I like voting and I think I contribute to the survival of the human race by voting for good Republicans like Mike Lawler, Rudy Giuliani, Lee Zeldin, and even DJT, (oh, and I am a biological woman, by the way) BUT —confident that it wouldn't get very far— I would like to see the move to rescind go forward—it’s percolating after the appalling Clancy verdict and the social climate around the trial—because we have to have this conversation: Are women responsible for their actions or not?

Feminism tries to have it both ways: You’re at your job; you are recipient of what you think is an “inappropriate” glance expressing appreciation for your female qualities. Meanwhile, little signs carpeting the break room encourage you to run to HR and file a “hostile environment” complaint.

Or you could file a sex discrimination suit, even though you were a terrible employee. My guess is there are still plenty of lawyers around who would take another one of these pro bono.

In New York, after the #MeToo movement revealed the depth of male perfidity, the powers that be wiped out the statute of limitations on alleged rape. One can now allege that you were raped by some fella from the office even though the drink date happened 20 years ago.

And accusers are still managing to win these cases and exit stage left with millions in payoff money (See Donald J Trump versus E. Jean Carrol.)

In the crazed climate after #MeToo, New York prosecutors set a new legal precedent by redefining consent for purposes of nailing Harvey Weinstein. Rape trials hinge on consent. No matter that the alleged rapees had stayed in touch with Weinstein, had taken him to meet their mothers after the alleged rape and sent him friendly notes, for example. New York’s prosecution told the jury that they needed to start thinking about “consent differently.” Consent is not just expressed with a “Yes” or a “No,” the lady prosecutor told the jury, but by dozens of minute clues which Weinstein should be held legally responsible for reading.

In other words, men are treated like adults. They are held responsible for every action, no matter how minute, while, for all intents and purposes, women are treated like children, given every excuse, never held responsible for their conduct.

In the military (I wrote a critically acclaimed book about this) officers must insist that "there's no difference between men and women" while living with two sets of very “gendered” fitness tests and the "gender norming" of tasks so women can do them.

(Orwell called this called Double Think, or the ability to carry to opposing thoughts in one's head at the same time.)

Feminists start shrieking when a female draft is proposed yet they want complete choice of military jobs (they consider infantry high status.) In other words, they don't want "rights and responsibilities"...just rights.

We need to have this conversation NOW

Every time I hear “Jolene” my heart drops out of my chest and it’s not just that voice, it is that voice combined with lyrics like:

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene You can have your choice of men, but I can never love again, he’s the only one for me, Jolene

“Jolene” was a song of another time (it dropped in 1974) and it took on the now-banned subject of female vulnerability. (We’re all Girl Bosses now, don’t you know?), an emotion, that when expressed, is reeducated and ridiculed out of the public square, with books, seminars, and pop music anthems.

And worse, Parton isn’t just expressing vulnerability, but vulnerability to a man, and one special man, for heaven’s sake. (If you must get involved with them, remember that men are dispensable widgets.)

In fact Parton is so agitated in Jolene, (she is, after all, begging another woman not to take “her man”) that the music producers of today would probably fret that she sounds “needy” or “codependent” and ask each other “Is that the message we want to send?”

Many years later Beyonce covered “Jolene” for her album “Cowboy Carter:

As a music reviewer put it approvingly:

While Parton opts to plead for Jolene not to take her man, Beyoncé exudes power and confidence in her fight against infidelity. Beyoncé is not asking, she’s telling Jolene to not try and interfere in her relationship. If she does, she’ll find herself on the wrong end of Beyoncé’s fist.

I’m warning you, woman, find your own man. Jolene, I know I’m a queen [and] I’m still a Creole banjee bitch from Louisianne.

Put that way Beyonce’s retake fit right in with the long boring parade of relentlessly upbeat female empowerment anthems that dominate pop music

Katy Perry specializes in these anthems—there is Firework and Roar, just for starters. Britney Spears did very sexy vulnerability but she was rewritten to comply. “Let it Go” from the musical Frozen, is another girl power anthem and on and on.

Here’s the thing, real art moves us because it goes very deep—into the unsayable, even triggering relics in the unconscious. Often we don’t know why a particular piece of art—a painting, a song, even a piece of choreography—haunts us, but it hits a kind of bulls eye.

And it hasn’t been educated away yet, but women still occasionally get completely gutted over the possible loss of the man they love.

(Hear that feminists? Your work isn’t over yet.)

And that’s one of the reasons “Jolene” is art.

The Trump/Vance v. Harris/Walz election of 2024 had been about repressive CoVid policies and the 40% increase in food prices that followed, but it was also a referendum on feminization, the kind peddled by folks like Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, who used his new fame as the guy carrying Kamala Harris’s purse to tutor the heathens on new ways of being masculine.

A frequent topic of his seminars: “How do detoxify masculinity.” It’s the kind of “conversation that doesn't happen enough but must for women to have true equality," Emhoff told People magazine in October of ‘22.

The attempt at social engineering backfired, almost as badly as the attempt to sell Bud Lite with a transvestite in a bubble bath. A whole swath of the country apparently just wasn’t ready! Who knew?

It turned out that nudging guys to be more dutiful citizens of the Femtocracy was not producing a new breed of more docile men—just more traditional guys who were even more pissed off than ever and now fairly champing at the bit to vote for a non apologetic unwoke hell-raiser like Donald J. Trump.

Accordingly, election ‘24 saw an even bigger share of white working class men turning out to vote GOP, plus a new bunch of black and Hispanic crossovers, black and Hispanic men who identify themselves as men first and black and Hispanic a very distant second, if at all.

As they sifted the wreckage, Democrat party advisors and media consultants realized they would have to trudge into flyover country and mingle with dreck they wouldn’t have touched with ten foot pole in previous decades.

Up till very recently coastal “elite” types showed utter scorn for the gun and religion clingers of the white working class, a.k.a “that basket of deplorables.”

I’ve never forgotten running across a chat page comment in the early nineties where a New Yorker writer had snarked that “the term military intelligence is an oxymoron.” That mood also produced this rancid New York magazine cover story:

But in the 2020s military service as a credential, a resume line, is all the rage for political candidates. And this resume line often escapes vetting because of the Dems’ deadly combination of tingly-down-the-leg reverence for anyone who has served combined with a complete inability to sift military credentials with basic questions like “at what rank did you retire?” “where did you serve?,” “where did you do boot camp?” and “what was your MOS? (Military Occupational Speciality.)”

Anyone who doesn’t have to blare their military bonafides at every opportunity knows that the U.S. military (particularly when it worshipped DEI) has its share of sociopaths, cowards and grifters.

You’d never know that from hearing the gushing over men in uniform. The combination of cluelessness and teenaged girl-like giddiness leaves the door open for bullshit artists like presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg who squeezed max posturing from a very uneventful and soft term of duty.

Buttigieg bypassed boot camp and dropped right in at Naval Officer in the Reserves via a shortcut called a “direct commission.” The little-used end run (a program that allows individuals with specialized skills and education to join [the services] as officers without having to go through the traditional Officer Candidate School or Reserve Officers' Training Corps) is available to the well-connected and famous who need to butch it up quick.

“Just a health exam and a background check were all it took to make [Buttigieg] a naval officer,” wrote Greg Kelly and Katie Horgan in an article for the Wall Street Journal.

After five months in Afghanistan where his job was ferrying potentates around in an armored SUV, Buttigieg emerged as…Rambo, (see photo below) puffed up with self-righteous authority when he taunted President Trump with lines like, "I don't have to throw myself a military parade to see what a convoy looks like, because I was driving in one around Afghanistan right about the time this president was taping season seven of 'Celebrity Apprentice.'"

The Buttigieg story is an illustration of how the deer-in-the-headlights dazzled Dems fall so easily for guys who can claim a stint in the armed forces—however short, stateside, and paper-pushing.

Serving in the military was until recently something people like us just didn’t do but after Donald Trump shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry sprung up on the left dedicated to answering a single question: How can Democrats win back the working class?

Enter the Great Testosterone Hunt wherein progressives who’d grown up with the notion that gender is a social construct were now charged with talent spotting and courting “authentic” men for elected offices.

They had a vague idea of what He would look like: Their man would have muscles, tattoos, and probably go hunting. He’d be comfortable with firearms, and make naughty jokes—when he was out with the boys drinking beer, of course. They’d probably find him at the end of the bar wearing a Carhartt jacket…and saying f*** a lot. Karens beware!

Kamala made one of the first moves into the new territory. The masculinity expert (not!) hand-picked Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a one-time high school teacher, as her running mate because of his supposed Midwestern appeal, folksy style, and apparent familiarity with exotic props like guns and basketballs.

“He hunts, he fishes, you want to have a beer with him,” a person familiar with the nomination told CNN. “He will play in Michigan, Wisconsin, western Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina.”

Whoops. Harris/Walz ended up losing all five of those Blue Wall states—for a number of reasons, of course, but in part because Walz had been revealed as such a faker during the election run-up.

Simple Google searches (why do Dems and lefties apparently avoid Google searches?) revealed he was not so typically Midwestern after all: In mid-campaign, for instance CBS News, published the revelation that “As of 2016, Walz said he had visited China about 30 times” including for his honeymoon. This doesn’t necessarily signify a love for the CCP but it is something most Midwestern high school teachers simply can not afford.

“I’m a gun guy,” Walz had assured the casting directors jauntily, so a photo op (carefully diverse with a requisite woman suited up in orange) was staged with Walz hunting pheasant during which he was caught on camera struggling to load his pump action shotgun. The meme-o-verse churned out comparisons to Elmer Fudd, the hapless hunter forever humiliated by Bugs Bunny—that waskelly wabbit—who Walz, pudgy and bald, does in fact resemble.

Then his much-crowed-about military service turned out to be a lot less than advertised as well.

In the background Gen Zers, fresh out of college and working on Bernie Sanders’ various campaigns for office had been watching and feeling very scornful of their elders. Like all young folks, they were convinced they could do it better.

Waiting for men and women to come up through the ranks was for cucks.

It just brought in more establishment worshipers and their time, how ever short, in office had already tainted them with old school thinking. Authenticity resonates (it did with Donald J. Trump.) People are sick of professional pols.

And the old guard didn’t pay enough attention to optics.

This reliance on known-quantities, men who’d already been tested—at least on a frickin city council—has been responsible for placing too many dowdy, low charisma men in Congress representing the Democrats. (Hakeem Jeffries, anybody?) A new Che Guevara was called for.

“If you’ve wanted to be president since you were 5 years old, a large percentage of the electorate thinks you’re a loser,” said Morris Katz, the part media consultant/part casting director behind the rise of Graham Platner, in an interview with the New York Times.

“There’s a ‘no more losers’ thing. It’s harsh, but it’s true.”

Twenty-seven-year-old Morris Katz was fresh from his success aiding Zohran Mamdani in his race for mayor of America’s biggest city when he took on the Platner campaign. He had spent his childhood in Tribeca around filmmakers (like Mamdani, by the way) so, early on, he aspired to be a filmmaker and accordingly believed wide-net casting calls and screen tests should be an essential part of the drafting process.

In 2016, a Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated group called “Brand New Congress” put out a call for nominees they could support. Dan Maroff, one of their number (who later became instrumental in the Platner campaign) had said “we are trying to blow up the way Democrats do campaigns.”

After much culling, interviews, and screen testing, Ms. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, theretofore a lowly campaign volunteer for Bernie Sanders, emerged…as if on a half shell.

In their sloppy style (which we just saw so clearly in the Graham Platner campaign) they let AOC’s working class cred be certified by a stint as a bartender.

Most of us have stints as bartenders or waitresses in our past. So what? But in advertising man language, the word bartender in a bio “reads” working class. And anything can be spun up.

And Justice Democrats’ instincts were right about the power of cute. Once the public saw AOC’s adorable face and sexy body, all reservations fell away and the rest is history—well, history that is still being written. AOC and Zohran Mamdani are the DSA’s trophies.

But neither, you might notice, are white, heterosexual, Midwestern guy’s guys…the sort the Dem party now believes it needs.

Enter burly Graham Platner, the man who looked like he had it all. He was, as they say in the newspaper business, “too good to check.”

Katz was so dazzled he said he “within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, this guy owes it to the country to run for senate.”

And this creates a big problem for the DSA-types. A generation raised on signifiers, optics, 15-second Tik Tok reels, and film school believed anybody could be sold if they were…well…cute and adorned with the right “cosmetics.”

And that job is challenging. They may not realize it yet but Maroff, Katz and company are looking for a unicorn: a brawny, gruff-voiced, hard drinkin’, manly man, with working class credentials…who also happens to be a communist.

“There must be a ton of them out there” the graduates of Brown must have told each other, “on the docks, in the corn fields…” Didn’t Lenin say that?

As Jonathan Chait of the Atlantic explained:

The theory is always the same. Somewhere out there is a latent working-class majority, held together by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically reassembled to vote for Democrats. The New Deal did it – Democrats can do it again.

Except they aren’t everywhere. Working class guys are very materialistic. They’re not going to hand over their $250,000 tractors and $700 chain saws for the collective.

This is one reason that longed for marriage between workers and elite communist theorists has never happened.

Elite communist theorists have known what it is like to be rich and don’t understand the value of being comfortable; they are searching for a new frisson of danger and the forbidden that they think comes from being what they consider disadvantaged, meanwhile working class guys (who, in reality, make far more money than the Brown film school grad) really enjoying getting rich and are savoring the thought of passing wealth to their children.

So the new casting directors, people like Morris Katz and had two big problems. 1.) They couldn’t spot masculinity if they tried, having grown up in a culture where masculinity had been drummed out of the arena And 2.) They were looking for something that exists only in communist tracts.

Graham Platner oozed a kind of masculinity. Every little move he made felt very fresh and seductive to the man-starved women of New York City who rule big media.

You could feel the New York Times reporter swooning when she observes Platner in an interlude with his dog:

Suddenly Platner’s black Lab, Zevon (named after rock star Warren), lunges at the tinfoil-wrapped breakfast sandwich on the table. Platner sticks his hand into the dog’s mouth to wrestle it away.

(Think of it! He didn’t put on a glove and a mask before sticking his hand in his dog’s mouth!)

Now that Platner’s campaign has blown up, the old guard, people like Wall Street Journal reporters (if they are old school reporters they have been taught to check, and check and check again) are doing cartwheels. They have been vindicated.

Much is now being made of the lack of Platner vetting. “Didn’t you see the tattoo?” asked a Wall Street Journal reporter in a video that has now gone viral. Maroff fudged the answer and the moment went by.

I am quite sure they knew about the tattoo. A key part of Platner’s launch was his anti-establishment vibe. The tattoo was a dog whistle, a wink to Gen Z voters, who think Nazis are the ultimate in anti-establishment. And his campaign managers were pushing the boundaries, seeing just how much of that trendy antisemitism they could slip in.

For the age-old hatred feels fresh right now. You can tell them about the Holocaust until the cows come home, but this generation has been bombarded with guilt trip seminars their entire lives and they dismiss Jew hatred as another sacred cow, another guilt trip installed by their elders

The Dems are right to worry that the DSA wing could split the party. The coming nominating conventions (I’m going to get my popcorn) will test how much establishment Democrats are wedded to gender issues like all-feminism-all-the-time and transing the kids.

Can one really seek “real men” to back while simultaneously believing that “men” can get pregnant?

Because of the many systemic problems with linking working class men with the Democrat party when the DSA went looking for their real man, their Che Guevara, they came back with a big baby.

I don’t care about the he said/she said rape allegations. That kind of lawfare was used to harass and even bring down plenty of decent men: Andrew Cuomo, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and of course, Donald J. Trump. The MeToo movement was like a Stalinist purge.

What I care about is Platner’s lies.

I care that he couldn’t be honest about himself.

Real men face up to hard truths—such as “if my oyster farm has one client, my mother’s restaurant, maybe I should describe myself as a hobbyist oyster farmer.”

What is most worrisome to me about the DSAers is that they confuse masculinity with made-for-tv macho. Part of that macho is their rebellion against the establishment’s cautiousness about straight forward workaday credentialing and the party’s (rapidly declining) cautiousness around antisemitism.

Katz has said he’s a bearer of hard truths and that “in the face of big income divisions…the angry young men they are courting are frustrated with the politics of politeness.”

If this confusion over the difference between manhood and macho and their love of communism continues, ultimately they may judge masculinity with who is best at lowering the guillotine.

Bear in mind: Communists (real ones, reporting back to Moscow) have infiltrated America since...I dunno...Lenin took over.

Read Alger Hiss's autobiography.

But the serious (reporting to Moscow) communists of Hiss’s day were deep undercover, genuinely afraid of being found out, so the sedition they attempted was subtle and thus actually dangerous for not naming its end goals.

I have far more respect for the communist infiltrators of Hiss’s day than the cos-players of today. One sign of their seriousness was their avoidance of publicity; they could hardly have been it it for attention. Would the Mamdani movement be attracting so many followers if social media did not exist?

And that means we have a new advantage: The self-declared communists this time around seem to be mostly chubby little rich girls—not just uncharismatic but completely open about their sympathies, indeed, as are most chubby rich girls today, clamoring for attention, which means America will be getting an eye and earful of what their brand of silly Communism looks like.

I’m not being sexist here, saying that women can’t or have not been important parts of revolutionary movements. Throughout history various women have been great recruiters for would-be revolutions.

See Bernardine Dohrn for the Weathermen in the mug shot below. But Dohrn was sexy as all get out. And knew it and worked it.

That La Pasionaria of Spanish Civil War Days could talk up a storm and I very much doubt she up-talked (ended every declarative sentence with a rising intonation as if asking a question.)

For contrast we have the piece in Columbia University’s student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, titled “Meet the Hot Girls For Zoran.”

Not surprisingly they aren’t so hot.

I doubt chubby, verbally incontinent Barnard grads are going to muster much of a revolution.

Nicholas Kristof’s Parody of Journalism

Don’t forget the IDF’s Trained Rape Dogs! So what if the claim comes from one anonymous source? As they say in newsrooms: Some stories are just too good to check

Here’s a hot story idea for New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, author of “The Silence That Meets the Rape Of Palestinians,” a Times piece published this week.

Sure, an unsubstantiated single-source account featuring an IDF-trained rape dog set loose on a male prisoner by guards in an Israeli prison will get you lots of clicks, so why stop there?

(There are plenty of other types of alleged abuse recounted in the piece, but remembering my days as a young reporter, if I’d downplayed the “IDF-Trained Rape Dog“ I would have been charged with “burying the lede.” “Where’s the f*****g dog!,” the editor would bellow.

The dog is, and probably for good reason, like utter lack of foundation, not introduced till about graf 20.)

But now that you’re working the unsubstantiated-but-vivid-allegation beat, Mr. Kristof, how can you ignore the impotence-causing belt story?

I learned about the male potency killing accessories a couple decades when doing research in the West Bank for articles which eventually became a book. Guys would nod sagely and tell you It was well known that “Israelis (IDF, Mossad, or whoever) had infiltrated sales stalls in the souk to fob off men’s belts tricked out with radioactive materials intended to set off an E.D. epidemic.

Here’s another story with click appeal, Nicholas. How about what came to be called,“the great bubble gum scare of 1997” propagated when Palestinian officials, including the Supply Minister Abdel Aziz Shaheen broadcast that “sex-hormone- laced bubble gum was being distributed near West Bank/Gaza schools” purportedly to “drive women wild with desire” while making men and boys too “genetically damaged” to take advantage of the opportunity.

According to Agence France Presse, that story “came to light after a Palestinian man filed a complaint that his daughter had experienced ‘dubious side effects’ after chewing the offending gum…”

Do you sense a theme? These accounts, like the substance of Kristof’s article, are about unmanning Palestinian men, as that is a pretty consistent obsession in the shame/honor creed that rules the Islamic world. (Hence the brutal treatment of sisters, daughters and nieces who tarnish the family’s honor with sexual behavior that would be considered unremarkable in the West.)

In the bubble gum saga, for instance, how can one ignore that attributing “dubious side effects” to chewing gum might have been a way for a teenage daughter to distance herself from her newfound sexuality, a sexuality which she recognizes is dangerous in her world.

It is impossible to escape the sexual dynamics that rule the Palestinian-majority territories and the male Palestinian’s resentful, perpetually aggrieved relationship with their Jewish (they defined it that way, we didn’t) “oppressors.” Sexual jealousy and the fear of sexual inadequacy is at the heart of the conflict itself.

I don’t want to ridicule the serious allegations in Kristof’s piece and I have no doubt that there have been and will continue to be brutal treatment of Palestinian men in Israeli jails. (Kristof’s piece relies almost exclusively on anecdotes featuring Israeli prison guards and male inmates, though eventually he chucks in some soldiers and, of course, the always featureless “settlers.”

There is a reason prison guards keep featuring in the stories of horrendous humiliations in prisons. (Abu Gharib, anybody?) The work of a prison guard—patrolling cell blocks, dodging inmate-hurled feces, risking a shiv to the ribs on routine yard patrols—is, to top it off, low paid and so ranks somewhere near cleaning convenience stores on the night shift on the social status score.

This should not excuse Israel from investigating Kristof’s charges and disciplining miscreants who can be identified, but there are a number of things about this now-viral piece that made my bias-detector go off.

I know a lot about the New York Times’ publication standards. I did a number of freelance pieces for the paper and know the drill. Being cleared for publication involved being able to survive what seemed like hours of interrogation by cranky subeditors, who demanded that every factual allegation be justified beyond what one had done in the piece. Even word choices were put on the stand.

But those standards are nowhere to be seen here!

One realizes that Kristof, as the Times won’t stop telling us, is a two-time Pulitzer winner, but does that mean we are not supposed to care how he writes and reports?

Kristof makes serious, even potentially libelous allegations. As former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, who is quoted in the piece, puts it,”that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy.”

Where are the other kinds of evidence usually used to support serious allegations—forensic reports, photographs, and serial corroborations?

Toward the end of the piece, Kristof gets around to noting that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women...” (My italics.)

Furthermore, he writes that he found those victims by “asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, [and] aid workers...”

Kristof’s M.O. is to offer one person’s harrowing story and then bring in a lurid but generalizing quote—”a grave pattern of sexual violence”—from one of the many NGOs whose raison de etre is flattening the Israeli/Palestinian conflict into a binary of Evil Israelis (actually the reference is actually to “Yahudi,” Jews in Arabic) and weak, agency-less Palestinians.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the Times appears to have welded this awkward piece together to counter a new report on the October 7 atrocities, completed by the Israeli government which has relied, according to its executive summary, “on videos and photographs of victims and scenes from attack sites, autopsy results corroborating sexual violence, and testimonies taken from thousands of witnesses and medics.”

Lots of evidence in other words—not anecdotes from anonymous sources, including one described only as a “Gaza journalist.”

Things have gotten very awkward for Hamas-apologists of late, but Kristof, grant him that, is giving moral equivalency the old college try.

Say what you will about President Trump but he’s himself, all the time, for good or ill. He won the presidency twice because Americans were sick of being talked down to by professional pols like the Clintons, sick of their slippery lawerly half truths, sick of what was implied in the constant slipperiness i.e. “[The people who live in the flyover terri…

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When a teenaged girl fell down in convulsions in front of Salem’s array of upright citizen judges and then wheeled around to point at someone in the audience, crying out that she’d seen that woman, (Goodie Sarah, perhaps) “dancing naked with the devil,” Goodie Sarah was marched off to be burned at the stake…purely on a sex-starved hysterical girl’s say …

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I’m not sure if I’ll watch any 2026 Winter Olympics broadcasts this year. My hopes for coverage that doesn’t make me want to throw a beer can at the TV have been dashed so many times.

I’m old enough to remember when following the televised Winter Olympics was kind of like watching C-Span…and it was great!

There were no frills. (And no Pairs Ice Dancing …

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It’s like watching an episode of The Walking Dead….

You’re doing something ordinary, like standing in line at the Walgreen’s and suddenly one pops up. Maybe she’s having a fight with the drugstore’s manager, except that she’s not doing it in a reasonable fashion. She looks like a zombie from the Walking Dead series: unkempt, with something vacant in t…

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One winter night many years ago when I was a cab driver in Ann Arbor, Michigan one of my passengers offered me a joint. I took a few hits to be sociable and immediately found myself higher than a cuckoo bird.

My preeminent realization—I used to have very heavy insights into everything (it was exhausting) while high on marijuana—was that I …

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Marinating in demonstrative, performative self-pity in the mistaken belief that you can guilt, shame or reason the world into making the bad guys go away is demeaning and harmful to our cause.

I’m trying to be fair to the tribe I have half-membership in (as a result of having a Jewish father and …

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“The Epstein class must be held accountable.

This is about survivors.

This is about protecting our kids.

This is about a nation not having a different system of justice for the elite.”

Thus thundered Representative Ro Khanna (D, Ca.) in a tweet on X yesterday. (There are so many inaccurate statements in this proration I wouldn’t know where to start if I …

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It is Day 2,345, by my unscientific estimate, of the media’s coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Cut to: a podcast pitting lonely Epstein case sensibilist (a word I think I’ve just invented) Michael Tracey against three panelists with varying motivations for being what Tracey calls “hysterical” Epstein “mythologists.”

They are discussing the importan…

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The amount of time I spend using Grok, Elon Musk’s superior AI product, just keeps creeping up. So far querying the service—which is attached to X.com—four times in two hours is free and I regularly hit my limit because, for some reason, my little Grok sessions give me a dopamine rush.

Elon’s stamp is all over the software. There is, for instance, the …

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It was my bad luck to grow up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, then known as the Berkeley of the Midwest, so it’s a phenomenon I know well: That mild-mannered assistant professor down the hall suddenly (nowadays it’s most likely on social media) shows a side of himself you’d never imagined existed…

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Overwhelmed by the press of truly consequential news yesterday I found myself diverting to a rant about Ella Emhoff.

Pretty trivial. But we all need a break, right?

Ella Emhoff is the daughter of former United States Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. Emhoff Sr. might be handsome if he lost about forty pounds, and before he married Kamala he was married to …

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Good grief, you would think that Israel dropped a bomb in downtown Finland or something, and not, employing extreme surgicality, on one building in the capital of the slave-labor-dominated monarchy that’s been providing sanctuary in its five-star hotels to the men who danced with de…

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I do not want to trivialize the horrific shooting this week (parts of this American Spectator article are funny) but I wanted to reup the piece, written over ten years ago, because…it was good, dammit…and it illustrates how quickly the idea that all of one’s problems could come down to being “assigned the wrong gender” was metastasizing even eons ago in…

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Stupid, stupid Western reporters. Is it stupidity or willful blindness? Actually, it’s a toxic blend of both.

The world went mad in 2020 with the broad acceptance of the covid miasma; the next great bout of mass hysteria/mass hypnosis was the belief that something c…

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