing but bring this up as evidence that Trump was a racist and his supporters were Nazis. That lie has been perpetuated for ten years. The death of Heather Heyer was attributed to Trump, and the Democrats milked it for all it was worth.

Well, now Trump’s DOJ has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for funding the Unite the Right rally, among other hate groups. Here is the mic drop:

The indictment can be read by clicking here.

It is a little like how the FBI entrapped Muslim men to bring necessary scalps to the public in the war on terror, and did the same thing with the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping, the find “MAGA extremists,” conveniently before the 2020 election, and again with January 6th, though there hasn’t been sufficient evidence to nail that one down yet.

In the case of the SLPC, it looked like they needed a constant supply of racists, White Supremacists, and extremists to justify the donations. This was a mass delusion that might have had some real-world connections, but was mostly about the Democrats holding power because everything in the last ten years has been about Democrats holding power.

None of it ever felt real, even back when I was a Democrat. I wondered, what America are they talking about? Unfortunately, it’s a mass delusion that continues to this day. You have to wonder about those phony Patriot Front “protests” now.

Nicely done, DOJ.

Dear Senator Murphy,

There was a time when I was your biggest fan. I thought your filibuster on gun control was one of the most miraculous things I’d ever seen in government. “Wow,” I thought. “That’s a hero.” I was locked into a feedback loop back then and very much part of a system that built totalitarianism in this country. You couldn’t see it then, and neither could I.

I can’t fault you for falling for the same deceptive practices as I did by a ruling class — a true oligarchy, a woke oligarchy you might call it — because how were you to know? You have to somehow compete with the noise, and after a ten-year war on Trump, you’re all running out of names to call him and running out of excuses to explain your failures across the board.

Those failures include abandoning America’s working-class majority to chase utopia. I know. I was part of it too. That utopia is a gun-free world, isn’t it, Senator Murphy? But it’s also blurring the boundaries that have protected children throughout my lifetime. Thank God for Donald Trump, the one man who could fight back against all of you and win, not once but twice.

I was disgusted to hear your words against this country, its president, and reality itself when you stood before a crowd in Barcelona and said the following:

Why are you lying about this country, Senator? Trump isn’t trying to destroy democracy — he is only in power because of democracy. Note how you choose your words carefully. You say:

“He’s trying to steal OUR democracy.
He’s trying to seize OUR courts, OUR law enforcement, OUR media.”OUR? You mean YOUR, Senator, not OUR.

Let me set the record straight: Donald Trump was elected because you failed. You have lost control of your message and failed the people. All you’ve done for ten years is screech about Trump, blame Trump, lie about Trump to cover up your inability to reach the people with your own vision, your own hope, your own solutions. You have none.

All you ever had to do was stick with the truth, not lie, about who Trump really was, and you would not have lost to him a second time. But in painting him as Hitler, a fascist, a totalitarian, a pedophile, a felon, a dictator, you overplayed your hand, and that is how you got a pie in the face for a decade.

You cower on the sidelines and point your finger, “But teacher! He said a bad word! I’m telling!” You offer nothing for people like me who abandoned the Democratic Party long ago, back when I could see the real totalitarian threat.

It was never from Trump, who was the totalitarian. He’s just the only person on the planet who could stand up to you, deflect and survive your attacks, and prevail. Shouldn’t that tell you something? You threw everything you had at him, and he won again. That’s not authoritarianism or totalitarianism. That’s democracy.

Trump has made this country much freer, much more open, and given my daughter and others like her a chance to grow up in a country as I did, where I wasn’t afraid to say what I really think. If it sometimes bleeds into the offensive well, that’s the price we pay for a free society. At least young people have a chance. That is, if we can keep the real totalitarians out of power until such time as you can get a grip.

How is it that you and the Democrats have cultivated a climate of fear and a culture of silence and do not see it for what it is? You sought to censor speech via social media, violating the First Amendment. You captured Hollywood and the legacy media. You attempted to lie about law enforcement and defund the police. You have laid down indoctrination in place of education. Then you demanded we all go along with it or else. Haven’t you ever read 1984?

But worst of all, you have lied. You lied about Trump, and you lie about yourselves. That has hurt you more than Trump ever could. You live inside a delusional feedback loop and give the people what you think they want to hear. Well, guess what? You’re wrong. The people just want to hear the truth, and most reasonable Americans can see you for what you are: a coward and a liar.

All you had to ever do was offer the people something better. You couldn’t, and you still can’t. All you have are the lies that you are forced to tell your own voters to cover up for your failures.

This country does not belong to you. It belongs to all of us. Trump did not roll in with troops and overtake this country. He won the popular vote.

In America, you have to win elections by appealing to the public for their vote. You failed. Why? Children were being indoctrinated into a cult. They were being told, and still are, that they were born in the wrong body and all they had to do was take drugs and they could “fix” themselves. We were told we had to agree with that, to love Big Brother and declare 2+2=5. That isn’t all of it, but it’s symbolic of how your side lost touch with reality. It was the line people like me could not cross.

Right now, a faction of Trump’s supporters is throwing hissy-fit tantrums because they’re mad about Israel. It would be a great time for the Democrats to offer the people something, anything other than this mass deception, this grand illusion, this lie you have been telling America and spreading throughout the world. You have that opportunity sitting right in front of you, but you have to keep your cult afraid, awash in the same psychosis.

I feel sorry for you, Senator. Watching all of you lose your minds over Trump, all because you could not defeat him, makes you look weak.

Anyway, I just thought someone should tell you the truth, for once.

Eric Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign was a ticking time bomb, and the Democrats knew it. They’ve denied it, but come on, are we really supposed to believe that a story that was kicking around in 2019 and set to break in Politico did not reach the ears of Nancy Pelosi? The question isn’t whether they knew, but why they did nothing about it and essentially let Swalwell loose upon the world with access to Snapchat and hotel rooms.

Swalwell was one of Pelosi’s protoges, a foot soldier for the party bosses who decided Donald Trump should never lead this country, no matter the election outcome. They convicted him on Inauguration Day, then spent the next four years finding the crime. The biggest and most embarrassing of these was Russiagate, where Swalwell played a starring role.

They knew Trump would not be removed from office, but they decided to wait out the clock, waste his time and ours, with a phony scandal that, to this day, has never been adequately addressed by legacy media or the Democrats. They just moved on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and all the while, there was Swalwell doing everything right.

There he was on Impeachment Number 2, saying all the things, drawing all of the conclusions, pushing all of the hysteria.

For his efforts, Swalwell was beloved by celebrities like Robert De Niro, late-night comics like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. For a time, he was like Icarus, soaring as one of the Democrats’ shining stars.

No wonder he thought he should be next in line to lead California now that Gavin Newsom is running for president. All that’s required of him is that he be someone who can take on Trump.

But Icarus flamed out. In the past week, we watched a political hit that has to be among the cleanest and most efficient on record. One minute, he was leading in the polls — the next, he was dropping out and resigning from Congress. Swalwell never had a chance.

Powerful forces that will never be known wanted him out because there was a good chance the “open secret” that dogged him for years would drop, handing California to the Republicans. It would be another nightmare on par with Biden’s debate disaster. There was no way the Democrats were going to let that happen.

Swalwell never saw it coming. He assumed he had risen to the level of being a valued member of the “resistance.” But he clearly doesn’t know the Democrats very well. If they could force the President of the United States out of running for a second term for the good of the party, they could do it to anyone.

What Did the Democrats Know and When Did They Know It

Swalwell had survived the Right’s favorite lurid tale of the Chinese Spy Fang Fang, along with the rumor he’d passed gas during a cable news spot.

But in 2019, a woman tipped off a Politico reporter that Swalwell was engaged in inappropriate sexual activity with young women while in Congress. Icarus took flight and attempted to run for president. But for unknown reasons, he dropped out.

And then, inexplicably, the reporter dropped the story.

Why would they drop the story? Maybe because they lost their appetite for taking down Democrats after the Al Franken debacle, where Franken was pushed out by the most prominent Democrats, like Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, with no chance to defend himself against what were flimsy charges at best.

As Matt Taibbi writes in Racket:

Democrats tripped over each other to denounce Franken, with 32 Senators calling for his resignation on Dec. 6, 2017. Digital stones flew from Minnesotan Amy Klobuchar, ex-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and future VP Kamala Harris, among others:

The Franken story would sting by 2019, following a redemption piece by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. No one wanted to do that again, so maybe they figured they’d let the Swalwell story pass.

The bigger reason was that the Democrats had one objective in 2019, and it wasn’t to take out the guy who was key in Trump’s impeachment and Russiagate, but to take out Trump himself. It was an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment, and no reporter would have wanted to be caught dead helping Trump and hurting the Democrats.

That’s also why they ignored the story in 2024 of Kamala Harris’ husband Dougie who allegedly slapped a woman so hard she spun around. Like so many other stories that could hurt Democrats, including Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, they said nothing, lest they hurt the “resistance.”

It was also 2019 when a group of women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of inappropriate touching. No one seemed all that interested in pushing it to the point where Biden would drop out. He denied it, and everyone gave him a pass.

Even when Biden was accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, most in the press wouldn’t touch it. But one person did. Megyn Kelly.

Kamala Harris was among those who leaned into the accusations, but that would not stop Biden from choosing her as his VP.

Like the good Democrat I was, I tried to discredit Tara Reade, along with the rest of the accusers. I, too, had been burned by the Al Franken story and was disgusted with how the Democrats behaved, and like most people, I was getting exhausted by the Me Too movement and the lack of due process. In our minds, this was too serious a moment. We had to defeat Trump. Everything else would have to be sidelined.

I always thought that the harassment charges against Biden were less about Me Too and more about pushing the old man out of the race so that a more progressive candidate might take his spot. Reade, for instance, was a devout supporter of Bernie Sanders, and just before she accused him of assault, she and everyone else on the progressive Left were hoping for a miracle.

Is that what happened with the Swalwell story, too? Something about it just doesn’t add up. It was too clean, too well planned, too easy. It makes me wonder who was really pulling the strings. For the second time, he tried to fly too close to the sun and run for higher office, and for the second time, dropped out, but this time, there won’t be any coming back.

As Taibbi writes:

Which brings us to Swalwell. The accusations are extremely serious. Another woman came forward alleging he drugged her, lured her to a hotel, raped her, and choked her to unconsciousness. “I thought I died,” Lonna Drewes said. Taken with two accusations of sex with women “too intoxicated to consent,” the stories sound more like a developing serial murderer than someone merely guilty of being raised on Bob Hope jokes. Still, Swalwell’s political demise reads like a repeat of the Franken tale, only with context issues amplified a hundredfold, and Epstein playing the role of Weinstein.

With Franken, it took weeks for Democrats to denounce him. With Swalwell it happened overnight, and accusers are already being called “survivors,” as in the Democratic Women’s Caucus announcing, “We stand with survivors.” The writer in me dislikes the appropriation of a word that means “remaining alive where others have died,” but it is true these women might prove to be “survivors” of something, but what? At this early stage of inquiry, “survivors” functions as a turbocharged version of “Believe all women,” in which the possibility of disbelief is linguistically eliminated.

But time is the point. Time means another candidate can build a campaign and beat the Republican in California. That’s the hangover from 2024, and it’s why I don’t believe any of this happened organically.

Who ordered the hit?

The story goes something like this: two progressive female influencers caught wind of a whisper network, with rumors swirling about Swalwell’s sexual proclivities.

How this information found its way to them is not yet known. Will anyone ask or investigate? Probably not. Some of it came from their friends, and that was more than enough to start an amateur investigation, one that will probably find its way to a TV movie near you.

Think: Woodward and Bernstein or Kantor and Twohey, the women who broke the Harvey Weinstein story that kicked off Me Too. Now, instead of reporters, we have influencers.

To hear them tell it, they believed their best bet was to take the story to CNN, where their staff could fact-check it and, more importantly, make it legal.

One is Cheyenne Hunt, who calls herself the first Gen-Z woman to run for Congress, though she did not win. Assertive and confident, Hunt has the influencer game down. She also carries with her the certainty of the Gen-Z woman who does not believe in due process and thinks every man is a predator until proven innocent. Just asking a woman for her phone number could be a reportable offense.

To her, Swalwell was a dangerous moderate who was pro-Israel and too sympathetic to and supportive of ICE. These are red lines for the new Democratic Party's progressive wing, especially in a big state like California.

The other is Arielle Fodor, also known as Mrs. Frazzled, who is known for talking baby talk to Trump and his supporters to an irritating degree, but that is why she is popular on TikTok.

Fodor seems to be the type who would Vote Blue No Matter Who and probably would not be motivated to take down Swalwell unless she was encouraged to do so. Her story is nearly identical to Hunt’s:

It’s an awfully strange coincidence that they began mobilizing efforts to break the story in March, and by April, they were out on social media with it. If Swalwell were a valued member of the progressive Left, if they thought he would fight for Medicare for All, defunding the police, abandoning Israel, and transing the kids, would they have pulled this off? I doubt it.

What seems more likely to me is that they were egged on by unseen forces that were doing the hard job of pushing the accusers in the right direction and nudging the story ever closer to the surface, you know, like Deep Throat in All the President’s Men?

The same forces on the progressive Left that wanted Biden out in 2020 could also be in play here. He looks a lot like the kind of candidate the Democrats say they want and need - someone who can attract the working-class white men all over the country.

But for these women and the progressive Left, there is one candidate better suited to fight for what they care about most: Katie Porter. Both influencers have been seen in photos with her, and Porter and Hunt are both affiliated with the same law school.

Porter denies any direct involvement, but then again, why would that even need to be said?

There is no doubt that Cheyenne Hunt and Arielle Fodor look to be the party’s future, not just as influencers or as women, but as people who are willing to go this far to steer the ship in the right direction. Hunt, in particular, seems committed to rooting out all of the sex pests in Congress, and what better way to make a name for herself?

All the Congressman’s D*ck Pics

The Swalwell story unfolded straight out of the writers’ room of a Lifetime movie where all women are victims, and all men are predators. How could anyone, much less a white male politician, much less a Democrat, send Snapchats of his Johnson to a Gen-Z staffer post Me Too?

Maybe he did it because no one would believe anyone could be that stupid. Maybe he did it because Snapchat deletes the photos, and it’s his word against theirs. Maybe he did it because the thrill of it outweighed the risk. Was he a predator? Were these consensual? Me Too demands we do not ask.

Most of the victims tell the same story we heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the old days of Me Too. How a hungry young woman looking for employment opportunities is lured into a trap, only to have their friendly conversation devolve into a cheap proposition for sex. The woman is always portrayed as a non-consenting partner, someone who didn’t flirt back in any way, and was just suddenly hit with an offensive image.

That’s always been the biggest problem with the Me Too movement. It is held in the court of public opinion, and those accused have no way to defend themselves. Because both sides - Left and Right - are invested in Swalwell taking a fall, no one really bothers with the specifics. He did it, that’s all.

Why, for instance, did one of the victims claim Swalwell assaulted her in 2019, only to go back and get drunk with him in 2024 and claim the same thing happened again? Is that assault, or is that bad choices? Doesn’t matter, don’t ask.

I’m not defending Eric Swalwell. I feel about him the way Matt Taibbi does when he writes:

I can’t stand Eric Swalwell. A leading torchbearer in Russiagate lore, he’s always carried himself with an air of oozy self-satisfaction unusual even in a politician. I remember wondering if Swalwell was Latin for “Stubble Lizard.”

But the Democrats have managed to do the impossible. They’ve made me almost pity the guy. He thought he was doing everything right. He told all the lies they told him to tell. He helped build the very machine that would later devour him. But something about this hit feels too orchestrated and perhaps sets a dangerous precedent. Even guys like Swalwell deserve the benefit of the doubt, even if he never offered it to Trump.

Swalwell almost committed the perfect crime. He painted himself as an advocate for women, all the while allegedly going through them like a box of See’s Candies. If it’s true that he drugged and raped women, lock him up, lock him up. But if all of this was over consensual flirting, regrettable sex, and mutual Spapchats, then he’s the dumbest man on the planet.

Swalwell is finally learning who the Democrats really are and that life comes at you fast. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t squeaky clean enough, or well-behaved enough, or smart enough to keep it in his pants. He should never have tried to fly that high, at least not with so much baggage weighing him down.

//

He promised to tax the rich, and he’ll deliver on that promise, at least for now. Once the rich move out of the city and dump their money elsewhere, things might get a little more tricky.

This is the first time in the city’s history that the often-proposed but never-passed pied-à-terre tax has been enacted. While it still needs legislative approval before it can become law, Mamdani is hoping to raise $500 million, enough for his programs, such as universal childcare, free buses, rent freezes, and now a city-run grocery store project.

The first store in Harlem will cost $30 million, bringing the total to $70 million. Anyone will be able to shop there, regardless of income.

Why would they need to spend $70 million to build city-run grocery stores when “food insecurity” is already addressed with SNAP/EBT benefits, you might ask? Well, because it’s a visual symbol that is necessary to sell a movement. The symbolic nature of it matters almost more than its practical purpose.

It’s like AOC’s Met Ball dress.

If it’s something people can see, success they can measure, that builds a model that can be implemented in other big cities, as long as voters keep electing Democratic Socialists. Who knows, maybe New York will become America’s first “Socialist” city. If it can make it there, it can make it anywhere.

The city-run grocery stores will be a visible marker of Mamdani’s influence, not unlike Trump’s ballroom or proposed arch in the other direction. What a stark contrast between two opposing visions for America’s future. Funnily enough, it’s the wealthy who tend to side with Mamdani, while the working class tends to side with Trump.

These buildings will be their own campaign ads, for better or worse. If things don’t turn around with America’s economy, city-run grocery stores might look a lot more appealing than the lavish ballroom. The difference is, of course, that the taxpayers will pay for Mamdani’s dream, whereas Trump’s ballroom won’t cost them a dime.

We’ll have to see how it all works out for Mamdani. If all goes well, he’ll emerge a hero. But if the food sells out so fast that the shelves are bare, or if there are lines around the block and no one can even get in to shop, least of all the poor, then it will be a disaster not just for Mamdani but for his utopian dreams of a Democratic Socialist America.

It’s not just Mamdani’s dream. Increasingly, it’s the dream of Gen-Z, who have been raised on convenience culture, with a smartphone in their hand, DoorDash a click away, TikTok at the ready. Hard work, to the Coddling of the American Mind generation, is anathema, even traumatic. If there was ever a time to sell socialism to America, this is it.

They don’t yet realize that without capitalism, there would be no iPhone on which to make their pro-socialist videos, no way to call in a Starbucks order and have it delivered hot and fresh to their door. All they know is that they’ve been told by the likes of AOC and Mamdani that the answer to their problems is to TAX THE RICH.

A Living Virtue Signal

The city-run grocery store idea doesn’t make me think it will solve the problems of the poor so much as provide absolution for the rich. It reminds me of the kinds of signs I see around my mostly white, mostly liberal, high-income town. They proudly broadcast pledges like “ethnically grown coffee” and “sustainably manufactured yoga pants,” no child labor, no fast fashion, won’t pollute the environment, etc. They’ll only spend their money if they believe what they’re buying is ethically pure.

What better way to feel like good people than by paying higher taxes for city-run grocery stores? Given that, Mamdani might be careful of what he wishes for. What might seem like a simple plan to lift people out of poverty could become a purity-struggle session. Where does this food come from? How was it grown? How was it farmed? Were any laborers exploited? How will they recycle their waste? How will they hire their staff?

One thing we know for sure about today’s progressives: nothing is ever good enough.

I’m working on a podcast about Swalwell. I hope to post later today.

Apparently, Trump has deleted the offending post. I added it to the original story but just in case you didn’t know, here’s the update.

Previously:

As Bridget Phetasy said on X:

Which is what happened last night when he posted this meme:

I know many of my readers here are devout Christians, and among the kindest people I have ever met. One of you bought me a subscription to the Hallow app (and I do listen to the nightly prayer). The letters, the subscriptions, all of it has warmed my wrecked heart more than you know.

So we might disagree a little on this. I do not believe Trump posted this, “depicting himself as Jesus Christ.” I think he saw it, liked it, and posted it, not realizing that it would be considered blasphemy. He is not now nor has he ever been a devout Christian. His base is, or a large part of it is. He himself might not have realized it was blasphemous and would create a firestorm.

I don’t know if he will delete it. Maybe he will. Maybe he’ll apologize. But here’s the thing. To apologize, he would have to admit intent. I know this game well. When I posted a joke about “White Dudes for Harris” and said “white power,” it whipped around X and was seen by thousands of people. Two of my friends called me on the phone and said, “Did you mean to celebrate white supremacy?” It was surreal.

The Hollywood Reporter saw it and decided to run an investigative report on me, which essentially destroyed the career I’d built over 20 years. I was now a “MAGA darling,” a Trump supporter who celebrated white supremacy. The problem for me was that they were wrong. I was making a joke about how all of a sudden it was okay for white people to form a group based on identity because it was suddenly convenient to help elect Kamala Harris.

It didn’t matter because on the Woke Left, what matters is not intent but impact. Did it offend? If so, you are in the wrong, and you must own it and apologize, regardless of what you meant. I can’t work like that. I will apologize if I did something wrong.

But clearly, the Christian Right does not believe that. Michael Knowles, for instance, said Trump should take down the post and apologize “regardless of intent.”

Coming out of the cult of the Left, I had to work hard on undoing this mindset and look at intent. Did the person intend to say something offensive, or did they not? I had to look at things from their perspective. In this case, Trump might not have known it would be considered blasphemous, or he might have assumed his base would give him the benefit of the doubt.

For me, I was called every “ist” and “phobe” in the book for years. They assumed I was guilty of all of their high crimes because they believed they knew what was in my mind and heart. It is the very thing that made me want to leave. I could not now agree with the same thing playing out on the Right, even if I understand the difference between woke blasphemy and Christian blasphemy.

The meme comes on the heels of Trump posting a rant against Pope Leo:

Did Trump post it to be offensive and mock God? Of course not. Marjorie Traitor Brown is now calling him the “antichrist,” along with Sneako, Milo, and the usual suspects of the Woke Right.

I gave up being offended by Trump long ago, after years of being offended by everything he did and said. I accept him, warts and all, because he is the guy who has the audacity to run again after they impeached him twice, indicted him four times, raided Mar-a-Lago, convicted him of a felony, lied about him, called him every name they could come up with from Hitler to pedophile, and now, to war criminal.

To suddenly pull that support because of a meme? Not me. So people will say I always defend him, and I do, but especially about this. He took down the Obama ape video - maybe he’ll take this one down too.

One thing I know for sure is that the guy who could face down the machine and undo the woke Left’s grip on the minds of children, to declare there are only two genders, to end the cruel practice of “gender affirming care” for minors, and to protect women in sports is the same guy who would post that meme.

And others rang in:

Giving Trump the benefit of the doubt is becoming harder for many of his supporters, especially those who are devout Christians. Does it really pivot that hard from “Iran will cost him the midterms” to “No, a meme will”? It seems to me that a faction of the Right has already accepted losing the midterms. They just need the best reason to hand power back to the Democrats.

I usually stay out of the comments because I figure, I had my say, so readers should also have their say. But ever so often someone writes me and I must respond. I do so knowing it will create a war in the comments. I only ask that you treat each other with respect. So, a reader writes:

I've been following your posts for a couple of months now and have mostly agreed with everything you have written, However the day Trump announced we were going to war I was shocked. I voted for him 3 times. Now I view him is a liar and a sociopath and a tool of Israel. Our forces are in effect mercenaries for Israel and that is a shame…You might also do some research on how genocidal Israel has become and the Zionist concept of an expanded Israel. Look at the bombing of southern Lebanon as a recent example. They have become what they accuse others of doing - They are the terrorists now.

First off, thank you for reading my posts and I’m glad that you have found some value in it. My response to this is simply to compare Israel to America. Supporters of Israel will say that they had claim to the land going back thousands of years. Whether that is true or not is beside the point. My point is to end what I think is dehumanizing against Israel and the Jewish people and that is that they are terrorists, Nazis or “committing Genocide” or that Trump is a “tool of Israel.”

As a sidenote, it would be funny if Trump reflected this ideology because finally, after ten long years of lies and accusations by the Left, he would have finally lived up to the Hitler moniker. Thankfully, that isn’t Trump. He has always been someone who understands that Israel is an important ally to the US. Here he is during his first campaign speech way back in 2016 saying as much:

He did campaign on no more wars and no wars in the Middle East. I would contend that the bombing of Iran is ending, not starting a war. Per Grok:

There is an argument to be made that Trump should never have gotten involved at all and let Israel fight the war that Iran started on October 7th. You know because it’s not like they haven’t been chanting “Death to America” for what - almost 50 years? They love us!

But I get that. Many in MAGA want prices to go down, the economy to improve, more jobs at home, etc. Although is that really true? Or is it that they want the Epstein circular conspiracy to finally indict Israel as involved in a globalist pedophile ring and finally end our support of Israel and abandon our key ally in the Middle East? Who’s to say?

Trump has been fighting this war on three fronts: the legacy media and the Left at war with him for ten years hoping every single time he does anything that this will finally destroy MAGA. Iran, of course, and their massive propaganda machine that has played the long game by infecting young minds in this country for years now to see the US as a colonizer and oppressive force and to see the Islamic Republic as the oppressed victims. And he’s also fighting against those like this reader who now feel betrayed and abandoned because of Trump’s support of Israel.

Let’s leave all of that aside, however. We can argue the points of the war - good, bad and ugly. However, it’s the deeper and more sinister part of this ideology I’d like to address. If you believe that Israel are now committing “genocide” and that they are the terrorists and that a tiny country full of 11 million people is really a massive threat, then you also must see America that way.

If you see America as a colonizing empire that exploited Black and Brown people and conquered this land, committing genocide against the Native Americans and taking what didn’t belong to us then congratulations, you’re a woke Leftist. And only then, will you not be a hypocrite for saying the same thing about Israel.

Just so that we’re all on the same page, you can’t be both a patriot and supporter of this country, its founding and its “right to exist” and not also defend Israel on the same essential grounds.

If you see America the way you see Israel then fine, I can’t argue with you. But if you, like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and others pretend to love America, support its founding, stand up for its right to exist, Manifest Destiny and all of that, then you have to also grant Israel that same right.

My opinion is that “fair” has nothing to do with it. You come, you conquer, you win and that’s that. That is how it works in the natural world, across all species from insects to mammals to humans. Hitler, in fact, would have conquered Europe and turned it into an Aryan Empire if not for the allies kicking ass and taking names.

You have to fight to protect what you love. If you think the United States, after being the good guys in World War II and facilitating in the founding of Israel, should abandon all ties with the country then you’re a fool. No one gives up powerful players on the Chess board willingly.

If you’d like to make the argument that Trump should cut and run right now to focus on the problems at home, fine. That’s a fair argument to make. He loses either way. The media will make sure of it. They will talk of nothing but the war until the midterms. If he succeeds that could mean an ugly war with boots on the ground, American soldiers dead but a war finally won.

Finally, Trump, I see as the Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning. In every Fourth Turning, there is always a war. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II. I knew years ago, and have written about it, that there would be a war for this to be a Fourth Turning. We don’t know what kind of war. I figured it would have involved China, Russia and Iran.

If the Democrats had won, we’d likely have been at war with Russia. Now, who knows where this goes. But a Fourth Turning is not for the faint of heart. Here is how they wrote about it in the 1997 book by Neil Howe and William H. Strauss:

So, Trump is the Gray Champion, the only person in the storm guiding the ship. We don’t know what the outcome will be but we can only hope for the best. Fourth Turnings, according to Howe and Strauss, can’t be stopped. I have been expecting a big war.

Don’t let your mind be poisoned by people who need an easy scapegoat to blame for their problems. You can argue support for the war or Israel without making it a sinister conspiracy. And if you see it as a sinister conspiracy well, you have to see America — and every other nation — the same way.

Sooner or later, Trump was gonna swat back at the buzzing flies all around him over Israel and Iran. He waited it out, not focusing too much attention on it, thinking that navigating a difficult war and a delicate ceasefire might be important enough not to have to pay attention to the social media churn.

But once CNN and MS-NOW and other outlets began platforming the podcasters - otherwise known as Podcastistan - Trump had to let loose. An instant internet meme was born.

Trump was made for the meme factory and Tupacabra let it rip:

In case you didn’t know, all hell has broken loose on X, YouTube and the “podcast space” as they call it, with a full blown war raging between those on the anti-Israel side, chief among them Crazy Candace Owens spinning one wild tale after another, with very few people wanting to stand up to her or call her out lest she turn her crazy mobs of devoted psychopaths back on them.

Trump killed Charlie because Israel pressured him into it. Or he killed him because he wanted him out of the way. Or he killed him for [insert whatever will drive the most clicks here]. It’s so absurd that it makes the movie Network’s predictions seem tame by comparison.

In Network, it is theorized that the world is run by a cabal of too-powerful billionaires and corporations.

If Trump once seemed like Howard Beale, entertainment for the masses until the shadow overlords decided to pull the plug, he now seems like Howard Beale with the influencer and podcast churn pull the plug now that they are in dire need of more clicks and views.

Trump called out the loudest among them, or at least those making headlines in mainstream news as they amplify the rift - Tucker, Megyn, Candace, Marjorie “Traitor” Brown and Alex Jones. He didn’t go after Piers Morgan, Dave Smith, Joe Rogan, Ana Kasparian or any number of influencers or podcasters who have been criticizing the war in Iran and saying Trump betrayed his base by getting America involved in a way “no one wants.”

A new conspiracy theory has just dropped, that Trump is being bribed by Israel over blah blah blah Epstein, as Ana Kasparian explains to Megyn Kelly:

There is no need for any kind of proof or evidence here. It’s pure speculation. Why? I guess it drives the churn. And here is Tucker Carlson, backing up the baseless claim:

He says “we don’t know for sure whether this is happening,” but let’s just push it out to millions of people anyway, right? What could possibly go wrong? A conspiracy theory that can never be proved or disproved and that will live forever maybe?

He doubles down to Newsmax:

If you’ve followed Tucker a long time, as I have, you know he often plays this card, the one where he “feels sorry” for a politician or leader. He’s pulling out his sharpest tools to stab back the hardest.

In the meantime, Tucker tried to lighten the mood by taking a page from the Gavin Newsom meme factory:

CNN decided, for whatever reason, to poll Trump against Tucker Carlson and well, the news isn’t good.

Candace Owens simply said, “Time to put Grandpa in a home.” Oh but she’ll milk it for all its worth and lots of people will tune in to hear what she has to say.

It’s all so … Network.

So it’s okay for all of these folks to go after Trump, to say he’s “compromised by Israel,” that he orchestrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk, that he’s betrayed his base and will abandon the Republicans because he only cares about himself but Trump is not allowed to clap back? Well, I think if you want to get in the ring, you better be prepared for someone to throw a punch.

Meanhile, Candace has never looked more foolish than she does today as the story has broke that a note written in Tyler Robinson’s handwriting admits guilt:

The lesson out of this mess, at least to me, is that having lots of traffic and views while pushing out conspiracy theories and absurd claims is that we are not able to control ourselves. We love to watch the car crash. We’ll tune in for anything. We have to be saved from ourselves and hope that those who have a microphone also have a conscience.

History tells us we can’t be trusted. Just look at the Romans.

Chimp Civil War

The MAGA Civil War, if there really is one, seems to be echoed over in Uganda where a rare Civil War among chimps has broken out and for the same reason. Just as Charlie Kirk’s assassination has busted up the entire coalition and various people battle it out to become new leaders, so too did the chimps lose their minds when some of their leaders died. It’s far more brutal than mean Tweets and rambling idiocy on YouTube. I guess we should feel lucky about that.

In other news….

The Arch D’Trump has been unveiled - and there is probably zero chance this actually gets built, and if it does, the Democrats will demolish it once they take back power. They’ll be cosplaying Berlin after the fall of Hitler.

Melania decided to make a statement denying she was ever involved with Epstein and invited the victims to testify in Congress (but of course they backed out).

It makes me think a big story is about to break. The midterms are coming up, after all, and it will be all hands on deck to destroy Trump — AGAIN.

Why Have a Paid Subscription if You Get the Cow For Free?

A reader recently asked me what they could get with a paid subscription. Despite many attempts, I have yet to put content behind a paywall. That’s because people have sent in donations by different means, like checks in the mail. That makes it hard to keep track of, though I still plan on figuring it out.

What you get is supporting my work and encouraging me to keep going. About 10% of my subscribers are paying, and that is my income. If I can keep doing it, I will. If I can’t, I will have to do something else. So I guess if you get something out of it and you can afford it, why not? That’s my best answer.

I am working on a video piece I hope to post over the weekend. Hope you have a nice one. Hug your loved ones, or pets, tightly.

There are advantages to a puppy because they don’t come with all of the history that can sometimes be traumatic. My dog Luna had a rough past and has been unable to socialize well with any other dog except Jack. She backs off and hides behind me. I took her to meet a dog I thought would be nice enough for her to warm up to, but she scared them off, and we had to start over.

I kept coming back to this one dog at a nearby shelter. His story was so sad. He’d been kept in a small cat carrier with two other dogs in a hoarder situation, said to be the worst in US history. But it was his face that stayed with me.

So I figured I’d go check out this little guy. He was shy, but after I gave him a few treats, he came and sat on my feet. That was a sign. So I adopted him and named him Buddy.

I looked into the story of the dog hoarders, and I saw him in the video.

The woman who ran it said they were cared for and that she wasn’t hoarding them.

I don’t know what is true about this story, but I do know that Buddy is a happy guy. He looks around the world in wonder, as though he’s never seen things like grass or trees. My other dog, Luna, is not happy about any of it. She hides under the bed and hasn’t warmed up to him much. She doesn’t really walk alongside him. I hope that they can get to know each other.

When I first brought Luna home, she warmed up to Jack instantly, and they became best pals. But now that she is the main dog, she’s less inclined to accept the new dog. This is fairly normal, I’ve heard. I just hope it’s temporary. I guess we’ll see.

For now, Buddy is a happy guy. Hopefully, Luna will be too.

—Jacob Siegel, the Information State, excerpts from audiobook, which can be found here.

Totalitarianism came to America slowly at first and then all at once. It began as a utopia, one I helped build. It seemed like a perfect new America and gave all of us godless creatures, who’d been chewed up and spit out by the Boomers’ counterculture revolution, a collective sense of purpose. It was all going so great until it wasn’t.

A Virtual Utopia

I got online 30 years ago. I never planned on living half of my life on the internet. It just turned out that way. I had motive, means, and opportunity to kill off my real-life self and be reborn in the virtual world. Why wouldn’t I escape a life that had become a full-spectrum failure at everything I tried to do? A relationship that blew up when the man I thought loved me went back to his wife, the Graduate Film Program at Columbia I’d targeted as my life’s dream ended in one semester as I chased that loser guy back to LA.

There are things about that moment that are too painful to write about, at least for now, but I will someday. The result was me staring at the wall with nothing achieved and nowhere to go. I had just turned 30.

The internet allowed me to remake myself as someone else. I could be strong. I could be confident. I could be beautiful because who knew what you looked like? I could just use words, and I was good at words. So I dove into a life online full of excitement and wonder, a dreamscape of endless possibilities. There was no Amazon, no eBay, no Google. There was barely a web browser.

I fell in love with an Italian I met online and came back from Italy pregnant. He didn’t want to be a father, but I wanted to be a mother, so I had my baby, and then I built a website so I could stay home with her and support us.

I was the success story for every progressive female: a single mom and a business owner. A daughter of feminism en route to helping launch the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening.

I was in Italy when I sent my first Tweet from my Treo. When Barack Obama signed on, I followed him, and he followed me. Then I became part of his army of clicktivists, shaping the new rules and building our desired narratives. We felt omnipotent.

This was the internet, after all, and you could be anything you wanted to be - an activist for moral good? Check. An outspoken exhibitist? Check. West Wing-like politicos acting like experts in politics? Check. Remaking a new America one social media post at a time? Check. Virtue signaling with images blasted out to followers displaying our goodness? Check.

For all the ways we used the internet, it shouldn’t be that surprising that we built a virtual America - a fantasy utopia - that we forgot wasn’t real. We were riding high with our media stars like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow. We were the new, the progressive, the forward thinkers, the early adopters. We colonized the internet in our image.

Utopias only have two paths forward. They either collapse or they must become more totalitarian out of necessity, to quote Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Our utopia was opt-in at first, and who wouldn’t want to be a part of it? For a time, it felt like the best thing ever, all of our problems solved. It was everything, everywhere, all at once. A “whole of society” effort. It was # OscarsSoWhite. It was Critical Race Theory. It was every institution, corporation, legacy media outlet, and movie studio.

But it was also dull. Movies became infused with dogma. The rules became stifling. Sooner or later, people like me were going to shake the tree.

Says Siegel:

Maintaining utopia, let alone defining it, meant that there would eventually be people like me who asked too many questions, who would be hurled before the almighty panopticon — an army of puritanical scolds policing thought and speech — and eventually destroyed and purged as the mob cheered.

The Breakdown

I’d been a good liberal, a loyal and devoted Democrat all of my adult life. I’d never thought about conspiracy theories. I didn’t really challenge the system. I never doubted the intent of our government.

I was all in for Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. I was so loyal a supporter that I was invited to an early Biden fundraiser in May of 2019. I watched him speak with tears in my eyes. He will save us, I thought.

One year later, however, COVID hit. My daughter had to leave her senior year of college and have her graduation on my balcony. We were sewing our own masks and making our own hand sanitizer. It was a whole-of-society effort to deal with this once-in-a-generation pandemic.

But by the end of May, the George Floyd video whipped around the world, and before long, the whole of society's effort had to shift to racial injustice as millions poured into the streets.

What I saw unfold that year, the lies that were told, the gaslighting, the lurching from one narrative to the other, and all of the obedient robots going along with it, in full mass formation, was too much, even for me. We watched them lie - the experts, the journalists, the celebrities, the Democrats.

I kept trying to scream from the rooftops that we would lose the 2020 election if the violent protests didn’t stop. What I didn’t know, what I would find out by the end of the election, was that it didn’t matter. They would bend the media narrative to pretend there were no violent protests. It all worked cleanly and smoothly. No one was even allowed to question it.

Trump was campaigning hard, doing multiple rallies a day, and it seemed to me he was making headway and changing minds. We know this because he won Florida, Ohio, and Iowa. Only once in history has anyone won those three states and still lost: The 1960 election.

The difference in votes between Kennedy and Nixon proves how close the election was. But it never made sense to me that Biden would win by such a large margin and also lose Ohio, Iowa, and Florida. Unless, of course, they’d built a system that was too big to fail and had collected enough ballots long before Election Day.

The FBI, still working under Trump, had helped the Democrats by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop via social media. COVID gave Biden the excuse to hide in the basement and not campaign. A “whole of society” effort to purge a once-in-a-generation threat seemed to justify everything they did, as we know from the confession in TIME Magazine. Our elections, it seemed, were too risky to leave up to the people.

This system, this utopia we built, believed itself to be more powerful than our democracy, more powerful than our elections. I couldn’t go along with that, just as I couldn’t go along with everything that came after, as our utopia devolved into a totalitarian dystopia.

The Information State

Sometimes, during those dark nights of the soul, I wonder, did I do the right thing? Did what I thought happened really happen? No one in the mainstream media or culture has ever acknowledged any of it. They don’t want to admit it or talk about it. Their war on Trump simply rages on, and they hope all of us will one day get with the program.

But for me, there is still that untold story, a story I need to be told so that everyone on the Left - my friends and family and all of Hollywood and much of our legacy media understands what happened in the last ten years. Why are we living like this, with one half of the country marching by the millions to protest a president who defeated them not once but twice? Their hatred and shunning of half the country is still justified and accepted. Why?

Now, thanks to Jacob Siegel, we don’t have to wonder. He’s written it all down, the whole ugly tale, in this essential text, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. There is nothing they can do about it now. It will set the record straight, at long last.

The Information State starts with Woodrow Wilson’s Great War crackdown on speech, and moves through World War II, Harry Truman and the Cold War, up to 9/11 and the expansion of the surveillance state. But it was the Obama administration that took it much further, beyond mere surveillance. He used information to change hearts and minds and to create a utopian society, not unlike those of the Soviet Union or China.

As Siegel writes:

How the protests and riots over the Summer in 2020, versus those on January 6th, were treated so differently by our government remains one of the clearest examples of the kind of two-tiered society we were living under before Elon Musk bought Twitter and Donald Trump won again.

The BLM riots attacked working-class people, so they didn’t matter, but January 6th attacked the powerful, and that, to them, meant war.

Siegel writes:

“Truth Held Forth and Maintained.”

The scandal of how 20 people were hanged as witches in Salem would have been long forgotten, were it not for a cantankerous Quaker named Thomas Maule, who made the brave choice to expose the scandal in a pamphlet he called Truth Held Forth and Maintained.

In cool and cutting sarcasm, he wrote that God would condemn the witch trial judges. He famously stated, “[F]or it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a Witch, which is not a Witch.”

Maule’s pamphlet was banned, and he was thrown in jail for “blasphemy and slander.” He would eventually get a trial, and the jury, exhausted and demoralized by the events of that winter, ruled in his favor, handing him a landmark win that would be among the cases that inspired the First Amendment.

Jacob Siegel won’t be jailed for blasphemy. Those named in the book will either ignore it outright or attempt to discredit it. As of today, there are no reviews in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

As if out of a chapter in his own book, Renée DiResta objected to how she was portrayed and wrote a letter of complaint to the website Baffler, which then pulled the review. Siegel and DiResta publicly debated whether it counted as censorship. But who needs censorship when you have total societal control? At least among the university-educated ruling class.

DiResta’s bio on Twitter reads:

DiResta and the machine she works for have rigged the game in their favor. No major media outlets will ever call them out. Hollywood won’t write any controversial screenplays about them. Late night comediens will never mock them, and they will always be treated gently, with soft cotton gloves, lest anyone leave a mark.

Into the Unknown

Jacob Siegel’s The Information State does not paint an optimistic vision for the future. It ends with a question mark. Who will control this vast leviathan of data and human behavior, that now includes unstoppable AI? And how will we survive it?

What will these same people who took complete control of society, of thought and speech, do if they take back power? I think we can probably guess. If they’ve never admitted it, never atoned for any of it, then we can expect it will come roaring back, and this time, they won’t bother trying to hide it.

My advice? Log off. Migrate back to the real world. Look at the sky at twilight. Dig your toes into the sand. Build a fire in the woods. Look people in the eye. Attend a poetry reading. Go to a coffee shop. Meet people in the real world and leave the internet and the Information State far behind.

It’s probably too late for me. I’m a lifer. I know that. But I’m also a cautionary tale. This is what happens when you spend 30 years of your life in the virtual world. But if I can find my way out, then anyone can.

//

It was Gerard Baker and Chris Cuomo. It was the Democrats and many of the newly anti-Trump MAGA Right. The tweets were coming fast and furiously as the “for you” algorithm dumped more into everyone’s feed. The panic was everywhere. This was finally it! Trump was going to drop a nuke! He was going to wipe out an entire civilization!

Despite the many times we’ve watched Trump navigate The Art of the Deal, and all of the times we’ve seen him make major threats that cause the hens in the henhouse to scatter, they all seemed to fall for it every time.

Of course, genocide is nothing to take lightly, and a president threatening to destroy a whole civilization, even if the post, as with much of what Trump does, was not well thought out, to put it mildly. But as usual, the reaction to Trump is always worse.

The Democrats screamed for the 25th Amendment and the immediate removal of Trump.

But shockingly, because Israel is involved, the same level of mass panic was coming from the Right too. They were all ready to force Trump out of office.

This went on and on for hours, left and right. If I didn’t know better, I would think we were on the brink of a Civil War.

This is what it’s like inside the Doomsday Cult. Every day is the end of the world. They really did believe Trump meant it, just as they believed he would send in the National Guard in the Summer of 2020 because he is a fascist, and as they believed he colluded with Putin to win, and that he’s all over the Epstein Files. Their delusions are all they have.

It seems that this pattern plays out often, and yet, they never seem to stop themselves from reaching the mass hysteria flashpoint. And of course, as expected, a Deus ex Machina in the form of a Truth Social post by Trump announcing a two-week ceasefire.

Instantly, the Democrats and the disgraced podcasters tried to save face by flipping it back to Trump, saying he lost the war to Iran and that he was “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out).

Too late, man. We saw you running around screaming like little girls. You can’t pretend you didn’t. WE SAW.

They are programmed to always be against Trump, no matter what. He has to fail. Either he’s a madman about to commit genocide, or it was a humiliating military defeat, you know, like the withdrawal from Afghanistan? They have their script, and they’re sticking to it.

The Democrats went full doomsday. You never want to go full doomsday.

Then came the cope chaser:

I am so glad I escaped the Doomsday Cult. I can’t imagine what it must be like for them to be dealing with all of that imaginary trauma for a decade. If only they could realize that there is a whole other America outside of it, one where people aren’t losing their minds every day over something Trump said.

I never thought Trump would nuke Iran. I never thought he would blow up a bridge with women and children being used as human shields. He doesn’t have it in him to create mass murder, despite what the Democrats say about him.

Trump’s enemies will want to paint this as a major loss for us and a win for Iran. It’s a compromise that has left Iran weaker than it’s been in 40 years. Is this the end? Who knows, but it’s a start.

Fighting against the narrative shaping machine is not easy. Tomorrow, I will be posting a longer podcast about it. Stay tuned.

It was, of course, the usual suspects - the human embodiment of festering boils on the backside of humanity - losers, all: the bug-eyed Jo Jo from Jerz, the always hysterical and repellent Krassensteins, smug and dim-witted Brooklyn Dad. They are all robots that do not think for themselves. Trust me, I used to be one of them. I could never go this far, however, which explains why I am an exile.

So, on the one hand, this is what they do. They dream of Trump’s death as their only relief, their only way out, because in their world, there is no defeating this Voldemort of their own making.

But I also considered one other possibility. The CIA was heavily involved in the Iran operation. Is it possible that they fed these fools with false information to spread the lie that Trump was in a weakened state to throw the Iranians off the trail? How easy would that be? Like shooting fish in a barrel.

I also considered the possibility that it was Iranian trolls sabotaging Trump via the useful idiots on the Left, but the timing for that feels suspicious. And then, of course, there is the worst explanation of all, that they just decided to push this lie as part of their ongoing campaign to weaken Trump.

CIA seems to be the most plausible. If so, well done. They managed to make the Democrats look like the dumbest opportunists on the planet while making Team Trump the heroes of the day.

Happy Easter!