Whatever it is we did to kids that started around 2013 has led to whole generations of freaked-out, delusional cult members who can barely function now when things don’t go their way. There is no turning it around. There is no changing what so many of them believe.

This militant army worked well for the Democrats, but I do wonder if any of them looked at Kenosha or Portland and thought, What have we done?

Because so many adults were too afraid to confront the problem until the problem grew up and joined the workforce, that power is out now, and it is destroying the Democratic Party, not to mention everything else the Left controls, faster than you can say Holy Woketopia Batman.

That fear that has crippled all of them surprised me. I didn’t know so many would be so willing to conform, stay quiet, say nothing, or join the mob and pick up a stone. I don’t know, I guess I thought there would be more like me, people willing to stand up and push back.

Lionel Shriver talks about this personality type while on a recent episode of the Triggernometry podcast.

Speaking of mania, I’ll never forget how a film critic named Sean O’Connell once wrote a film review about Pixar’s Turning Red. He didn't particularly like the movie because he wrote from his perspective (normie white dude). The attacks came fast and hard, from young Asian girls who had begged for representation in movies, to the scolds on Twitter. Then came the agonizing op-eds. By the end, he didn’t lose his job, but he almost did. He had to apologize and take down the review.

It went all the way to this:

Even after his apology, the tweets that flooded in continued to punish him for not liking what is (not a very good movie in the first place) about a 12-year-old girl getting her period. He was being honest, as film critics are supposed to do, but not anymore.

They even escalated it and asked him to name names:

Sean O’Connell should have stood up to them. He should have done what I did every time they came for me. You turn around and you flip them the double bird. It isn’t that hard. Yes, you will lose almost everything, but in return, you will gain your self-respect.

If they can’t even tell the truth in a film review back 2022, how can they possibly fix what is wrong with any of it, from Hollywood to the Democratic Party?

Send in the Dudebros

It’s obvious to everyone that Democrats are repelling men. All men. Young men, old men, Black and Hispanic men. They’ve decided the reason for that is the “woke crap” that many can’t stand but will never admit out loud.

They say they’ve gotten the message. Now, they figure they don’t have to do much, like offer the public a way out of the madness that has afflicted their party, and thus, all of the cultural, corporate, and educational institutions they control.

No, it’s a messaging problem, not a policy problem. They only have to dispatch a few mascu-bros to get the talking points out that they hate the “woke crap” too but they still want to be good people and do the right thing, unlike the other half of the country who are bad people, and don’t want to do the right thing.

It’s easy to spot the likely paid influencers on TikTok who almost look normal until they start parroting the talking points of the madness of the Left. And then, just like that, we’re sucked back into the crazy.

Oh, it isn’t as bad as the women who dominate the party and TikTok. If I spend too much time surfing that algo, as I often do for research, I come out of it thinking, is that really what became of it all-thirty years of progressivism, feminism, and activism, and it ends with delusion and mania?

Influencer Henry Sisson has emerged as a supposedly brotastic anti-woke Democrat on Piers Morgan.

Then, there was David Hogg on Bill Maher, pretending it’s possible to bring some sanity to the party so young men can “get laid and have fun.”

Perhaps it is a good strategy. Just give those who can’t stand the wokeness a reason not to worry about it anymore.

Reactions like that might help them accomplish their goal of bringing people back to the party, especially men, but I doubt it. Matt Walsh is correct when he says they were never cool.

Ultimately, their reality disconnect prevents them from ending their ongoing mass hysteria. Take this piece at Daily Kos (yes, it still exists, shockingly), by this person, note the pronouns in bio:

She/Her writes:

That March story about Enola Gay was part of an electronic preliminary pull that flagged certain words that might unearth woke content. That didn’t mean Pete Hegseth banned it. As with the children’s book by Julianne Moore, it was put in the “to be looked at” pile, but that didn’t stop the headlines.

If you see that many headlines hitting your feed and it’s spread far and wide, and people you trust and admire, why wouldn’t you believe it? And if they are being misled to that degree, how can they ever be expected to pull themselves out of it? And if they are not telling us the truth but just trying to hurt Trump, how can we trust them?

After all that, they dumped him anyway. Lesson learned, eh, David?

The Democrats have become so afraid of blowback that they have to try to get their message out anonymously. But do they ever ask themselves how we can address the needs of the people if we are that afraid of our own party?

Recently, Mark Halperin spoke for them in an attempt to force the Democrats to the table to confront some of it.

Why They’re Stuck with it

Wokeness isn’t a “fad,” like a tramp stamp tattoo you mature your way out of, then seek to remove. This goes deep, probably deeper than anyone ever knew back in 2012 and 2013 when the “whole of society” effort began unfolding in schools, in institutions, and online to gently introduce Critical Race Theory as a new way of seeing ourselves in the world.

“The last spectacular ball in the history of the empire ... [but] a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace ... while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low." - Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch

The theme of the Met Gala this year was Black Dandyism. In case you don’t know what that is, The Met explains:

Black Dandyism is cool and all as its authentic self. I’m not sure it maintained that coolness last night with “radical chic” on full display as a symbol of virtue for the powerful watching in real time as their empire comes crumbling down.

You no doubt noticed the vibe shift. Something seemed off about it. It was like the Blue Origin flight. It felt inauthentic, all for show, a ritual to genuflect to their chosen status symbols while disguising who they really are.

Not that they will be criticized by the people who matter to them. Those outlets that aren’t owned by Donald Newhouse, the billionaire who owns Vogue and the New Yorker, worth around $18 billion, wouldn’t dare say a word. Everyone is to applaud and praise them for their goodness and moral virtue.

But as I watched the parade of famous Black artists walk the red carpet, alongside ashamed, self-hating white celebrities who looked like they’d been kidnapped and who couldn’t wash away the fear in their eyes, I could see the man behind the curtain, or in this case, the woman.

Who are they kidding? This was not power or progress, not for any of them. The Met Gala served the same purpose it always has: to make rich white people look good. How they measure what defines good is all that has changed.

The white guilt among the wealthy in our modern Gilded Age is thick. They know something is ending. They can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. Just as the very wealthy in the late 1800s did. They have no choice but to try to buy absolution by bribing the virtuous to be their facade.

They have no choice. They know the mob would eat them alive if they didn’t defer, de-center, elevate, platform, and do something to make their insular world seem like the good place, not the bad place. They have to be on the right side to survive a little bit longer, to hold their place in society, even as, especially as everything falls apart.

They didn’t call it “virtue signaling” during the Gilded Age. They called it Civic Virtue, which has a long history in America, going all the way back to the Revolution. It is one of the reasons we see so many of the big names from that era splashed across major institutions, like the Andrew Carnegie institution, etc.

The billionaires alive today are all expected to give back to society in a way that justifies or absolves them of their sins. But something else entirely is going on with what we saw at the Met Gala and with Blue Origin. It wasn’t Civic Virtue so much as virtue signaling.

But it does seem strange in a year when Donald Trump and his MAGA Deplorables won the popular vote, where he is attempting major change to elevate the silent majority, to attend this spectacular ball and to send yet another message to America that you are not invited to this party because we think you are bad people, racists. So we’ll celebrate in front of you. We’ll rub it in as though we never lost the election at all.

The wealthy aristocracy in our country has figured out that they need shields. They must hide behind people whom no one would dare attack or criticize. It is the reversal of the fanaticism that afflicted and ignited the mob when the streets were filled with protesters in the Summer of 2020.

What we see now is their way of healing from the trauma of the agreed-upon reality that emerged that Summer. Most people don’t remember how unprecedented this uprising really was. Remember chanting through the neighborhoods in Seattle?

If you were cowering in your home as a Good White Liberal, what did you make of that? How much guilt did you feel? Their escape hatch for all of this madness we’ve been living through, a fake-pretend fix to oppression because Lulu Lemon and the Lifetime Network now center Black characters and de-center “whiteness.”

I’ll never forget my white friends in Santa Monica, of all places, hurling themselves in front of “Black bodies” because the cops were less likely to shoot them. They all believed this delusion, even in Santa Monica. But now, there is a reversal of that dynamic playing out. White people need Black people and other non-whites or LGTBQIA+ members to hide behind.

Kamala Harris might have many gifts, but intelligence is not one of them. How else to explain her speech, where she compared today’s Left to a herd of protective elephants?

Here is the clip:

As with most of Kamala Harris’ speeches, there was no there there. It was delusional gobbledegook that seemed to get really obvious things wrong, especially the way she ended the speech by saying this country doesn’t belong to those in the White House but to “we the people.” Yeah, uh, what part of winning the popular vote is not “we the people,” Kamala?

I thought of that line in The Big Lebowski:

The Democrats have decided their leader should be Kamala Harris, and they set her loose, careless metaphors and all. What else can they do? Tell the truth? “Sorry, we tried to make Kamala Harris happen again. We already knew she was a tragically weak candidate who couldn’t even win in her home state of California, and is mostly known for her extreme cringe and her viral word salad clips. But she’s a woman of color, and white women will never vote for a normie white dude, so let’s make Kamala Harris great again?”

Granted, most people on the Left have become so disconnected from reality that they can’t see the big picture anymore, but even still, if there is one thing we know about elephants other than that they are intelligent, empathetic creatures, it is that they, like all mammals, protect their young to ensure reproduction and survival.

And of all animals to drag into this mess, why must it be elephants? This is a strange thing to be outraged about, but I love elephants. I love them like I love pigs. It isn’t just that they are intelligent, although they are ranked number five on the list from How Stuff Works (pigs not far behind).

I love their deep empathy because I have too much of it and can relate. I love how they remember those who protected and raised them, even decades later. I hate that they are hunted and butchered (just as I hate factory farming with pigs). I realize I must accept these realities, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

But mostly, like all mammals, elephants are known for being ferocious protectors of their young, so much so that the entire group is often involved in saving even one calf.

You should see what a mother elephant would do to anyone who came near her baby with a surgical scalpel or dangerous, irreversible drugs to sterilize them for life.

Do you think elephants would be casually aborting their children or allowing gender clinics to guide them toward irreversible harm to their bodies, all in the name of some imaginary mass delusion? Do you think elephants would divide people based on skin color and gender identity and deem those the most vulnerable?

Elephants are matriarchal because the older female elephants have gathered enough knowledge to help guide and lead the herd through treacherous terrain. The males must leave when they become adolescents and form a herd with other males who teach them what they need to know.

For the Left, they like the part where elephants form a herd of females and exile the males. They don’t like the part where the most important thing to them is ensuring reproduction and survival.

That’s last thing they do on the Left now. They seem to be actively trying to extinct themselves, whether it’s buckling to a dangerous cult that sterilizes the young, or encouraging abortions to the tune of one million per year.

Those who have paid the highest price for this are the children whose mothers can’t protect them because they are cowards, not like mother elephants, that’s for sure. Fathers, too. They’ve been castrated metaphorically and literally.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”―George Orwell,1984

It isn’t that one crazy, alleged animal-abusing Democrat who just introduced articles of impeachment against Trump who will define Resistance 2.0.

It’s the more serious threat that looms ahead should the Democrats take the House next year.

Steve Bannon has become the harbinger. He predicted it in 2018, and he’s predicting it now.

He’s right. They have no other plan for America, not in the four years Trump was in power the first time, not for Biden’s four years, and not now. They have one directive: to purge Trump and MAGA from utopia.

It’s beginning to look a lot like 2016, only this time I’m watching from the other side of the door. I escaped, but only just barely. I sometimes look back at who I was then and scratch my head. How could I have been that easily manipulated? How could I have believed them?

I believed it all. I read every book on Putin. I hung on every word that came out of Rachel Maddow’s mouth. I believed the New York Times had our best interests at heart. I could not believe or even imagine that the people I trusted would eventually expose themselves as weaponized, partisan propaganda machines.

I try to connect with the Democratic centrist I used to be because that is still where most of my friends and family are, not to mention all of American culture and most institutions. They live in a completely separate reality, and I live in this one.

The only comparison I can make takes us back to just before the last Civil War. One reality not only justified slavery but also existed inside a utopian Antebellum paradise of Southern Belles and wealthy plantations, but also believed ending slavery was an existential crisis they could not survive. How else to convince so many to go fight and die for a cause?

The pre-war propaganda whipped both sides into a frenzy that would eventually take them to war. From War History Online:

In the decade prior to the Civil War, the American press began flourishing and evolved rapidly in terms of technology, output, and distribution. Meanwhile, the number of newspapers expanded and a new style of weekly pictorial publications filled with comics and illustrations became popular and widespread in northern and southern states.

This mass distribution of picture-based media was eagerly and voraciously consumed by the American public. It also proved ideal for distributing and disseminating propaganda and successfully pushed divisive ideologies from both sides of the divide.

Sound familiar?

When the Union Army won the war, however, their utopian paradise in the South was upended, which kicked off episodes of mass hysteria that would eventually lead to Jim Crow laws, the KKK, segregation, and worse.

It’s easy, especially for the modern-day Left, to see those crimes against humanity as a disease that lives inside of white people, the sin of racism, a war they believe they’re still fighting today.

The side that suddenly had all of the wealth and power after the rise of Silicon Valley and the marriage between the Obama coalition and culture was lacking only one thing: spiritual relief

I was part of it. I was a “woke” blogger, though we did not use that word then, and many don’t dare use it now. What mattered to me was elevating non-whites and other marginalized groups in the film industry. That gave me, a white woman, a sense of purpose, a deeper meaning for my work and my life, something I’d never felt before.

But to be “woke” as translated for white people means believing you share your country and your culture with racists afflicted with “white fragility.” At first, it was an idea that spread, but by 2020, it was mandated.

It makes sense when you consider our country expanding onto the new frontier of the internet, where the free market, cities, towns, and demographic groups mattered less than this giant swirling soup of humanity we suddenly had to make sense of. What better way than to divide us up into easily recognizable categories?

2016 was, to all of us, a sign that the Confederacy had returned, especially since Trump was now a prominent figure on Twitter, just like Obama had been. We saw his win as an act of war. We were to obstruct, block, shun, attack, or resist. He was not to be allowed to govern, which would ensure his destruction, or so we thought.

What we didn’t do, however, was listen to the voters. They were invisible to us because we wrote them off as angry white deplorables clinging to their guns and religion. They don’t deserve representation. No, it wasn’t we who failed. It was Trump who invaded us and is now oppressing us.

We couldn’t see things any other way. Because we were the “good” side and those people over there had to be the “bad side.” The nation’s first Black president, we believed, was hated by white Americans, and now, they were coming to dismantle his legacy, our utopia, and Make America White Again. They still believe that. It is existential to them, which explains the ongoing need to purge their utopia of threatening people.

Those same realities that decided who got to stay and who had to go also existed in George Orwell’s 1984. What is “cancel culture” anyway, but virtual gulags?

Anyone who didn’t agree with the reversed hierarchy was out. You couldn’t just go along with it; you had to believe it. You had to love Big Brother.

Orwell had it so right when he wrote in that last paragraph, “He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody.”

I could feel it, the mass dehumanization. It didn’t sit right with me. I was disgusted by how my side was behaving, but it wasn’t until I walked in the shoes of Trump supporters that I knew for sure that this really was a Civil War.

No, Trump supporters were not getting lynched or put in concentration camps or a gulag. But the mechanisms at play are the same. I’ve never seen people in America feel emboldened to attack another group this way, but no doubt it has happened many times throughout our history.

To justify that they are the “good” side, they must continue to find victims of oppression based on skin color or gender identity. They don’t seem to care that much about the hollowed-out, torn-down neighborhoods in the middle of the country, where people of all skin colors are suffering. No, it has to be those who come from other countries, helpless and faceless, defined only by one thing: the color of their skin.

The rage and hysteria are escalating. They’re openly calling for Trump’s assassination.

They’re marching, they’re protesting, they’re screaming into the void for what, they don’t know. Something has been taken from them, something they desperately want back. It’s been ten long years of fighting, but nothing has worked. There is no way out for them. They’re trapped.

If you talk to one of them, they will tell you they believe things that aren’t true. Trump is taking away Social Security and Medicaid. They’ve eliminated the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They’ve eliminated the Department of Education. They’re “disappearing” people from the streets and sending them to concentration camps.

The truth doesn’t seem to matter and hasn’t for a long time now. Hyperbole is all because they have nothing left to sell, no vision for America’s future. Who would they be if they weren’t the people hunting Donald Trump? They do not know. They’ve destroyed themselves trying to destroy him.

The headlines fed to them supercharge their rage. These are mostly educated white women in real life, but in their fantastical imaginings of their cosplay resistance, they are warrior protectors of every oppressed group. It’s all coming true. Doomsday is here.

They don’t like the word “hysteria” because it hearkens back to the dark ages when women’s mental health issues were mislabeled that way. It’s the word. It’s always the word. They felt like no one could hear them scream. Out of that eternal frustration came the feminist movement, a movement now dead in its tracks.

It’s the word “hysteria,” like the word “woke,” like the word “illegal,” like the word woman like the word “homeless,” like the word “fat.” Change the word, change reality.

These white women can’t be feminists anymore because that makes them “white feminists” or “Karens.” They hate those words too. They must always defer, apologize, step back, de-center themselves, and elevate women of color who matter more.

I have known Joseph Massey For quite some time now, we have always wanted to do an interview, but we never made it happen for one reason or another. Now, after we collaborated on a video (see below) and he’s written a brand new book that has shot to the top of the charts at Amazon, thanks to an appearance on Megyn Kelly’s show, we thought it was a good time to have a deep conversation about everything from his faith, to his poetry and of course, to the craziness of the Left and cancel culture.

We will be giving away five free copies of America is the Poem. Joseph will select interested participants from the comments. Please leave a comment if you’d like to be considered. I will contact the winners for addresses.

Have a listen to the podcast above, and here is a link to the book on Amazon:

America is the Poem video, Joseph and I collaborated on together:

Joseph’s appearance on Megyn Kelly’s show:

A sampling of photos of Massey’s work, but you can find more at his Instagram.

For more or to subscribe to Joseph’s Substack, click here: Joseph Massey

Hope you enjoy our conversation, and let me know if you’d like to hear more interviews from me.

I hope to post one more thing for Easter Weekend, but otherwise, please enjoy the holiday, and for those celebrating Passover too.

The Wall Street Journal has dropped a hit piece on Elon Musk. Their headline suggests Elon Musk is farming out his seed and growing crops for a super-intelligent generation to colonize Mars in the near future. That’s the story they wish to tell, and it’s the story Ashley St Clair is grateful they will tell it. After all, the only thing she seems to want out of this is to be “not a secret.”

The story is behind the paywall and I am not that invested to pay for this and other hysterical bleating from Rupert Murdoch’s high-minded Conservative outlet. I was a subscriber for many years but lately, I’m not finding much difference there from everywhere else — it’s an endless war on Trump. We get it. You don’t like him. We get it. You don’t like Elon, either.

Instead, I’ll draw from this piece from The Independent:

St Clair, 26, went public with her claims that she and Musk share a child in February. Now she has claimed that the billionaire offered her a one-time payment of $15 million, plus $100,000 a month until her child turns 21, in exchange for her silence.

Well, that probably explains Amber Heard’s move to Spain and her mystery baby delivered via surrogacy. As long as she never says Elon Musk fathered it, she can live out her life with money and privacy, plus a baby she always wanted (she did not want Elon).

Heard was scorched earth anyway by the time she moved to Spain. Maybe this was the cash infusion that got her there and allowed her to live out her days in comfort caring for her baby girl. Here is a picture of the two of them:

Heard, like St Clair, went into this with her eyes open. Unlike Sinclair, and not needing a bounce of fame, Heard (maybe) took the money and ran.

By contrast, St Clair seems to very much want everyone to know who fathered her baby, and why wouldn’t she? In a time of influencer culture, what could be a better narrative than Mean Old Elon flew her somewhere exotic, filling her head with pretty little lies, and then filling her womb with sperm, whereupon a baby was made?

Where did that baby come from? It came from you, Ashley. That’s what happens when you spread your legs for Daddy. Take note.

To pretend she had no idea this was where the whole thing would end up is absurd. She knew he wanted to father a child with her. She didn’t know that no one would ever know about it and what good is sleeping with, much less having a baby with the richest and arguably second most famous man in the world if nobody knows about it.

Good for her she came of age in a culture of victimhood. Everyone is a victim, especially grown women, didn’t you know?

As yet another single mother with a mystery baby, she is a nobody. As one of Elon’s baby mamas, however, she can now become a somebody, a superstar of her wildest dreams. Maybe that’s right, maybe it isn’t, but money is nothing compared to fame, unless you’re Amber Heard.

St Clair acts like she just gave birth to the b*****d child of King Henry XIII and is fighting for him to be recognized as a royal. And now, has cast herself as the brave martyr, the poor peasant girl the King commanded to lay back and take it.

She rejected the offer. “I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret,” St Clair reportedly told Musk’s fixer Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office.

And:

St Clair claimed that Musk has used his wealth to silence some of the other women who have had his children, according to the report.

And:

St Clair gained an insight into Musk’s “paranoid” way of thinking when they dated in 2023 after meeting in the spring of that year. Their romance began on Musk’s social media platform X after he began to interact with her posts.

She was invited by Musk to visit X’s headquarters in San Francisco. From there, he took her on a separate trip to Rhode Island on his private plane, where the Space X CEO was visiting one of his sons at college, and then later on a getaway to St. Barts for New Year.

During their time together, Musk frequently talked to St Clair about having children, she claimed. “The first time they had sex, Musk joked that they should ‘pick a name’ for their future child,” the outlet reports.

On the trip to St. Barts, she told Musk that she was ovulating. “What are we waiting for?” he reportedly replied, and their son was conceived, according to St Clair.

I’m less interested in the part of the story where Elon Musk wants to populate to colonize Mars with his version of a super-intelligent offspring, or as the Left will very likely dub it, a “master race.” The part of the story I am interested in is the idea that Ashley St Clair, or any woman who spreads her legs for Elon or allows his sperm to be injected into her, is, in any way, a victim.

Ashley St Clair knew exactly what she was involving herself in, but she could not stop herself because almost no young woman could. Many young women go through the ritual of pretending to fall in love with a rich old dude so they can then get pregnant and be financially taken care of for the rest of their lives. Everybody knows that. Get that honey, or else no money is the new get that ice, or else no dice.

Ashley apparently thought she was Cinderella, that she’d get the fairy tale. Most women want that too. They want the romance. They want the wealth. They want a good father. They want the faithful man. They want a happy ending. They also want to be empowered.

They want a man who will listen to them and hang on every word. They want a man who will be attracted to only them for the rest of their lives. They want a country that remains attracted to old women, fat women, and women who are not traditionally pretty. They want it all because they have been told they deserve it all, because they’re “worth it.”

Well, you can’t have it all. If Ashley St Clair wanted a husband and a father for her child, the last person she would so willingly sleep with is Elon Musk, who made no secret of telling her yes, I would love to impregnate you.” But no, I’m not exactly looking for a commitment.

What did she expect? He would abandon everything, rush by her side, marry her, and they could, oh, I don’t know, go live happily in a SpaceX Tiny House?

Fanatical activists are out there calling him a Nazi, fire-bombing Teslas, and trying to destroy his businesses, and here’s Ashley whining, WAAAA, pay attention to ME!!

That’s not to say anyone should approve of plugging willing women in order to produce as many children as possible. But the FLDS does it too, minus the sex with underage children part.

That’s Amore

I speak from experience. I went to Italy to meet a man I fell in love with on the internet. I spent a month there. I came back pregnant. He was furious. He did not want me to have the baby, like every man who engages in casual sex except Elon Musk. Trust me, the used part is not “have a baby with me, and I’ll pay you $15 million to keep it under wraps.” The used part is, “Let’s have fun, and if you get pregnant, you’ll abort the baby, right?”

Would I have loved a real relationship and a real marriage with a happy home and lots of kids? Yes, of course. I wanted the fairy tale, too. But the whining by Ashley St Clair and the pearl-clutching by both the Left and the Right of what these women have CHOSEN to do with their bodies is nauseating. They are not children. They are not Handmaids. They are not victims.

Ashley St Clair all but begged him, “Impregnate me Elon!!” And we’re supposed to feel sorry for her now?

The truth? She wants control of all of it. She wants the lavish lifestyle and to be known as the woman Elon Musk plucked off the internet to father his super-intelligent Mars space force.

She was so pretty and so smart he chose her! What else is she going to be? How do you keep that a secret for 20 years? She didn’t make that choice for her kid. She made it for herself. Own it, Ashley.

And to Conservatives glomming onto this, I will quote an email I just received from the Daily Caller’s Editor At Large, Geoffrey Ingersoll:

It’s for that outcry on the right to become so loud that Trump simply has to part ways with Musk. As far as motivations go, this much could barely be described as ulterior. Onlookers in public can see the real goal.

I supported my daughter on my own. I worked jobs that I could do either with her in a backpack (sports photography), sleeping on my chest (movie critic), working from home (horoscope writer) or in a stroller nearby (working as a janitor).

Eventually, I built my own business, which was successful enough that we would be fine—a “woman-owned” business everyone on the Left approved of until they found out I voted for Trump.

But I don’t regret that decision, just as I don’t regret flying off to Italy and getting pregnant. Raising my daughter has been the best thing I have ever done, and there is no close second. But it was my decision.

Just like it was my bad decision not to have babies I could have had. I wish I could blame feminism or the men who got me pregnant, but I have only myself to blame. And I live with that regret every day of my life.

Do I feel sorry for the kids involved because they don’t have a father around, and is that good role modeling for men? Sure, I feel bad for them. No, it’s not good role modeling for men. Like my daughter, every kid deserves that.

I’ll never forget when she was dressed up for prom and came out to show me how pretty she looked, and how much it hurt my heart that no father was around to tell her.

She’s the one who paid the price for MY DECISIONS, just like Ashley’s child will pay for hers, for better or worse, but honestly, you could do a lot worse than $15 million plus $2 million more. Take it from someone who once had to scrounge for change because the Tooth Fairy arrived one night unexpectedly, and I had no money to put under her pillow.

No one offered me a payout, that’s for sure. But it didn’t matter how broke we were. That’s the thing about parenting: you make it work. You aren’t born a parent; you become one.

Take responsibility for your own decisions, Ashley. You will need a good explanation when your child gets older, and you have to explain to him why he’s so famous now.

//

end

I listened with an open mind to this illuminating interview between Bari Weiss at the Free Press and Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, two of the founders of Axios, about how the public lost trust in the media.

As we watch them scramble to explain why they covered up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, what we see instead of an apology is an excuse.

There has never been any real reckoning of what happened to them after Trump won in 2016, all through his first term, especially in 2020, when they lost much of the public’s trust for good.

The legacy media took a side, but worse, they positioned themselves as superior to the other side, which meant that not only weren’t they chasing the story, but they weren’t paying attention to those who were.

The Biden/Trump debate was Toto pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz. There was not much they could do after that. The jig was up.

It didn’t break news for anyone who got their news outside the bubble, however. There, the media is endlessly mocked for its pandering, weakness, and propaganda.

How it Started

How it’s going:

The opening paragraphs:

The collective post-debate gloating from conservatives is in full swing this week, as Democrats reckon with the ongoing political fallout. But the immediate response on the right has focused less on the fact of Biden’s potential mental decline than on alleging that Democrats and the mainstream press colluded to hide it.

That’s the kinder, gentler explanation. The alternative is that they are SO BAD at their jobs, such terrible reporters, so in the tank for one political party that they couldn’t see what was right in front of them for four years. Pick one.

It’s hard to sympathize when so many of us were left twisting in the wind, dealing with major issues in American life, from COVID to the protests to lockdowns to the woke madness in our schools. We needed a legacy press that would tell us the truth, not do the bidding of one political party.

True, they could have lost their jobs for it. That happened everywhere. Reporters lost their jobs for a headline, “Buildings Matter Too.” Donald McNeil lost his job at the New York Times because some overly fragile brat tattled on him and accused him of being a racist. But so what? Someone had to stand up for objectivity and journalism, didn’t they?

What Happened to Me

The mania around race and racism was on a low simmer after Trump won the first time. Cancel culture was in full swing. We’d already gone through the first wave of a mass hysteria episode around the Me Too movement. But none of that could compare to what happened to us when we were all locked down from COVID and the George Floyd video hit the internet.

It was seen by millions all over the world within minutes. Right after the video hit, a fake image of Derek Chauvin wearing a “Make America White Again” MAGA hat also made the rounds, driving up the rage meter just before the largest protest in American history erupted on the streets, breaking lockdowns and forcing the Left to pivot from social distancing to masks.

It would be days before the story of the fake photo was corrected. Probably even now, many still believe it was real.

The worst thing that’s ever happened to the Democrats is democracy.

It must be quite an existential crisis that, after all that, the rest of the country rejected their opinion of Donald Trump. That the guy they said was a rapist, a racist, a fascist, a dictator, a Nazi, a bigot, a transphobe, a misogynist, a Russian asset, a criminal, a felon, a fraudster, a fake, a traitor, an election denier and insurrectionist, an extremist, a terrorist, a white supremacist, a phony that they impeached twice and indicted four times, and became the first presidential candidate with a mug shot, and to be convicted of a felony still won the popular vote.

That has got to really burn.

But it isn’t the Trump side that is now in a perpetual state of shock because it existed inside a utopian bubble, cutting itself off from the rest of America. It isn’t the Trump side that cosplayed World War II for so long that it lost touch with reality about either our world now or what really happened in World War II. It isn’t the Trump side that was the empire.

Their war-torn resistance fighters were so disgusted that none of the Democrats had done enough to “stop Hitler Trump and his Nazi leader, Elon Musk,” that their approval numbers were at historic lows. DO SOMETHING, their supporters cried.

So Cory Booker took to the Senate floor to remind them of what they still stand for. And to rally the troops. He prepared in advance for the performance of his life. He denied himself food and water to go the distance. It was, for him, a chance to audition for the part of Charismatic Leader, the democrats so desperately need.

Booker found a way: It’s not Left or Right but right or WRONG.

It’s a far cry from Obama’s “not red states or blue states, but the United States.” The Democrats no longer believe that. They went from “don’t normalize Trump and his supporters” to it’s more than justified to demonize, dehumanize, even terrorize them. They are “bad people.” They’re no longer welcome. Not in our culture, restaurants, movie theaters, family gatherings, and, most of all, our democracy.

Their anger stems from their class privilege of having everything they need, yet they can’t accept losing something they want.

Here is Batya Ungar-Sargon:

Either the Democrats really are caught up in a mass delusion about who Trump is and why he won, or else they’re the drama club, and none of it was ever real.

Splendor in the Grass

I wasn’t just in the Drama Club in high school. I was the undisputed queen. Just ask anyone who went to high school with me. I was a terrible student. I barely graduated. My nickname was “no-show Stone,” but the one thing I showed up for was the Drama Club.

That's me as Elizabeth Proctor in the high school production of The Crucible.

In case you’ve never seen or read The Crucible, Elizabeth Proctor was John Proctor's pregnant wife who was accused of witchcraft but who was spared because of the presumed innocence of her baby. Her husband, John Proctor, would be hanged.

I could never have known that all of these decades later, we’d all be living in a Salem of our own making, and I’d be once again an accused and condemned witch.

Inside the drama club, I had a magic mirror - a small group of people who thought I hung the moon. My Drama teacher thought that too. I was his favorite, at least for a time. I didn’t know the word “grooming” back then, but looking back on it, I see that’s probably what he was doing—a pinch here, a grope there. On the last day of my junior year, he French kissed me just before I went away for summer break.

That Summer, he drove up to my house and dropped off a copy of the play Splendor in the Grass. I took that to mean I would be cast as the lead, the part Natalie Wood played in the movie. As the queen of the Drama Club, I got all of the leading roles. Of course, I would play Deannie.

But when it came time to cast the play, the part went to someone who wasn’t even in the drama club. She was the prettiest girl in school: the Head Cheerleader and the Homecoming Queen. Our teacher had broken the silent code of the drama club - nobody from the outside is allowed in. Because if they do, our fantasy world is shattered.

That’s all we had. We weren’t the popular kids, the cheerleaders, the jocks, the science nerds. We were people who didn’t belong anywhere else. But we also liked escaping into a fantasy world of being another person other than ourselves.

During the Me Too movement, my friends would always bring up our drama teacher, but honestly, I was more angry that he’d given my part away to a prettier girl.

In reality, the Homecoming Queen was the right person to play Deannie, even if our teacher probably just had the hots for her. She was good, too—better than I would have been. Because she was popular, everyone in the school came to see the play.

We were all big fish in a small pond, which gave us power we weren’t willing to relinquish. But having the whole school see our play meant reality was here, whether we liked it or not.

I often think about the drama club now when I watch Christopher Guest’s hilarious Waiting for Guffman, which is about a self-important director of a small town theater group and their delusions of grandeur.

And that’s also what I see when I look at the democrats and all of the performative protesters and activists on the Left, from Eric Swalwell to AOC to Jasmine Crocket to Chuck Schumer to Cory Booker, to all of these delusional people who believe Musk did the Nazi salute and Trump is Hitler.

They are Waiting for Guffman. They are the drama club.

It’s a cosplay fantasy, a dystopian Renaissance Faire. None of it is real. The American people have been watching this performative outrage for almost a decade. They wanted to turn the channel so badly they voted for Donald Trump a second time, and now, here they all are, once again, caterwauling about the very democracy that just took them out of power.

They still believe that doing exactly the same thing for this long will get them a different result, the very definition of insanity.

But there’s a darkness too, a rising violence. What they all mean when they say “Hands off” is not just “hands off” our government, but “hands off” everything else too.

Along with keying Teslas and violent outbursts against Trump supporters, there is a hashtag making the rounds on TikTok called “when it happens,” where users fantasize about Trump’s death.

Identity First vs. America First.

During the last Civil War, the two conflicting realities were that a country founded on freedom could not own human beings vs. the false reality that slaves could not survive as free human beings and that there would be chaos and collapse if things changed.

Now, we find ourselves once again at a crossroads with two factions believing in two completely separate realities. This time, it’s not about westward expansion but rather our migration onto the new frontier of the internet, AI, and the upcoming robot revolution. What will this country be going forward? What will be our values? What will define male and female? What will decide power?

You can see each of our potential futures laid out before us. Whole generations have come of age in virtual reality, where they can choose their own avatars and have their own audiences for their own show. It’s all performative. But to be included, you must follow the rules. If you don’t, out you go.

Like everyone else on the Left, I grew up wanting to exist in the rarified air of NPR. It was, to me, like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby: the place you don’t belong but the only place you want to be.

I was thrilled when NPR invited me to the studio in 2012 for an interview. I even took a picture of the parking lot—anything with NPR on it.

I’d finally made it, ma—top of the world.

I woke up with Morning Edition and spent the afternoon with All Things Considered. It required no effort at all. It was always on every time I got into my car and drove somewhere, and in Los Angeles, everyone drove everywhere.

Long before controversial CEO Katherine Maher was hired at NPR, listeners were already dropping like flies. Any honest person knows that NPR changed dramatically. Even my sister, a die-hard Democrat, joked with me in 2020 that she had to stop listening because every episode seemed to be about a “transgender migrant crossing the border for an abortion in Texas.”

Maher’s testimony at the “Anti-American Airwaves: Accountability for the Heads of NPR and PBS” will be seen by most on the Left as something along the lines of the House of Unamerican Activities in the 1950s and for similar reasons. Here, in the most viral exchange, Rep Gill even brings up Marxism.

Like this moment, this hearing will be shape-shifted into a story that paints them as the victims and their side as the side standing up for free speech.

The truth? They abandoned objectivity long ago, if they ever had it at all. I used to think they did. I was a faithful believer in people I thought had our best interests at heart. It took me years to understand why the Republicans have been complaining about them since their inception.

Maher is a stunner, even at her age, with her platinum blonde bob and Hepburn cheekbones. She’s probably not used to being dragged before a tribunal and made to answer for how NPR has abused the public’s trust. But abuse it, they have.

She might not also be aware that this is a revolution. No, heads didn’t roll, but the 2024 election was a triumph of the people, by the people, and for the people—a revolution made possible only by Donald Trump's alliance with Big Tech and Elon Musk especially.

To the Left, in their delusional fever dreams, they are the oppressed side. They’re the #resistance like back when German tanks rolled into Paris. But they’re not. They never were. They were always the empire. How do I know? Because I was one of them. I was an enthusiastic participant in the movement that would overtake much of American society, grow its power with the rise of the internet, and spread its fundamentalism like a fungus, one that is now killing its host.

A revolution because there was no other option.

A revolution because the kids were at risk.

A revolution because this isn’t a country that likes to be ruled over by an elite, out of touch aristocracy and never has.