An Instagram post by a basketball player has not only resulted in Chicago Bull Jaylen Ivey being cut by his team, it has also ignited a debate about our freedom to express and exercise our faith, and the bias against conservatives and Christians.

The bias against conservatives and Christians was immediately evident in the way the story was reported:

• Yahoo reported that “The Bulls waived Ivey on Monday after he made homophobic comments on social media during a speech about his religious views”

• ESPN claimed “The Chicago Bulls waived guard Jaden Ivey for conduct detrimental to the team Monday, hours after he posted a lengthy video rant on social media about religion and other topics that included anti-gay sentiments.”

• SB Nation similarly wrote that Ivey was waived after “a homophobic rant”.

• ESPN commentator Ryan Clark added “We use Christianity to veil the hate and the evil that we want to spew.”

Yet Ivey spewed no hate or evil. He used no slurs towards those in the LGBTQ community. He did not disparage homosexuals. His criticism was aimed solely at the NBA Pride celebration:

They proclaim Pride Month in the NBA. They say come join us for Pride Month to celebrate unrighteousness. They proclaim it. They show it to the world. To celebrate unrighteousness. They proclaim it on the billboards. They proclaim it in the streets. Unrighteousness. So how is it that one can’t speak righteousness? How are they to say that? ‘Man, this man is crazy.’

In fact, the day after his viral Instagram video, Ivey released another video in which he clarified his position and echoed the Christian belief that one should hate the sin but love the sinner, saying “I’m not against the man or the woman. I’m against what is contrary to the word of God.”

And “the word of God,” as Ivey put it, is clear. Leviticus 18:22 states “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Furthermore, even if Ivey had made a homophobic comment, he would not have been the first NBA player to do so, only the first one to be cut by his team for doing so. Some might remember 2015 when Rajon Rondo called a gay referee a gay slur. Rondo was suspended for one game.

Perhaps more insulting to Christians was the common assumption of many that Ivey was suffering a mental break, as if Ivey was cut from the Bulls for running down a highway naked singing Taylor Swift rather than for reciting gospel.

Bulls coach Billy Donovan said this after Ivey was cut:

I think in this day and age, you have to be conscientious of all these guys may be going through things. And I’m not passing judgment on what Jaden is or is not going through. But I do worry about that, not only for Jaden, but for all of our players. Are we providing the resources, which I think we do, to help them in any way we can? I think if any player reached out and said I need some help in this, we could help them.

Even one of Ivey’s former teammates, Josh Giddey, is quoted as saying “I hope he gets the help he needs, whatever he’s going through or not going through.”

Ivey’s response is perfect:

They don’t say to somebody who’s going to the clubs ‘Are you crazy?’ They don’t look to somebody smoking weed ‘are you crazy,’ right? But to the Christian proclaiming the truth by preaching the gospel, I’m looked at as crazy and mentally ill, and have mental illness and I’m psycho and I need help, and I’m crazy.

But I love God. I love my family, my children. I love them and will give my life for them, and pour into them. And I’m gonna do the will of God in Jesus’ name. And do His will. That He may be glorified. Not my will be done, but His will be done.

It is hard to miss that Ivey is being subjected to a double standard; not simply because he does not seem to be headed towards a Wilt Chamberlain-type career, but because those who hold Christian and/or conservative views have considerably less freedom to express those views than those who do not.

This is especially so among entertainers. How many clips from award shows have we witnessed from recent weeks in which someone uses their spotlight to insult ICE, insult Trump, call for a free Palestine, or say “no one is illegal on stolen land”? I do not have the exact number, but I’m certain the total is far greater than the number of folks who we’ve heard say “Christ is King.”

I am reminded of two sports controversies from years past.

One is the Kaepernick controversy. I supported the 49ers’ right to punish Kaepernick because he was protesting on the field in his 49er uniform while taking a check from the 49ers. Bosses have a right to fire or punish employees for behavior - even off-duty behavior - if it damages their business. If I still worked for McDonald’s, for example, and I spent my shift advocating for some cause, or if I went online after my shift to post that McDonald’s was an evil corporation, they would be justified in firing me.

But Ivey clearly wasn’t on the clock when he called the NBA’s PRIDE celebration unrighteous. Nor did he attack the NBA itself. His comments were made on his personal Instagram page and were directed solely at the NBA’s Pride celebration,

In 2023 the sports world faced a somewhat similar controversy when the LA Dodgers decided to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence [SPI], a group of men who mocked Catholicism by dressing as nuns while wearing grotesque makeup and giving themselves names like “Sister Porn Again.”

Much like the NBA’s Pride celebration, honoring SPI understandably offended athletes with strong religious convictions. Most outspoken was Washington Nationals pitcher Trevor Williams, a Catholic, who posted a statement on Twitter. Here is an excerpt:

To invite and honor a group that makes a blatant and deeply offensive mockery of my religion, and the religion of over 4 million people in Los Angeles County alone, undermines the values of respect and inclusivity that should be upheld by any organization.

Creating an environment in which one group feels celebrated and honored at the expense of another is counterproductive and wrong. It is a clear violation of the Dodgers’ Discrimination Policy, which explicitly states that any conduct or attire at the ballpark that is deemed to be indecent or prejudice against any particular group (or religion) is not tolerated.

Like Ivey, Williams faced backlash for his remarks, yet he did receive support from several bishops, and, perhaps more importantly, from Clayton Kershaw, the Dodgers’ superstar pitcher. This forced the team to save face by honoring the drag group when the stadium was nearly empty and adding a “Christian Faith & Family Day.”

Ivey added in another monologue, “They said my conduct was detrimental to the team. Why didn’t they just say we didn’t agree with his stance on LGBTQ? Why didn’t they say that? How is it conduct detrimental to the team? What did I do to the team?”

The only reasonable answer to this is that he expressed Christian beliefs.

Ivey, as a Christian, likely knows this and accepts it, for it says in 1 Peter 4:12 - 14

Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.

If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you: on their part he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified.

Amen.

Since 1980 there have been roughly 1,000 Americans killed by Iran or Iranian proxies, including the horrific 1983 Beirut barracks massacre and the hundreds killed in Iraq during our occupation there.

They have been a major sponsor of the terrorist attacks that have killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

They recently killed tens of thousands of their own people who were demanding reforms and more freedom.

Worse, they continue to be, by their own admission, a threat. They intend to kill many more Americans as soon as the opportunity presents itself, which it will as soon as they develop the capacity to build nuclear weapons and ICBMs.

I am also a Zionist. However one feels about it being “a historic homeland to the Jewish people as determined by God” and all the rest of that, it is inarguable that Israel is a vital ally and serves as a buttress against Islamic fundamentalism which wishes to see “Death to America!” Iran is a threat to Israel.

However, I pray that this does not turn into another Afghanistan. There we basically just hung out for 20 years, opening schools and whatnot, losing thousands of American lives, spending over 2 trillion dollars - all while allowing the Taliban to live in the Hindu Kush mountain range until they eventually resumed their evil regime.

We should thoroughly decapitate Iran’s political and military leadership, then provide incentives for a more humane, more pro-Western government to take its place.

There are many from which to choose . According to the music data and licensing platform Blokur, there are over 9,000 Christmas songs, not including “seasonal songs” like “Frosty The Snowman” and “Jingle Bells.”

Generally, Bing Crosby’’s “White Christmas” is considered the most popular of these Christmas song, though nowadays Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” seems to be wearing that belt.

There are countless other great Christmas songs as well. Some of my favorites are Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo,’ Chuck Berry’s “Run Run Rudolph,” and Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”

Even Christmas songs not deemed secular have as little to do with the birth of Our Lord and Savior as so-called Christmas movies like “Die Hard” and “Home Alone.” “Silent Night” clearly does, but are few others.

Interestingly, one reason why most of the most popular Christmas songs are either considered seasonal or secular is because so many were written by Jews. A Jewish writer named Johnny Marks in particular wrote the standards wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tre,” and “A Holly Jolly Christmas.”“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” were also written by Jews.

It can be argued that Jews are not the best sources for expressions of Christian piety. However, neither are poets are do not believe in the virgin birth or even in God Himself. Yet one of the songs that does celebrate Christ’s birth is “O Holy Night!” which was based on a 1847 French poem “Minuit, Chrétiens” by Placide Cappeau; an atheist, socialist, and abolitionist.

As described on findmypast.com by Daisy Goddard:

In 1847, the parish priest asked Cappeau to write the words for a Christmas song to be sung by opera singer Emily Laurey, accompanied by the church’s newly renovated organ. The priest suggested Cappeau take his poem to Adolphe Adam, a composer well-known at the time for his ballet Giselle, to write the music. It so happened that Cappeau and Adam had a mutual friend through which Cappeau arranged a meeting, and Adam agreed to write the music.

Despite Cappeau’s atheism he was familiar enough with the Bible to base “Minuit, Chrétiens” on the Bible, specifically Luke 2:8-14:

8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

In 1855, an American music critic named John Sullivan Dwight translated the carol into the English “O Holy Night” for an American audience. As Delaney Cohen wrote in American Magazine,

In Dwight’s rather liberal translation, the text takes on new life. The French, which would directly translate to “People kneel down, wait for your deliverance,” becomes “Fall on your knees; O hear the angel voices!” The meanings are similar, but Dwight’s rendering evokes the awe-inspiring grandeur of the coming of the Lord. Cappeau’s French lyrics provide a historical and theological recounting of the nativity narrative; Dwight’s English text suffuses the events with rich emotion, placing listeners beneath the radiant star that marked the Savior’s birth.

Besides being a translator, Dwight was also a music critic and a Unitarian minister. Importantly, he, like Cappeau, was an abolitionist. As Cohen mentions, “[Dwight] wrote publicly about his horror that ‘three or four millions of our human brethren [are] in slavery’ and believed that the United States was committing ‘moral suicide.”

This view prompted Dwight to translate Cappeau’s third stanza, which spoke about a “Redeemer” who “sees a brother where there was only a slave,” into an even more powerful, more direct condemnation of slavery:

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His Gospel is Peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother
And in His name, all oppression shall cease.

Various reports speak to the unpopularity of O Holy Night in the antebellum South, as one might imagine. Dwight’s characterization of their slaves being their chained, oppressed brothers was undeniably controversial:

Because he faithfully translated Cappeau’s anti-slavery sentiments, Dwight’s O Holy Night was unpopular in the South, and one large and influential Southern church convention officially forbade its use in their churches. This ban was formally lifted only within surprisingly recent memory,

O Holy Night is not often listed among the songs slave sang when yearning to be free, like “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Go Down, Moses.” Yet the song “gained fast favor among Northerners during the Civil War.”

The stanza can however be heard in some versions. It can heard here in my favorite version my favorite version from Celtic Woman, for example. However, it is s not uncommon to find Dwight’s stanza muted, or excluded altogether.

Many traditional songs are routinely shortened, including Silent Night and Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land. Versions of O Holy Night from Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson, Celine Dion, and Andy Williams sadly eschew Dwight’s contribution.

That’s a shame. Although the slavery both familiar and despised by Cappeau and Dwight is long gone, slavery itself still exists today. People are being forced to work to pay off impossible debts by human smugglers. Girls are being forced into prostitution. Millions have fallen into drug addiction.

It would serve us well to remember that these slaves are our brothers as well.

This is a bizarre story.

Read more

Share

Subscribe now

Politico has recently posted the leaked texts among “leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country.”

The texts are not pretty:

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

After writing a post about the rise of Nick Fuentes and the Groypers (Fuentes followers) which necessitated my watching countless videos and reading endless commentary about that cabal, the leaked Young Republican texts revealed by Politico seem very familiar to me.

It is pure Groyper language. It is the vocabulary of the Racist Right. It is generally what you’ll hear if you watch a Fuentes livestream or if you read through Groyper tweets. As I wrote in the aforementioned blog post, “If one reads Groyper posts, one will see the acronyms RKD and TND mentioned frequently. “RKD” means “rape, kill, die” — as in the loyalty pledge ‘I will RKD for Nick Fuentes.” “TND” simply means “Total Nigger Death.”

It is also the language of other representatives of the Racist Right, such as podcaster Myron Gaines. Gaines is a co-host of the Fresh and Fit podcast, which has over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers. It’s my personal opinion that he is a grifter who entertains his audience with misogyny, antisemitism, and anti-Black remarks despite being Sudanese himself.

Recent tweets from the Myron Gaines Updates X account feature clips of him calling an Hispanic woman a “taco slut,” complaining that Jews “control every infrastructure within the United States,” and telling a young Black male that “if you get with a woman who makes more money than you, it’s a matter of time before she starts sleeping with niggers.”

Gaines also responded to one of my tweets which compared him to Fuentes with “No i [sic] hate you dumb niggas even more. You primates should be at the zoo.”

Clearly, the faction of the Racist Right does not lack for leadership.

To be clear, the element I am calling the Racist Right did not begin with Fuentes, Gaines, or the white supremacist voices. When I was a youngster, for example, I happily joined the College Republicans, thinking they were a good group of guys and gals who -- to my amazement, being an African American living in the blue state of New Jersey -- agreed with my conservative political takes. Sure enough, the very next day someone pointed out to me an ad in the school newspaper from that very same group that I was so proud to join, asking for new members. Everyone was invited except for people who were (I won’t use the language they used) gay, Jewish, or African American.

Yet, though not new, this Racist Right rhetoric is problematic, especially nowadays when bigotry can be so easily amplified. Besides “private” group chats among peers, there are also Instagram, TikTok, X, and other such venues that make it too easy to type vile things on a keyboard.

Because of the group chat leak, the Young Republicans were forced to disband in New York and other Young Republican members have been rightly disciplined:

The Young Republican National Federation board told all of the chat participants to “immediately resign” from the organization. Vermont Republicans urged state Sen. Samuel Douglass (R) to step down for his contributions to what Gov. Phil Scott (R) called the “vile, racist, bigoted and antisemitic dialogue,” The Kansas GOP said its Young Republicans chapter was now “inactive.”

Still, it is disappointing that more Republican leaders continue to seem unwilling to condemn the Racist Right -- even when it infiltrates a group as associated with the Republican Party as the Young Republicans.

JD Vance would be a logical choice to address the malignant tumor of racism in the GOP. He is the Vice President, a young Republican himself, the favorite to be the GOP’s next presidential nominee, and someone who, as the husband of a brown-skinned wife and father to mixed-race children, is uniquely well-suited to oppose the Racist Right cabal.

Yet he continues to decline to do so. He calls the group chat remarks “edgy jokes” told by “young boys,” forgetting that many of these young boys are men nearly his age.

On X, Vance deflects to the controversy surrounding the Democrats’ candidate for Attorney General for Virginia.

This is sadly in keeping of Vance’s unwillingness, or perhaps strategy, of avoiding confrontation with the Racist Right elements.

In response to Fuentes’ well-known racist traded against his wife — including referring to her as a “jeet” — Vance said “I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is. Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just, I love Usha. She’s such a good mom.”

That’s not quite the punch in the nose Fuentes deserved, is it?

It is not as if Vance is incapable of expressing anger. When it was revealed that a DOGE employee was also a member of the Racist Right clique, evident by his posting such things as “Normalize Indian hate” and “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Vance became irate, not at the DOGE employee, but at Ro Khanna, an Indian-American congressman who had asked Vance to tell that employee to apologize.

To underscore this point, Vance felt “disgust” not for the DOGE guy advocating for Indian hate but for the Indian-American who wanted to hear an apology.

It was not long ago when this Racist Right faction was shunned by the GOP. No matter how much some may have agreed with him in private, David Duke was disavowed by every prominent Republican willing to comment about him, whether it was Ronald Reagan in 1991, Donald Trump in 2016, or anyone in-between.

Today, however, a David Duke-type influencer might be found as a frequent guest on a number of right-leaning podcasts, much the way Nick Fuentes and Myron Gaines are.

It’s a shame, too. In 2024, Donald Trump received more support from Black voters than any Republican presidential nominee had since 1980. Trump also secured the highest percentage of the Jewish vote for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. These upticks in the Black and Jewish vote helped him get elected.

How sad would it be to lose some of that support over a group chat full of “edgy” gas-chamber jokes and references to African Americans as “the Watermelon people?”

—DK

Share

Subscribe now

On September 12th, YouGov published a set of polls which reported that, while most Americans either thought political violence was “a very big problem” or “somewhat of a problem,” this majority only stood at only 59%.

When the respondents were categorized by political ideology, “very liberal” and “liberal” were the least likely to be concerned about political violence. When the respondents were categorized by age, the young (18-29 and 30-44) were least likely to consider political violence a problem.

The results are similar when the question becomes whether political violence could be justified. The poll shows that the young and those who identify as liberal are the groups that most find political violence justifiable, whether it’s against a presidential candidate speaking to a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a UnitedHealthcare CEO walking home through Midtown Manhattan, or a young Christian conservative debating college students on a campus in Utah.

Why this survey is disturbing is that it was initiated on September 10th, the day of Charlie Kirk’s murder. One might have hoped that Kirk’s death would be more of a unifying event against political violence.

Yet, even this tragedy was not enough to bring the percentage of Americans who consider political violence unacceptable closer to 100% than 50%. Even the sight of a young man with a wife and children did not persuade a sizeable percentage of young liberals that this horror should never be tolerated in a civilized society.

Kirk’s murder did bring some bipartisanship, however. The Senate unanimously passed a “National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk” resolution to honor his commitment to “the values of individual liberty, open debate, the importance of civic engagement, and the defense of constitutional principles.”

The House also passed the measure, but not unanimously. In contrast to the resolution that condemned the shooting of two Minnesota Democrat state lawmakers, which passed 410-0, the House resolution for Kirk saw 58 Democrats voting no, 38 Democrats voting present, and 22 Democrats simply refusing to vote.

Chief among those who refused to support the Kirk resolution is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a New York congresswoman especially popular among young liberals, who complained that the passage of the bill “brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry today.”

She then goes on to paint a slanderously inaccurate portrait of Kirk’s views:

Subscribe now

“We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted Black Americans the right to vote was a ‘mistake,’ who after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi claimed that ‘some amazing patriot out there’ should bail out his assailant, and accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges – it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.’ His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans – far from ‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority in this resolution.”

AOC is implying here that Charlie Kirk opposed the right of African Americans to vote. He doesn't. Kirk opposed the act because he felt the Civil Rights Act (CRA) led to a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” one that often superseded the U.S. Constitution.

Kirk often prefaced his argument against the CRA as radical, but it is an opposition shared by libertarians from Barry Goldwater in 1964 to today. Many libertarians have argued that, though they support civil rights, our federal government should not infringe upon the rights of private businesses or of the states. It is not an argument that I support, but it is not one founded in racism.

AOC also takes Kirk’s remark about Paul Pelosi out of context in order to falsely portray him. She implies that Kirk felt that because Paul Pelosi, husband to Nancy Pelosi, was a prominent Democrat, it would be patriotic to free the attacker on bail. However, Kirk argued that the attack was “awful” and that the attacker should be bailed out in order to investigate why the attack occurred:

“And why is he (Pelosi’s attacker, David DePape) still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out… Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.”

Kirk clarified that he wasn’t “qualifying” the attack.

“I think it’s awful. It’s not right,” he said.”

Kirk also saw no reason to be shy about expressing his view that Jews have an oversized influence on certain areas of American life because the facts, and many Jews, support him.

Subscribe now

For example, according to a study reported in The Jerusalem Post, only 2% of Americans are Jewish, yet 50% of the donations to the Democratic Party come from Jews. The Jerusalem Post also confirms that “the entertainment industry has disproportionately many Jewish people working in it.”

So where is the lie in Kirk’s comment?

Unfortunately, AOC is not alone in her slandering of Kirk. Since his death, there has been an overwhelming number of attempts to sully his name.

Kirk was, as mentioned, a fierce opponent of DEI, for example. He said that because of DEI hiring practices — hiring based on the promotion of diversity, equality, and inclusion; rather than on merit — that “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”

Kirk expanded upon his argument here:

“Let me tell you exactly what I said, okay? So this was in response first and foremost to United Airlines saying that half of all their new pilots that they are going to hire are going to be women or people of color. Currently, they are 15%. So they want to go from 15% to 50%.

A conversation then ensued about how every time affirmative action is employed, standards have to be lowered. There is not a single incidence when that does not occur. So then I said ‘Boy, if I see a Black pilot, I am now going to wonder is that individual qualified, or were they selected because of their race. Comma. But that’s not who I am but this makes me think this way. And I stand completely by that statement.

Secondly…DEI and affirmative action, what it does, is it lowers the merit, it lowers the threshold of standards, and increases the things that do not matter, such as skin color and ethnic background. So that is what I said.

A more important question to ask me is ‘Charlie, do you believe that Black pilots can be qualified?’ Of course. Any individual can be qualified. I want a hiring quota and program that only cares about qualification, not skin color.

And thirdly, I would say, why does United Airlines care so much about the color of the pilots that are flying them. Shouldn't they just want the best pilots?”

Kirk was also known to point out that more crime was emanating from the African American community than from other communities. His statements on this issue may be uncomfortable to hear, but were rooted in fact, and hardly racist.

Some are so desperate to smear Kirk that one wonders if they can hear themselves. Some, for example, point to Kirk’s dislike" of Dr. Martin Luther King as proof of his racism. It is not a dislike that I share. However, using his assertion that “Fredrick Douglass, Ben Carson, Thomas Sowell, and Justice Clarence Thomas are far better Black role models to celebrate than Martin Luther King” is not the slam-dunk evidence that Charlie Kirk is a White Nationalist that they seem to think it is.

Subscribe now

Another post circulating on X claimed as fact that Kirk was a “White supremacist” because, believe it or not, he didn’t like Beyonce’s music. If you don’t like “Crazy in Love,” then you hate Blacks, apparently.

Perhaps the most incredible attempt to prove that Kirk was a racist is another post that had gone viral on X with 17 million views, claiming that the video was of Kirk calling an Asian woman a “chink.”

According to FactCheck:

“The video, however, does not show Kirk using the slur. Rather, as an X Community Note explains, Kirk was shouting at Cenk Uygur, a co-host of the Young Turks, a progressive online news show, and using his first name. The two men were at Politicon, an annual nonpartisan political convention, in October 2018.

“I live like a capitalist every single day, Cenk!” Kirk said angrily to Uygur, after Uygur interrupted a debate Kirk was having with the Young Turks’ Hasan Piker about what political views young people should have. “Come on, Cenk, let’s go,” he said later.”

If one truly wants to know Kirk’s view on race and racism, one should not look to social media or the mainstream media. His view on these issues, much like his view on a list of topics, are very easy to find:

“If you look at DNA independently in a science laboratory, they cannot distinguish between a Black person or a white person. They cannot just look at DNA. Because the only difference is melanin . . . Racism is a social construct that I want to break out of.”

Charlie Kirk’s murder affected this nation in a way matched by few. He was not in a position in which he could directly affect many lives. He was not a governor or a president. He was not a general. He was not on the Supreme Court. He could not send anyone to war or even raise anyone’s taxes. No one who did not like him was obligated to attend any of his debates.

He was only a husband, a father, and an American who voiced his opinions.

Despite his youth, his organization, Turning Point USA, reached tens of millions — online, at faith-based events, in high schools, on college campuses, at major political conventions — and the like. He was focused more than most on preaching conservatism and Christianity to the very group of young Americans who, as evidenced by the aforementioned YouGov poll, are most easily radicalized.

He died because of his beliefs. By doing so, he exposed the enemy. It is the same enemy that is seeking to follow his assassination with an assassination of his reputation.

—DK

Share

Warning: This blog contains offensive language

With the ascension of so many Democratic Socialists; such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Briahna Joy Gray, and Zohran Mandani; Gen Zers in the Democrat Party have announced how they want their party to appear in the post-Trump era.

But where will Gen Z take the MAGA movement once Trump’s second term comes to an end? Will it continue on seamlessly under a chosen successor? Will it warp into something unrecognizable? Or will it simply fracture into several pieces?

The challenge of holding MAGA together post-Trump becomes especially daunting when one considers that it is a movement that not only bridges ideologies - incorporating voters ranging from former Bernie Bros to mainstream conservatives - but generations as well. And what works for one generation will not necessarily work for another. For example, according to exit polls after the last presidential election, support for Trump dropped 20% from Baby Boomer voters (45 - 64) to Gen Z (18 - 29).

A peek at the ratings for Fox News, which was so important to both of Trump’s electoral wins, also tells the story. Although the ratings for the right-leaning network are strong, the median age for its viewers is 69. According to Pew, only 28% of Gen Z get their news from Fox, and while 76% of Republicans ages 65 and older say they trust Fox, only 41% of Gen Z Republicans agree.

Take also as an example one of Trump’s most loyal and influential supporters, Mark Levin. Levin is a traditional conservative with a great legal mind. He’s popular on radio and television, his books are bestsellers, and he has nearly 5 million followers on X.

Yet Levin is a poor choice to influence Gen Z. Levin - like most prominent conservative acolytes such as Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Glenn Beck - is over 60. Also, though his radio audience is massive, Gen Z prefers podcasts. Furthermore, he’s a Trump sycophant who gushes over Trump the way girls gush about Taylor Swift, making him the sort of insider who will not risk losing White House dinner invitations by talking about Epstein or anything else that might reflect poorly on this president.

Worse of all to Gen Z is Levin’s devotion to Israel, which fits his audience but puts him at further at odds with the younger Republicans who are markedly more anti-Israel than their elders.

Much of Gen Z’s unwillingness to support Israel to the degree older folks do is because many are isolationist, having been raised in the shadow of two unpopular wars. Much of it is the result of the perception that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Some argue that Israel is trying to push the U.S. into a war with Iran. There may be more to their disdain for Israel than those reasons, however. One can not dismiss the rise of white nationalism in Gen Z or how that impacts how Gen Z’s view of the Jewish state.

According to The Nation,

On high school and college campuses across the country, many young right-wingers are outflanking their MAGA elders in enthusiastic embrace of radically antidemocratic, exclusionary, and bigoted politics. To be sure, most of Gen Z leans liberal. But those who buck the trend cling proudly to their dissident status, doubling down in uncompromising reassertion of the race, gender, and other hierarchies their peers are set on dismantling

The primary leader of many of these “young right-wingers” is not some prominent Republican politician, Fox News host, or conservative academic. It is not President Trump, Vice-President Vance, Governor DeSantis, Mark Levin, or Ben Shapiro. It is a 27-year-old livestreamer who Tucker Carlson called a “weird little gay kid in his basement in Chicago,” Candace Owens calls “a pathological liar,” and Glenn Greenwald praises as “generational talent.”

The person about whom this is referencing is Nick Fuentes, an extremely articulate and popular influencer who uses his large social media platforms - 250K followers on Rumble, 740K followers on X - to promote racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism.

He is the leader of a dedicated band of white supremacists who call themselves Groypers. One suspects it is these Groypers - named after the Pepe the Frog meme - who dominate the comment section in support of Fuentes on anything that feature their hero. If one reads Groyper posts one will see the acronyms RKD and TND mentioned frequently. ‘RKD” means “rape, kill, die” - as in the loyalty pledge ‘I will RKD for Nick Fuentes.” “TND” simply means “Total Nigger Death.”

The rise of Nick Fuentes portends badly for the future of the MAGA movement. Fuentes has been openly disparaging of both Trump and MAGA. He has even flirted with voting for a progressive - assuming of course the progressive is not a minority, not a woman, and not Jewish.

Trump’s running mate JD Vance is a favorite target of Fuentes. True, there are legitimate reasons to question Vance’s meteoric rise from a Peter Thiel protege to a never-Trumper senator to Trump’s heir apparent. Fuentes to his credit raises these points. But it never takes long for Fuentes to mention the real reason for his contempt for the vice-president.

Here he encourages his followers not to vote Republican if Vance is the nominee. Fuentes compares Vance to California governor Gavin Newsom, the presumptive 2028 Democratic presidential nominee:

At the end of the day who do they (the GOP) field? They field some fat dumbass dork with a brown family. And the Democrats are mogging us. The Democrats can put up an actual white guy with a white family. Why can’t we? I thought we were the party of Patrick Bateman memes and aesthetics and bodybuilders and physique and all the rest of it. Our candidate’s a fat guy with a brown family. The Democrats are fielding a handsome white sociopath with a beautiful white family. Something has gone terribly wrong.“

Fuentes also tweeted “Jeet First Lady? I hope I never see the day”

I did not know what a “jeet” was until I heard Fuentes refer to Usha Vance as one, but once I saw that it was a word used by him and the Groypers I assumed it was a racial slur used against Indians or South Asians. Sure enough that is exactly what it is.

Like other racists, Fuentes understands that it often to his advantage to mask his race hate. When the subject is African Americans, Fuentes, like other racists, resorts to blaming his disdain on an exaggerated fear of Black crime:

It must suck being one of the good Black people and your race is synonymous with doing something badly. Like if your doing a contracting job you say “Hey, don’t nigger that up,” it means do it really poorly, like you don’t give a shit …

I think Black people are not irredeemable Nobody hates Black people for being Black. If there are people like that I think that's exceedingly rare, and I don’t consider myself one of them. The reason why people have negative attitudes against Black people is because most people’s intersections with them are negative. …

It is true that Black people are - in this day and age unfortunately seem to have very low moral character. It’s not even just the violence although the violence is pretty striking. If you live your life and you know that you are going to be mugged by Black people it kind of colors your opinion or your perception of Black people, wouldn't you say?

If 99% of the carjacking and stabbings and shootings that you see in Chicago are by Black people, when you’re walking down the street late at night guess what you’re looking for - Black people. And you equate that with danger. …

I’m not a bad person. It just seems that every time I encounter you people, for the most part, it’s negative. And sometimes extremely negative, like I could get a gun in my face.

If Black people were super well-behaved we’d be racist in the other direction.

Fuentes fails to mention that he despite his protestations about Blacks, he actually lives in Berwyn, Illinois; a nice suburb with very few Blacks. Fuentes does not live in “nigger hell,” as he calls Chicago.

Fuentes also fails to mention that 60 - 65% of violent crimes against whites like himself are committed by other whites In fact one can easily see from the images released to the public that the would-be assassin who came to Fuentes’ home to kill him was also white.

Fuentes has often denied being a racist as he does here to interviewer Warren Smith But while speaking to Candace Owens, a Black woman, he says “I am a racist.” Furthermore, when Owens essentially asks Fuentes if he believes Blacks are born bad or if the become bad due to circumstances, he argues for the intrinsic inferiority of Blacks.

Well, you know, I think it is more nature than people would like to believe. You know, there's this classic tension of ‘is it nature, is it nurture, is it cultural or is intrinsic? Is it racial?’ And I've always been on the latter side of this among conservatives. Conservatives like to say it’s all culture. Black America is the way it is because of hip-hop music and the Great Society and that kind of stuff. And I think the uncomfortable reality is a big part of it is intrinsic.

So intrinsically inferior are Blacks in Fuentes’ view that he has on more than one occasion falsely claimed that Africans did not possess written language or even the wheel until being introduced to these by Europeans.

The oddest thing about Fuentes’ rise as a white supremacist is that neither he nor his supporters are purely white. His father is half-Mexican, making him the product of either his paternal grandmother or grandfather being a “race-mixer,” as he called JD Vance.

And one of the earliest prominent Groyper supporters is conservative writer Michelle Malkin, an Asian woman married to a Jew. How does she reconcile whatever political agreements she may have with Fuentes with his racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism?

However Fuente’ strangest bedfellows are the Black Conservatives who are loudly embracing Fuentes’ message. When Fuentes went viral recently for a video in which he portrayed Blacks as lawless immoral thugs, claiming that “you know that everybody thinks if we snapped our fingers and you all disappeared tomorrow, everybody thinks our quality of life would go up,” some Black conservatives rushed to Youtube to amplify his comments.

The Hodgetwins for example used their enormous platform to tell their audience that the inexcusable examples of bad behavior one so easily finds on social media are “genetic” and “hardwired in out DNA.”

Sadly for them, the affection these Black conservative pundits feel toward Fuentes is not always reciprocated. Here he critiques Jason Whitlock and Black conservative commentators in general:

Hey, by the way, you are a token. Hey Jason, you’re a token. You are in conservative media as a Black guy who can confer upon white people the dignity of not being called a ‘racist’ for having their views. That's why you get paid and I don’t. Because I didn't have the privilege of being born Black. I was born white. So there’s a limit on what I can say without being penalized in the so-called ‘free market space of ideas.’ And everybody knows it, Everybody knows it. Everybody knows it. And everybody is sick of it, especially in the conservative space that Blacks have had it easy.

To Fuentes, only the right-leaning Black influencers who explicitly endorse him and his anti-Black rhetoric, such as Myron Gaines and the Hodgetwins, are worthy. The rest are all “Uncle Tom token Blacks.”

I’m kind of done with all the Uncle Toms. In a way I’m done with all the Uncle Toms. I’m done with Jason Whitlock. I’m done with Candace Owens. I’m done with all the Uncle Tom token Blacks. You’re not that smart. You’re not even that conservative. You built your career on a grift that is now dead. You were hired when diversity quotas were a thing. You were hired when white guilt was a thing. I don’t feel white guilt. I never have. DEI is over. So now you’re done. You need to be fired. Like you’re done.

Nick Fuentes denied being a racist to Warren Smith in the interview mentioned earlier.. He also denied being anti-Semitic, arguing that antisemitism is a “made-up word,” despite him repeating the trope that “we have too much Jewish power in America.”

Yet on his own live stream he says this:

There is an occult element at the highest levels of society, and specifically among the Jews. So many of the people who are perpetrating the lies and the destruction on the country. They are evildoers. They are people that worship false gods. They are people that practice magic or rituals or whatever. And more than anything those people need to be - when we take power - they need to be given the death penalty. Straight up. … This is God’s country. This is Jesus’s country. This is not the domain of atheists or devil-worshippers or perfidious jews. This is Christ country.

Ali Breland recently wrote in The Atlantic, “In 2023, I reported thatconservative organizations at roughly 30 college campuses across the country had been taken over by students aligned with Groypers. Such groups have long helped breedthe next generation of Republican staffers. By infiltrating them, Fuentes is shaping the future of the right. Even if his popularity starts to wane, his politics aren’t going away for a long time.”

I’m optimistic however that Nick Fuentes and his Groyper army are not the future of MAGA or the GOP, but we are in an interesting time. People are condemning Netanyahu and defending Putin. People are condemning Churchill and defending Hitler. A white former porn actor is building a settlement in Arkansas that excludes Blacks, Jews, and homosexuals. People donated over $800,000 to the GoFundMe of a woman who yelled “nigger” at an autistic 5-year-old Black child who stole her applesauce. Hate crimes are on the rise. And X is increasingly reading like a recruitment letter for the KKK. So much of this is coming from right-leaning, white Gen Z men.

If ever the conditions were ripe for the rise of someone like Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, it’s now.

Share

Subscribe now

On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified and declared part of the U.S. Constitution, finally giving women the right to vote.

It was a victory for most American women and the end result of hard work by suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Burns, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Although the 19th Amendment did not benefit African American women in the South due to Jim Crow laws, African Americans — Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, et al. — were instrumental to its success.

In 1973, President Nixon signed a bill introduced by Congresswoman Bella Abzug declaring August 26th to be Women’s Equality Day.

In honor of all women, we are providing the transcript (based on various reports) of the most famous speech by Sojourner Truth, a former slave who rose to be one of our nation’s most important abolitionists and suffragists. It was delivered on May 29, 1851, at a Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Subscribe now

AIN’T I A WOMAN?

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be somethin' out of kilter. I think that 'twixt de niggers of the South and the women at the North all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.

But what's all this here talking about? That man over there say ‘women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere.’ Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?

Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman?

I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

As for intellect, all I can say is, what’s that got to do with women's rights or nigger's rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yourn holds a quart, wouldn't ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin' to do with Him."

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they are asking to do it, the men better let them.

Blessed to ye for hearin' on me, and now ole Sojourner han't got nothin' more to say.

—DK

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Recently, in the New York Times, Claudia Goldin, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Harvard, wrote an interesting guest essay titled “How Underpaid Are W.N.B.A. Players? It’s Embarrassing.”

She argued:

Women’s basketball has rapidly become one of the country’s most popular spectator sports. The Indiana Fever, with its star Caitlin Clark, regularly sells out arenas. Several W.N.B.A. games last year attracted more than two million viewers. The 2024 N.C.A.A. women’s championship game drew a larger television audience than the men’s championship.

Yet players in the W.N.B.A. make far less money than many male athletes in less popular sports leagues — and only a sliver of what the average N.B.A. player does. Nothing can justify this extraordinary pay gap.

The ‘“extraordinary pay gap” Goldin speaks of is a popular topic, especially among WNBA players.

Subscribe now

One may remember, for example, the stories comparing the NBA’s 2023 #1 draft pick Victor Wembanyama‘s $14 million rookie salary to the $87,000 rookie salary of the WNBA’s 2023 #1 draft pick Caitlin Clark.

Or perhaps one saw Caitlin’s fellow WNBA Angel Reese complaint that her WNBA pay was not enough to pay her rent.

So WNBA players wearing “Pay Us What You Owe Us” t-shirts before this year’s All-Star game was unsurprising.

As CNBC reports,

The declaration came days after more than 40 players met with the WNBA and failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement. The players opted out of their last CBA in October and are negotiating for a better revenue-sharing model, higher salaries, better benefits and a softer salary cap.

The players weren’t satisfied with the progress in negotiations as they head toward a late-October deadline, the Associated Press reports.

They decided to wear the “pay us what you owe us” shirts at a meeting Saturday morning, knowing the All-Star Game was one of the last high-profile events where all players would be in one place before the regular season ends in September.

Subscribe now

The notion that WNBA players are not being paid what they are owed is an interesting one, so I did some rough math.

The average salary for a WNBA player is between $116,000 and $147,000, depending on the source. Let’s say it’s $130,000 a year.

On top of this, they receive 9.3 percent of the league’s $200 million revenue, so they earn about $245,000, or about $6,000 a game.

Funny that Angel Reese did not mention how much she earns from revenue sharing when she complained about her salary, or the endorsements that have made her a multimillionaire at 23 years old.

Subscribe now

If they receive the same 50 percent of all league revenue as do NBA players, WNBA players would each receive an additional $641,000, bringing their annual total to $770,000, or $19,000 a game.

So, to satisfy these players' demands, the WNBA would have to increase the average player pay by about half a million dollars for each player.

Since there are about 156 WNBA players, that would increase the league payroll (salary + revenue-sharing) by about $80 million.

Instead of losing $40 million a year as the WNBA is reportedly doing currently, the WNBA would then likely lose $120 million a year, more or less.

This assumes there won’t be a massive increase in ticket sales and TV ratings in the near future. The league may be working hard to promote its stars not named Caitlin Clark, but given how precipitously ratings fall whenever Clark doesn’t play, such a spike in WNBA viewership seems as unlikely as Sophie Cunningham accepting one of my numerous online wedding proposals.

Do they “deserve” such an increase? No.

Subscribe now

Goldin doesn't mention in her essay that in the 2023-24 season, the NBA generated over $11 billion in revenue. The WNBA, on the other hand, is currently losing $40 million a year. In 2023, the WNBA had a third less viewership than the NBA during the regular season. The viewership of the WNBA Finals that year was less than 7 percent of the viewership of the NBA Finals.

Will they get it? Probably not, but they’ll probably be far richer.

Obviously, WNBA owners aren’t WNBA owners to make a profit, at least not anytime soon. As retired NBA star Gilbert Arenas once pointed out on his podcast, most team owners are billionaires who make their money outside of sports but enjoy the cachet of being a team owner. To them, owning a team is like owning a painting by Vermeer that they can show off for a few decades, then sell for a profit or a tax write-off down the road.

They are losing, on average, about three million dollars a year per team anyway. If WNBA players win their collective bargaining agreement and teams start losing millions more, most of these owners wouldn't even feel it.

The greatest basketball player of all time is Wilt Chamberlain. He dominated the NBA in the 60s, making him the league’s highest-paid player at $65,000 per year. Today, Devin Booker, who is maybe the fifth-best shooting guard in the NBA, recently signed a two-year contract that will earn him $72.5 million a year, nearly $900,000 a game.

Subscribe now

The reason why the fifth-best shooting guard will earn more in two games than the greatest player of all-time earned for his entire career is largely thanks to television. Television is a gift that keeps on giving to the NBA, which signed an 11-year, $76 billion media rights deals with Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon.

I expect WNBA pay to grow at a similarly meteoric rate for the same reason for a similar reason. The same deal that will make the NBA about $7 billion a year will benefit the WNBA as well. The WNBA will earn $2.2 billion over the 11 years, or $200 million a year.

Unfortunately for the WNBA, much of this money will not go to the pockets of players and owners, as this money will have to be split with the NBA, which owns 42 percent of the WNBA and heavily subsidizes them as well, investors, and past debts accrued

Nonetheless, the women should get a significant bump in pay from the new deal. How much of a bump would depend on how great a percentage of revenue they will be able to wrestle from the league in their new collective bargaining agreement.

I don’t expect the “extraordinary pay gap” between NBA and WNBA players — or male and female athletes in general — to dissipate soon. Not unless the number of WNBA fans increases exponentially. Wearing t-shirts that irritate fans who see earning $245,000 for playing 44 basketball games as a lot of money is not going to help their cause.

— DK

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

On November 17, 2024, Donald Trump Jr. posted a funny picture that featured Robert F. Kennedy Jr — alongside President Trump, Elon Musk, Rep. Mike Johnson, and himself — nervously grimacing over a McDonald's Quarter Pound meal, with French fries, nuggets, and a soda under text that read, “Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸”

Kennedy had good reason to be nervous. Given his reportedly extremely healthy diet, it is likely that he has not developed the necessary immunities required to handle eating the greasy, salty, saturated fat deliciousness of a McDonald's meal without going into toxic shock. The Trumps, however, like Musk — and yes, like myself — have digestive systems well inured to such culinary decadence.

It was a captured moment as portentous as it was amusing. One cannot imagine that it would be the last such moment for Kennedy or many on the Trump team. Team Trump is comprised of individuals who have a history of diverging on issues far greater than what should be served for lunch. Like MAGA itself, it is a team marked by such diversity, such a wide range of ideologies, that moments of cringing seem inevitable.

Kennedy, of course, possesses a surname that is iconic in political circles, but even more so among Democrats. He may have been the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee had his party allowed a fair primary. Yet, he is still not the most liberal member of Trump’s cabinet.

Subscribe now

Nor is Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, though her record of opposing school choice and attacking right-to-work laws made her nomination irksome to many conservatives.

Kennedy and Chavez-DeRemer are like William F. Buckley and Mollie Hemingway compared to our new National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard. It is not enough to say she, like Kennedy, is a former Democratic presidential candidate. To truly emphasize how liberal Gabbard is, we must point out that the American Conservative Union (ACU), which scores politicians based on how conservatively he or she votes, gave the Vice-President JD Vance a lifetime rating of 95% for his voting record as a U.S. senator, which is comparable to our most conservative senators like Ted Cruz (96%), Rand Paul (97%), and Mike Lee (99%). In contrast, the ACU gives Gabbard a lifetime score of 7.63%, in line with Nancy Pelosi (3%) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (3%).

Trump, thankfully, has many solid conservatives on his team, such as Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Tom Homan, and Kristi Noem. However, with so many non-conservatives and non-Republicans present, and a vice-president who once compared him to Hitler, one wonders what these meetings are like behind closed doors.

We may have been given a sense of the tone of at least some of these meetings, thanks to a report of an alleged dispute between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has been described in the past as a “Democrat mega-donor,” and fellow former Democrat mega-donor Elon Musk.

Subscribe now

As reported by the New York Post:

Elon Musk aggressively body-checked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the White House after being called a fraud — igniting a fiery clash that sparked the billionaire’s messy falling-out with President Trump, a new report claims.

The heated scuffle broke out in mid-April after the men pitched rival plans for the Internal Revenue Service to Trump in the Oval Office, with the president ultimately backing Bessent’s choice, the Washington Post quoted former White House official Steven Bannon as saying.

The pair left the meeting hurling insults at each other within earshot of the president’s office, Bannon told the outlet.

There is also a noteworthy feud within the MAGA coalition — particularly between the conservative wing and the libertarian-isolationist wing — which comes to the fore during debates over to what extent, if any, the U.S. should support Ukraine and Israel in their wars against Russia and Hamas, respectively.

This scuffle is best illustrated by the blows being thrown by two of the most prominent voices on the right: Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson. Carlson, who is the apparent leader of the libertarian-isolationist wing, considers Levin to be a warmonger and accused Levin of visiting the White House to lobby for war with Iran. Carlson describes Levin as “a repulsive ghoul whose entire sex life consists of people getting blown up.”

Subscribe now

Levin, in response, began calling Carlson “Chadsworth Qatarlson” — a reference to Carlson’s privileged upbringing and his alleged connection to Qatar.

So far, these quarrels within the MAGA movement amount to little more than popcorn theatre. As Trump says, he is MAGA, and with an approval rating of 90% among Republican voters, there is little danger that the movement will fracture during his administration.

However, Trump will not be president forever.

MAGA is not a cult, nor is it a political philosophy. It is a coalition, an alliance of opposing actors, bound together by a single individual. One wonders if Trump’s successor will be able to hold the coalition together.

Already, Elon Musk has announced that he is forming a third party he has labeled the America Party, which he declared will, “crack the uniparty system” and “give you back your freedom.”

This America Party will be yet another strange hodgepodge of individuals who politically won’t have much in common other than a dislike for Trump. Eventually, one assumes, the party will attract some disgruntled Democrats, libertarians, and Never Trumpers. The only prerequisite to being an America Party member, it appears, is that one must hate Trump.

Subscribe now

Musk seems to envision himself as a modern-day Ross Perot, who was a successful businessman who undermined George Bush’s reelection campaign in 1992 and Bob Dole’s campaign in 1996 in large part by promising to reduce the federal budget deficit with tax increases and spending cuts.

Unfortunately for Musk, the Americas Party is without a compelling leader or defining cause. It has no Donald Trump or even a Ross Perot. It may not even have a nominal presidential candidate. If they do, it won’t be Musk. Musk was born in South Africa, so he is banned by Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution from running for president. Even if he could run, Musk’s history of having been a socialist, an Obama Democrat, a Hillary Democrat, a Biden Democrat, an Andrew Yang supporter, and a MAGA Republican, all in a relatively short period, shows that he is politically unmoored. Furthermore, we have seen enough Teslas vandalized in recent months to know that his primary issue — cutting government spending — has earned him few friends.

It is unlikely, then, that the America Party will find traction in 2028. That does not mean, however, that other challenges to MAGA won’t emerge.

To forestall these challenges, MAGA will have to find a cohesion that will unite its supporters, even while Donald Trump is enjoying his retirement.

— DK

Share

Subscribe now

Although I am no longer a New Yorker, and have no plans to ever be one again, I could not help but notice the amazing rise of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani, as most are aware by now, is a charismatic, young, millionaire socialist who was born of Indian parents in Uganda and migrated to the U.S. at age seven. He became a New York assemblyman who has now won the Democratic primary in a campaign that excited progressives nationally — including endorsers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and defeated the well-funded favorite, former governor Andrew Cuomo. Although he still has to face Mayor Eric Adams in the general election, polls indicate that a Mamdani mayoralty is a done deal.

Mamdani’s victory has made many New Yorkers nervous due to his progressive wishlist. New York has had far-left mayors before — former mayor Bill de Blasio was “an admirer of Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista party,” for example — but Mamdani’s economic and social agenda makes even mayors like de Blasio seem like Calvin Coolidge.

He has called for taxpayers to put out 65 million dollars for “trans medical treatment,” including sex-change operations for children:

“Mamdani, 33, also vowed to go after private medical institutions that continue to deny trans youth care, stating he would work with state Attorney General Letitia James and local district attorneys in the five boroughs to ‘investigate and hold public hearings on hospitals that deny trans youth their rightful healthcare and hold them accountable to the law.’”

On his campaign website, he says he will “ensure our immigrant New Yorkers are protected by strengthening our sanctuary city apparatus: getting ICE out of all City facilities and ending any cooperation, increasing legal support, and protecting all personal data.” This goal of strengthening NY’s sanctuary city apparatus comes despite how much illegal immigration is hurting New York as well as the Black and legal immigration communities (as I have previously mentioned here and here).

Mamdani has a number of economic proposals that, if passed, seem likely to expedite the flight of the rich and businesses out of New York City. This list of proposals include a $30 per hour minimum wage (is McDonald’s going to pay their full-time cashiers over $60,000 a year?), raising taxes on the rich, and opening nonprofit, city-owned grocery stores.

Already, real estate stocks have fallen in light of Mamdani’s nomination, and the owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain has said he will consider relocating his business out of New York.

But, the most shocking aspect of Mamdani’s election is not that New York — a city with more Jews than Jerusalem — elected a Muslim as mayor, but that it elected a mayor whose antisemitism and antipathy towards Israel is blatant.

Mamdani essentially admitted to these views in a recent mayoral debate. One of the moderators, likely mindful that, because NY mayors traditionally travel internationally frequently, as befitting being the chief executive of a city that imports and exports hundreds of billions of dollars in goods each year, asked the candidates which country he or she would visit first.

Strangely, given how much revenue and how many NY jobs depend on international trade, Mamdani claimed that he would stay in New York. There was no follow-up question during the debate (or after, as far as I know) to Mamdani probing why he rejects the role of being an advocate for New York’s global trade.

However, a moderator did follow up by asking if he would visit Israel as mayor. Mamdani answered:

“As the mayor, I'll be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and I'll be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs, whether that's in their synagogues and temples or at their homes or at the subway platform. Because ultimately we need to focus on delivering on their concerns.”

In other words, Mamdani, as mayor of the second most Jewish populated city in the world, would be the first choosing not to visit a nation that is one of his city’s most important trading partners, Israel. Neither the task of being an advocate for NYC-Israel trade nor a representative to his Jewish constituents appeals to him.

Mamdani’s hostility to trade with Israel, which he refers to as an apartheid regime, is long documented. Mamdani “was the founder at his campus of Students for Justice in Palestine—an absolutely vile anti-Israel group which has wreaked havoc on campuses everywhere.” He continues to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement which aims to harm Israel economically. As an assemblyman Mamdani co-sponsored “Not On Our Dime,” a bill that targeted NY charities giving to Israel and was seen as so hostile and antisemitic that it was “rebuked with a joint statement from a majority of Democratic lawmakers in the New York State assembly.”

In subsequent interviews, Mamdani rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, I would not be the first to notice that those like Mamdani who find the existence of one Jewish state problematic do not find the existence of 57 Muslim states so. In fact, so hostile is Mamdani to Israel that he promises that if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits New York, he will have him arrested.

Perhaps worse of all, Mamdani has endorsed the slogan “globalize the intifada,” As the New York Times reports:

“Palestinians and their supporters have called the phrase a rallying cry for liberation, but many Jews see it as a threatening call to violence against Jews around the world. The phrase, which contains the Arabic word for “uprising,” alludes to Palestinian rebellions, including violent attacks, against Israel in the 1980s and 2000s.”

Mamdani may be a disaster for New York even if he is only able to enact part of his agenda. No matter. He is now a leading figure in a Democrat Party that favors young, radically leftist, people of color and/or female, candidates who hate capitalism and Trump, but love anything associated with transgenders and illegal immigrants.

Most of all, Mamdani embodies the unfortunate growing hatred of Israel evident now in both political parties. In one of the oddest political twists one may be able to see, Cuomo ran for mayor of a city with the second largest Jewish population in the world as the pro-Israel candidate and lost.

—DK

Share

Subscribe now

There are two recent polls that, together, serve as a sort of addendum to AACON’s most recent blog, “Why Should We? African Americans should not be brow-beaten into joining the anti-ICE protests.”

One poll was featured on a recent video by Rassmussen Reports pollster Mark Mitchell. According to his findings, President Trump now has an amazing total approval rating among African American respondents of 54 percent.

This is remarkable. According to some exit polls, Trump won roughly 18 percent of the Black vote in the 2024 presidential election, making him the most popular GOP presidential candidate since Eisenhower’s 1956 election. A 54 percent approval rating would mean that Trump’s favorability has more than doubled since Election Day.

There is another clip that features CNN pollster Harry Enten that dispels the media reporting, not to mention all the mocking “FAFO” TikTok videos, that claim that the legals who supported Trump now regret doing so now that the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is deporting illegals.

Subscribe now

The proverbial legal who voted for Trump and is now shocked — shocked, I tell you! —was always more myth than reality. If Trump was clear on anything as a candidate, it was that he was going to deport illegals. Nonetheless, this CNN poll underscores just how divorced this narrative is from reality:

“More so than any other group that I could find, the group of voters who became more hawkish on immigration were in fact immigrants themselves, immigrants who were registered to vote in this country. Closest to a ‘trust more on immigration,’ you go back to 2020, Democrats, get this, held a 32-point lead on this issue. Immigrant voters were in the Democratic camp. Jump forward to 2024, 2025. Look at that shift. A 40-point shift to the right among immigrant voters. Republicans now lead on this issue by eight points over Democrats.”

Perhaps to dissuade those who think that this shift is due to millions of legal immigrants suddenly falling in love with those pretty red MAGA caps, Enten explains the shift in clear terms:

“The net favorable rating [of] immigrants who are here illegally, ‘Among Immigrant Citizens,’ again, those registered to vote, in 2020, look at this, plus 23 points on the net favorable rating. But look at where we were in 2024 - minus six points underwater. So immigrant citizens have become increasingly unfavorable in their views of those immigrants who are here illegally.”

In other words, according to Enten, legals, angered by the tsunami of illegals who caravanned into this country and their neighborhoods during the Biden administration, have embraced the Trump deportation efforts.

Subscribe now

Much of this anger towards illegal immigration from the legal immigrant community is financial. Much like African Americans , legal immigrants are “disproportionately likely to be in low-wage jobs” therefore vulnerable to the wage-depressing effect of illegal immigration.

As the Federation for American Immigration Reform states:

“[The] wage depressing effect of illegal immigrant workers was documented in 2008 by researchers working for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, who found that ‘average wages among documented [legal] workers are lower in industries that employ undocumented [illegal] workers and that a greater share of undocumented workers in those industries further lowers wages.’ Immigrants introduce downward wage pressure in low-skilled occupations almost everywhere they are found…”

Besides wage depression and service cuts, African American and legal immigrant communities, both disproportionately reliant upon social services, are seeing their social services threatened by illegals.

New York Mayor Eric Adams became a much more controversial figure recently by daring to speak on what sanctuary city mayors rarely speak on, namely, the cost inflicted upon cities by illegal immigration.

In 2023, Adams put it bluntly. Pointing to the estimated $12 billion the migrant crisis would cost his city over the next three years, he said, “Let me tell you something New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to — I don’t see an ending to this . . . This issue will destroy New York City.”

Other sanctuary cities are in a similar predicament. Illegals have to be fed, sheltered, provided with free medical care and education. The cost of all this is met by the taxpayer and by cuts in social services, again hurting the Black and legal immigrant communities the most.

Subscribe now

As Illinois Policy reports:

“[Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson’s] migrant policies come at a direct cost to the Black community. His administration has committed over $600 million to migrant services while the state has spent over $800 million on migrant housing and other supports and nearly $1.5 billion more on migrant health care. Wirepoints estimates CPS alone has spent anywhere between $215 million and $410 million on migrant students. Even original Chicago Teachers Union contract demands included an extra $2,000 per migrant child.

“Compare that to his support for Black Chicagoans: his “treatment not trauma” mental health initiative funded just four clinics. His reestablished Department of Environment consists of six new staffers added to an existing four. His reentry program for formerly incarcerated residents? Just a tiny office. His youth employment initiative? Only 4,000 temporary, minimum-wage summer jobs.”

There is also resentment towards those who ‘jumped the line’ even among legal immigrant groups that are not financially affected by illegal immigration, as expressed by Lindy Li.

However, the most damaging way illegal immigration hurts legal immigrants is with crime. Much like how Black communities are plagued by crime from Black criminals, illegals are a cancer within the larger migrant community.

This is not surprising. Biden’s open border policy allowed millions of unvetted individuals into the U.S. Some of these are from the same gangs that legal immigrants came to America to escape. These gangs — Tren de Aragula (TDA) and MS-13 are the most notorious ones, résumés that include human trafficking, rape, extortion, and drug smuggling.

Question: When these gang members, from places like Venezuela and El Salvador come to the US, do they settle in neighborhoods that are primarily occupied by Spanish-speaking legal immigrants, or do they prefer to live in the dormitories, townhouses, and expensive apartment buildings of the typical “No Kings” protestor?

These reactions from the African American and legal immigrant communities to the Trump deportations contrast sharply from the reactions expressed by civil rights organizations:

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has declined to invite President Trump to its next convention due in part because he, according to the NAACP, “has illegally turned the military on our communities.”

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) have called the deportations a “deeply disturbing escalation in federal tactics and shocking violation of democratic norms.”

And the Asian Americans Advancing Justice have called ICE raids “increasingly aggressive and overboard in its immigration enforcement efforts, creating chaos and panic in communities.”

Subscribe now

Yet the most visible proponents of illegal immigration, as well as the most vocal opponents of ICE, tend not to be these organizations who, on the issue of immigration, advocate against the best interest of the communities they purport to represent. Instead, we see a group that is primarily caucasian, progressive, high income, almost completely unaffected by illegal immigration in any substantial way, and, despite their frequent characterization of people who oppose open borders as “xenophobic” and “racist,” seem to lack sincere regard for the welfare of illegal immigrants.

Representative Becca Balint, a white Vermont Democrat, expressed the thought of many of her peers when she told a town hall audience why she supports immigration “If we don't have avenues for people to come here legally, to work or to build a home here . . . we're not going to have anybody around to wipe our asses.”

Yet, Trump is the bad guy?

Trump recently flirted with the idea of giving illegals who work on farms, in the hotel industry, or at eateries, a pass on deportation. This would have been a mistake.

Americans should dispel the myth that we need illegals to work in any industry, including the farming, hotel, and restaurant industries. There are no jobs that Americans won’t or can’t do, especially at a time when there are over 7 million Americans who are unemployed.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) looked into 472 civilian occupations and found only six (1.27 percent) that were “majority immigrant.”

Even if it were true that there are jobs that only immigrants could do, it would not follow that those immigrants have to be illegal immigrants.

Trump should stay on course in deporting illegals or encouraging illegals to self-deport. America will be better without them. There will be more jobs, less wage-depression, and less overburdened social services. The best of these immigrants will return anyway. Next time they’ll do it legally.

— DK

Share

Share

Subscribe now

The recent immigration riots, which began in Los Angeles but now seem to be spreading to cities across the country, have caused many Hispanics to take to platforms like TikTok to ask, “Where are you, our Black brothers and sisters? Why aren't you here rioting with us?”

In response, many African Americans have taken to the same platforms to say, “This is not our problem,” “This is your fault for voting for Trump,” “We don’t like each other,’ and “Why should we?”

It is that last response that most closely matches my view on why I hope not to see African Americans join the “professional anarchists” protesting in favor of open borders. I say, “Why should we?”

One of the issues AACONS has spoken about most often since our inception has been the negative impact of illegal immigration on the Black community. One way we have been doing so is by quoting the work of Harvard economist George Borjas, who has been the leading voice in explaining the detrimental effect immigration has on the African American community.

Subscribe now

In his 2009 paper IMMIGRATION AND THE ECONOMIC STATUS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN MEN, for example, Borjas, along with his co-authors, Professors Jeffrey Grogger and Gordon H. Hanson, argued that “a 10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the black wage by 2.5 percent, lowered the employment rate of black men by 5.9 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of blacks by 1.3 percentage points.”

Many others have said similar things. In her 2007 book, Debating Immigration, Dr. Carol Swain, a favorite AACONS guest, wrote at length about African Americans disproportionately losing jobs to illegals. Also, in 2016, Peter Kirsanow of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) testified to the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, “Illegal immigration has a disparate impact on African-American men because these men are disproportionately represented in the low-skilled labor force.”

Black anxiety about the detrimental impact on their community from immigration has a long history.

The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, for example, a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther’s, joined Walter Mondale and Cesar Chavez to protest illegal immigration:

Subscribe now

And, as Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute writes:

“In fact, black unease about immigration goes back to the 19th century, when former slave Frederick Douglass warned that immigrants were displacing free blacks in the labor market. Many blacks supported the 1892 federal law that restricted Chinese immigration and later urged restrictions on Mexican workers. "If the million Mexicans who have entered the country have not displaced Negro workers, whom have they displaced?" asked black journalist George Schuyler in 1928.”

Many Blacks fully realize the harm open borders have inflicted upon them, even without reading the work of Borjas, Swain, Schuyler, and others. This is a major reason President Trump saw an eight-point increase in Black support between 2020 and 2024.

“They coming for our jobs” may be a South Park joke, but in the Black community, it’s a statement of fact. A great example of this occurred in 2007 when a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid emptied the Cripher poultry plant of many of its illegal immigrant employees. This resulted in a huge increase in the number of Black employees and wages at the plant.

And, we have seen more than a few viral videos, such as the one below, of Black citizens confronting their sanctuary city mayors over having to suffer tax hikes and cuts in services despite these mayors dedicating an obscene amount of money to illegals:

Subscribe now

The smartest, most succinct statement on immigration came from one of this nation’s most significant African American politicians, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who in 1995 famously said, “Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.” She added, “The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.”

So again, whenever I see someone attempt to browbeat African Americans into essentially protesting for open borders, I ask, “Why should we?” Immigration, especially the sort of limitless illegal immigration we saw under Biden, is not now, nor has it ever been to our benefit.

—DK

Share

Subscribe now

On May 20, 2025, during a Homeland Security hearing, Senator Tim Kaine asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio several challenging questions, which Rubio was unable to adequately address.

Kaine begins by pointing out that the Trump administration issued an executive order (”Realigning the United States Refugee Program”) essentially pausing American acceptance of refugees. Yet, as Kaine points out, one exception has been made: white South African farmers, many of whom are referred to as Afrikaners.

Kaine asks, “Do you think they’re more persecuted than Uyghurs or Rohingyas or more persecuted than political dissidents in Cuba or Venezuela or Nicaragua, more persecuted than those who would be threatened should they be returned to Afghanistan by violence by the Taliban?”

Subscribe now

Rubio could not say that they were, instead attempting to justify this exception by mentioning that the Afrikaners were “a small subset” who are easy to get and who live in fear for their lives and their farmland.

President Trump has been even more blunt in his assessment of the plight of white farmers in South Africa. During a press conference on May 12, Trump said, “It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about. But it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place. And farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they’re white or Black, it makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”

To Trump’s point, there are recordings of party leaders, who, while thankfully in the minority, can nonetheless lead large crowds into chanting “Kill the Boer!!,” which can be — though not necessarily -- interpreted to mean “Kill the Afrikaner. "

These videos are chilling. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, tweeted one such video, describing it as, “A whole arena chanting about killing white people.” Trump played one such video during his meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphos. Imagine how frightening these videos must be to the Afrikaners.

However, to answer Kaine’s question directly about whether the Afrikaners are more persecuted than the Uyghurs and other groups; no, they are not.

While it’s true that South Africa is one of the most violent countries in the world, the primary victims of these homicides in South Africa, much like in the United States, are Black. According to The Spectator, “Overwhelmingly, murder victims are young black men killed by other young black men. Whites make up around eight per cent of the population and are the victims in roughly two per cent of murders.”

And while Trump specifically mentions that white farmers are being “brutally killed,” of the over 19,000 South African murder victims between April and December 2024, only seven were farmers. How many of those seven are white is unclear.

Subscribe now

By contrast, while Afrikaners are being frightened by horrific speeches in packed arenas, Blacks in Nigeria are being massacred for simply being Christian. For example, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) reported that 56 such Christians were murdered on April 13, 2025. According to a CSI Nigeria project manager, “The majority of the victims had been hacked on the back of their necks with machetes.” Yet no expedited refugee status has been offered to these Christians.

To another point, on February 5, 2025, Rubio tweeted that he would not attend the G20 Summit in Johannesburg, in part because, “South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property.” Musk’s aforementioned tweet also complained that “the South African government passed a law legalizing taking property from white people at will with no payment.” Trump has expressed outrage over this expropriation as well.

They are referencing South Africa’s controversial Expropriation Act, 2024, which, “gives the state the power to expropriate some privately owned land without compensation for owners,” but, according to South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, “provides for compensation to be paid in the vast majority of cases.”

Much like Special Field Order 15, General Sherman’s 1865 “40 acres and a mule” military order that sought to redistribute land taken without compensation from former slaveholders to freed slaves, the Expropriation Act, 2024 will purportedly seek to redistribute land from the Afrikaners who largely earned their land and wealth through the exploitation of South African Blacks.

Through apartheid, the white minority, which had initially enslaved Blacks, then forced them to work in mines for gold and diamonds, continued to trap Blacks into an economically inferior position. Apartheid prevented Blacks from voting, restricted education and entrepreneurism, and limited their ability to own private property. To use Rubio’s word, apartheid also ‘expropriated’ the land of many Blacks and gave that land to whites, often without compensation to the rightful owners.

Subscribe now

Furthermore, one wonders if the white South African farmers who were granted an EZ pass into the United States are the sort we, as Americans, should want inside our borders. One of the complaints many express with immigration, especially here and throughout the West, is that the foreign-born sometimes fail to integrate into the culture of their new nation. One hears, for example, about migrants from Africa who now live in, say, Italy, but don’t speak Italian, are not Catholic, and, most shockingly of all, don’t eat pasta. And speaking of the fear of foreigners not integrating, and of eating, who can forget Trump accusing the Haitian immigrants in Ohio of eating pets?

Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1990, 35 years ago. That’s more recent by nearly three decades than the birth of an average member of Congress. Even a few of the wives and mistresses of these congressmen can remember the fall of apartheid. Are we to believe the white South Africans have not been affected by the evil, racist apartheid culture that they've all benefited from and some have lived under during their early adulthoods?

As Kaine mentioned, “Never has there been a special program for Africans to come in as refugees to the United States. We’ve allowed special programs for people being persecuted for their religion, Soviet era Jews. We’ve allowed special programs for people fleeing from communism, Cuba, Vietnam, [and] the Soviet Union. We’ve never allowed a special program to allow Africans into the United States in an expedited refugee status until now.”

And the beneficiaries of this expedited refugee status are not the victims of centuries of racial repression, but rather the perpetrators of it.

—DK

Share

Subscribe now

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Watch on YouTube

One-Time Site Support

Share

Subscribe now

Start your tape right now, because I'm about to tell you the truth. And f-you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I've known him for years. The Brzezinskis have known him for 50 years. If it weren't the truth, I wouldn't say it.

— MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, March 6, 2024

Roughly three weeks after Biden was forced to abandon his quest for re-election, it is difficult to believe words like these were spoken only months ago, not only by Joe Scarborough, but by many of President Biden’s most dedicated defenders.

In fact, as evident in this viral tweet, the approved MSDNCNN talking point until Biden was made an offer he couldn't refuse — either by threatening to halt fundraising, invoking the 25th Amendment, or perhaps by pointing to the Trump’s assassination attempt as a warning him to not argue with them — was that Biden was sharp as a tack.

Yet, evidence that Biden was no sharper than a hammer was evident long before his debate with Trump, and those who publicly praised Biden’s sharpness were well aware.

If the MSDNCNN reaction to Biden’s debate performance is sincere, and they truly did not know that our president had long become what he is, then one wonders what else they do not know. Did they know Biden was white? Had they heard of his son, Hunter? Did they know Biden’s uncle was not eaten by cannibals; that Biden was never arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela; or that Biden was not ‘raised in the Black church?’ The depth of MSDNCNN’s ignorance about our current president would have to be astounding.

But we know they knew.

We know they knew of Biden’s lack of sharpness because in 2018 Senator Cory Booker, then a rival for the Democrat presidential nomination told us that “there’s a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling.”

We know they knew because in 2019 The New York Times reported a piece titled “Why Joe Biden’s Age Worries Some Democratic Allies and Voters,” which reported:

As aides and allies watched Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first debate performance last month, their initial optimism about his abilities turned to alarm as Senator Kamala Harris laced into him over race and busing.

It wasn’t just Mr. Biden’s halting answers that worried some of them. They thought he was showing his age — that, at 76, he appeared slow off the mark, uncertain about how to counterpunch as he allowed Ms. Harris to land clean hits without interruption.

We know they knew Biden ‘campaigned from his basement’ in  2020, supposedly because of the pandemic, but more likely to avoid the mistakes he is prone to make. They saw as we all did Biden wander off at the G7 summit and knew, as we all did, that the clip wasn't “deceptively cropped.”

We know they knew because Robert Hur, who was appointed by Biden’s Attorney General to investigate Biden’s theft of classified documents, told us so. He concluded that, in essence, while then-vice president Biden did indeed steal documents, most likely for his self-enrichment, “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Kamala Harris knew, even as she was on television claiming, “We have a very bold and vibrant president in Joe Biden” in February of this year. The same month Axios reported that old and vibrant Joe’s “reliance on notecards to help explain his own policy positions — on questions he knows are coming — is raising concerns among some donors about Biden's age.”

The reaction then of MSDNCNN to the revelation that Biden was, in fact, a dotard, despite having seen him guided by an Easter Bunny at a public event years ago, is reminiscent of the Hans Christian Andersen folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which a crowd pretended that their king was not marching in a parade exposing his royal jewels because everyone feared he or she would be considered a fool if they said otherwise. Finally, a boy yelled out “The king is naked!” At this point, everyone admitted that all of the king’s birthmarks were visible to everyone who cared to look.

The debate was that parade. Trump was the boy. Biden supporters were forced to finally and publicly admit what they've known for almost a decade: Joe Biden is unfit to be president.

One wonders why they allowed Biden to debate Trump. Clearly they did their best to tilt the scales in Biden’s favor. It was a debate on a notoriously anti-Trump network with two notoriously moderators with rules thought to work to Joe’s advantage. They even gave Joe a week to rest and study.

Perhaps they thought Trump would decline the debate or, failing that, Joe would do well. To his credit, Biden was able to deliver a series of well-rehearsed lies; such as claiming that Trump advised Americans to “inject bleach” into themselves to kill the Kung Flu, that Trump praised Neo-Nazis at Charlottesville, that no U.S. troops died during his administration, and even that he had a golf handicap of six.

The excuses from the President’s side began pouring in even before the debate was finished: he had a cold, he was tired, Trump just lied so much, and so on. It was clear, however, that unless the unexpected occurred, like, say, an assassination, Biden would not keep the White House in blue hands, and something had to be done.

As The Post Millennial reported:

A new Substack out from Seymour Hersch indicates that former President Barack Obama and VP Kamala Harris, now presumptive Democrat nominee for president, threatened sitting President Joe Biden with the potential invocation of the 25th Amendment if he didn't drop out the presidential race and cede that spot to the veep. This would mean that not only did they force Biden out of the race, but that the Democrats know full well that Biden isn’t fit to serve out the rest of his term, but are comfortable letting him continue as a figurehead if it serves their efforts to retain power for the party.

Interestingly, Pelosi, who Biden seems to have confirmed was also a key player in this coup, is also reported to have had a key role in the supposed January Sixth coup attempt. She may no longer be House Speaker or House Minority Leader, but Pelosi is still one of the most powerful and dangerous figures in Washington.

However, it is Harris’ involvement that is key. Party elites may have preferred a number of others to replace Biden — Governors Newsom, Shapiro, and Whitmer are just three of the list of politicians who would likely be a more formidable candidate than Harris — but they could not threaten the stubborn Biden with the 25th Amendment without her participation.

This may be the fatal flaw of their plan. It hinges on Harris being popular enough to defeat Trump. As of this writing, despite the great honeymoon she is experiencing, this does not seem likely.

RealClearPolitics is reporting that Harris is leading Trump by 1.1 points: 47.8 to 46.7. However, the same site reports that on this date in 2020, Biden led Trump by 7.7 points, eventually winning by 4.4 points, and in 2016 Hillary led by 6.8 points, eventually winning the popular vote by 2.1 points.

That Biden and Clinton had an average lead of 7.25 points on this date and saw that lead decrease by an average of more than 22 percent on election day has to be concerning for Harris backers, even as they shout with daily headlines “Kamala Now Leading Trump!”

Why Harris is underperforming in the polls relative to her predecessors should be especially alarming to her fans. According to an August 4,2024, Pew Research article, Harris’s support among women is at 49 percent, among Hispanics 52 percent, and among African Americans, 77 percent.

MSDNCNN may be accurate when they trumpet how much these numbers are better than Biden’s numbers from a few weeks ago, but they are failing to mention that, historically, these numbers are a disaster.

According to numbers provided by the Roper Center, since Reagan’s great victory over Carter, the Democrat presidential candidate has won an average of  65 percent of the Hispanic vote. Harris’s 52 percent is 20 percent lower.

Since Reagan’s win in 1980, the Democrat presidential nominee was won, on average, 52 percent of the female vote. Kamala Harris, running to be our first female president, is seeing 6 percent less support among women.

Among African Americans, Harris, who leans in so heavily into her blackness that she once responded to a Black interviewer’s question by saying “Girl, I’m out here in them streets,” is being largely rejected. The Democrat presidential nominee since 1980 has won an average of 88 percent of the Black vote. Harris’s 77 percent is 13 percent lower. If that holds, she would be the least popular Democrat presidential candidate among African American voters since 1960.

These numbers could change, obviously. Trump faces sentencing in September over the infamous “hush money” case, there is a Democratic convention scheduled, and at least one debate likely. Currently there is a buzz among right-leaning politicos that Biden will soon resign, allowing Harris to go into November as the sitting president. Any of these things will change the poll numbers.

But to emphasize the point, at this moment, Kamala Harris, running to be our first Black woman president, is the least popular Democrat presidential candidate among women, Hispanics, and African Americans, in over 40 years.

Harris supporters should hope that in the few weeks remaining until Election Day that she can avoid that particular ignominy, even if she fails to take the White House.

If not, she may find herself as naked as our current president.

—DK

Share

Subscribe now

I have loved classic cinema all my life. My favorite actor was Jimmy Stewart. I can't tell you how many times I've watched “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Harvey,” “Vertigo,” or even “Rear Window.” But, somehow I'd never gotten around to seeing “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Until today. 

Tears are coursing down my face as I write this. So heartbroken am I that our country, founded on the ideals we celebrate today, that our Founders risked their reputations to craft, has found itself in the state it is today, and at the crossroads we now find ourselves at.

I've been in politics for over 15 years, and even seeing the lies and corruption up close with my own two eyes, I still feel like Jeff Smith, filled with love for this nation.

I believe in those ideals and principles. I believe in God first and country. Though the Joseph Paines and Jim Taylors of the world try to clog the halls of Congress along with their complicit media conglomerates, I believe in the innate desire of the people to have a representative government that upholds the principles this country was founded upon, and that reflect the genius of our Creator God.

Have we, on the human side, miffed up and gotten it wrong from time to time? Most definitely. Were our Founders perfect? Of course not. And, truly, that's the ingenuity of this system that has lasted 248 years! Despite our imperfections, despite everything, we have a system that has protected us, and that has allowed for the course corrections that have addressed many of those stains upon the fabric of this country.

But, we are in perilous times. The Joe Paines and Jim Taylors are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the people.

In this election year, if I could beg you to do anything, it would be to be a fact-finder. Forget the so-called social media “fact-checkers;” they answer to Paine, Taylor, and Associates. Do your own due diligence. 

As I've said, I have been in rooms where politicians have spoken, only to watch the resulting coverage on PNN (Paine Network News) or TTC (The Taylor Channel), filled with distortions, at best, and lies, at worst.

On my last trip to Washington, DC, I visited some of the monuments Mr. Smith regarded with awe. I sat in the balcony of the Senate gallery, where Senator Smith’s ardent admirers imbued him with the energy to go on. I felt the passion of our Founders, and want us to find our internal fortitude and “Smith spines” to protect what we have.

Despite dire odds, without spoiling the movie’s ending too much, I believe we can overcome as Smith did.

America, we have something special. If we hold to our principles, if we become informed and active participants in this representational system we enjoy, we can have, as Founding Father Benjamin Franklin posited to Mrs. Powel when she asked what we had, a monarchy or a Republic, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

Let’s keep it.

--MCS

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

One-Time Site Support

One-Time Site Support

Share

Subscribe now

One of the more outrageous talking points one hears is that a Trump victory in November’s presidential race poses an “existential threat to democracy.”

This mantra begins with President Biden — who has never been above this sort of fear-mongering — evident by stating to a largely Black audience in 2012 that Republicans wanted to put “y’all back in chains” in 2012 or his more recent claims that Trump advised his followers to inject bleach in themselves to kill COVID.

In his controversial 2022 unofficial campaign speech at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, for which all three TV networks illegally donated millions of dollars of free airtime, Biden argued that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

In his recent official campaign speech, Biden repeated this theme, claiming “Donald Trump poses, in my view, many threats to this country, from the right to choose . . . to civil rights and voting rights to the American standing in the world. The greatest threat he poses, though, is to our democracy.”

It's a warning one hears almost daily from Biden allies: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, and so on. One cannot be a paid propagandist for MSNBC, either as a host or even a guest, unless one is willing to say that a Trump victory in November will destroy our system of government. Michael Cohen, the  former Trump personal attorney, still bitter that he was not appointed President Trump’s Attorney General and who had admitted to stealing $30,000 from the Trump organization, repeatedly showed why he is welcome on that channel by stating, “If God forbid a million times that Donald wins in 2024, my prediction is that there will never be another election thereafter,” to which host Joy Reid added, "I agree with you."

The November election may well be the last U.S. presidential election, but it wouldn't be because Trump won. Rather, it will be because he lost.

It is a point AACONS has made often, but we’re not the only ones. A NPR/PBS/Marist poll revealed that 53 percent of independents agree that Biden is a greater threat to democracy than Trump.

The Democrats are attempting to rig the game so that they can replace competitive elections and our two-party system with a national one-party government along the lines of what we see in California. It is for this reason that they should be referred to as the Anti-Democrats.

Subscribe now

The Anti-Democrats are attempting to end democracy with a variety of means. One such effort is by eliminating the Senate filibuster, which will allow the Democrats to pass any legislation that pleases them with 52 votes, rather than the 60 that is required today. Another is increasing the number of states by including D.C., Puerto Rico, and maybe even American Samoa, the Virgin Islands; and Guam to become states, on the presumption that each of these new states would send two Democrats to the Senate; forever burying the GOP in the minority. Similarly, there is an ongoing effort to pack the Supreme Court with four additional liberal jurists in order to “restore justice and balance to the rogue, radical Supreme Court.”

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Democrat, recently exploited the anniversary of the 1965 March by activists from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest Democrat politicians’ corruption of American democracy by reminding us that Biden’s Department of Justice will continue its efforts to campaign against secure elections:

That is why we are challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.

A larger example of their effort to rig the game is the opening of our borders. According to research, immigrants vote overwhelmingly Democrat. In Texas, for example, according to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of immigrants lean Democrat, while only 18 percent lean Republican. Nationally, according to a KFF-LA Times survey, “Immigrants, including naturalized citizens, lean more towards the Democrats when asked which political party represents their own views, which party best represents the interests of immigrants overall, and whether immigrants were better off under the Biden or Trump presidencies.”

Given this electoral advantage, it is little wonder that the Democrats have refused to secure the border. In fact, I would argue that the primary reason why the Democrats have demonized Trump is not because they thought he was allied with Putin or any other such nonsense. It is because in 2015 Trump began his presidential campaign warning that “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best,” then subsequently ran his campaign on building a border wall. This caused an alarm among the elites who are counting on left-leaning migrants to give their side the permanent majority for which they long.

Another element of the Anti-Democrats game-rigging is their almost Soviet-style effort to prevent the electorate from having alternatives to their candidates. Yet the Anti-Democrats in the Democrat Party are not looking to just prevent people from voting for Trump. Their goal is to have Biden run unopposed.

According to Semafor:

A coalition of Democratic and Republican anti-Trump groups are organizing an aggressive, multi-front campaign to stop the independent group No Labels from injecting a third major candidate in the upcoming 2024 election.

Their plans, laid out in a private, roughly 80-minute call obtained by Semafor, include legal attacks, opposition research and warnings to potential candidates and donors that involvement with No Labels could make them politically toxic.

One of the warnings came from an unnamed Anti-Democrat on the call, who sent a potential No-Labels candidate a very clear message:

Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it. If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.

Is it any wonder why the No-Labels party “suspended their campaign . . . after failing to find any worthy White House contenders?”

The Anti-Democrats have gone after other Biden rivals as well. U.S. Representative Dean Phillips had to go to the Supreme Court “after Democratic leaders on the selection committee left him off it [ballot] following a meeting on Jan. 2.” This was only weeks after Florida denied its voters the opportunity for any Democrat presidential contender by canceling the state Democratic primary election.

Another Biden rival who has felt the consequences of trying to provide voters with an alternative to Biden is Robert F. Kennedy. When asked by a CNN commentator if Biden posed an equal threat to democracy as Trump, he spelled out cogently what it is like to face the Anti-Democrats:

Listen, I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy.”

And the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent. I can say that because I just won a case in the federal Court of Appeals and now before the Supreme Court that shows that he started censoring not just me -- 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me.

No president in the country has ever done that. The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force the social media companies, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, to the CIA, to the IRS, to CISA, to NIH to censor his political critics.

President Biden, the first president in history, used the Secret -- his power over the Secret Service to deny Secret Service protection to one of his political opponents for political reasons. He's weaponizing the federal agencies.

Those are really critical threats to democracy.”

Trump was subjected to several attempts by Democrat state attorney generals to remove him from the presidential primary ballots in their states for leading an insurrection against the U.S. government, as per Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. However, Trump has never been found guilty of leading an insurrection. In fact, there is significant evidence hidden by the January Sixth Committee that “President Trump did, in fact, offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol which was turned down.” Yet it took a Supreme Court to allow voters to vote for Trump in many states.

Read more

Subscribe now

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Watch on Rumble

Listen on Spotify

Watch on YouTube

One-Time Site Support