Not mine in the petty sense of possession. Mine in the strange, almost sacred sense that something can belong to you simply because you belong to it.

We live in an age where everything is brought to us. Food arrives at the door. Entertainment plays on demand. The entire accumulated knowledge of civilization sits inside our pockets.

The national parks make you go get the thing.

The view does not come to you. You climb for it. You drive down some ridiculous road for it. You wake up before sunrise. You lose reception. You wonder halfway up the trail why you thought this was a good idea.

Then the view opens. And there it is.

Some enormous piece of America that cannot be delivered, streamed, optimized, or felt through a reduced thumbnail.

It is one thing to look at the outline of America on a map. It is another to know what Montana smells like after rain. To feel how cold an alpine lake is when you first put your hand into it or to hear the waterfall before you see it. To wipe the orange dust of Utah off your face. To hear the silence of the caves hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface in Kentucky. To learn that distance in the dunes of Colorado is deceptive. To watch the last light turn a mountain pink in Texas. To see a bison standing in the middle of the road and remember, suddenly, that this continent was once unimaginably wild.

Every park reveals another personality of the same country. Yet somehow, no matter how different the landscape, there is a familiarity waiting inside the unfamiliar.

You drive hundreds of miles into a place you have never been. You see the sign warning LAST GAS. Civilization thins out behind you. The road stretches ahead into mountains or desert or badlands, and for a moment you feel very far away from everything you know.

And then, almost like a mirage, you see it. The brown national park service sign. A little further down the road is the entrance station. And there, beneath that familiar wooden roof, is a park ranger topped with their unmistakable hat.

Waiting for you. As if they were expecting you.

This arrival stirs something in me. Because no matter how far I have driven, no matter how strange the landscape outside my windshield, no matter how long it has been since I saw another town, there is something instantly reassuring about it.

I know this place.

Not this place. I have never been here before.

But this place.

And even though it is a trail I have never walked before, somehow, I am home.

See, you think you know America.

But that is just the thing about the national parks: they make America mysterious again.

You realize how much of your own country has been hiding from you. You understand that to access some of her best parts, you still have to work for it. You have to earn it.

We spend so much time talking about America as if it is something we have already figured out. We quickly reduce it to politics and demographics. Red states and blue states. Coastal elites and flyover country.

And then you stand on the edge of Yosemite Valley and the arguments become very small.

Not unimportant.

Just small.

These places were here before our political parties. These rivers crossed the continent before our borders. These forests grew and burned and grew again before anyone had invented any of the words we now hurl at each other.

And somehow, through an extraordinary act of national foresight, we decided that some of the most beautiful places among them should not belong to a king, or a corporation, or the person rich enough to buy the view. They belong to Americans.

Perhaps this is why I have started thinking of hiking, climbing, rappelling, slogging, spelunking, sand surfing, snow shoeing, and paddle boarding through these parks as a kind of claiming.

Not claiming the land.

Claiming my relationship to it.

Every trail walked makes the map a little less abstract. You stop saying “Somewhere out West” because now you know exactly what that particular stretch of America looks like at dusk.

You begin collecting the country. The smell of pine. The crisp breeze of the altitude. The sound of boots on loose dirt. A bear spray canister bouncing against your backpack. The circle on your map drawn for you by a ranger. The first glimpse of snow on a distant peak in August. The simple sandwich that tastes better than a Michelin star dinner because you carried it miles up above the treeline.

These are the small things.

But love of country is built from small things.

Patriotism can be grand. It should be. Flags and anthems and fireworks have their place. But there is another, quieter kind of patriotism. It is knowing the place.

These parks are ours.

Not because we conquered them (which we did).

But because, at our best, we had the wisdom to leave them alone.

There is another gift these places give us. They hold the evidence we didn’t know we needed for ourselves.

There are versions of ourselves we can only meet when we go far enough from the familiar – selves that are waiting somewhere in the silence, the altitude, the exhaustion, the danger, the enormity of it all. And once you know that person, you want to know them again.

I found parts of myself I didn’t know existed on mountains I didn’t know I could climb. She was stronger, more comfortable in the uncomfortable than I could have predicted. Now, when I stand in front of something daunting and new, I no longer wonder whether I am the kind of person who can do it. I know that I am.

I have met this version of myself on too many mountaintops to doubt her anymore.

Ah, the national parks.

Of course, the goal is to explore them all. And there is something deeply satisfying about watching the map fill in, about turning names I dreamed of visiting into places I have walked and touched and breathed. These places all keep a version of me, too.

In the beginning, I was eager to cross off as many parks as I could. Another park, another pin on the map. I wanted to collect them quickly, almost greedy for the next one. But somewhere along all those miles, across all those states, I understood.

I love knowing there are still places that remain mysterious to me. Wonders I still get to see for the first time. And after visiting some of the parks more than once, I know that it is impossible to meet the same mountain twice.

People often ask me how “quickly” I want to finish the list. How many parks I have left. How many years I think it will take.

Finishing is the goal, but it was never the point.

Here’s the secret to this grand adventure: I never want it to end.

Arynne Wexler

August 25, 2026

Passover begins tonight — a central story for Jews and Christians alike but also a defining narrative for America.

America’s founders drew heavily from the Exodus and the Hebrew prophets. They studied Hebrew. Some even proposed it as the official language of the United States. Benjamin Franklin, for his part, suggested that the national seal feature Moses crossing the parted Red Sea. The reverence for this story runs deep in our national DNA. It’s no accident that Hollywood — the most American of art forms — has returned again and again to retell it.

And yet, as a nation, we’ve let some of our oldest traditions fade. But that’s nothing new. God always finds a way to remind us.

Today, many Americans have begun to realize we needed the pain of 2020 and the years that followed. Without that nightmare, President Trump wouldn’t have returned with the mandate to truly save America. Without those four bitter years, the country might never have awakened to remember who we are.

This moment echoes the Exodus. Just as we needed four years of national affliction to witness Trump’s political deliverance, the Israelites needed to see God’s hand to remember His power. That’s why scripture says God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” Not only to punish Egypt — but to remind His people of His unmatched might. To declare, for all to see, “that there is none like unto the Lord our God.”

And yet, even after 10 plagues and a miraculous escape, the Israelites faltered. Jewish tradition teaches that only one in five left Egypt; the rest chose the false comfort of slavery. Many who did leave lost faith before stepping into the Red Sea. Others bowed before the golden calf while Moses ascended Sinai.

Even in the face of miracles, it was easier for some to forget God than to trust Him.

Americans had forgotten even before 2020 — and God gave us a hard reminder.

So ask yourself: If we forgot who we are, what else have we forgotten?

Look again to the story of Passover. The book of Exodus begins with a chilling line: “There arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.”

It wasn’t just that Pharaoh forgot Joseph. He chose not to know him. Acknowledging Joseph would have meant acknowledging the Israelites and all they had done for Egypt. Joseph saved the Egyptians from famine. His descendants helped build up the nation. So Pharaoh erased them. He enslaved them. He ordered their sons drowned in the Nile.

But not everyone forgot. Pharaoh’s own daughter remembered. She rescued Moses — the one who would lead the Israelites out of Egypt, receive the Ten Commandments at Sinai, and pass down a faith that would eventually give birth to Christianity.

That’s something worth remembering. We rightly see Pharaoh as the villain of Exodus — but how many of us stop to honor the quiet heroism of Pharaoh’s daughter?

She saved Moses when it was unpopular, even dangerous, to do so. She defied her father’s command, choosing righteousness over convenience. Her courage made everything that followed possible.

Christians have long understood the wisdom of Romans: “If the root is holy, so are the branches.” Like that olive tree, we must guard the roots to grow strong branches. We must remember.

So let us remember who we are. Americans are a people who remember God. Like Pharaoh’s daughter, we remember Joseph — even when the world forgets. Like the Israelites, we walk away from slavery and into the unknown, trusting the God who delivers.

We are that people.

I just pray we don’t forget.

So then why is it that the “feminists” of the West are completely silent?

These are the same women who spent years telling us to believe all women, who walked around in their stupid Handmaid’s Tales costumes claiming their rights were going to be taken away, the same women who insisted on blaming the patriarchy for everything, and disrespected religion and replaced it with progressive politics.

The same women who defended men pretending to be women.

You won’t find a single one of them or the news outlets that championed them mentioning anything now about the women of Iran. These women have been at the forefront of the freedom revolution that is currently unfolding. They are fighting against an authoritarian regime that beats and murders women for simply showing their hair, with the most well-known cases being with Nika Shakarami and Mahsa Amini.

What do you think the IRGC’s Morality Police - which yes, is not from an Orwell book, it’s an official unit in the Islamic Republic of Iran - what would they do at one of these western women’s marches?

Well, of course we know. What is happening in Iran is in direct conflict with almost every claim these so-called ‘feminists’ have ever made.

See, they don’t actually care about women.

They cared that they could weaponize them to take down all the things they hate.

But now that a real women’s movement is challenging what these progressives have long defended, from Islam to state control. And more than that, the women of Iran love America. They love the West. And they love freedom.

This is a direct challenge that western feminists cannot - and therefore will not - answer. So to use a phrase that these feminazis love: “Your silence is deafening.”

We will never forget it.

I stand with the women of Iran.

Here’s what you can tell a leftist claiming that President Trump “broke international law” when he captured the narcoterrorist dictator Nicolás Maduro.

International law is WORD MAGIC.

It’s meaningless. It’s used by people with masters degrees in gender studies to stop good guys, like the United States, from stopping bad people. The same people who are upset about broken international law didn’t seem upset about basic human rights in Venezuela.

International law only has power because WE, the United States, chose to enforce it.

Without us, what will you do? Is the UN going to write a strongly worded letter enforced by the French? Do you think war lords in the Congo are scared of international law or the full force of the United States of America?

Your words are meaningless.

You choose to not understand — but the rest of the world does.

Welcome to 2026.

Yes. You heard me.

We use the phrase “Make America Great Again” a lot, so it’s worth remembering what that actually means. America is great because it took many different types of crazy, improbable people to make this country what it is. America is great because Americans are crazy.

American greatness was not inevitable. Our nation is the embodiment of Drake’s famous line, “Started from the bottom, now we’re here.” There’s something almost fanciful about the idea that a nation which began as an island of misfit toys for religious dissenters could survive at all, let alone break away from its mother country. And as for becoming the greatest superpower on earth? That idea is more than fanciful and yet, incredibly, it is reality.

So how did it happen?

Simple: Because our nation started as the place where people could think extraordinary thoughts, it became the place where people would do extraordinary things.

Ours is a strange, hybrid culture, combining not just the reason of Athens and the faith of Jerusalem like the nations of Europe, but adding the pioneering spirit of wanderlust found among the Hopi, the Navajo, the Powhatan, and many others. Even the Founding Fathers were like intellectual Swiss Army knives: Protestant dissenters, Greek philosophers, Hebrew-speaking prophets, Roman Senators, and frontier gunslingers all rolled into one.

Like the sculptors of Mount Rushmore, Americans did more than settle the land that makes up this savage, mighty island; we remade it in our image. We didn’t tame it, for America can never be tamed. Rather, we let its wildness into our souls and became strong enough to master it, because we were one with it.

It was in those difficult, early days when the seeds of American greatness were planted. It wasn’t enough that we sailed across an ocean to settle the equivalent of an alien planet. No, we did it again, sending thousands of wagons full of hope into the vast unknown, as if we were recreating the human experience for the benefit of history. And then we bought or fought for the rest of the continent. When Davy Crockett led the doomed warriors at the Alamo, it was an insane, hopeless cause, which made it feel almost Biblical, only with muskets. We ran for California to pan gold and search for fortunes in rivers. We settled Florida – literally, a giant swamp. Small wonder that when Lewis and Clarke drew a road from sea to shining sea with nothing but imagination and grit (and Sacagawea), it was like they were showing where the horizon itself could stop.

All of this is a microcosm of why Americans are great: because Americans are fearless.

We don’t care about the odds. We do it anyway. That’s actually crazy.

Franklin Roosevelt, for all his flawed policies, was genuinely speaking for America when he said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That phrase perfectly captures why America became great: because we never let fear – or even sanity – stop us.

We fought the world’s greatest empire and won because we were crazy enough to adopt guerrilla warfare just to have a fighting chance. We turned a wilderness vaster than Europe into a united, civilized colossus of a nation because we were crazy enough to see opportunity in a savage wilderness. We took on the rest of the world – twice – in the name of stopping war forever, and actually managed to create a weapon which made war too costly to pursue between advanced nations because we were crazy enough to master the atom itself. We put a man on the moon (yes, we did) when others were congratulating themselves on sending glorified debris because we were crazy enough to take it for granted that it was possible. We even brought two ancient empires to their knees because we were crazy enough to defy entire philosophical traditions screaming that history was against us.

Even in the shadow of economic pain, our dreams expand endlessly outward, and when those dreams are tested by the fires of destiny, they are forged to become the world’s new reality. Especially when those dreams are absolutely crazy.

We are always trying to map the furthest edges of human potential. It is due to that spirit that there is no better place and no better time for us to be alive than today in the United States of America.

I know this America is still here. I see it in the fact that even today, we still strain endlessly against limits as a people. Having exhausted our physical frontiers, we build endless digital ones to settle and conquer, even if the very act drives us mad. Having defined our world, we turn our eyes upwards to the stars, even when the resources required boggle the mind. Having been great once, we refuse to fall to fatalism, but instead elect leaders on the promise of restoring that greatness, only this time without the flaws of the past, no matter how delusional the expert class tries to convince us to. We are forever iterating and imagining, striving and searching for the next undiscovered, untamed place where crazy can become common sense, and madness can forge new meaning.

The day we stop will be the day America dies, and that day is not here yet.

This week we celebrate one of our oldest and most quintessentially American traditions. Besides the usual things, I know what I’ll be giving thanks for this year. I’m going to be giving thanks for American greatness, and just as importantly, for what enabled America to be great.

Cheers to the crazy people.

Have a great Thanksgiving. God bless you and your family. See you next week.

The Retard Right’s strategy is inaction, subtraction, and distraction. This is why other hateful values have been allowed to run rampant.

We have been dragged into a messy civil war of death by a thousand clicks.

Arynne’s Substack

President Trump Must Protect His Legacy From The ‘Retard Right’

On the ten year anniversary of President Trump’s Golden Escalator announcement, we must consider how the movement will endure when he is no longer there to hold it together.

Arynne Wexler

Jun 16, 2025

President Trump is re-founding America.

When Trump descended the golden escalator this day ten years ago, he confronted a broken, calcified Republican party that was still in thrall to bad ideas and worse candidates. Trump took it by storm, in what I can only describe as the political version of a leveraged buyout, and then used his extraordinary powers as a turnaround artist to take the presidency, and both houses of Congress. Twice.

He literally redefined what it meant to be on the Right in America. He forced us to confront that a conservatism which seeks to conserve everything except the interests of forgotten Americans is not conservative at all.

And now, he is redefining American government. He has yanked power away from an unelected, un-American Leftist bureaucracy: a bureaucracy which tried everything in its power to stop him, and yet failed against the force of nature that is Donald Trump.

Unlike past giants of the Republican party, like Ronald Reagan, Trump didn’t have the luxury of inheriting a conservative movement primed for power. But he didn’t need to. He is the movement. And now, with nothing but the force of his personality, he is taking a sledgehammer to the false idols of Washington in the name of the American people. And in doing so, he is re-founding America, which is to say he is dragging America back to something our founders would actually recognize.

But while Trump is undoubtedly a great man of history, his legacy is still a work in progress. And not just his legacy as a president, but his legacy as the leader of the American Right. And it is here that his ability to be a one man army actually works against him. Because there will come a time when President Trump is no longer president. When new generations will have to carry on his mission.

So ask yourself: how will they know what that mission is? Who is going to define it when President Trump is gone? How will his movement endure when he is no longer there to hold it together?

To be honest, I’m troubled by the early signs. Because some of the loudest voices on the Right who claim to be the protectors of Trump’s legacy are exactly the kind of people who will ruin it. Nazis. Conspiracy kooks. Self-confessed criminals. Hucksters who think virality is a substitute for reality.

Personally, I call them the Retard Right, not because they’re all stupid (though many are), but because they treat their audience as if they are.

Which is why I refuse to believe they represent the majority of MAGA. MAGA is not stupid, and neither is President Trump. But because these people are so loud, they confuse many into thinking that they’re bigger than they are. Which means they’ve gained a lot of undeserved influence over the Right.

Let’s be quite clear: these people’s “loyalty” to President Trump is a mirage. They talk a great game, but their business model relies on dividing the MAGA movement. On doing nothing but complaining that President Trump isn’t going far enough even as they don’t lift a finger to help his movement. On stoking whatever their audiences believe, even if it drives most of MAGA – and America – away.

They aren’t capable of loyalty to anything but what keeps people watching. They are slaves to the whims of their audiences. And once President Trump is gone, their “loyalty” to him will not extend to his legacy if that legacy isn’t getting them the attention they want. They will drag the movement into a messy civil war; a death by a thousand clicks.

You need only look at this weekend’s developments in Iran to see the Retard Right in action. Before President Trump had so much as uttered a word, self-styled supporters of his started spamming “no new wars” on X, as if simply saying the words could ward off geopolitical reality. In fact, and President Trump knows this, one of the most important ways to stop new wars is to make the enemy too afraid to start them. Or do these people seriously think a nuclear state controlled by people who chant “Death to America” and fanatically follow a religion that views martyrdom as the highest honor would be bound by realpolitik?

But again, I doubt any of them has thought for one second about what would happen if anyone with power actually listened to them. All that matters to them is that “no new wars” does numbers on X, and never mind why. Though frankly, they aren’t even consistent on that; just ask them about invading Canada and see how quickly “no new wars” evaporates.

Which gets to the real problem with the Retard Right: for all their talk of winning, they’re basically dogs chasing cars. They want to win to prove a point, but have no idea what to do with power once they have it. They’re too stupid to wield it, so they inevitably fail in office. Which means they have to make their audience think their inevitable failures were caused by a conspiracy rather than by simple incompetence. They’re like Marxists forever whining that their philosophy has “never been tried” in order to avoid the simple fact that even they don’t know how to try it. That’s why so much of their rhetoric is aimed at stoking feelings of paranoia, disempowerment, and irrelevance by pretending that Trump’s victory has been somehow undermined or betrayed.

Just look at all the absurd claims that Trump has somehow been “bought.” Trump has been bought? Even the Left knows that’s impossible, which is why they hate him. Trump couldn’t be bought by the world’s richest man. Trump couldn’t be stopped by a bullet to the head. Trump does what he thinks is right without hesitation and without apology. The Retard Right is the opposite of that; they can’t even blow their noses without checking X to see if it’s popular.

That can’t go on. These people are poison for President Trump’s movement. If they rise to lead the GOP, it would be the surest path back to power for the globalists whom Trump defeated.

Remember, President Trump beat the globalists with two ideas which they tried to kill forever: nationalism and populism.

The globalists told us that populism meant lynch mobs, and nationalism meant Nazis. The elites of both parties willingly accepted this, because it made it easier for them to sell out the American people. And if the Retard Right gains power, those elites will be proven right. If the Retard Right becomes the face of the Right, then Americans will recoil. They will believe that President Trump was a Trojan Horse for the lynch mobs and Nazis the globalists warned us about. And they will vote the globalists back into power just to avoid them.

The Retard Right’s politics of inaction, subtraction, and distraction will turn President Trump’s mighty legacy into a source of annoyance and revulsion for every sane American.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. President Trump can stop it – in fact, he is the only one who can.

And the best way for him to do so is to bring these loud voices to heel. Either he must call them back to sanity, or if they refuse to be sane, he must cut them out of his movement before they destroy it. There is no place for low IQ losers in the struggle to make America great again, because there will be no patience with them in an America that is great again.

[For the video version, please watch + subscribe to my YouTube channel here.]

I’m writing this because I refuse to abandon my fellow citizens. Particularly when they’re suffering.

Let’s be quite clear about something to start: Nick Fuentes is a liar.

However, the greatest lies start with truth. If you are one of Fuentes’ followers, I’m betting the thing that hooked you wasn’t just the anti-Jewish message. I bet you found him funny, which he is, and I bet he said something that resonated with you, and felt true to your experience.

I don’t want to take that away from you. In fact, I think the Right gains nothing by denying the true parts of Fuentes’ message. We simply look unreasonable, out-of-touch, and heartless.

Groypers, I agree with you – you are suffering.

Particularly if you’re young. I also agree that it’s not your fault; you couldn’t control the fact that you were born in this era – in an era when cost-of-living has ballooned, when the older generations have turned the housing market into basically a crypto scam, and when college degrees are oversupplied and thus comparatively worthless despite still being vastly overpriced.

What’s more, you’re right to look at the past and sense that this is not normal. It used to be that men could have secret second families on a teacher’s salary. Now, men can’t even have main families, and even if they could, what woman are you going to have it with? Someone you don’t want, or more likely, someone who all of society tells you will never want you? No one would want that.

I hear and agree with you when you ask how it can be justice that you live in a society where the culture is rigged against your finding love and human connection, and the economy is rigged against your owning a house, a car, or assets of any kind short of junk meme coins.

You’re right; it’s not justice. And you are right to want answers as to how it became this way, and who is responsible.

What’s more, you are right that right now, no one will come to save you (and, by the way, that includes Nick Fuentes and his sympathizers like Tucker Carlson). I even think you are correct about the fact that America’s politics have ceased to be responsive to its people – that it is, in fact, rigged in favor of the wealthy, the old, and the corporate.

You’re right that most Americans want an economically populist party. You and I both know it. So why don’t we have one? Obviously, because money controls politics more than votes. In other words, because DC is corrupt.

And then you look at the Jews, and we don’t seem to have any of these problems. In particular, while people seem to be listening to us less and less these days, you can’t help noticing that we have the right phone numbers to call and you don’t.

So let’s talk about what you clearly believe: the Jews control everything.

Okay, firstly, if that were true, we’d have no reason to care what you think. Secondly, Zohran Mamdani would not be the next mayor of New York City. Thirdly, there would be no movement to get rid of test scores in secondary education. Fourth, we would be playing on NBA teams instead of owning them. And fifth, it would always be Short King Summer.

Now, you have presumably all been educated on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book “The Israel Lobby.” You think this book proves we control everything. Actually, all it proves is that the only reason we have any power at all is because, to the extent the “Israel lobby” exists, it’s a very cheap date compared to other interests in Washington.

No, seriously. Aid to Israel amounts to about 0.05 percent of the federal budget. Compare that to the federally-directed largesse enjoyed by the automotive industry, or the pharmaceutical lobby, or the agricultural lobby, or the tech lobby, and you’ll see that you’re complaining about the government handing out less than a penny to one group while it shovels out hundred dollar bills to everyone else.

And that’s exactly why all these people love directing your attention to Israel, because it distracts you from caring about the issues that might compromise their lobbying money, or do literally anything to stop Washingtonian corruption. They think you’re too stupid to actually do the math.

Stop falling for it.

If you want to see who’s getting the money that could sponsor a new industrial policy and start to resurrect the easy prosperity of the last century, we’re not the droids you’re looking for. There’s a whole universe of subsidies, unfair regulations, and other nakedly irrational, heartless policies holding back the kind of unifying, populist economic policy you want.

If foreign aid to Israel were stopped – which I think it should be – that money would just go straight into increasing what those other, more powerful lobbies get.

I can see the fire you hold in your hearts for us. I humbly suggest you try training it on the people who are actually regulating your future out of existence to preserve their present. And if, once you’ve eliminated them, Israel then becomes the biggest subsidy on the books? Well, then we can talk.

But, you say, at least those industries are American, whereas Israel is foreign. Fair enough. But how much do they spend on lobbying to normalize illegal immigration? Or for more H1-Bs? And all while you labor in bondage. You think we don’t know what that’s like? If not us, then who does? Muslims? The Palestinians? They hate you for being Christian, and anyway, aren’t you the people who hate the Boomers for selling you out? The Palestinians literally strap bombs to their kids’ chests. That’s seriously who you want to throw your lot in with?

But I understand your resentment of Israel. I do. You look at Israeli society, with its optimistic young people, ballooning birth rates, and universal military service, and some part of you stirs with the awful thought that all of it exists at your expense because of the foreign aid we give to Israel.

Very well. I won’t call you antisemitic for thinking that. Instead, I’ll just ask you this: say that’s true, that foreign aid made Israel so prosperous. We spend a fortune on other nations, and they don’t look like Israel. Why? Could it be because culture and values play a part, too?

But then, perhaps that’s also part of the problem for you. You look at Jewish Americans and how much we help each other, how our family units are largely intact, and how we love life, and you want that. But more than that, you feel deliberately excluded from it, so much so that when Nick Fuentes comes along, with his fake Talmud quotes, and tells you that is exactly what is happening, you believe him.

Let me be quite clear: we do not want to succeed at your expense.I want you to have everything young people in Israel have, too. That’s why I’m writing this. Not for my own sake, for yours. Because in hating us, you are cutting off your ability to gain wisdom from the one people who’ve been where you are now. Again and again. For thousands of years. You think you are our enemies?

Bubbeleh, after the past ten years of woke governance, you are us.

You see, once I forced myself to ignore all the antisemitism in your rhetoric, I actually noticed a couple of strange things about the way you talk: firstly, that when you talk about Hitler, you always end up describing someone else; and secondly, that when you talk about the traits of yours which make you feel alienated from modern society, you always cite traits which historically have been associated with Jews.

First, let’s talk about how you see Adolf Hitler. Let’s look at what you believe he did:

1) He reclaimed the land which was his people’s ancestral birthright,

2) He saved them from laboring under the rule of malicious foreign powers,

3) He mercilessly devastated their enemies in pursuit of regaining his people’s sovereignty,

4) He reunited his entire civilization under one flag and stood up against the great foreign threat which sought to assimilate them to a fallen, false order.

You know what’s weird about these descriptions? They don’t fit the historical Adolf Hitler. At all.

Instead, they sound like you’ve spliced multiple legendary figures from Jewish history together into one person. Claiming land as a divine birthright sounds less like lebensraum than like our shared Forefather, Abraham. Saving an oppressed people from laboring in bondage and mercilessly forcing their enemies to grant them sovereignty is more Moses than Operation Barbarossa. Reuniting an entire civilization against assimilation and foreign false Gods isn’t what the Fuhrer did, but it is what the Messiah will do. In other words, even as you poach the aesthetics and talking points of mid-20th century fascism, it’s obvious that what you like about it is the opposite of what the actual fascists liked about it.

I know some of you love quoting the Joker, so let me just beg you: don’t talk like one of them. You’re not, even if you’d like to be.

And you know something else? I see how you talk about women. Or rather, how you talk about why you struggle to relate to us. You say you’re too disagreeable, too much of an outsider, too concerned with reason and truth, and too far from society’s “Chad” physical ideal to be attractive in spite of these traits. Again, these are all complaints which Jewish men in particular are achingly familiar with, because this is historically how they’ve been characterized. Even the figure you named yourself for – the “Groyper” frog – looks like an antisemitic caricature: fat, smug, with hands clasped in a gesture which implies scheming.

You see yourselves as a persecuted minority, possessed of hidden, esoteric knowledge which got you censored (read: exiled) everywhere, who now can only rely on in-group solidarity and your own moral exceptionalism. You tell yourselves that you are perpetual outsiders who nonetheless secretly wield massive influence over the people who currently rule America. Do I even have to point out the parallels?

The truth is, you – yes, you – are as much victims of antisemitism as we are.

The very traits which make you feel alienated from mainstream society are traits which society still associates with us, and which it never got over associating with us despite the fig leaf of acceptance which it has presented since the Holocaust. The great innovation of wokeness was to rebrand that hatred as hatred of “whiteness” rather than Jews, the same way it twisted the phrase “Black Lives Matter” to mean “white people should die.” You doubt that? Okay, let me ask you something: when wokeness was burning like a brushfire through every elite institution, seeking “straight white males” to fire and cancel, who do you think they were targeting? Meaning no disrespect, but there aren’t many red state white guys in America’s elite institutions. Do you think Bari Weiss was persecuted at the New York Times for being too white? Of course not.

But, you say, if we have so much in common, then why do we seem to hate your heroes, like Nick Fuentes? And why do they tell you to hate us?

Well, first of all, they tell you to hate us because we’re easy targets. Just like you were easy targets for the woke Left. People keep calling you the woke Right, and you rightly militate against that. Because you saw – correctly – that for all their moral posturing, woke people were cowards who punch down on people who can’t hit back. You, on the other hand, see yourself as punching up.

You’re wrong.

You’re punching sideways, at the other people who have always been the acceptable scapegoat. You think that sounding like the pro-Palestinian demonstrators will win you sympathy. It won’t. Woke Leftism is a big club, and neither you, nor we, are in it.

Though, of course, they won’t object if you do try to sound like them. Not because they want your support, but because they would love it if you – the evil straight, white, cis males they loathe – made yourselves as impotent, angry, and incapable of accepting help as the Palestinians. It would vindicate everyone on both sides of the aisle who wants to marginalize you. Every Boomer rant about how entitled, how unworthy of the culture “they” built (read: inherited from their parents), and how anti-American you are would look true. Everything Hillary Clinton said about why people shouldn’t let Bernie win will look smart in retrospect, rather than like the desperate, misandrist spin of a pathological liar.

The Left went out of their way to provoke, harass, and persecute you, in the hopes you would lash out and make their persecution look justified. I get it. I’m a Jew. We’ve been there.

So back to this question: why do we attack Nick? Well, why did you attack Robin DiAngelo? Why did you attack Ibram X. Kendi? Oh yes, obviously, because they were scapegoating you and putting you in danger of not having the life you wanted. If you could blacklist them from all polite politics, be honest, you would have. But more than that, you knew they were frauds. You knew they were liars and grifters. You knew that people who might be attracted to the emotional part of their message -- the part that was true -- deserved better. Because deep down, you knew how they felt.

That’s how we feel about you. We want you to have better. Not all of us; I’ll admit there are assholes in the Jewish community just like there are anywhere. But there are also many of us who have even been where you are and want to help.

Some of you were fierce about protecting the gaming community or any of a million other subcultures which came under attack from the woke because you needed a place where you aren’t persecuted. So do we. That’s why we care about Israel (among many other reasons). For some of you, I know Nick’s fanbase provides that. But you deserve better.

I want you to find a community where you can do more than lick your wounds. I want you to find one where you can be lifted up, loved, and accepted. We made one for ourselves. We can teach you how. All you have to do is not hate us.

Perhaps you think I’m only saying this about you because I’m afraid of you. Ha. Please. I’m afraid for you more than I’m afraid for myself. People like me have survived thousands of years of being hated. We’re used to it.

But look at history: blaming the Jews never turns out well. It’s always a precursor to civilizational decline. If this is what you’re resorting to, what does that say about your future?

It’s very easy to blame us, if only because our last names are very distinctive and we’re easy to trace. But so are the names of Irish people, who are also at the top of many elite institutions, and responsible for many policies you don’t like (very much including social media censorship and banks). Are we going to seriously start debating the Shamrock Question, or challenge the existence of Ireland? Or are we going to admit Leftism exists everywhere? Which phenotype is immune to Leftism? Please, tell me.

Contrary to what Nick tells you, there is no reason we can’t be allies. Actually, it’s the opposite: we should be. The Left rightly sees both you and the Jewish community as obstacles to gay race communism; in fact, no offense, but they see us as a much bigger obstacle than you, which is why they rage so much more about Palestine than they do about you. And I’m not stupid. I know we can use all the help we can get.

But more than this, I genuinely feel sorry for you. Not because I am Jewish, but because I, too, am young. I know that people our age get a raw deal just as much as you do and I love your passion for fixing that, your merciless focus on justice, even your weaponized autism.

But you are making young people look terrible, and unworthy of help. And you’re ignoring the one model – the Israeli one – that has been proven to work. I can’t speak for every Jew on the planet, and nor would I want to, but I think you deserve help; that your circumstances are unjust and that you are worthy of sympathy. But you should want to fix your life, rather than burn the world down out of spite. I get it; your souls are so whipped raw with rejection and failure that you feel transgression and provocation are all you’re capable of.

Nick wants you to stay that way. That’s why he never gives you any solutions that have a prayer in hell of succeeding. Because that keeps you watching. It keeps the algorithm happy. He has no incentive to actually fix your life, and every incentive to keep you constantly frustrated, angry, and tuned in. His victory is not your victory. Look at how he reacts to your superchats. He hates you. He’ll forget about you the instant there’s an easier way to be famous.

And you deserve better than that.

I have a little game for you: name a nepo baby from the Third World who seduced the liberal Western intelligentsia with his credentials as a socialist critic of the U.S. and, in so doing, gained the power to essentially destroy the last traces of modernism in his homeland.

If you guessed “Zohran Mamdani,” you’re wrong. The correct answer was Ayatollah Khomeini.

Okay, let’s try an easier one: name a nepo baby from the Third World who seduced the liberal Western intelligentsia with his credentials as a socialist critic of U.S. policy and, in so doing, was allowed to functionally destroy a huge chunk of New York City.

Again, if you guessed “Zohran Mamdani,” you’re wrong. The correct answer was Osama bin Laden.

But maybe third time’s the charm, so here we go: name a nepo baby from the Third World who seduced the liberal Western intelligentsia with his credentials as a socialist critic of U.S. policy and, in so doing, ushered the barbaric, Islamist style of governance into the arguable heart of U.S. culture.

The answer to this, too, is not Zohran Mamdani. Not yet. But it could be. And that should scare you.

Let’s cut to the chase: If you’re afraid of a Muslim mayor of New York City, you’re not being unreasonable. You’re not being racist. You’re not being stupid or unsophisticated. Quite the opposite. The fact that you don’t want a Muslim as mayor of New York City is basic pattern recognition. It’s the ability to read history.

Here’s another question: Name a single society where living conditions improved once Islamist leaders took over.

Trick question. You can’t. It doesn’t exist.

Now, knowing that, here’s a more serious one: Name a single modern society which, having allowed Islamist rulers to take over, was able to dislodge them.

Again, trick question. You can’t. It doesn’t exist.

And that is what makes Zohran Mamdani dangerous. Because while Leftist leaders are not exactly a new problem in New York City, normal Leftists come and go. Normal Leftists can get voted out. If you’re lucky, they can have the damage they do reversed. But Zohran Mamdani isn’t just any Leftist. He’s a Muslim Marxist. And that is what makes him dangerous.

Now, Islam and Marxism might seem, at first blush, like they can’t coexist. Marxism, after all, has historically been militantly atheist, which is why groups like the Taliban were briefly U.S. allies against the Soviet Union. But Toto, we’re not in the eighties anymore. Now, we know that once you strip the anti-religious parts away, the two ideologies actually go together like…well, not chocolate and peanut butter, but maybe gunpowder and gasoline.

Let me count the ways:

Firstly, Marxism is an ideology for losers. This is true both in theory and in practice, seeing as its sole goal is state-enforced mediocrity. And Islam is the lowest IQ religion on the planet. If you want to put together a coalition for the world’s C students, what better partner than the religion that services most of them?

Secondly, both Marxism and Islam are inherently, necessarily violent. It’s been centuries since the last Holy War a Christian or a Jew fought, because both Christianity and Judaism have gone through centuries of enlightenment and reformation. Islam, on the other hand, is still (charitably speaking) stuck in the Bronze Age. And Marxism necessarily requires violence because, lacking any higher rewards for achievement, it has to resort to violent punishments to force compliance.

Both ideologies also appeal to incels. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the literal Incel wiki, which boasts entries for both “sexual Marxism” and “Muslimcels.” This should be no surprise to anyone, considering that the logical endpoint of Marxist hatred for private property is a rationalization for rape. After all, if you don’t own anything, that includes your own body, which means it can be redistributed against your will. This is practically an unofficial sacrament within Islam, seeing as the founder of their religion was himself a child rapist.

Does Mamdani agree with all this? I think so. Truth be told, I think that violence and barbarism obviously lurk behind Mamdani’s mellifluous NPR-style voice and dorm room radicalism. And the most convincing proof, in my opinion, is his stance on the NYPD responding to domestic violence calls. That is to say, he doesn’t want the NYPD to respond to them at all. Let me say that again: this man wants spouses to be able to abuse each other without interference from the police. Ostensibly, this is because he thinks the cops don’t have the training to deal with such a fraught emotional situation, in which case he’s naive, at best. But I have no idea if that’s the real reason, and neither do you.

Which brings me to the real problem with Muslims: they lie.

This is especially true where relations between the sexes are concerned. I spent my college years in Philadelphia, and it was public knowledge there an entire decade ago that the massive black Muslim population mostly converted to Islam (through the prison system) because it gave them a religious excuse not just to beat their wives, but then to stick them in burqas so no one would notice they’d been beaten. Which, coming from the religion of “honor killings,” is anything but surprising.

“But Arynne,” you say, “that’s quite a leap. I mean, it’s not like there’s evidence that Zohran Mamdani is tied to the kind of radical Muslim cleric who would sanction that sort of thing, right?”

I’d like you to meet Zohran Mamdani’s favorite Imam, Siraj Wahhaj. You want to know what Siraj Wahhaj thinks about getting involved in politics? “You don’t get involved in politics because it’s the American thing to do. You get involved in politics because politics can be a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.”

You want to know what he thinks of Jihad? “It is an honor to die in Jihad. Yes, an honor.” You want to know what he thinks of America? “You know what this country is? It’s a garbage can. It’s filthy. Filthy and sick.” He even hates the idea of Muslim children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. And again, this is the guy Zohran Mamdani calls “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century.”

We don’t have the luxury of waiting around to find out if Mamdani agrees with this kind of scum. I’m old enough to remember the last time a “skinny kid with a funny name” got exposed for having ties to a radical, Left-wing, anti-American preacher. If it hadn’t been for President Trump, that guy would’ve managed to outlaw his own opposition just like every other socialist. And he wasn’t part of a religion that sanctions deceit en masse.

Fool me once, shame on you. We don’t have the luxury of being fooled again.

And yet, despite all of this, Zohran Mamdani is leading – and leading by a commanding margin. Why? You’d think both parties would have an antibody to this sort of thing. Yes, both parties. Siraj Wahhaj, after all, isn’t just an anti-American preacher; he also has referred to gay people as “a disease of [American] society.” Does a keffiyeh automatically transfigure someone into a freedom fighter? Apparently so, at least for Mamdani’s voters.

And the Right? Well, our antibodies seem at least a little functional, seeing as Republican Mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa’s backers are now turning on him and reluctantly becoming Cuomosexuals just to avoid the scourge.

But why did it take this long? Mamdani is a Muslim Marxist. Literally everything that has been militantly opposed not just to the United States, but to Western civilization itself over the past 100 years is embodied by this man. Where are all the people with “America First” in their Twitter bios now that one of these savages is poised to take ownership over one of our greatest cities – arguably the economic center of the entire world? Do they just resent New Yorkers so much for being liberals that they don’t care if the enemy secures it as a beechhead?

Look, I get it. New York has made a lot of mistakes over the past decades. In the past, it’s been perfectly logical for the Right to look at the city, shrug, and repeat H.L. Mencken’s famous line that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Under normal circumstances, I’d agree that New York deserves to get its worst instincts imposed on it good and hard. But not when the price is capitulating to a hostile, hateful ideology with a history of never letting go of power once it gets it.

The Right might be in power, but we’re losing.

In fact, truth be told, it feels like we’re repeating all the same mistakes of the Left in the past ten years. The same mistakes that turned the once invincible-seeming Obama juggernaut into a series of feuding, politically toxic, extremist eyesores. And it all comes down to the same terrible combination: political opportunism being used as justification for moral cowardice.

The people responsible for this rationalize it by acting as if we’re always going to win, so we have no reason to ever improve. It makes you wonder if people actually want to lose, because it’s easier to fundraise, fear-monger, and funnel content to an angry audience when we’re losing. Everybody talks about JD as “48,” as if it’s a done deal. But the way we’re acting, I don’t see how we expect to win anything. In truth, I don’t see how we avoid making the American people cringe to death before they get to the voting booth.

And it’s all for the same reason the Left lost: because we’re too scared to call out our craziest voices.

To be clear, any winning coalition has crazy voices. Crazy supporters are just the side effect of a successful mass movement. Now and then, they make good volunteers for campaigns, so long as you give them a job that doesn’t require talking to actual voters. When they become a problem, however, is when they start dictating your message, because the antibodies against them have failed. Or, in the case of the Right, when the antibodies have decided it’s more profitable to imitate the crazies.

Which brings me to the problem with the Right personified: Megyn Kelly.

You may be surprised to hear me say that. I can already hear the protests: Really, Arynne? Megyn Kelly? Not Tucker Carlson? Not Candace Owens? Megyn Kelly?!

Here’s the thing: I don’t expect any better of Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens. Tucker becoming the Right’s version of Robin DeAngelo, only with demons and Jews as the stand-ins for systemic racism, was practically inevitable the instant he lost his guardrails at Fox. Candace Owens turning into the Right’s Jussie Smollett, only with Yarmulkes instead of MAGA hats, is just what you’d expect from a pathological narcissist who got her start as an influencer by threatening to dox children. They’re not the problem because they can’t be better.

But Megyn Kelly can, yet is choosing not to. And that is the problem with the Right in general.

It gives me no pleasure to say this. I’ve lost sleep over this. Megyn Kelly used to be my role model. I wish she still were. I want her to be. But right now, the inescapable fact is that Megyn is leading the movement off a cliff because she’s outright telling people not to think critically.

Really. At a recent Turning Point USA event, when asked who in the media to trust, Megyn urged those listening to simply pick one or two non-mainstream media voices to listen to that offer “bad news” for their own side. Note: She didn’t suggest any way to assess whether that “bad news” was true. No, according to her, the thing to do is to outsource your thinking to a couple of occasionally contrarian influencers and trust them without the regular service check.

Where do I even start?

Firstly, while admissions against interest are sometimes a sign of honesty, they’re not always. There’s quite a lot of difference between the “bad news” being “your party is going to lose the midterms” and “your party is covering up Charlie Kirk being murdered by his own wife.” Both are bad news, but only one is credible. The bigger problem, though, is that Megyn tells the audience to trust the people offering this “bad news” when one is meant to help you while the other is meant to get you hooked on political mass psychosis.

Look, I say this as an influencer myself, but influencers are not infallible. Far from it. Truth be told, the incentives for us are arguably worse than for mainstream media. At least in mainstream media, your audience is guaranteed to an extent, so you have some reason to care about what’s real rather than just what’s viral.

The same is not true in influencer spaces. Everyone here is vying for attention, and many don’t care how they get it, so long as it arrives. Want to demand answers to questions literally no one would be stupid enough to ask? Why not, you’ll stand out for asking them. Want to outright lie just to boost engagement? Hey, like Churchill said, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on – and that was before the internet. Besides, if you get caught in the lie, you can just pretend you never said it. No one has the attention span to care either way.

This is the reason I never tell my audience to only listen to me. I always tell people they should take information in and decide what to think about it on their own. The influence I want to have is the kind where my audience doesn’t need me to constantly spoonfeed them what to think because they already know how to think.

Sadly, that seems to be the opposite of Megyn’s approach now. Part of this tracks with the Right’s tendency to be seduced by follower count and name recognition, regardless of how they were earned. Except large followings just mean people are good at getting attention. You don’t have to respect anyone just because they have more followers than you. You don’t even have to take them seriously. Want me to prove it? Okay, I will: Kim Kardashian has 74 million followers on X. The Pope only has 18.8 million. Megyn Kelly is a practicing Catholic. Tell me, which of these people should she take seriously on matters of religion? And more importantly, is there any number of followers at which Kim Kardashian could be taken seriously as a theological authority?

Of course not. So if a large following grants no religious authority, why do we pretend that it can grant political authority? It can’t. It doesn’t.

Which brings me to the second point: Megyn Kelly knows better than this. We know that because when her business model isn’t implicated, she has absolutely no problem pushing back on widely followed people.

Remember when she asked President Trump that question at the first 2016 Republican debate? When she stalked to the Decision Desk at Fox on Election Night 2012 and called out Karl Rove’s wishcasting disguised as modeling? When she spent four years defying the suffocating wokeness of American media and popular culture, despite its vengeful enforcement by social media companies and (by proxy) the Biden White House? To be clear, you don’t have to agree with Megyn’s decision to do all or even any of these things. But you can’t ignore the pattern: she’s not afraid to call bullshit on people. It’s a huge part of her brand, to the point that she still says there are “no sacred cows.”

Which is what makes her sudden decision to support the Tuckers and Candaces of the world with her silence, despite knowing they’re clearly lying, so disappointing.

Why do I say she knows they’re clearly lying? Simple: Because she won’t admit to agreeing with them.

She just offers increasingly absurd reasons not to push back. Witness the woman of “no sacred cows” fame suddenly deciding that she “doesn’t care” if Tucker Carlson is an antisemite, and that going after the “young mother” Candace Owens is a bridge too far. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting Candace Owens is sacred (“cow” I can’t argue with, though), but Megyn clearly thinks she is. Why else would she so studiously avoid even the appearance of scrutinizing her claims?

Does she just not know what those claims are? Okay, fair enough. The Megyn I know has never had a problem admitting when she doesn’t know something. Why not say that? Why defend a woman whose statements she isn’t familiar with? Why call her “brilliant” if you don’t even know what she’s saying?

And, for that matter, why be content with ignorance at all? The Megyn Kelly that I know was never content with that. She pushed back on things, researched statements, and showed people compilations of their quotes. Yet for a woman who was always so careful, so unbending with her research, she is miraculously incurious about the things Candace and Tucker say on their shows. Why?

How can she not know, for example, that the “young mother” used her maternity leave to allow noted crackpot Ian Carroll to take over her show and claim Turning Point USA killed Charlie Kirk, complete with evidence-free allegations that he was shot from a concealed trap door. Carroll isn’t Candace, granted, but he’s also not a “young mother,” so why hasn’t Megyn denounced that, at least? Is it just spite? A decision to do the opposite of whatever people call for, regardless of wisdom? I don’t want to believe that. The Megyn I know took unpopular positions because she’d actually assessed the facts, not out of kneeejerk, petulant contrarianism.

This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about teaching your audience to separate fact from fiction. Which, if Megyn really believes that we should all just pick two independent media personalities to follow, ought to be the entirety of those personalities’ job. Actually being not just trustworthy, but more trustworthy than mainstream media, is literally the whole reason independent media is supposed to exist.

Imagine for a moment that someone chose Megyn as one of their two news sources. If she’s totally incurious about claims Charlie Kirk was shot from a nonexistent trap door, what other hypotheses will she tell her audience to entertain? What other figures will she tell them to consider as potentially trustworthy? Will she applaud the “genius” of Andrew Tate? Will she encourage us to “just ask questions” about lizard people running the world, or to seriously ponder if Stephen King shot John Lennon? There is as much evidence for those claims as there is for Carroll’s claim of the trap door. Which, being a lawyer, Megyn would know. So why not say so?

At some point, ignorance becomes willful, and when that happens, we have a duty to ask why. She is not a low IQ person, so why entertain this low IQ, resentful garbage? From Candace, it’s literally all I’d expect. But from Megyn Kelly, it’s hard not to see it as a willful abdication of her best qualities.

Look, I can’t know Megyn’s mind, and neither can you. We can’t know why she’s saying or doing these things. I’ll admit, it looks like she’s running cover for two pundits with large audiences because she’s terrified of losing any of the newfound love she’s found on the influencer circuit. But that might not be it. She might not even know; it might be purely subconscious. But it’s concerning. Megyn Kelly used to be my role model and I’ll tell you one thing I know for sure, the woman I remember would never have gotten so high on her own supply that she’d be willing to do anything for a social media fix.

But this is bigger than Megyn herself. Which brings me to the third reason this is so concerning: this has consequences not only for people listening to Megyn, but for the MAGA movement as a whole.

Let’s not mince words: we’re staring down the barrel of a massive power vacuum in just over three years when President Trump leaves office. We are already confronting an only slightly smaller power vacuum with Charlie Kirk gone. There is a real question of who picks up the mic to lead the Right going forward. And whoever picks up that mic has the chance to rival the president in terms of influence, if not outright power. Part of what makes MAGA so special is that it’s not a movement that trusts blindly; not a herd of sheep following a few voices off a cliff.

Or at least, it wasn’t. But if former voices of critical thinking like Megyn Kelly not only go silent in the face of the most cynical, exploitative, dead-end ideas, but actively encourage her own listeners to outsource their thinking to those voices, then it may become just that. That would be a disaster, and not just for high-minded reasons. We saw what happened when the Left spent four years letting their bitter, low IQ peasantry write the party platform. The Right should take one look at that and run far away.

There are few people with the credibility to stop them in that course. And Megyn Kelly, for all her flaws, is still one of them. Which is why those of us trying to preserve MAGA as the party of common sense, of truth, and of patriotism, still need her in our camp.

We don’t follow her just because she’s pretty; we’ve got plenty of hot people. No, we follow her because she’s pretty and smart and isn’t afraid to call out nonsense.

In fact, that’s why Americans vote Republican at all: because at a certain point, they get sick of hearing lies detached from reality. Because they’re sick of copium and want to self-improve. Megyn can still self-improve. She can still be a voice of reality. Which is why I hope that she, and all of the Right, are able to snap out of their uncritical love affair with crazy before it’s too late.

In the beginning, God made light. With Adam, He made man. But with Isaac, He made laughter.

Most know the story of how Sarah laughed when she heard she’d finally be pregnant at ninety. “Yeah, right. Sure. Me? Pregnant? At this age? Who’s writing this script?” But then it happened.

So Sarah gave him the name Yitzhak, “he will laugh.”

The Jewish story didn’t begin with triumph, or power, or even survival. It began with a laugh. With disbelief turned into joy. With the reminder that it is never too late. The family that would give birth to Judaism and eventually Christianity (and yes, tragically, Islam too) began with a joke told by God Himself.

So what do we do in the face of blood libel? In the face of violence and persecution? In the face of true hate?

We do what Sarah did. We laugh.

This is not denial. It is defiance. Laughter is the most subversive thing in the world. The tyrant cannot stand a joke. The antisemite cannot survive ridicule. Despair cannot live in the same room as comedy. The Nazis banned Jewish humor – they knew what it could do.

If you can laugh, you are still alive. And if you are still alive, you are still Jewish. It’s literally in our DNA. (Cue: Thanks, it’s the trauma)

There’s a reason why comedy is always the last bastion of free speech in a society. It refuses to bow to the sacred cows. It makes people laugh before they even realize they’re agreeing with you.

Laughter is where truth survives.

I feel very connected to Isaac. My parents had trouble conceiving, and it took a modern miracle for me to show up. My own life began in unlikely joy. And while I was raised on the lessons of the patriarchs and matriarchs, I was also raised on the laughter of Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Crystal, and all the cultural forefathers and foremothers who understood that Jewish life hinges on sharp humor.

A prayer and a punchline were both holy acts.

The Hasidim knew this. The Baal Shem Tov said “if tears open the gates of heaven, joy demolishes them!” Laughter is not frivolous, and the divine cannot reside in a place of sadness.

I am no stranger to the wave of hate we are up against. The hate is real and serious. But Jewish history is proof that no matter how bad it gets, we don’t stop laughing. It is a shield; joy is our weapon.

And Isaac’s name is our inheritance. Yitzhak. We laugh not because the world is good, but because God insists the world can be good. We laugh because God’s message to Sarah still echoes: “It’s never too late. Surprise! Here’s joy when you least expect it.”

In fact, if history has shown us anything, it’s to keep the faith. Make the babies. Tell the joke. We always get the last laugh.

Gmar Chatima Tova

May you be inscribed in the book of life

[This essay was originally recorded with Tablet Magazine on the morning of Friday, October 6, 2023. The next day was October 7th. A video recording of this article can be found here.]

Let’s start at the end.

This High Holiday season, as we do every year, we conclude the Torah with the Israelites as they are just about to enter the Land of Israel. You would think this would be a time for celebration. Yet instead, in those final moments, Moses details to the Jewish people how they have failed time and again, and predicts they will fail again. Then standing in sight of the most Promised Land, Moses dies, the greatest of dreams unrealized. And like a good first installment in a series, the screen cuts black – we are left on the edge of our seats.

One of the clear messages we take away from this ending is delivered throughout the Torah: failure is part of the program. It is both our opportunity and our onus to return from it.

This is also a classically American concept – or rather, it was. We were once a country that saw itself as a never ending project. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

Something we’ve inherently understood as Americans is constantly striving towards the idea of ‘a more perfect Union.’ We love the comeback story, root for the underdog, and celebrate the triumphant return.

But there is a crisis of the American soul today. First, the obsession with fixating on historical flaws cut the legs off what was once a unifying power. Now, in the place of a shared history is a void filled with attitudes of helplessness and division. Our country has become sick with self-flagellation, cancel culture, and dangerous conspiracy theories born from a victim mentality. It is a shift that leaves no room for forgiveness.

And a society that hates itself cannot survive.

America’s founders drew heavily from the Exodus and the Hebrew prophets. They studied Hebrew. Some even proposed it as the official language of the United States. Benjamin Franklin, for his part, suggested that the national seal feature Moses crossing the parted Red Sea. The reverence for the stories of the Torah runs deep in our national DNA.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z”l) once wrote the question: “How do you live with the past without being held captive by the past?”

Well, Judaism insists: a life without forgiveness of the past is a life without progress towards the future.

We are a religion that does not shy away from our history. This is true even down to the commandments. The Talmud tells us that both sets of tablets, including the first ones that Moses broke when he returned to the scene of the golden calf, are together in the Ark of the Covenant. “Even though the first tablets were broken, their sanctity obligates one not to treat them with contempt.” (Brachot 8b)

Judaism instructs us clearly; keep the faith, remember the past. Neither shame nor deny it, but move on from it. Our story, complete with flaws, is what allows us to return.

In another example in the Gemara, Avoda Zarah 5a, we ask the question: Why is it so important to mention King David’s sin with Bathsheba? Why ruin the image of one of our iconic leaders? Rabbi Yochanan explains that that’s exactly the point. David’s moral collapse teaches us that we too can sin and repent, just as the generation of the golden calf shows that a community can do the same.

Our free will begets failure, and we must believe in the pursuit of our own redemption.

This concept is both one of forgiveness and assignment. Judaism does not let us off the hook – David pays for his mistake for the rest of his life. But even so, G-d still acknowledges David’s greatness and makes him the father of all future kings. We understand that the blood of our actions is on our hands, but it is also in our hands to fix it.

The Hasidic concept of ratso vashov (run and return) echoes that inherent to the act of being alive is failing. There is no paradigm of constant growth. The founder of Hasidic Judaism, the Baal Shem Tov, compares the need for failure in life to a parent teaching his child to walk. The father’s goal as he moves his hands away is to let the child fall. When G-d accompanies us in life, He has to step back.

Simply put, you cannot learn to walk on your own unless you learn to fall. Progress necessitates failure.

Back in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), in a remarkable plot twist, Judaism extends the line of leaders from Judah instead of Joseph. Judah, who concocts the plan to sell his brother into slavery and sleeps with a prostitute who turns out to be his son’s wife. And yet when choosing the future King of Israel, how is it that he is chosen to be the model? The answer is that Joseph famously avoids failure. Judah knows how to lead because he has lived and grown.

America, on the other hand, has become exceptionally bad at handling her past. In one extreme form, failure is now treated by many as an indelible stain that can never be forgiven. Tear down the statues, rewrite historical events to suit a modern stomach, nullify any merits with any demerits. And at the other end, there is the total avoidance of dealing with failure. Give everyone a participation trophy, excuse bad behaviors, coddle minds with the low expectations of a victim mentality. After all, there is no individual responsibility when the past – or others – are to blame.

However you slice it, both tracks take the easy way out. Completely at odds with the Judeo-Christian values that form the bedrock of this country, they remove the core concepts of individual autonomy and liberty. How easy life would be with no expectation for change. Working towards ideals requires risk and hard work. Having a direct hand at the outcome means opening the chance to falling short.

Failure is intrinsic to freedom.

Yes, the United States has lost its center of gravity – but so did the Israelites. These were the people who witnessed G-d’s miracles through the ten plagues. Yet still, only chamushim (one-fifth) of Jews in Egypt chose to leave. These were the Jews who witnessed the splitting of the sea, yet still built the golden calf. They received manna, and still, the spies returned with lies.

Today, we have miracles around us all the time. We have trees that grow and hearts that beat. But sure, we arguably don’t have the same awesome, in-your-face wonders. So perhaps we can be easier on ourselves for needing reminders when we fail too.

The founders of both nations believed in the continuing, ever evolving stories of their people. We are two nations distinguished in our belief that nothing is predetermined. America, the great unfinished symphony. Judaism, with her structured mechanisms that remind us never to give up. It is the essence of the High Holidays that begin with Tshuva (repentance) and close out with the holiday of Simchat Torah. Just as we complete the Torah, we immediately start again with the first chapter. We are told clearly that it is only just the beginning. We must continue the story.

So we end back at the beginning. Bereishit.

Fail, the Torah tells us. Fail again. Fail better.

It is so incredibly Jewish to keep trying. It is so deeply American to do the same.

Charlie Kirk died as he lived: fighting for the soul of the next generation.

He was on a college campus, in the belly of the beast. He knew there would be people who hated him. He knew that it was time away from his wife and kids. He knew it wouldn't make him the money that other ventures could. None of that mattered, so long as there were people he could reach and inspire.

And Charlie didn’t walk out. But that is, and now was, the magic of Charlie Kirk. He was the man who never walked out of a fight. He never walked out of a chance to persuade someone. He never walked out on his friends, on his family, or his country. He never walked out on the chance not just to defend America, but to champion what made America great.

He strode into every lion’s den with the righteous courage of a Daniel come to judgment.

Whether it was Cambridge or Utah Valley, Charlie Kirk didn’t walk onto college campuses in normal times. He visited them during the height of the Great Awokening, when the pseudo-apostles of George Floyd and gender ideology were busy tearing down statues, tearing through American history, and tearing up American values. Charlie Kirk stood athwart all of this, not impotently yelling from the sidelines as previous generations of conservatives did, but with a listening ear and a quick tongue, even in the face of furious, screaming, jeering crowds.

Before Charlie Kirk, the Right gave up on college campuses and treated youth as a punchline. Charlie Kirk, on the other hand, dared to listen, to be present.

There is no one I can point to in this country who cared more about the next generation of America than Charlie Kirk.

And yesterday, he was shot by a cowardly, vicious animal whose name may never be known, and which – even if it is – deserves to be forgotten. I will not dignify that animal. Instead, I will say what Charlie Kirk meant, even though there is something unbearably surreal about trying to encapsulate the movement that he built. It is trying to summarize a story that ends midsentence.

Many have remarked on the similarities between the 60’s Left and today’s Right. On those terms, there’s only one appropriate comparison: Charlie Kirk was our Martin Luther King Jr., and not only because we’ll always remember where we were when we heard he was shot. In an era when young conservative men were treated like pariahs – ostracized, shamed, scapegoated, dehumanized, and demonized – Charlie alone could channel their rage without being consumed by it. He not only felt their pain, but genuinely worked to fix it, which gave him the moral authority to tell them to rise above their worst instincts: to take the high road to self-betterment rather than one of the many primrose paths to self-immolation.

Unlike many other conservative influencers who claim to speak for young people, Charlie did not do this as a cynical ploy to protect donors. Quite the opposite.

I had the privilege to be with him a month ago for an off-the-record, high-level discussion with some TPUSA donors, where the topic unexpectedly became home-ownership among young people. It was a topic that Charlie chose. And in a room with people who arguably paid his salary, a lesser leader would have simply parroted what the people with money wanted him to say, but not Charlie Kirk. He refused to let that dictate his words. He refused to give up on the idea that young people deserved to experience the American dream, because as a man who never finished college and yet who ended up leading and shaping an entire movement, he personified the American dream.

I never once saw him look at his phone during the two days we met. Even when we disagreed, it was as if he had nowhere else to be. Like right there, in that moment, all that mattered was the subtle thrust and parry of intellectual fencing between two minds. He was preternaturally laser-focused, and despite the fact that he was both a literal and figurative giant (6’5’’ even when slouching), he somehow never made you feel small.

And it worked. In refusing to accept what his nearest historical analogue, William F. Buckley Jr., called “the failure of the conservative demonstration,” Charlie Kirk demonstrated that conservatism could be fun.

He made it look youthful, edgy, clever, and cool.

He bled aura.

When Turning Point started recruiting influencers, their videos were consistently good, with cool stages, obvious production value, and slick messaging. When the GOP needed to create its own ground game to compete with the Democrats’ longstanding advantage in mobilizing voters, who did they turn to? Charlie Kirk.

There was a season last year when wearing MAGA hats became a daring fashion statement even in places like New York City. Charlie Kirk did that.

He was able to pull all of this off not just thanks to talent, but thanks to conviction.

As the name of his organization implies, Charlie recognized that we were at a turning point in this country. He recognized the violence of the Left. He recognized that younger generations had much bleaker prospects than their parents. He cared about that deeply, which is why he went to these college campuses over and over again, even long after he no longer needed the exposure, and when he probably could have done countless other things that would’ve made more money.

But he still made time to do it. He made time for everyone. Countless friends have mentioned in the wake of his death that they had spoken with Charlie in the past week – not to namedrop, but because he made himself available to everyone all the time. In many ways, it felt like he was the whole movement’s pastor.

What he could not have foreseen was that the true turning point was the moment of his death. At the risk of sounding disrespectful to the victims of 9/11, this moment very well may change America even more than September 11th. 9/11 only showed us that we weren’t safe from the rest of the world; 9/10 showed that we aren’t safe from each other.

No doubt, the shooter and the Leftist ghouls cheering him on meant for this to be a public execution. For Charlie Kirk’s blood to be shed with a million cameras watching, and to spell out an implicit message in our mind: Don’t you dare be publicly conservative. Don’t you dare try to fight. Keep your mouth shut, or this will happen to you.

The shooter is a fool.

We know what we saw.

We saw Charlie Kirk die on the battlefield, trying to ward off violence with speech because, in his own words, “when civilizations stop talking, civil war ensues” – only to be struck down by the sting of a cowardly, sniveling insect cowering behind his scope just as the pathetic social justice warriors of Bluesky and TikTok cower behind their keyboards.

We know that courage is always cool, and cowardice is always cringe.

They think they can scare us just by shooting one of our leaders? We’ve seen this movie before. When President Trump was shot, only to be saved by God with a last-second head turn, he told us how to respond to this kind of barbarism with a single word:

Fight.

Fight.

Fight.

And we will.

We might be too early in the stages of grief for it now, too shocked to react, but the moment will come when shock and denial give way to anger. Anger which will burn and cleanse. When Trump was shot, but survived, our anger was somewhat stayed because his survival made us feel as if we’d been wrapped by God in a protective blanket. Instead of feeling fear, we felt destiny. But what the Left failed to realize was that that blanket did not protect us; it protected them.

However, even as my heart thrums with desire to see justice done, I have only one warning for my fellow members of Charlie’s movement: There will be those who want to use this moment to argue that we must meet violence with violence, and anarchy with anarchy. Ignore them. Ours is the party of justice, not vengeance. Of authority, not caprice. Of right reason, not blind rage. Ours is the party of good old-fashioned American law and order. Yes, we must punish this act of horror implacably, but not irrationally. It would be a great shame if the man known so well for “owning” his opponents with facts and logic became the unwitting tributary for the Right to abandon both.

Yes, they shot the one man who wanted to change their minds. But ask yourself this: would they have shot him if he weren’t succeeding? Would they have shot him if they did not fear minds being changed even more than bullets? Of course not.

I think we should give them what they fear. I think we should give it to them good and hard. There may no longer be a Charlie Kirk, nor anyone who can fill his shoes. But there is a movement he made, and while today feels like the day the music died, Charlie Kirk showed us all that we could be instruments of God. That as one, we can fill the void he left. Let us punish, yes, but let us also persuade, because to our enemies, that is the greatest punishment of all.

It’s what Charlie would want. And no, that’s not speculation. Charlie said it. When he was asked how he’d want to be remembered, he said, “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.” What greater act of courage is there than to testify on behalf of the truth, even in the face of an assassin’s bullet? To die debating, unafraid to engage and to understand?

Let us mourn Charlie Kirk, and let us be worthy of his memory. The memory of a man who chose his voice over violence. And if anyone disagrees with us, let us have the courage to offer the same defiant challenge which flew over Charlie’s head during his last day on earth:

“Prove me wrong.”

Safe home, Charlie. Thank you for everything. God bless you.

You know that moment in high school when everyone gets back from summer break and you see who had a glow up, and who had a total glow down that they’re almost unrecognizable?

Turns out that’s true in politics as well. So if you’re just checking back after “summer break” and are lost or in shock, consider this your guide.

The Right Ate Donuts, The Left Took Ozempic

You just got back and now you log onto Twitter and it feels like bots, and Nazis, and Nazi bots. You tune in to your favorite podcaster and they're having the most unhinged congresswoman on and not pushing back on a single thing she says. You have people saying you're only truly American if you came over on the Mayflower, that citizens – not illegal immigrants, citizens – are “paperwork Americans.” You have major personalities arguing that the United States sided with the wrong people in World War II and should have allied with Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, of all people, have people like Gavin Newsom trying to imitate President Trump’s rhetorical style, and moderate figures actively pushing back on the party’s excesses.

If this were high school, it’d be like the star athlete left school for the summer only to spend every day scarfing down donuts and watching porn, only to come back a fat, disgusting slob, while the obese, blue-haired “agender” girl went on Ozempic over summer break, grew out her natural hair color, and came back the new queen bee.

What’s going on? How did the Right seemingly start to become the most odious version of itself just as the Left is starting to pick itself up off the floor?

Is Twitter Real Life?

The answer to that is complicated. But first, let me give you some good news: it’s not actually all of the Right. It’s probably not even most of them. Most Americans, period, would find the idea of calling Ellis Island immigrants mere “paperwork Americans” insane, never mind offensive. By this standard, even the Vice President’s children would be suspect, yet I seriously doubt anyone worth listening to is calling for the deportation of Usha Vance or her kids.

However, even if they know it’s absurd deep down, plenty of people are suffering from a collective illusion that a majority of Americans actually agree with the weirdest, most self-destructive ideas on the Right.

Which brings me to what’s actually happening. Somehow, despite watching the Democrats destroy themselves by treating the simulated reality of Twitter circa 2020 as actual prevailing sentiment in America, now that we’re in charge of X circa 2025, we’ve apparently forgotten that it still isn’t real life.

Remember when Democrats convinced themselves that not just every voter, but every consumer, was clamoring for more attention to be paid to the votes of bisexual POC midgets with untreated PTSD from being called the wrong neo-pronoun? When they got so high on their own supply of artificially maintained e-consensus that they crashed to historic disapproval margins and the worst electoral prospects since 1988?

Turns out that now we know what the right-wing version of that is, and it’s just as insane.

Just substitute Nick Fuentes for Taylor Lorenz, “Roman salutes” for watermelon emojis, and abstruse political labels for pronouns, and as Pam from The Office might say, they’re the same picture. There was a lesson we should have learned from that: when the method by which a collective illusion is enforced dies, the people who believe in it become jokes.

The problem is that, until that day comes, the collective illusion can still claim to be reality, which brings us to the more serious question. Which is, how did adopting these insane ideas become the litmus test for being a daring, edgy Right-wing thinker in the first place? Why would anyone want to believe in this X-induced hallucination?

The answer, there, is more complicated, but it boils down to one simple problem: because the Left spent so much of the last ten years trying to make everything taboo, the Right ended up convinced that nothing was taboo, including obvious lies. Moreover, given that most Republican voters have checked out after handing Trump unassailable power, suddenly a whole crop of right-wing influencers who could rely on the Biden administration for easy ragebait content now find themselves fighting over a diminishing audience of politically engaged people. And now they have to find ways to make themselves look ever more supposedly authentic, courageous, and willing to ask the tough questions in order to keep that audience coming back.

Edgy Isn’t The Same As Smart

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with asking tough questions. But in order to ask them, you have to know what you’re talking about. And if the problem with Leftists is that they know too much that isn’t so, then the problem with today’s online Right is that they very proudly know nothing.

As such, many of them think a question is tough simply because people react negatively to it, or aren’t sure how to answer. The problem is, you can get people to act angry and confused by shouting nonsense at them just as easily as you can by exposing truths they’d rather keep secret.

Not that some of them even need you to get angry and confused, because in actuality, many influencers haven’t so much become sources of information as emissaries from their own solipsistic cinematic universes.

“I am just a concerned citizen who knows no more than anyone else,” the usual pitch runs, “and if you won’t answer my questions, you must be hiding something.”

Of course, those saying this know an authority figure actually answering their absurd questions calmly and comprehensively would destroy them. Which is why they specialize in bizarre, offensive, or just plain insane questions, because those are the easiest for people with actual knowledge to ignore in disgust. It only takes one authority figure to ignore someone like this, and suddenly they’ll start concocting an elaborate fantasy narrative where a powerful person ignoring a random retard with a camera phone is evidence of a vast conspiracy.

The goal of this is obviously not to promote accountability, but rather to make themselves the story; the protagonist in a vast web of plot twists and increasingly insane ideas designed to keep an audience watching, angry, and alienated from those around them.

This kind of narcissistic fantasy would come off as the ravings of a crazy person if you saw it happen in real life. But on Twitter and TikTok, it does numbers and makes bank. And that, ultimately, is why the collective illusion thrives: because, as the Retard Right’s favorite “villain” Winston Churchill said, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.

In short, lies are more viral, and right now, virality is more profitable than reality.

Collective Problems Require Collective Solutions

In the past, I’ve called on President Trump to disavow people who lead their audiences down these sorts of absurd rabbit holes. I’m gratified that he has taken measures to try to separate himself from the worst of the online so-called MAGA base, though I would say his administration should reconsider their apparent belief that if something doesn’t happen nightly on Fox, then it doesn’t exist at all. Most of the Republican voters, leaders, and thinkers of the future don’t know or care what happens on Fox, but they do care what President Trump says. However, he’s also only one man: a titan of history, granted, but still a single individual.

If we’re to fight our way out of the collective illusion which the online Right is foisting on us as a movement and a party, then that decision must come not just from the top, but from the collective support base for President Trump himself. A collective problem requires a collective solution.

I just hope we figure one out before the Democrats do it for us.

Welcome back from summer break, everyone. Politics’ school of hard knocks is now in session.

As America continues to rebound under the fearless leadership of President Trump, it’s become fashionable for MAGA and Americans more broadly to mock Europe.

Just search X for the phrase “the European mind cannot comprehend,” and you’ll see what I mean. Everything from large breakfasts to the song “Freebird” to air conditioning units set at 65 are allegedly incomprehensible, eldritch phenomena for our cousins across the pond. And of course, some of this is deserved.

I’m guilty of making these jokes. Even Leftists get in on the game, claiming that Europeans cannot understand things like American racism.

The underlying message is clear and overwhelming: Europe cannot understand us because Europe is poor, provincial, and generally inferior to us, and therefore unworthy of our concern, let alone our interest.

I can think of at least three reasons why this is low IQ nonsense:

Firstly: Seriously? We’re going to pretend that there’s nothing to see in Europe? That museums filled with thousands of years of history (and controversial history, too, which MAGA at least should love) should be forgotten? That we should ignore the birthplaces of Mozart, Verdi, and Chopin, the home of the Sistine Chapel, and the soil of the Holy Roman Empire?

Are we actually saying that the rest of the West is unworthy of our attention because some snooty Europeans make fun of supersize meals and prefer soccer to football? Really? Only a caveman or a petulant child would believe that.

They have as many museums and historical plaques lining their streets as we do Starbucks. If you have any sense of history, culture, or awe, that has to matter.

Europe may be living on the fumes of past beauty, but that beauty is still there. It may not be in their politics, but it lives on the walls of their museums, in their concert halls, even in the very stones beneath their feet.

Secondly, even if some Europeans can’t see what makes us great, that’s not an excuse for us to be equally incurious about what makes them great. If anything, it’s the opposite.

Great, you think Europeans are dumb. Don’t be dumb like a European.

Don’t erase history like a woke Leftist.

Refusing to engage with another culture is a sign of fear. We have nothing to be afraid of and everything to learn. Being an American who fears to visit Europe is like being a cloistered coastal liberal elite who refuses to leave the city.

Which brings me to the third and most important point: do you actually think America could exist if we’d learned nothing from Europe?

Do you think John Locke grew up next to a Dairy Queen? Do you think Montesquieu ate at McDonald’s? Do you think Magna Carta was signed at Macy’s? Of course not. Yet that’s where the inspiration for the greatest American documents – the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence – came from: the French and the English.

The classical American culture we are currently trying to rediscover is rooted in European greatness.

Look no further than President Trump’s day one Executive Order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” if you doubt that. The architectural traditions Trump references in that order, particularly classical architecture, are all European inspired. The reason the White House, the US Capitol, and the Supreme Court look the way they do is because we were imitating the architecture of Ancient Greece and Rome.

The fact that we have two representative bodies – the House and Senate – owes its existence to the Founders imitating Rome’s division between the Roman Senate and the Tribunes. Even some of President Trump’s own favorite tunes, from “The Phantom of the Opera” (by a British composer) to “Nessun Dorma” (from the Italian opera “Turandot”) are European in origin.

In short, you cannot rediscover what is best in America without acknowledging its origins in Europe. Imagine scoffing at The Freedom Trail in Boston or the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia because both cities now vote blue. Do you really want to act as if the Pilgrims just apparated out of the ocean?

You cannot love the branches without the roots.

And what about what Europe learned from us? They’d never know how to overthrow tyrants in the first place. Which means fascism and communism would probably still be alive and well. The two geopolitical victories which cemented America’s status as a superpower would’ve been impossible. And therefore, American greatness itself would not have existed.

Because our greatness does not, and cannot, exist in a vacuum. We need Europe because without their culture, we have no roots. They need us because without our freedoms, they wilt.

Which brings me to today.

If Europe does not “comprehend” us now, then that is because they have been besieged by the same woke cultural vandals we just overthrew. You know, WEF-sponsored goons who shrink their meals, police their speech, choke off their access to energy, and generally immiserate the cradle of Western civilization in order to revere a nihilist politics of degrowth.

Those people are indistinguishable from the kings and tyrants of yesteryear. We defeated them just as our Founders defeated King George III. Now, we must be prepared to do what our Founders also did, and inspire our European cousins to throw off the same yoke. Just as they gave us the seeds of both American and Western civilization, we can offer them the courage to grow anew. Such is our proper role as citizens of the greatest, freest nation on the face of the earth.

And if Europe won’t appreciate where they came from? If they won’t preserve it? Then we will.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Europe to finish out the summer. See you in September.

The internet has lit up with calls to arrest Barack Obama this week. I am completely in favor of this.

Let me make the case for you.

While I’m sure there are liberals, and maybe even some Republicans, who might blanch at the idea of sticking America’s first African-American president behind bars, I think that concern is misplaced. Why? Well because Barack Obama wasn’t America’s first African-American president. He was America’s first African president.

And I say African president not because he cares about black people. Ha, as if.

No, I say African president because he governed like a third world strongman, not like an American leader in the tradition of George Washington.

Thanks to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, we now know that he tried to play one of the oldest and dirtiest third world tricks in the book, and literally outlaw his political opposition. The only difference is that while an African president would be able to simply send in the death squads, Obama and his cronies had to dream up a legal pretext for political persecution of their main opponent and mass imprisonment of his supporters. Richard Nixon needed a pardon for less. President Trump will not – and should not – be so generous. He should have Barack Obama arrested and tried for seditious conspiracy, if not outright treason.

I wouldn’t have said this four years ago.

I used to be the type of conservative who thinks “We don’t arrest presidents. This is America. We should lead by example.” But then the Democrats never played by the rules, kept decorum, or respected the Constitution that we were following. I watched as they arrested President Trump, persecuted him on untested legal theories, tried to bankrupt him, impeached him twice on faulty grounds, tried to force him to resign with a dishonest Special Counsel investigation propped up by a cock-and-bull conspiracy narrative about Russian collusion.

And Barack Obama never said anything to discourage this. In fact, as we now have confirmed, he was behind it all.

What’s more, the rest of his allies weren’t even subtle about their intentions. They openly fantasized about stripping their opponents of the right to vote. They actually managed to strip many of their right to free speech. Even rhetorically, you can trace all of their actions back to Obama: it’s a short step from whining about “bitter clingers” to trying to disenfranchise them.

What’s the point of playing by the rules if the other side never follows them?

There isn’t one. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Besides, Barack Obama’s sitting on a sizable fortune, plus he’s a Harvard-educated lawyer. It’s not like he won’t be able to mount a more than capable defense against any charges. Stick him in a courtroom and let him try to disprove the record of his own conspiracy. It’ll be the great show they hoped they would get with Trump.

But this much, at least, Obama won’t be able to disprove: his party’s attacks on Trump for “authoritarianism” were a confession. Just look at Obama’s third world-worthy record if you doubt that.

Obama institutionalized flagrant corruption. He used paramilitary organizations to disenfranchise opponents. He had barely concealed terrorist connections. Granted, he wasn’t a Muslim; he was worse. He was a subscriber to Black Liberation Theology, black nationalist communism masquerading as Christianity that is best epitomized by his pastor and spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

None of this is the background we would expect, let alone hope for, from a president. None of this is the background of someone who could even remotely be trusted to protect American freedoms or democratic norms. And Barack Obama didn’t.

Unlike past generations of liberals, who often tried to make America a savior of the third world, Barack Obama tried to make America be the third world, and to keep it that way even after he left. That can never happen again. As Americans, we should never have to fear this kind of “leadership.” It should never even cross our minds. Which means there must be consequences when someone attempts it.

So yes, arrest Barack Obama. To borrow one of his favorite phrases: it’s the only way to save our democracy.

President Trump always sticks to his guns. He has always done so, even in the face of a lying media, hostile intelligence agencies, and literal bullets to the face. This is precisely why the forces arrayed against him fear him so much: because he always does what he thinks is right, without hesitation or apology.

I bring this up because a lot of people in Trump’s coalition – specifically, the members of his base who care less about making America great again than they do about stoking the impotent rage of online mobs – seem to have conveniently forgotten it. Rather, in the face of his stubborn refusal to play politics with one of the most sensitive career criminals in recent memory (Jeffrey Epstein), they’ve reached delusional conclusions.

They want you to believe that Trump, the one-man army who didn’t flinch from a bullet, can be intimidated. They want you to think that the man who waged and won a battle of influence with the literal richest man on earth can be bought. And perhaps most implausibly of all, they want you to believe that a man who refuses to back down against superpowers can be shamed by whining on Twitter.

Thankfully, Trump has disappointed them. He’s cut them out of the fold – a move which I suggested exactly one month prior – denounced them as “former supporters,” and decided to move on.

And why not? All their ideas about him are laughable when you actually say them out loud. The only reason you could believe them is if you’re telling on yourself, which these people are. They think Trump can be intimidated because they can. They want you to think that Trump can be bought because they either can be or already are. They want you to think that Trump will laugh in the face of death, but wince in the face of Twitter ratios, because they are capable of only half those things (and it’s not the “laughing in the face of death” half).

Meet Trump’s Most Noisy “Former Supporters”: The Pitchfork Panicans

In the past, I’ve called this group the “Retard Right” because they treat their own audiences as if they’re…well, retarded. But treating an audience like they’re stupid isn’t exclusive to the Right. If it were, MSNBC wouldn’t be in business. And these people have much more in common than peddling low IQ rage bait agitprop.

They actually all sing from the same, suspiciously similar and slop-filled hymnal: First, they always try to pose as more populist and more authentically in-tune with MAGA than Trump himself. Second, they don’t so much make arguments as provide endless reasons to catastrophize, even when that requires them to constantly shift the goalposts so that even the most unqualified triumph looks like evidence of compromise and betrayal. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Trump’s most noisy “former supporters”: the Pitchfork Panicans.

In a sane world, these people should be treated like unhinged lunatics howling about end times which never arrive (cue a conservative Greta Thunberg except men with beards). But the problem with the Pitchfork Panicans is that they don’t just treat their audiences like gullible idiots. They know how to manipulate their audiences into acting like it, too.

The fact that they frequently succeed is no fault of the innocent conservatives who might be tempted to listen; often, they have no idea that people supposedly on their side actually view exploiting their fears as a cheat code for getting money and status. They may not know how easily social media can be weaponized to gaslight users with fantasies of paranoia, disempowerment, and irrelevance in order to maximize engagement while minimizing sanity. They likely do not have the context to realize how easily a skilled influencer can play on their values as a way to make them unwitting pawns, fighting not for justice, but for the influencer’s own petty personal vendettas.

In short, we can’t blame conservatives for falling for this kind of behavior for the same reason we wouldn’t blame an innocent woman for falling prey to a narcissistic, toxic ex-boyfriend.

However, just as we can educate ourselves to avoid narcissists, so too can we educate conservatives to avoid Pitchfork Panicans. These people can be seen. Their influence can be stopped. You just have to know what to watch for.

So let’s talk about that. Fair warning: this will be long. I’m not reducing this to a slogan or a tweet. I actually respect you, and explaining the tricks these bad faith actors employ is going to take a lot of deep cuts. We’re going to gut their entire communications strategy, the way a hunter field dresses a deer. You’re going to see how every piece of it fits together, what it does, and how to stop it.

So buckle up.

Special, Secret Knowledge

The first and most obvious sign you’re dealing with a Pitchfork Panican is if the person abuses questions.

Now, let me be clear: asking questions is good, even noble. It means you’re thinking. But thinking is the last thing a Pitchfork Panican wants you to actually do. For them, asking questions isn’t about gaining knowledge; it’s about gaining leverage. They use questions the same way an abuser tries to drive a wedge between you and your friends: so that you will be isolated with no one but them to turn to.

Sometimes, this is ridiculous to almost everyone, like when Candace Owens tried to claim dinosaurs weren’t real. But in the hands of someone less openly delusional, this tactic can be highly effective, especially when the person doing it is drawing on real abuses to justify what are otherwise ridiculous ideas.

In fact, even Candace’s rhetorical raid on Jurassic Park starts from something justifiable: the very reasonable post-COVID fear that scientific “experts” might actually be politically compromised liars. It’s emotionally easy, if logically ridiculous, to conclude from that one, massive instance of scientific abuse that all science is suspect. Even though, if we actually believed that all of modern science was a presumptive politicized lie, we might start trying to fuel our cars with firehoses, jumping off cliffs thinking we can fly, or suspending air travel in case a plane flies off the edge of the flat earth.

But, of course, we know from firsthand experience that cars need gas, that gravity is real, and that planes stay up (and reach their destinations) by flying around the earth. Yes, even Candace knows that last one (despite statements to the contrary). Otherwise she and her nobleman husband wouldn’t be able to fly in a private jet.

But those kinds of nonsense questions are easy to see through, because it’s easy to prove that hard science is right. Less easy are cases where more nebulous forms of expertise are involved.

It’s undoubtedly true, for example, that America’s colleges and universities have become hotbeds of wokeness and therefore try to pass off all sorts of fake statistics and data as scientific consensus beyond question. Just look at the recent Supreme Court decision in US v Skrmetti, in which the court revealed that gender “science” experts consistently overstated the case for puberty blockers. They even claimed banning puberty blockers would make huge numbers of trans teens commit suicide, when there was no evidence for this at all. It’s not just the gender studies crowd this affects. Hundreds of supposedly scientific studies can’t be replicated at all.

So yeah, skepticism of “experts” on politicized topics is valid. The question is not, “Have the experts been lying to us?” but rather “When did they start lying to us?” That is a question worth pursuing.

But the Pitchfork Panicans don’t care about actually answering that question. All they care about is invalidating anything which can be used to disprove their own crazy gaslighting narratives. They want you to think that because the experts recently lied for the sake of ideology, that they’ve been lying forever (or at least, since the moment the experts stopped validating their beliefs).

Darryl Cooper, aka Martyr Made, tries to distort the historical record with this sleight of hand all the time. As if the fact that the 1619 Project got kid gloves treatment from academia somehow proves that decades of historical scholarship about Winston Churchill’s role in WW2 must be equally fake. The concern that academia is captured by the Left is real; the rush to invalidate everything that doesn’t align with their opinions as a result is complete gibberish.

Worst of all, sometimes the Pitchfork Panicans claim their questions come from special, secret knowledge. Here, we can look at perhaps the most embarrassing hoax to plague the Right in recent memory: QAnon. The entire idea behind QAnon was that some high-level staffer in the first Trump administration had knowledge of a secret plan by the president to destroy an alleged cabal of elite pedophiles, was leaking it on 8chan, of all places, and that every move Trump made was somehow part of this grand 4D chess plan. Their proof? “Trust me, bro.”

This should have been laughed off. Common sense alone should’ve told you it was bunkum. But in an environment when all sides of the political spectrum have softened up their audiences into hair triggers for hysteria, and in which truth has been debased for the sake of sensationalism, any claim to know the real truth acquires undeserved power. Q knew this and weaponized it. They made an unfalsifiable claim to authority because they knew it would bypass their audience’s defenses against the absurd and, in turn, make their audience trust them more and trust any competition less.

Q, of course, ended up ridiculously telling people to “trust the plan” even when Joe Biden was inaugurated. Which brings us to what should be the moment the Pitchfork Panicans lose power: that is, the moment when reality actively disproves what they say. This should be the end of them, but it isn’t.

Why? Well, just look at Dave Smith’s response during a recent TPUSA debate with Josh Hammer when Hammer pointed out that Smith had been predicting World War III after President Trump’s strikes on Iran, and no such war had happened. Smith responded with a classic ad hominem, calling Hammer’s point “low IQ,” and then adding, “I was warning that there’s a risk of a catastrophe. And he’s saying, you’re stupid because there wasn’t a catastrophe. This is on the level of playing Russian roulette, and if the bullet doesn’t go off, you go, see, dummy?”

In other words, if their predictions do come true, then they were right all along and you should have listened. And if their predictions don’t come true, they were just warning you that something could go wrong, and you’re a fool not to listen because someday it definitely absolutely positively will. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Ideological Love Bombing

So far this is just gaslighting 101. But it specifically is used by Pitchfork Panicans because they share a larger objective: not only to make you rely exclusively on them for information, but to become a weapon they can wield against anyone who has slighted them. Because the dirty little secret about Pitchfork Panicans is that, as with all narcissists, they secretly crave elite status because they think being elite means never having to say you’re wrong or sorry. But actual elites, like President Trump, aren’t stupid. Inevitably, they are repulsed by these people. However, narcissists can’t admit everyone hates them because they’re loathsome, so instead, they have to claim that the entire world has been rigged against them. And what’s more, they need you to believe it, too.

Which leads us to the only questions the Pitchfork Panicans do want you to ask: why would anyone bother creating massive, decades-long conspiracies to silence the truth? Why would a cabal of shadowy operatives ignore the perils they warn about? The honest answer is that the reason they “know” there’s a conspiracy is because people don’t like them. But they can’t say that, so instead, they turn it around and say the reason these conspiracies exist is because all these elite figures have it out for you.

Maybe it’s because you’re white. Maybe it’s because you’re Christian. Maybe it’s because you’re a man. Whatever it is, it all comes to the same thing: you are under siege by terrifying, undefined threats and only the Panicans are on your side. Which is why you need them to protect you, and why you must never ever question what they say.

Now, obviously, there are people in the world who hate whites, and Christians, and men. I’ve been on Twitter, too. I’ve seen them. But have you seen how mentally ill and politically tone deaf those people are?

Do you seriously think the Starbucks baristas of the world could mount a conspiracy that stretches decades and possibly even centuries to undermine people they hate?

A conspiracy from which not one person has ever defected? Whose existence, and movements, have never been leaked? And all for the sake of nothing but tearing down a good society? This is the stuff of comic book villains, not real history. Even the attempt by Soviet intelligence agents to infiltrate the United States government got squashed by defectors like Whittaker Chambers.

Are the Pitchfork Panicans really convinced that libs are more competent than the KGB?

These conspiratorial, paranoid, and deeply black-pilled visions are as obviously absurd as the “systemic racism” and “patriarchy” which the Left rails against. But the Pitchfork Panicans don’t lead with those ideas, just as Scientologists don’t lead with talk of Xenu or Body Thetans. Rather, their opening pitch is that they are more populist, Christian, pro-MAGA, pro-white, or pro-American than anyone else.

Those claims aren’t sincere expressions of belief; they’re a form of ideological love bombing. The Panicans say this because they know that if you think they care the most about people like you, then you’ll be more willing to listen when they tell you that you don’t understand just how badly you’re under threat. How deep the rabbit hole of conspiracies against you goes. How much you need them to protect you by “exposing” it all.

Which is why they constantly make a show of believing that Trump has been betrayed, or compromised, or bought, despite claiming to support him. They know he’s the one person who can call out their bullshit without fear (and just has), and yet they can’t try to isolate their viewers from him with smears and bad faith questions, because ultimately, the MAGA base they prey on is loyal to Trump above any petty influencer. Especially considering that many of these people supported Trump in the first place because they knew it would bring them followers (in some cases, a lot of followers) and money.

As MAGA superstar lawyer Mike Davis bluntly put it, “MAGA influencers do not have a power base separate from Trump. Their power is derivative of Trump.” And this is their biggest weakness, because they need their audience to stay miserable and isolated, and thus dependent on them for validation, but President Trump won’t let that happen because he is singlemindedly focused on improving the lives of the American people.

And Trump does make people’s lives better, whereas all the Panicans do is claim your life sucks for reasons beyond your control.

They want you to think that this is absolving you of blame; that your suffering is not your fault, but was foisted upon you by an evil outside force. All they’re doing is taking away the last of your power. Because only when people feel powerless as individuals do they follow hucksters leading mobs. Only when citizenship gives way to panic, do the people pick up pitchforks. Which is, ultimately, what the Pitchfork Panicans want.

Something to be Angry About

Does any of this sound familiar? Does it maybe make you wonder what separates these people from the woke Left? If so, that’s a question worth asking and unlike them, I’m not going to feed you the answer. I think you’re smart enough to see it for yourself.

Just as you’re smart enough to avoid following them. President Trump cut them loose, and you can, too. Ignore their crocodile tears on your behalf. They don’t care about protecting you. They care only about protecting the image they present to the world. Even if it’s a lie. Especially if it’s a lie.

Dismiss their paranoid ravings aimed at pilfering your power. You’re not Canadian. You’re American. You’re blessed to live in a Republic where consent of the governed is the law, and you don’t have to let these people rule your life. They did nothing to earn that power. Withdraw it, and watch them spiral.

So going back to our analogy with your toxic ex, you can do better. There is no reasoning with that person, just as there is no reasoning with the Pitchfork Panicans.

As one of my wise readers put it in response to my last piece:

“The people demanding transparency aren’t asking for justice – they’re asking for content. They want the spectacle, not the convictions. What strikes me is how we’ve convinced ourselves that mob justice and real justice are the same thing. They’re not. One fuels our need for immediate satisfaction. The other requires patience we don’t have. The uncomfortable truth is that most of us would rather have something to be angry about than something that works.”

Which way, Western man?

Much of the Right has freaked out over the Trump administration’s claim that the late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein did, in fact, kill himself and that there was, in fact, no “Epstein list” to release.

I get why some of them are mad. It’s fair to ask why Pam Bondi said she had the “list” on her desk months ago, only to walk that back now. At best, this was a dangerously premature declaration that Bondi had evidence far stronger than she actually had. For example, the “list” she was referencing may have been nothing but Epstein’s address book, which Gawker made public ten years ago.

Unfortunately, that “list” raises more questions than it answers, since some of the names on it aren’t even people, but corporate entities like Balliol College, Oxford, and as such, no one would confuse it for conclusive evidence. Or it could have been Epstein’s flight logs, which mention President Trump himself (albeit in the vaguest and least incriminating possible way), and which have also been available since before Trump took office. Both of those would qualify as “Epstein lists,” in that they were literally lists compiled by Jeffrey Epstein (or his staff). Neither one, however, would be enough to put anyone away in a court of law, which may be why Bondi is now walking her earlier claims back.

But you know what? Forget all of that. Let’s assume the worst case scenario. Let’s assume that Bondi and the administration gained access to something much more disturbing and explicit than either of these two publicly available lists. Let’s say they had photos, or even videos, of Epstein’s clients molesting their victims, and that it was clear who some or all of those clients were.

In short, say there is an actual verified list of powerful, high-profile predators that’s being kept secret from the general public by Trump’s DOJ. If that’s true, then what can we conclude from Bondi’s recent denials?

Sadly, they only mean one thing: Bondi – and Trump himself – think we can’t handle the truth. And they’re right.

Yes, you heard me. Assuming such evidence exists, the administration would be thoroughly justified in withholding it. Now granted, Trump shouldn’t have promised to release it before he knew what ‘it’ was. But if you ask me, breaking a campaign promise is a lesser sin than inciting a preventable, and likely global, mass hysteria. Which is exactly what would happen if that kind of evidence became public.

I’m going to talk to you like an adult for a minute. Because you are.

Here’s the thing about Jeffrey Epstein: he wasn’t just some small-time pimp. His address book was practically a “who’s who” of elites from all over the Western world. Everyone from Prince Andrew to Bill Clinton to President Trump himself was listed on it. Both David Koch (of the Koch brothers) and George Soros’ nephew were on it. In other words, this is not a list that has the potential to only embarrass one party, or even the leadership of only one country. Instead, I want you to imagine that every single voter in every single Western nation was given evidence that some or all of their leaders were diddling kids.

What do you think happens next?

At best, that information would only become a pointless political football. Liberals would shout at conservatives that Trump is a pedophile, conservatives would shout back that so is Bill Clinton, and everyone in the middle would have one more reason to hate American politics and mistrust everyone who practices it. At some point, some asshole libertarian (redundant, I know) might even say that if all the powerful people in America are pedos, then maybe it’s time to revisit the age of consent.

And that’s the best-case scenario.

The worst – and much more likely – case scenario is that chaos would ensue because every single political faction could point to someone they hated on the list. And we know how hard it is to convict someone for crimes like this; just look at Diddy’s trial. In the absence of convictions, it’s not hard to imagine vigilante justice taking form.

And that’s assuming we actually know all the participants. In actuality, it’s far more likely that the evidence we have is ambiguous, or that the identities of those involved is unclear. Releasing evidence like that wouldn’t provide closure; it would inflame suspicion. It would be the stuff of the Salem Witch Trials, or the Satanic Panic, where everyone is presumed guilty because we don’t know who’s innocent.

But ultimately, this is likely all hypothetical because the whole idea of a “list” is nonsensical. Epstein wasn’t some two-bit brothel madame noting down clients and the services they paid for. He was a deadly sophisticated operator who likely used layers upon layers of operational security. The only “list” involved probably only existed in Jeffrey Epstein’s head; he knew who owed him, and who he had blackmail on. Indeed, the whole idea of the “list” is a misinterpretation: a low IQ rendering of Epstein’s address book, which, again, is already public.

And here’s the really hard truth: there is absolutely no chance that people would absorb this information rationally in a world where political influencers exist. If you disagree, then I invite you to argue with a straight face that Hasan Piker, Dean Withers, Nick Fuentes, the Hodge Twins, Destiny, Jake Shields, Cenk Uygur, Candace Owens, or any other clickfarming Twitter freak would be capable of reacting to the Epstein list with anything but the dumbest, most polarizing bullshit you’ve ever heard.

If I seem impatient, it’s because I’m sick of talking about this. And you know why I’m sick of it? Because none of the people who are engaging in the rage bait agitprop actually care about the victims. If you doubt that, just search their handles and see how often they’ve mentioned any Epstein victim’s name. See if they’ve made any donations to anti-human trafficking organizations (I have). If they’re on the Right, see what they think of Andrew Tate, who is basically Jeffrey Epstein with half the IQ and twice the chronic logorrhea (and no, that’s not one of the STI’s he undoubtedly contracted).

Go ahead. Look. With rare exceptions, the evidence will all point to the same thing: these people aren’t mad because pedophiles allegedly went free. They’re mad because they won’t be able to make money dividing the country. They’re mad that they can’t keep you feeling angry, disempowered, and desperate to keep watching. Like they always do.

I will say what we aren’t supposed to: if the “list” exists, it’s not just a good thing that the Department of Justice kept it under wraps. It’s their responsibility to do so.

The only justice in the court of public opinion is that of the mob, and pitchforks are no substitute for proof.

And if the Epstein “list” exists and is actually full of irrefutable proof? Well, then the DOJ has information that will allow them to flip powerful pedophiles, infiltrate and expose their networks, and turn the few they do not openly prosecute into government informants. If you believe Alexander Acosta, that’s what Jeffrey Epstein himself was.

Such determinations are not the opposite of justice. They are part and parcel of the difficult quest to secure justice for the most people possible.

The influencer class might be angry that Pam Bondi has denied them their chance to pose with binders full of fake information yet again. But if they want to know how the sausage gets made, then they should first make sure they stop serving baloney to their followers.

Last week, I warned you, my audience, that a growing force which I termed the “Retard Right” was undermining President Trump’s legacy, even as they pretended to protect it. Because ultimately, they have never actually cared about President Trump’s agenda; they aren’t loyal to anything except what keeps people watching.

I almost feel like I needn’t have bothered. Because less than 12 hours after the article was published, President Trump denounced Tucker Carlson as “kooky” and stuck his thumb in the eye of internet isolationists everywhere by greenlighting Operation Midnight Hammer.

Carlson, like the rest of them, had it coming. I mean, the man said with certainty that any move against Iran would lead to thousands of American deaths and oil prices would spike to $30 a gallon, neither of which has happened. Maybe he got confused with 30 Riyals? Or maybe, just maybe, math isn’t a strong suit for a man who seems never to have heard of per capita GDP.

But I’ll say this for Tucker – at least he wasn’t encouraging service members to get dishonorably discharged and effectively ruin their lives in order to avoid a war that hasn’t even happened. Or literally posting mutually exclusive statements on different social networks. Or claiming the entire war was fake and a distraction engineered by the Matrix (or something). Or calling for Trump’s impeachment.

Then there were the people who tried to tell you there were only two possible outcomes: all-out World War III, or total isolation from the rest of the world where war would never happen. The people who insisted that intervention had to mean invasion, who said Americans would die for a foreign country, and who claimed that any American involvement at all would bring the wrath of the Iranian regime down on us. The people who suddenly became aware of the dangers posed by Iranian sleeper cells, which they somehow didn’t fear when the Iranian regime was on the verge of going nuclear, but are mysteriously terrified by now that Iran’s leadership is a weak, scrambling shell of its former self. The people clutching their chests with community theater-level overacting in the face of what turned out to be US-approved, choreographed “reprisals.”

And then there were the fence sitters, who kept their convictions quiet because they allow themselves to be held hostage by their audience, and are now pretending that waiting to see which way the wind is blowing is the same as being in the arena. It isn’t.

All of them were embarrassingly, fatally wrong. And now, they are crawling back to normalcy like rats (or toxic ex-boyfriends), pretending that Trump followed their playbook. He didn’t. If he had, Operation Midnight Hammer never would have happened.

So now they are trying to memory-hole the most brutal demonstration of their own irrelevance in recent memory in order to maintain the illusion that anyone cares what they say. Where once they bleated like the world’s biggest panicans, now they pretend they were on President Trump’s side the whole time. That they somehow drove President Trump to call for a ceasefire (Lol, Lmao even). That somehow, some way, they were right and totally meant to get egg on their faces. It’s usually a classic leftist tactic to rewrite history while still living it.

These are not the acts of leaders. They are the acts of false prophets, seeking dishonest profits.

If you were part of the audience for any of the people I alluded to above, I have bad news: you’ve been duped.

But you don’t have to stay a dupe. Being fooled by people who make their living tricking conservatives into parting with their money, their data, and their common sense is no sin. Wisdom does not always arrive comfortably. Those who have fallen for the Retard Right’s politics of subtraction, inaction, and distraction need only let the scales fall from their eyes. This is already happening, and it was inevitable.

It’s high time the Retard Right wakes up and realizes that their followers are not as stupid as they have treated them. Trump sees through it, and now, so should you.

When Trump descended the golden escalator this day ten years ago, he confronted a broken, calcified Republican party that was still in thrall to bad ideas and worse candidates. Trump took it by storm, in what I can only describe as the political version of a leveraged buyout, and then used his extraordinary powers as a turnaround artist to take the presidency, and both houses of Congress. Twice.

He literally redefined what it meant to be on the Right in America. He forced us to confront that a conservatism which seeks to conserve everything except the interests of forgotten Americans is not conservative at all.

And now, he is redefining American government. He has yanked power away from an unelected, un-American Leftist bureaucracy: a bureaucracy which tried everything in its power to stop him, and yet failed against the force of nature that is Donald Trump.

Unlike past giants of the Republican party, like Ronald Reagan, Trump didn’t have the luxury of inheriting a conservative movement primed for power. But he didn’t need to. He is the movement. And now, with nothing but the force of his personality, he is taking a sledgehammer to the false idols of Washington in the name of the American people. And in doing so, he is re-founding America, which is to say he is dragging America back to something our founders would actually recognize.

But while Trump is undoubtedly a great man of history, his legacy is still a work in progress. And not just his legacy as a president, but his legacy as the leader of the American Right. And it is here that his ability to be a one man army actually works against him. Because there will come a time when President Trump is no longer president. When new generations will have to carry on his mission.

So ask yourself: how will they know what that mission is? Who is going to define it when President Trump is gone? How will his movement endure when he is no longer there to hold it together?

To be honest, I’m troubled by the early signs. Because some of the loudest voices on the Right who claim to be the protectors of Trump’s legacy are exactly the kind of people who will ruin it. Nazis. Conspiracy kooks. Self-confessed criminals. Hucksters who think virality is a substitute for reality. Personally, I call them the Retard Right, not because they’re all stupid (though many are), but because they treat their audience as if they are. Which is why I refuse to believe they represent the majority of MAGA. MAGA is not stupid, and neither is President Trump. But because these people are so loud, they confuse many into thinking that they’re bigger than they are. Which means they’ve gained a lot of undeserved influence over the Right.

Let’s be quite clear: these people’s “loyalty” to President Trump is a mirage. They talk a great game, but their business model relies on dividing the MAGA movement. On doing nothing but complaining that President Trump isn’t going far enough even as they don’t lift a finger to help his movement. On stoking whatever their audiences believe, even if it drives most of MAGA – and America – away.

They aren’t capable of loyalty to anything but what keeps people watching. They are slaves to the whims of their audiences. And once President Trump is gone, their “loyalty” to him will not extend to his legacy if that legacy isn’t getting them the attention they want. They will drag the movement into a messy civil war; a death by a thousand clicks.

You need only look at this weekend’s developments in Iran to see the Retard Right in action. Before President Trump had so much as uttered a word, self-styled supporters of his started spamming “no new wars” on X, as if simply saying the words could ward off geopolitical reality. In fact, and President Trump knows this, one of the most important ways to stop new wars is to make the enemy too afraid to start them. Or do these people seriously think a nuclear state controlled by people who chant “Death to America” and fanatically follow a religion that views martyrdom as the highest honor would be bound by realpolitik?

But again, I doubt any of them has thought for one second about what would happen if anyone with power actually listened to them. All that matters to them is that “no new wars” does numbers on X, and never mind why. Though frankly, they aren’t even consistent on that; just ask them about invading Canada and see how quickly “no new wars” evaporates.

Which gets to the real problem with the Retard Right: for all their talk of winning, they’re basically dogs chasing cars. They want to win to prove a point, but have no idea what to do with power once they have it. They’re too stupid to wield it, so they inevitably fail in office. Which means they have to make their audience think their inevitable failures were caused by a conspiracy rather than by simple incompetence. They’re like Marxists forever whining that their philosophy has “never been tried” in order to avoid the simple fact that even they don’t know how to try it. That’s why so much of their rhetoric is aimed at stoking feelings of paranoia, disempowerment, and irrelevance by pretending that Trump’s victory has been somehow undermined or betrayed.

Just look at all the absurd claims that Trump has somehow been “bought.” Trump has been bought? Even the Left knows that’s impossible, which is why they hate him. Trump couldn’t be bought by the world’s richest man. Trump couldn’t be stopped by a bullet to the head. Trump does what he thinks is right without hesitation and without apology. The Retard Right is the opposite of that; they can’t even blow their noses without checking X to see if it’s popular.

That can’t go on. These people are poison for President Trump’s movement. If they rise to lead the GOP, it would be the surest path back to power for the globalists whom Trump defeated.

Remember, President Trump beat the globalists with two ideas which they tried to kill forever: nationalism and populism.

The globalists told us that populism meant lynch mobs, and nationalism meant Nazis. The elites of both parties willingly accepted this, because it made it easier for them to sell out the American people. And if the Retard Right gains power, those elites will be proven right. If the Retard Right becomes the face of the Right, then Americans will recoil. They will believe that President Trump was a Trojan Horse for the lynch mobs and Nazis the globalists warned us about. And they will vote the globalists back into power just to avoid them.

The Retard Right’s politics of inaction, subtraction, and distraction will turn President Trump’s mighty legacy into a source of annoyance and revulsion for every sane American.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. President Trump can stop it – in fact, he is the only one who can.

And the best way for him to do so is to bring these loud voices to heel. Either he must call them back to sanity, or if they refuse to be sane, he must cut them out of his movement before they destroy it. There is no place for low IQ losers in the struggle to make America great again, because there will be no patience with them in an America that is great again.