Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”
As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the part of the national immersion in Trump Derangement Syndrome not being entirely without some truth on its side.
What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts.
Megyn’s had her own controversies over the years, including problems with splashy attention seeking, public demeanor, and lately her choice of political allies and villains. That doesn’t mean she is disqualified from critiquing Michelle Obama. There are cases where the adage, “takes one to know one” rings true.
The article quoted here doesn’t make this point, because it is sharply focused on one target. Michelle.
That’s okay with me. She deserves it. The piece appears in an Internet rag called aright Wing News, which is so loaded with pop-up advertising that it’s taken me an hour to produce the consolidated text you see here. I won’t apologize for the Journalism 101 for Dummies style guide approach that says one sentence equals one paragraph. We are no longer living in a literate society. Which means we make do wiypth what we have.
The Left spent eight years telling you Michelle Obama was untouchable.
Megyn Kelly just spent twelve minutes explaining why that was always a lie.
And Megyn Kelly used Michelle's own words against her.
Kelly Plays the Tape – and the Tape Does the Work
On July 20, Kelly played a clip from Michelle Obama's IMO: The Look podcast – recorded live at the Essence Festival in New Orleans – where the former First Lady told actress Keke Palmer that early media coverage of her campaign speeches focused on her clothing as a deliberate attempt to "diminish" her.
Kelly wasn't buying it for a second.
"Oh my God, she is dripping in narcissism, dripping in it," Kelly said on The Megyn Kelly Show. "Would you at least feign some humility? I'm embarrassed for you. You're actually not that great. You're fine."
She didn't stop there.
"You seem very scripted and artificial to me, if I'm honest. You don't speak from the heart. You didn't move me at all at the Democratic National Convention," she said.
On the fashion coverage grievance, Kelly dismantled it cleanly: every female politician gets written up for what she wears – Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Sarah Palin, all of them.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a column.
"So f–k off with this grievance nonsense," Kelly said. "You're not aggrieved."
The Part the Media Won't Ask About
She noted that Malia, 28, and Sasha, 25, both live in Los Angeles – and that the four Obamas are rarely photographed together.
"No wonder the girls fled the coop," Kelly said. "I'm sure they're so happy to be rid of this non-stop negativity."
Michelle Obama has been on a near-constant publicity circuit since leaving the White House – podcasts, festival appearances, book tours.
Her daughters have been notably absent from the public-facing version of that life.
Meanwhile, the Obama marriage has generated its own headlines for months.
Michelle skipped both Jimmy Carter's funeral and Trump's inauguration in January 2025 – showing up for neither while Barack attended alone.
When the couple laughed off the divorce rumors together on Michelle's IMO podcast, Barack joked, "She took me back. It was touch and go for a while."
Which is a strange way to debunk a rumor.
Kelly had noticed that pattern too.
"This is what poor Barack has been dealing with for 20-30 years now," she said. "No wonder the guy is so gray so prematurely."
The Same Media That Picked Apart Melania's Christmas Decorations
The same journalists who spent weeks dissecting Melania Trump's choice of Christmas ornaments gave Michelle Obama blanket immunity to rewrite her own history as a story of courage and persecution.
That's not journalism.
That's a protection racket.
Kelly called Michelle "a lying sack of you-know-what" who "has never seen a situation in which she's not the victim."
That's a statement millions of conservatives have been making at their kitchen tables for years without anyone in mainstream media acknowledging it as a legitimate view.
They're calling Kelly's rant a "meltdown" and an "unhinged" attack because she said something true they can't refute, so they're attacking the messenger.
The most unfortunate circumstance Michelle had to deal with as First Lady was her middle child positioning as the Democrat FLOTUS after Hillary and before Jill. Which makes her the best of a bad lot, those two being the most damaging to the Office of President in American history. Compared to them, Michelle comes across as an clumsy DEI incarnation of a President’s wife. Lacking in personal warmth, maternal interests and causes, and even the intellectual luster of academic credentials that should have made her a political asset (her published thesis from Princeton was all about her and badly written to boot), she spent a lot of time shopping and traveling to 5-star hotels overseas, staying home just long enough to ruin the school lunch diet of millions of American children.
Being publicly grumpy about her image didn’t help. The truth about First Ladies should have been on her side. Scandal has always been an accessory of the President’s helpmeet. The 250th Century in particular was awash with bad behaviors in FLOTUS lives. Mrs. Wilson hijacked the Presidency for herself when Woodrow had a stroke. Eleanor Roosevelt and hubby FDR were cousins. Bess Truman was kept locked away as much as possible. Mamie Eisenhower was reputed to be a drunk, Jackie Kennedy a debutante with a little girl voice mocked by comedians, Lady Bird Johnson an inside trader who doubled LBJ’s net worth whike he was President, Pat Nixon an Ice Queen, Betty Ford another drunk, Rosalyn Carter a character out of a Faulkner novel, Nancy Reagan a deranged movie star with psychics on staff, Barbara Bush a mannish recluse who went on to help pioneer Trump Derangement Syndrome (w/watch counting down days to his death), Laura Bush a woman with a questionable psst involving a vehicular homicide, and then, of course, there was Hillary.
Hillary, Hillary, Hillary, Hillary, Hillary… Serious scandals in every single aspect of her ambitiously ruthless life, leaving who knows how many coverups and buried bodies in her wake. Still not gone even as Michelle had to undergo scrutiny no FLOTUS ever had before, measurement as to her Presidential potential based on wardrobe, Easter Egg hunts, Christmas decorations, and a sullen private life after eight uncharming years in Washington, DC.
After her came Jill, the bookend so to speak, whose list of scandals keeps growing, from suspicions of Presidential usurpation in office all the way back to the sleazy end of her first marriage, which has generated new headlines even this week.
All these women have taken their lumps, some deserved, some not. Why does Michelle suddenly seem like a story to Megyn Kelly this week. Perhaps it’s a “wag the dog” distraction for another woman’s career that might be in peril, caught up in the phony conspiracy theories that follow Trump and his allies wherever he goes.
Should we be glad or sad that Michelle never wooed public approval in quite the way Megyn Kelly has?
Your call, not mine. Unless something excitingly new emerges, I think I’m closing my own book on Michelle at this point.
Something we can do here that we can’t do at Effby. Feature two major links with graphics in a single unified post. The links have equal import. The first corresponds to something we’d do at the other place with a Reel. No need to send people scurrying just because a few seconds of video is involved…
Obviously borrowed quotes eliminate the threat of real violence. Why Reels are cool.
The source material is an item from Gateway Pundit:
FTA: << President Trump on Monday announced that he is filing an amended complaint in which he will “lay out, in extreme detail,” numerous offenses in his $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times.
This comes after US District Judge Steven Merryday declined the Times’ request to toss the case out on Monday.
Trump said the Times “failed again in their desperate attempt to have our powerful Defamation Lawsuit against them dropped….
“As we requested, the Highly Respected Judge has called for an updated complaint, which will lay out, in extreme detail, all the ways in which The Times has repeatedly and consistently acted, with actual malice in defaming me, my family, our Great MAGA Movement, and America, itself,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
“ We will continue to hold The Times and their “comrades” in the Mainstream Media accountable for publishing, promoting, and dealing in Fake News.”
As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Trump’s original $15 billion lawsuit, filed in a Florida federal court, against the New York Times was struck down in September. Trump refiled the lawsuit in October.
Last month, Trump went off on the New York Times in a statement, writing that he would add their “FAKE & MADE UP” coverage of the Iran war to his lawsuit. He further labeled the authors of a piece “criminals,” slamming them for “TREASONOUS” coverage of the war.>>
In a postscript, Gateway added, <<President Trump on Sunday responded to a piece in the New York Times, slamming the outlet as “corrupt and unethical cowards” after a report claiming the war accomplished none of its objectives. The Times ran a headline on Sunday, titled, “What Changed After Almost Four Months of war?”>>
What Indeed? Fewer casualties than any major military operation in American history. Biggest delay factor? The President’s clear and humane aversion to inflicting massive civilian Iranian casualties, an aversion the theocratic jihadists don’t share. Even so, the military damage and the death toll among the most evil actors has been unique in the 47 year history of American and allied reticence to confront a huge terrorist nation head-on.
In his response Trump nuked the “Corrupt and Unethical Cowards” at the New York Times.
Which is a fine lead-in to one of our favorite activities here — taking credit for taking the measure of the NYT’s utter collapse as a reputable newspaper years ago. The time they have been sort of living on is a lot like the present gang of Ayatollahs in Iran, loud, meretricious, and treacherous to all standards of human and patriotic decency…
Don’t worry. You don’t have to read the graphic. Just click it.
Why do we like it, especially now? because it’s funny, something sorely lacking in the media atmosphere now, and it’s truthful in the scathing way that only satire can offer.
Today is July 19th. As a Cassandra long on record, permit me to share the provocative predictions of a very rich man who is not generally believed but who does have a track record for being right that can be measured in dollars and cents. Why is the date important? Because I just discovered a post at Gateway this morning I’m inclined to take seriously. Because I pay attention when the universe is responding to questions I have been losing and asking for myself. I also pay attention to significant numbers. Here’s my briefest ever post at Instapunk Returns:
No one called or commented. It’s a Cassandra thing.
Lately I’ve been making some dark predictions about where we’re headed as a nation. I’ve been describing the reasons why it is obvious to me that we are on the verge of catastrophe and decrying the seeming silence by those who should be discussing this instead of preaching their shallow opinions on trivialities. I’ve written about both here at this young, crisis-inspired website. Take a look.
Today I have something additional to offer. Another voice, this one focused on the near and medium term financial impacts of the cliff we’re presently falling off of. It’s a sponsored (meaning read by no one?) post at Gateway Pundit. Here’s their teaser:
If you voted for Trump… or you’re just skeptical about politics…
You know many people are furious.
A year-plus into Trump’s second term…
We’ve seen ZERO insiders arrested.
Not a single deep state crony.
Or member of Biden’s team.
The question is – why?
We just met up with a 50-year Washington insider who has a wild theory on what’s really going on… and what will happen next.
“Behind the scenes,” he told us, “the Trump team has been planning a counter-attack unlike anything we’ve seen since the Civil War.”
And it won’t just re-shape Washington…
He added:
“The last time anything like this happened, the stock market lost more than half of its value. And by the time it hits the headlines, it will be too late for most people to prepare.”
That’s why we sat him down and got the whole thing on camera — his theory, the counter-attack he says is coming, and what it could mean for your money.
We’ve made it free to watch, while there’s still time to react.
You can see it for yourself, right here…
The man making the predictions is Jim Rickards, I have known about him for years, enough to know that his claims of successive past correct predictions are true. The first 20 minutes of the video are an excellent backgrounder of what he believes specifically and why. I was further persuaded by his description of the source of his perspective on big picture matters, one I have relied on myself. It’s called Complexity Theory, a late 20th Century outgrowth of Chaos Theory, both of which I have devoted time to understanding. Here’s an excellent book I found helpful:
In simplest terms, there are tipping points at which what appeared to be stable and incremental change in markets and other complex systems turns suddenly chaotic. The resulting collapse is swift and unstoppable. The one last snowflake that precipitated a devastating avalanche. My own analysis suggests that there are multiple snowstorms underway from more than one compass direction that are building to the same avalanche. The Rickards video focuses on the most explosively public of these storms, the economy, and makes dire short term predictions that can forearm some as many millions of others suffer irreparable injury.
I am encouraging you to watch his video as patiently as you can manage to hear all of the major factors he has identified as a huge economic tipping point. The ramifications of his financial perspective go far beyond stock portfolios and pension plans. Those other impacts you can work out for yourself.
But here’s the link and the video’s opening screen. Please take the time to watch and listen…
Click the graphic…
I’m not telling you what to think. We all have to do that for ourselves.
This album appeared from no known source in my dorm room closet in 1968.
No cover, plenty of visible scratches, but it always played. My intro to the Stones.
This is actually an animation. Derived from a Hopper painting obviously. Probably two Hopper paintings. I made this gif file 18 years ago. I don’t remember how exactly. And now, even with access to AI, I can’t figure out how to loop it.
Found it in an old post at the original Instapunk site. What’s interesting is that the issues and topic discussed are receiving fresh news coverage all these years later. The decline of population replacement rates in formerly Christian nations and the continuing discoveries being made at Gobekli Tepe. Which are NOT being discussed as related topics now as I discussed them then. Proving we still haven’t faced up to our massive spiritual problems.
Pay attention to the graphic as the file opens, or you’ll miss the morph. The internal links in this one all seem to be working as well. Sometimes, the Wayback Machine is still willing to show you how my mind works.
Here’s some of the latest on smoldering controversies at Gobekli Tepe.
Makes all of those old Discovery Channel snuff films about erasing human history and restoring the Virgin purity of Earth look kind of pitiful, doesn’t it?
I’ll be more willing to accept the pronouncements of official science about where we came from and how when they have a good explanation for where the moon came from and how.
Cosmological physics has not advanced much as a science since the automotive industry consisted mostly of Model T’s. They’ve had runaway growth in speculative fantasy peddled as science though. Their self-promoting record for infallibility is crumbling in a lot of disciplines at the moment. If you had asked the smartest scientists of the day what motor vehicles would look like in a hundred years, do you think they’d have shown you an image like this?
Well, maybe they would. I just saw one of those in person for the first time a few days ago. I’ll have more to say about that at a later date, maybe soon, under the topic category ‘Wrong Turns.’
The truth? I don’t want to be writing about politics anymore. What I want to spend my remaining time on is preserving my existing works now held hostage on the Internet and finishing works in progress that complete my MS in a Bottle to a future generation. That’s been my real mission since the NY Times refused to review The Boomer Bible, a book so innovative, complex, and prophetic that the decision not to review it was all the proof needed that I had correctly identified and understood exactly where western civilization stood at the end of the 20th Century. Since then, there are two ways to view my writing career.
This would be the obvious one.
I’ve been knocked down a lot in the world of American Publishing. It took The Boomer Bible 30 years to sell out its 100,000+ (U.S./U.K.) first printing. The second book manuscript I submitted to my publisher was rejected with a postcard by an editor who had proclaimed me a genius three years before. Why? I had dared to write another innovative work that satirized both feminism and popular social science literature. All women could see was the outlandish pseudoscience I’d made up to describe what’s wrong with the female sex. They missed the fact that I had also provided a telling picture of the ‘sociologists’ who had formed the male resistance, recently divorced men who worked from research facilities called “The Garage” and “The Lodge.” They drank quite a bit and thought up multiple compelling theories to debate amongst themselves.
The Naked Woman manuscript made the rounds of every major (and not so major) American book publisher and got only one strong nibble from a house whose publisher loved the book but left the buy/no buy decision to his twenty-something editors, all of whom turned thumbs down on it. At the time I had no way of knowing that of the two surviving nationwide bookseller chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble, both had female chief buyers and were actively involved in providing input to the publishing houses on what they would promote and not. By the time three different agents had returned manuscript partials to me, I was persona non grata in the industry.
So I came back with another huge work that was part video game, part prophetic satire from the standpoint of 11:59:01 pm on December 31, 1999. How the world looked and occupied itself at the precipice of a new century no one was prepared for. I used a brilliant drawing package built into Microsoft’s Word97 application to combine text, sound, graphics and multiple hyperlinks from individual graphic frames to let readers wander through a universe of 3,500+ graphic screens that included 100,000+ words of text, including two spin-off books. I finished it in two years time and made the Y2000 New Year’s deadline only to discover within months that the Microsoft update called Word2000 was not backward-compatible with Word97 and could not display its graphics intact on screen. I was out of the water.
It goes on like this. I found a way to get an HTML version of Shuteye Town 1999 and its equally ambitious sequel Shuteye Nation on free websites I coded myself, but the free site deal was a bait and switch deal terminated by acquisitions that left me hanging with less than two weeks to pay up or be shut down. Still working on getting them fully up and accessible online.
I turned to blogging and was part of the initial rush toward conservative blogger celebrity along with the likes of Instapundit, Hot Air, Michelle Malkin, Powerline,Pajamas Media, Ace of Spades, Michael Smith, et al. Instapundit in particular linked a lot of my posts from InstaPunk.com, until in 2009 I accepted Barack Obama’s challenge to write openly about race. I even dared to discuss the N-word using the actual word to suggest that black people used it promiscuously, white people couldn’t use it at all, and the result was a divisive double standard that served no one. I proposed removing the stigma, so that the insult could be worn out by repetition until it became as ineffectual as words like Kike, Wetback, Dago, Pollock, Chink, Nip, and Redskin, rarely heard anymore because robbed of punch power. Instapundit led the charge, condemned me as a racist and banned me, followed by a general piling-on that got me reams of death threats and a deadly hack of my email account that continues to cause access problems even now after it exists only as a dead end recipient of new password attempts elsewhere.
But I have come back from every knockdown over the years. I continued writing voluminous blogs, published books through Amazon.com, generated video and audio content on my own YouTube channel, and have now spent more than 10 years as a prolific Facebook contributor.
During all that time I have written about a wider variety of topics, in more styles and genres than anyone you can name, producing in total somewhere between 3 and 5+ million words of writing (fiction, poetry, cultural and political commentary, reviews, etc), plus many thousands of graphics, including photoshops, cartoons, and videos.
Which makes me the other thing I am, the father of punk writing and the secret Rolling Stones of American letters. The Stones have worked in every genre of popular music, from blues to country to hard rock to borderline acid rock to disco to rap. No matter what genre they work in, they are still always the Stones. Unique. They have lasted longer than anyone else. I am one of their biggest fans and have definitely written a book’s worth of essays explaining why they are the preeminent satirists in entertainment media from the late 1960s on.
Using the same criteria that enabled them to call themselves the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World before the world recognized it, I am not shy about claiming, famous or not, that I am the Most Important Living American Writer. There is no one competent to critique my entire oeuvre, because it is wider and deeper and more voluminous than anyone who presumes to know enough to dismiss or disrespect it. I have tried things no one else has yet identified as things, opened doors no one knows are there, and I am confident of being recognized after my death by a future generation looking for new ways to create literature now that the novel and even short stories are as dead as doornails.
I’m saying all this because it no longer matters if any of you like me. The TekLords are squeezing me constrictor-like into silence. It’s almost impossible for me to type or edit text at Facebook. When I try to comment on the posts of others, the page scrolls away from my typing and even from any attempt to backspace, which has to be done by counting clicks blindly, then scrolling to check the result. FB will not accompany my links to my own work elsewhere with lead graphics from those pieces, so that the FB post will be brief and featureless. My own computer and iPhone are by now maxed out with all the gyrations (and duplicate files) now required to acquire and finalize graphic materials in particular. I am also presently being blocked from generating FB reels using AI animation apps because certain names and other words in headlines are labeled NSFW and rejected for use by me. The NSFW label is even applied to images of individual faces the algorithm has been programmed to protect from humorous contexts.
That’s the definition of a crossroads. I survived a very blatant phase of censorship during the Biden administration when I was suspended for ‘fact-checks’ that were anything but. Told I could appeal but given no space in which to refute censor errors.
Now the censorship has returned with a vengeance, subtler, more pernicious, and more difficult to identify because it involves invisible (to me) customized notification delays to ‘friends,’ retroactive AutoCorrect insertions of typos (incredibly often in first lines of posts) and an aggressive interruption of keying by AutoCorrect algorithms determined to finish words and names incorrectly as I type.
All of this is also true to a lesser extent at my many Blogger sites, which are subject to a new kind of attack within the last week, in which I am forced to alternate between two different browsers to get a post written and illustrated. There’s the Google browser that wants to hijack my FB page so I can’t post on it under my own name and refuses to access my image files in my blog sites. I need a separate browser, though, to maintain my presence in Facebook, which means I’m going round and round in my interfaces on my phone and my iPad.
Blogger has huge deficiencies it refuses to correct. It isn’t possible to order posts oldest first, which would make book writing on the application possible without ridiculously intricate gymnastics. It does provide an option to pin one post as the first one people see in perpetuity, but not all of its blog templates actually permit this feature to be used. You can specify it; it just doesn’t work. Other aspects of site functionality and housekeeping are too complicated to use as well. My Instapunk Returns blog has had 350,000 visits in 6 active years and it has just one follower: me. Doesn’t seem likely that none of my visitors would check a box allowing them to be notified when there’s a new post without some intervening obstruction I can’t see. And despite years of wrestling with Blogger’s version of html, it’s still impossible for me to add more than one hyperlink to a graphic, let alone define parts of individual graphics as linkable. Why I can’t use Blogger to edit, add to, or build a multi-site sequel to Shuteye Town 1999.
Plus, all the software everywhere, including yours, is gradually falling apart in a labyrinth of conflicting password algorithms, systems handoffs, traffic overloads slowing response times, dozens of variations on the incompetent, now AI-poisoned AutoCorrect, and the danger of having passwords and credit cards hacked during what should be routine, secure transactions.
And users don’t seem to be noticing any of this. Facebook, for example, has implemented one subtle change after another to prevent actual discussion and conversation between friends. Intro text to a hyperlink post (say to a controversial news article) is omitted in sharing, so readers of the shared link don’t know why the originator posted the link in the first place. Paragraphing and hyperlinks in comments on others’ Facebook posts don’t work. Identities of those who have shared one of your posts are often concealed. FB insists on hiding comments from view unless summoned and then offers options of “most relevant” and “all,” which does not include showing replies to individual comments. They don’t want friends talking with one another.
Dead end. A prolific writer like me finally cold-cocked on the ground? Yes and no. I’ve been describing a personal crossroads thus far. My conflicting priorities about serving a contemporary audience vs serving a future audience. But we have also reached a critical crossroads as a nation,which makes the contemporary political scene a continuous strong attractor for my time and attention. Much as I want to work on the legacy stuff, the ominous nature of where we’ve arrived in our public discourse is nearly impossible to ignore.
Me and Michael Corleone have the same kind of problem…
I have a pinned post up at my Facebook page that has received virtually no likes or comments. It’s a more important post now than it was when I wrote it, and the Instapunk Returns post it links to should be even scarier. Because that was written almost a year ago, and its predictions are all coming true. I have a very good record as a prognosticator, and I don’t selectively edit my past. What I’ve written is all still there unless censored by others (including the ones that got me death threats, as well as the few times when I have been dead wrong).
Now would be a great time to read it. For the first time if you haven’t already. Again, if you think you have read it: With My Fortuneteller Hat On…
Me in my old incarnation of TruePunk
Where my personal crossroads meet the nation’s crossroads. I don’t believe we are going to weather this storm. In my view we are headed into a true Dark Age. In just a few months we’ve moved from endangered to a state of imminent catastrophe. Assassination talk of all kinds is increasing exponentially. Hard left political activism is growing aggressively and openly as an open enemy of the Constitution and the nation. AI and the incompetent management of its overlooked risk factors will result in either a recession in the short turn or a depression in the long run. Voters have never been more uneducated and suffering from consequent pandemic ADHD. The nation’s lower, podunk courts are increasing their arrogant overrulings of the policies the President was elected to implement. The nation’s news media have moved into the operating realm of open sedition by contemptuously affirming their own authority to ignore the President of the United States on the question of what is news and what isn’t.
Take a look at this poll teased by the suddenly confused editorial policy of Citizen Free Press, who aren’t so sure about this Trump fella anymore: Socialists top MAGA in CNBC poll.
The Iran War has become direly important because even mainstream Americans have forgotten that long term national security against a deadly enemy of 50 years standing is more important than gas prices at the pump this week.
The midterms are likely to be a disaster for Trump 2.0 because the RINOs in the Senate want him to fail, and even the pro-Trump pundits, opinion makers, and influencers aren’t talking about the psychotic mentality that’s pervading the country right now. It’s insanity on a national scale. What do they talk about instead? What little men always talk about — their own superior insight about what Trump must do here, here, here, here, and here [sigh]
to satisfy them [superior headshake], ad nauseam.
Throughout, the conservative abdication of leadership with their own constituencies has made it easier for anyone and everyone to decide that Trump really is at fault for all of this crisis stuff. A Jeb Bush presidency wouldn’t have brought us so close to the edge of civil breakdown and worse. (“Let’s all go back to that pleeease…”)
Which might even be true. Which also misses, tragically, the big picture. The catalytic effect of Trump has been to expose just how sick all our institutions are and how corrupt the supposedly wise class of elites who have been running them into the ground. He is showing us that all the utopians and cynical empty-promisers have forgotten the first rule of national survival. Which is that the prime directive is survival.
Why successful civilizations stumble repeatedly into Dark Ages. When men forget how to survive they have to relearn that lesson the hard way.
That’s where we are. On the brink of that process, which will be long and bloody and less prosperous than anyone alive here remembers.
My temptation right now is to shut up and let all that happen without comment. Go back to working on my legacy. Nothing I can write or do will change anything. QED…
…except there’s the old gunfighter dilemma. I can let all the bad dudes shoot it out and probably kill that attractive young teller with a Glock to her head, or I can draw my weapon and trade my own life for (maybe) hers.
What does the attractive young teller think? From where I sit it sounds like she’s saying, “I’ll just wait for a female-identifying gunfighter to save me instead, thank you.”
