Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, California, tried to rush into the White House Correspondents Dinner last night to kill President Donald Trump. It is the third time a home-grown would-be assassin has made the attempt, surpassing the two attempts made on the life of President Gerald R. Ford.

Commentary today centers on the rhetoric of Democratic politicians, the gleeful behavior of Democratic rank-and-file, and the inattention of traditional media outlets towards left-wing violence. Most interesting to your humble reporter is the sheer amount of Pseudologia Fantastica, or pathological lying, in baseless conspiracy theories about a ‘staged’ attack.

Pathological lying is distinguished from ordinary lies in that it seems unconscious. The liar is constructing a ‘preferred reality’ rather than simply trying to get away with something. Pathological liars plan events, then rewrite the events, internalizing a false narrative to protect their ego from cognitive dissonance and avoid confronting their own conscience. While it is not a diagnosis, pathological lying is usually linked to conditions like narcissistic personality disorders and borderline personality.

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Recall the days immediately after the 7 October attacks on Israel, when Hamas fans took to the streets and tore down posters of the kidnapping victims. These vandals were not in denial that Hamas had kidnapped anyone. Rather, they did not want to confront the immorality of kidnapping when their ‘side’ was at fault, so they tore down images that threatened their sense of themselves as ‘good people’ on the right side of history. They were protecting themselves, not Hamas.

This same psychology is behind the instant denials of what happened last night. Within moments of the story breaking, X and Bluesky saw the word “staged” trending as users who hate Trump declared their opinions in advance of any evidence. Most of these claims referenced the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024, which has also been the subject of conspiracy theories since it happened.

Insane as these denials seem, they are rational — in fact, psychology calls them rationalizations. They are coming from people who approve of violence against Trump knowing that it is morally wrong. Confronted with the fantasy playing out in the real world, they deny their own immorality by projecting it on the victim.

It is inarguable that this mindset exists on the left, and that it is widespread. For while any human is capable of displaying this behavior, it is more pronounced on the left than the right. This is not my supposition, it is the message of cold, hard data. Mr. Allen is in the age group most correlated with this mindset.

“We identified three key variables that predict support for violence”, Zack Dulberg and Max Horder reported a year ago. They are “left-wing authoritarianism (characterized by a willingness to use coercion and punishment for progressive aims), external locus of control (the extent to which individuals feel powerless in their lives), and use of the left-wing social media platform Bluesky.” Events last night certainly validated the last point.

Dulberg and Horder are senior fellows at the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University. Their full paper, “How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence”. is available on the NCRI website.

“Over half of those who self-identified as left of center (56%) reported that if someone murdered Donald Trump, they would be at least somewhat justified”, including “14.1% who said this murder would be ‘Completely Justified.’”

Nearly as many survey respondents felt the same way about Elon Musk, who has faded into the background ever since the DOGE initiative was shut down. “Over ⅓ of all respondents believe it is at least somewhat acceptable to destroy Tesla dealerships to protest Elon Musk’s involvement in the Presidential administration.”

These attitudes are “part of a tightly interconnected belief system”, the authors explain. “Central to this belief system is Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA), characterized by moral absolutism, punitive attitudes toward ideological opponents, and a willingness to use coercion for progressive aims.” Bluesky is where this demographic has concentrated online.

The third factor they identified, an external locus of control, is produced by the ideology that assigns blame for all evils to outside forces. For example, the Hamasaboos who tore down posters of kidnapped children blame Israel for the condition of Gaza rather than Hamas, which actually governed Gaza for 18 years. Hasan Piker blames “billionaires” for the absence of single-payer health care in America rather than the structural impossibility of providing free health care to 340 million people.

Scratch the surface of a leftist, and you will find this external locus of control hiding under the thinnest of skins. The physical harms of ‘gender medicine’ are caused by transphobia instead of a blinkered ideology. The failures of communism are caused by ‘the bourgeoisie’ rather than the magical thinking of flat-earth economics, and so on. Fault is projected on the Other, justifying the violence they wish to inflict.

“Unless political and cultural leadership explicitly confronts and condemns this trend, NCRI assesses a growing probability of real-world escalation”, the report says. “Given the current economic volatility and institutional distrust, the online normalization of political violence may increasingly translate into offline action.” A random teacher in California might attempt to carry out their violent fantasy, for instance.

What the authors call “assassination culture” is a permission structure. Violence is permitted against Trump and Musk because of their crimes against ideology. Indeed, the ideological left is eager to ascribe ideology to both men — they are deemed “Nazis”, “-phobes”, and “-ists” — because neither of them has ever expressed a coherent ideology. The closest they have come is opposition to ‘woke’ ideology. Ideology has to be projected on them to justify (rationalize) the ideology of assassination.

Donald Trump is not even halfway through his second term, and more attempts on his life seem certain. Assassination culture is not going anywhere, and will likely intensify. Democrats want to make impeachment their midterm issue, though they have not decided what Trump’s crime is, just yet. While that might relieve some of the psychological tension in the next Cole Tomas Allen, we should brace ourselves for Trump to end up with a record number of assassination attempts that will never be exceeded as long as America has a president.

The one thing we should not expect is for Democrats to moderate their rhetoric. Bluesky will not moderate. Trump is their locus of control, and they cannot control him. As long as he is president, they will want him dead, and make excuses for every failed attempt.

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Michigan Democrats have denied Jordan Acker, a Jew, a return to his seat on the Board of Regents at the University of Michigan. Acker’s home and vehicle have both been vandalized multiple times with antisemitic and pro-Palestine graffiti. In his place, Michigan Dems nominated Amir Makled, who calls Jews “demons” and echoes calls to have them banned from Congress. Makled employs a campaign staffer who justifies the ISIS massacre at Bondi Beach as an attack on a “Zionist klan rally”. Seen as a protégé of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, he is a rising star.

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Acker “backed efforts to hold anti-Israel campus protesters at the University of Michigan accountable for assaulting police and engaging in intimidation of Jewish students, among other instances of student misconduct”, Josh Kraushaar explains. “He declined to support efforts to divest university funds from Israel, along with other members of the Board of Regents, as a radical faction of students had demanded.” Paul Brown, Acker’s companion on the ticket, also supported the rule of law in response to campus violence. But he is also not Jewish, and he was not targeted for this takedown.

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It is time for another link post to all my recent scrivenings and podcastery goodness. Since I always try to introduce these things with a very dumb joke, this time I thought I’d drop a real bomb on you. To, you know, blacken you up and then cancel you for wearing blackface. I’m Machiavellian like that. Muahahahahahahahaha

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Polemology Positions

New Providence Island, 1776: The First Time Americans Got Drunk On Victory At Sea

Located at the Saint Louis Art Museum is a scene of binge-drinking by the men who made America great in the first place. They are abroad in South America as trading sailors. Esek Hopkins is sitting at the table in the hat with red facings on his coat, talking to his fellow Rhode Island shipmaster …

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a month ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Back To Alabama, For Now

I am uprooting once again, transplanting myself across North America to where I came from, heeding the call of family. My father took a bad fall recently and the old folks will need me around to help. Dad will want to read my book draft anyway, so it’s good to go home…

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a month ago · 19 likes · 1 comment · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Arianna Laureano And The 'Cluster B Clique' That Wants To Destroy Detransition Advocacy

Arianna Laureano is a Seattle area man who allegedly turns 35 next month. While he describes himself as a homosexual transsexual (HSTS) in some forums, on various platforms like GroobyGirls, Shemalez, and TrannyDemonTV, Mr. Laureano identifies as bisexual and transgender instead…

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a month ago · 42 likes

Polemology Positions

Will Donald Trump Buy A Persian Carpet?

Donald Trump presents flamboyant deal-making as his true “art form”— an instinct-driven, theatrical performance that is focused on winning big rather than playing it safe. I have just summarized Art of the Deal, which is a book based on Trump’s ideas about business…

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a month ago · 6 likes · Matt Osborne

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Polemology Positions

Operational Artist: Zhukov's Complete Victory That Started World War II On Soviet Terms

“He was a welcome friend, a true Communist”, Gen. Georgi Zhukov recalls of an acquaintance in his memoir. For Zhukov, it was the same thing to be a good friend as it was to be a good Communist. He credits ideology for victory, names the kommissars who indoctrinated his formations, recalls their noble careers and glorious deaths. “The heroic actions of our soldiers were inspired by the Communist Party and the army’s Party organization”, he writes of Khalkin Gol, the battle that started the Second World War…

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a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Today Is The Trans Day Of Invisibility

Transgender people are invisible today, but only for today. They become visible again at midnight…

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25 days ago · 5 likes · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

The Communists Are Revolting

It is not an April Fools Day joke that actual Communists were behind the No Kings rallies last weekend. Neville Roy Singham, an American billionaire loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, funds more than 500 organizations across the country with $3 billion a year…

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25 days ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Robert De Niro Calls For Assembly Of Experts To Choose Future Supreme Leader Of US

Like most of America’s cultural and political elites, Robert De Niro just cannot reconcile himself to Donald Trump winning the popular vote in 2024. Now he says he wants “a screening process that everyone has to go through”, which is very rich coming from a man who endorsed Kamala Harris…

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24 days ago · 16 likes · Matt Osborne

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The Distance

Hollywood Is Officially Too Broke For Woke

The Los Angeles media production job market is 30 percent smaller than it was in 2022, when credit became more expensive due to the war in Ukraine. So-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) capital — Vanguard and Blackrock — could no longer afford to prioritize the engineering of western societies over profitability. It was the beginning of a decline in LGBTQ+ ‘representation’ and the beginning of a process that will likely result in limited reach for future rainbow-themed content. Economics, not ‘hate’, will force these changes. The trends have been underway for years already…

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20 days ago · 19 likes · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Democrats Have A Long Road To November

On Monday morning, Harry Enten and John Berman informed the CNN audience that Democrats have the lowest generic ballot lead of any comparable midterm election in the 21st century. Over two decades, the pendulum-swing effect of a polarizing Republican presidency has diminished by half. As Enten explained, this means Democrats might be able to win a narro…

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18 days ago · 5 likes · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Iran Has Been A Disaster For 'The Experts'

Anyone who says they already know what comes next is lying and you can safely ignore them. Everyone who said that Donald Trump was doing too much, then said that he was not doing enough, then said he wa…

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18 days ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Cloning Experiment Demonstrates Binary Sex Is Essential To Survival Of The Human Species

New experimental evidence strongly suggests that mammals cannot sustain reproduction without the genetic shuffling provided by the sex binary…

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16 days ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Ukraine Is Winning Their Own War, Now

Despite some pain involved in the shift to a corps-based system, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are the side making the slow advances, now, whereas Russian troops are virtually unable to make any headway through the grinding style of attritional warfare that defined Russian doctrine in 2024 and 2025…

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16 days ago · 5 likes · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Republicans Just Need Direction

The left wants to fall in love with their candidates, while the right wants to fall in line. Donald Trump is presidential proof for this truism of our American primary season politics. Each time he ran against a field of Republicans, he swept them all away quickly…

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16 days ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Strait Flush: US Navy Holds All The Cards In Hormuz, Iran Loses All Maritime Leverage

Vice President J.D. Vance left Pakistan without a deal. This was predictable, for he is the grinder, whereas Marco Rubio is the closer in the Trump administration. Vladimir Putin similarly uses Vladimir Medinsky, his minister of culture, for 21-hour diplomatic haggling sessions, then sends Sergey Lavrov to close a deal when the other side is serious abo…

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13 days ago · Matt Osborne

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Osborne Ink

A Metahistory Of The Murder Ballad

Songs about a “murdered sweetheart” have been popular fare since the early 17th century and the arrival of the English printing press. Popular songs were sold in the streets by people who sang them from the printed sheets for sale, a direct and human form of marketing…

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13 days ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Affirmed to Death: The Tragic Case of Jamie Shupe, America's First 'Nonbinary' Pioneer

During his sojourn as a detransitioned man, James Clifford “Elisa Rae” Shupe sought an attorney to help him “put gender identity on trial.” Sadly, no one would help a self-described mentally ill person sue the federal government just because he had changed his mind for the moment…

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11 days ago

Osborne Ink

It Couldn't Happen To A Bigger Schmuck

Let us now bask in the utterly cooked state of Rep. Eric Swalwell. Under investigation by the House Ethics Committee on Monday, he resigned from Congress. He had suspended his campaign for California governor on Sunday after Democrats threw him under the proverbial bus in unison over the …

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12 days ago · 12 likes · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

The Siege Of Boston: Washington's First Victory

America’s first president had a gift for surprises. “With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions”, George Washington wrote in 1797. At sunrise on 5 March 1776, the British occupiers of Boston woke up to discover that overn…

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11 days ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

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Osborne Ink

Hasan Piker Will Kill Billions If We Let Him

“I don’t have any patriotism in my heart for America”, says Hasan Piker. Instead, he loves Communism with a capital C. According to The Black Book of Communism, the most commonly-cited source on the topic, Communism killed roughly 94 million people in the 20th century. Some scholars maintain there is double-counting, and say the number might be as low as 60 or 70 million, which is another way of saying that even apologists for Communism cannot hide the very murderous and oppressive nature of their cult…

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10 days ago · Matt Osborne

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The Distance

Why Are No Women Playing In The NFL?

Zero women have ever made an NFL roster, completed a training camp, or made a regular-season appearance on the professional football field with men. Every single person who has ever played a single actual snap in the history of the National Football League was male. Females have always been extremely rare at all levels of the game, but in the biggest professional league, they are nonexistent…

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9 days ago · Matt Osborne

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Polemology Positions

What IRGC Doing?

Emmanuel Macron is adorable. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz with European naval power “after the fighting ends” and cut the US Navy out of the deal. He is holding a meeting today, and “China and India were invited, but it’s unclear if they will attend, a French official said.” France operates the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the world that is not American…

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9 days ago · Matt Osborne

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political action committee spent $1,561,875 buying copies of his book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, and giving them away in exchange for donations to the PAC. Of the 94,700 copies of his book that were ‘sold’, 67,000 — about two thirds — were distributed this way rather than being sold in stores or on Amazon.com.

A spokesman for Mr. Newsom, Nathan Click, said his PAC, the Campaign for Democracy Committee, wound up netting more money from contributors attracted by the book offer than the cost of 67,000 copies of the book that the PAC provided. Mr. Newsom does not receive royalties for books sold through the program, he said.

“We were thrilled with the response,” Mr. Click said. “Our goal was to deepen the relationship between him and the millions of folks who have already expressed support for Governor Newsom’s work. And as it turns out, the tactic more than paid for itself.”

This was “by far the biggest expenditure” by the PAC in the first quarter of 2026. To be clear, this is not illegal and not even original. Kamala Harris reportedly had a similar scheme with her own book. So have Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and Sherrod Brown, the former senator from Ohio. Because whereas this kind of exploit was associated with conservatives a decade ago, it has become bipartisan.

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In 2015, the presidential campaign of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz spent $122,000 buying 8,000–10,000 copies of A Time for Truth directly from the publisher, HarperCollins, to redistribute among supporters. The New York Times initially refused to list the book as a bestseller, citing evidence of “strategic bulk purchases”, but eventually they did list it. Cruz’s campaign later spent additional hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the same for a second book.

At the time, progressive leftists made plenty of angry noises about this tactic. They called it “wingnut welfare” and acted as if Democrats would never. Yet here we are, just ten years later, and Democrats use the bulk book purchase exploit all the time, themselves, now. Newsom’s memoir is now climbing bestseller lists courtesy of his own PAC and they do not care at all.

To be clear, I do not consider this hypocrisy on the part of elected Democrats. Gavin Newsom is doing the perfectly-legal thing that Republicans figured out how to do first. The hypocrites here are rank-and-file progressive leftists from a decade ago who are silent or even complicit now. They never actually cared about books, or the integrity of bestseller lists. Their criticism was always about power — who wields it, and who it is wielded against. Morals are fungible in progressive politics, and the rest is just virtue-signaling.

Have a great weekend.

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“I don’t have any patriotism in my heart for America”, says Hasan Piker. Instead, he loves Communism with a capital C. According to The Black Book of Communism, the most commonly-cited source on the topic, Communism killed roughly 94 million people in the 20th century. Some scholars maintain there is double-counting, and say the number might be as low as 60 or 70 million, which is another way of saying that even apologists for Communism cannot hide the very murderous and oppressive nature of their cult.

I use the word ‘cult’ advisedly. Communism is a political religion. “Hegel is not a philosopher,” Glenn Alexander Magee writes in the first sentence of Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. “He is no lover or seeker of wisdom — he believes he has found it.” Hegel titled Phenomenology of Spirit so that we would understand his work as a kind of bible. All the hallmarks of political religion — faith, a moral purpose to history, a community of the elect, and the sacrifice of the masses — “are to be found in the private papers and published works of both Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx”, A. James Gregor writes. “Their presence there is a testament to Hegel and the continuity of his thought among those who imagine themselves having left him behind.”

Gregor’s book, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History, explains how the 19th century philosophers wanted to replace traditional religion, not simply repudiate it. Marx held “atheism, being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretical humanism,” an idea that he got from Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Hegelianism “takes the place of religion and has the essence of religion within itself.” They wanted to capture the spiritual impulse, used religious motifs, made moral arguments, and displayed religious devotion to their belief in the redemption of mankind. This is still the operating system of Communism.

Put simply, Hasan Piker is in a cult. “The fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century”, he told Yale students this week, to applause. (Gee, I wonder why public confidence in higher education has plummeted, according to Yale?) Piker further opined that China’s political system is “an example that we should learn from.” He has stood in Tiananmen Square to livestream and encountered the freedoms enjoyed by the Chinese in person, been to Cuba and partied with Code Pink, and praises Hamas as a popular resistance. Piker talks of America as the gnostic demiurge of the world, for the United States creates the world and all the problems in it at the same time, on purpose, to oppress Hasan Piker.

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Piker comes from a wealthy family. He launched his successful career as a Twitch streamer through The Young Turks, the media platform co-hosted by his cousin, Cenk Uygur. He once tortured abused faced credible accusations of mishandling his dog on a livestream and made lame excuses that it was all a misunderstanding. Piker pairs expensive Cartier glasses with a few days’ of facial hair growth to achieve the perfect hipster look when he visits a communist workers’ paradise that has no electricity. Piker stays in the one hotel that has enough generators to keep the lights and A/C and ice machine working, in that country, and then tells rapturous crowds of young idiots how awesome the solidarity of the international proletariat can be.

People like Hasan Piker never come from the actual proletariat. Ché Guevara was born into an upper-middle-class, bohemian Argentine family of Spanish-Irish descent with leftist, anti-fascist leanings. His parents, Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa, were politically active intellectuals from aristocratic, land-owning backgrounds. Genteel poor, they turned multiple houses “into a shambles” according to Ché’s brother Juan Martin.

Parallels are obvious. His memoir, Che My Brother, reveals that their father “was the charming but feckless son” who had “no degree and a life-long tendency to involve himself in failing enterprises”, including a yerba maté farm that failed, where Ché was born. A “seasoned seducer”, he frequently left the house and danced the night away just like Piker, and avoided getting a real job.

Piker has expressed admiration for Guevara. This public piety, along with his revolutionary cosplay and luxury lifestyle, has led critics to call Piker a ‘champagne socialist’ or ‘Ché Guevara in Gucci’, but in reality this is his religion. He wears it, confesses it, bears witness for it, and explains the history of the world with it. Rather than hypocrisy, Hasan genuinely believes the entire world is entitled to Cartier rims, and the only thing holding us back from that paradise of style is capitalism.

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Let us now bask in the utterly cooked state of Rep. Eric Swalwell. Under investigation by the House Ethics Committee on Monday, he resigned from Congress. He had suspended his campaign for California governor on Sunday after Democrats threw him under the proverbial bus in unison over the weekend. What a glorious moment for accountability in politics. What a reckoning for ‘toxic male behavior’ in Washington. Surely we are now one step closer to the end of the patriarchy.

Everyone knew, we now know. Democrats knew, indeed Nancy Pelosi knew when she made Swalwell her darling, and giving him up to the wolves now is a strategic choice she made long after she knew what he was. Christine Fang, the CCP honeypot that Swalwell fell into head-first like Winnie the Pooh, was an open secret to his fellow Democrats in Congress long before Americans learned about it. Swalwell’s colleagues knew that his ‘locker room talk’ was worse than anything Donald Trump said on the Access Hollywood bus even as they condemned the latter.

Swalwell is now accused of things that make the confirmation hearing attacks on Brett Kavanaugh seem pale by comparison. Some of these acts were reportedly recorded for posterity. Whereas Tara Reade could not even tell a convincing story about the physical location where she alleged that Joe Biden hit on her, the Swalwell accusations turn out to be credible, numerous, long-running, and genuinely awful. And Democrats all knew. The party of “EPSTEIN FILES!!!” knew all along that this was their guy.

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In 2017, Swalwell asked Trump Deputy Assistant Keith Schiller many questions about the hotel room mentioned in the Steele ‘dossier’. Schiller saw nothing during that Russia trip because the story was false. Two years later, Swalwell still could not say that he actually believed whether the ‘pee tape’ was real. Meanwhile, his colleagues knew about him, allegedly now on tape.

Democrats still pile calumnies on Trump without ever admitting any of them are wrong. He is a dictator one minute, weak the next, displays sinister cunning in one beat, becomes mentally incompetent in the following breath. No elected Democrat has admitted the ‘pee tape’ is a hoax, or that the Steele reports were bogus. They no longer talk about those things, either. They just let the whole stinking mess lie, because investigating it would lead to the heart of their own party.

But now, when the Democratic Party wants to ditch their gubernatorial front-runner so that Katie Porter can dump hot mashed potatoes on the face of California, suddenly everyone acknowledges the truth about Eric Swalwell in one, united voice. Permissions are structured. Now, reporters tell tales out of school, telling on themselves, revealing that they knew of Swalwell, but chose to let someone else report the news. Clearly, Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle exposé of Swalwell’s alleged sexual assault of a former staffer happened now because he lost his protection. He had always been radioactive. The timing of the meltdown served the party.

So I will accept this gift of schadenfreude, enjoy it for the passing moment, bearing in mind that what we really see here is a more cannibalistic Democratic Party. As I noted back in January, when House Democrats made the Clintons bend the knee to the Epstein investigation, the party craves blood, now, starting with their own.

Democrats want to normalize putting former politicians in prison. Punishing Trump is their dream. They talk openly of punishing everyone who works for his administration. They mean what they say. They are showing us the level of their dedication to this cause when they sacrifice Eric Swalwell. They will put him on an Aztec altar, and tear his heart out right in front of us, to show us what they really are.

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Songs about a “murdered sweetheart” have been popular fare since the early 17th century and the arrival of the English printing press. Popular songs were sold in the streets by people who sang them from the printed sheets for sale, a direct and human form of marketing.

The music itself was not printed. Rather, every song was arranged according to one of the melodies that were already popular in the streets. The printed lyric sheets were labeled with the tune used to sing them. Lyrics about a man murdering his lover were popular, for such tales were rare enough to be notable, but familiar enough to be universal.

What do Doc Watson, Jimi Hendrix, Maynard Keenan, and Chris Cornell have in common? They are all masters of the murder ballad. I make no excuse for murder, or the murder ballad. It simply happened, and thrives on the airwaves even now. Until the 20th century, these songs remained alive mainly as performance. In the usual way of the troubadour, musicians before and after the advent of recording technology gave these songs their own personal touches.

In the process, the history of the ‘murder ballad’ becomes not an objective, straightforward, or scientific reconstruction of the past. It is instead a history of the poetic act, a process shaped by the performers acting as custodians of the song, using imagination and language to effect moral and aesthetic choices. It is what historian Hayden White calls a “metahistory”.

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A song that never dies

Artists did not ‘discover’ or ‘reflect’ a ready-made meaning from the past in the murder ballad. Instead, they created new narratives of the sweetheart murder from a raw chronicle of events, fictional or real. For example, London-based music historian Paul Slade writes that the song “Pretty Polly” traces back to an original he has found in “the British Library’s Roxburghe Collection printed between 1567 and 1790”, most likely some time in the mid-1700s, that uses 136 lines in 34 verses to tell the story.

Today’s average popular song has two verses and eight original lines. So consider this stripped-down, electrified version of “Pretty Polly” by Creech Holler, a now-defunct band in the ‘southern gothic’ subgenre from the first decade of the 21st century. Walking bass and drums become ominous, distorted vocals add menace, yet the words Jeff Zentner has chosen are hundreds of years old. The track is less than four minutes long, far shorter than its most distant ancestor, and still unusual in its time for having two dozen lines. Stripped down with G minor tuning, this ancient murder ballad succeeds as a natural ‘story song’ from the dirty south.

Zentner chooses to sing of “her lily white hands”. He chooses to sing that Polly “fell asleep” without describing the mode of her death. “William” has been a generic name in murder ballads since the 18th century. Zentner’s William “used to be a rambler” and complains that “such a lovely was never found”, suggesting a motive without giving us any details. Mystery adds to the atmosphere of creep and dread.

The centerpiece of the Creech Holler version is the ride through the forest, Polly seeing the grave and the shovel, and expressing her fear of Willie (“I’m afraid of your ways”). Consistent with the rest of the two albums produced by Creech Holler, With Signs Following in 2006 and The Shovel and the Gun in 2008, the mood is southern horror and haunted humans. The track pairs favorably with “Lester Ballard”, a song inspired by the violent main character in Cormac McCarthy’s dark and disturbing 1973 novel Child of God. “Oh, Lester Ballard, whatcha do last night, did you roam the hills and hollers till the broad daylight?” presents the mystery in the question. The common theme is personal, inexplicable motive.

To repeat: this creativity is achieved primarily by lyrical subtraction. “In murder ballads, the magic is the mystery, the parts left unsaid,” Rennie Sparks writes.1 “Like the wordless, unspeakable parts of our own psyche, murder ballads hold secrets that loom larger the farther down they’re pushed. The more holes we cut in these songs, the more powerful they become.” It works because the deep poetic and linguistic structure of the original endures in the performance.

Hayden White calls this the “metahistorical” layer. In his 1973 book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White examines his subject as literature, that is, prose discourse in text, and argues that historians present us with stories — narratives — that are “emplotted”, explained, and ideologically framed for the reader.2 As with postmodernism, claims of pure scientific objectivity are illusory, White says. “Pretty Polly” is not a forensic examination, or a courtroom confession for the record. It is a musical mystery that leaves the audience wanting more.

Cycles of creative reconstruction

Then there are subtle additions, choices, and changes. In some versions, Polly begs for her life. Slade writes that The Stanley Brothers “were the first artists to have Polly beg ‘let me be a single girl if I can’t be your wife’, but that plea’s been echoed by Judy Collins in 1968, Patty Loveless in 1997 and many others besides.” During the 19th century, someone decided to add a moral to the story by having William undergo trial and execution, giving us the song with her name.

“It’s possible that this change appeared as early as 1805, but the earliest concrete example I’ve been able to find is a Liverpool sheet produced around 1822”, Slade writes. “This retitles the ballad Love and Murder, cuts it to just 44 lines, and sets its action in the English town of Worcester. The story is just as we know it, but the girl’s name has now morphed from Molly to Polly.” Until then, the name ‘Molly’ had been the generic match to ‘William’ in a series of variations on a song known to folk musicians as “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter”, originally “The Gosport Tragedy”.

As performed by Jackie Oates in this 2006 recording, “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter” becomes a fireside ghost story. Rather than hypnotic sound as with Creech Holler, the instruments are sparse, almost a chamber music performance, and all recorded by Oates herself. Longer, with 32 non-repeating lines that barely differ from Mike Waterson’s 1977 version, it is “Gosport Tragedy” delivered with clarity and emotional weight. We learn that William has killed Molly because she was pregnant with his child. Oates includes the mode of death, the knife repeatedly stabbing poor Molly. Her ghost is the mystery, a supernatural visitation appearing at the end to avenge her and her unborn baby.

The ghost story is original to the “Gosport Tragedy” (Roud Folk Song Index 15, George Malcolm Laws P36). William, the eponymous ship’s carpenter, encounters the ghost of Molly and dies a horrible, supernatural death. This sort of narrative outcome is quite common in what I will gently call ‘fake news’ pamphlets from the English Civil War era that I have read in the Thomason Tracts, so it is hardly surprising that English sailors would still be telling similar spooky stories a century later. From the original:

As he was running from the captain with speed,
He met with his Polly which made his heart bleed,
She stripped him and tore him, she tore him in three,
Because that he murdered her baby and she.

The ship’s captain delivers a key line that the ship is “in mourning and cannot sail on” because of the unavenged murder. Superstition at the time did in fact hold that sailing with a murderer on board put the entire ship and crew in danger. This is the underlying metaphor of another famous text published in 1797, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who used an albatross as the victim of the narrator. During the 19th century, however, murder ballads shifted from metaphysical vengeance to systems of justice. The poets were incorporating changes to their world.

Modernity and the murder ballad

Here is the late, great Doc Watson performing “Tom Dooley”, classified as “Roud 4192” in the folk song index of that name. Based on the 1866 murder of a woman named Laura Foster in Wilkes County, North Carolina, where the killer’s name, Tom Dula, was pronounced Dooley, it is considered a classic of the genre. Given his ‘last goodnight’, Tom denies his guilt, but the song does not believe him, excuse him, or forgive him. He is “bound to die” by hanging tomorrow morning, with or without the peace of confession. The state has taken over these duties from the vengeful ghost.

Tom Pettit observes that the murder ballad genre neatly divides into two clear subtypes on this point. Twenty examples in his survey involve a “judicial sequel” of legal process — the arrest, conviction, and imminent execution by hanging are described, even if the trial process is normally elided.3 In the remaining four examples Pettit found, the killer “is destroyed by less institutional forces such as pangs of remorse or her vengeful spirit”.

Moreover, the Victorian Age stressed moral lessons, not simply to wayward women (“before we get married, some pleasures to see”) but young men. “The ballads are ‘about’ the dangers to young men in a culture where young women are both socially accessible and potentially amenable to seduction, at least on a plausible promise of marriage”, Pettit writes. “The murdered sweetheart ballads seem to have been part of the way a culture, accustomed for centuries to cruel lady who said no, came to terms with the pretty girl who said yes.”

Sexual mores would play an increasing role in the performance of the murder ballad as it crossed the Atlantic. According to law professor Richard H. Underwood, the real Tom Dula was a womanizer who contracted syphilis and killed the woman he believed had given it to him. The implications are obvious, and they bear on interpretations of “Pretty Polly” by its performers.

“By avoiding any hint that Willie’s victim was pregnant, the American song removes all clues to his motive for killing her, and so denies us the chance to neatly rationalise his crime away”, Slade notes of the transition. “In the American song, Willie kills for no reason at all, and seems to consider it a trivial act. That makes him a far scarier figure than his English ancestor” who dies at the hands of Molly’s ghost.

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The left wants to fall in love with their candidates, while the right wants to fall in line. Donald Trump is presidential proof for this truism of our American primary season politics. Each time he ran against a field of Republicans, he swept them all away quickly.

The selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s belated replacement nominee violated this formula. Barack Obama imposed a candidate from the left, and then the Democratic Party asked voters to simply fall in love with her because she was not Donald Trump. It did not work because that is not how the left works, when it works.

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Now let us consider how the right works. The two men most likely to replace Donald Trump, and have the right fall in line during the early 2028 primary process, are J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. At present, Rubio probably has an edge over Vance with the Republican base, while Vance is more popular with the podcasters that Trump just attacked.

In his dual role as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, Rubio is an essential actor in Trump’s foreign policy. He comes from the ‘old school’ conservative political brand, and while he is not primarily seen as a cultural reactionary, he opposes gay marriage (or ‘supports traditional marriage’) as well as abortion limitations.

Of course, most Americans would be fine with a ban after 15 weeks, which is what Rubio has supported, so this latter view is actually mainstream. He may very well express a more nuanced view of the marriage question in 2028: ‘Obergefell is the law of the land whether I like it or not’ would not be a big rhetorical switch from his previous position, which proposed future court challenges. Rubio will have to reconcile with the reality that his party does in fact now attract the “normal gay guys”, as Vance says.

More to the point, Rubio can articulate what Trump’s policies have actually been, what informed them, and why he has taken action overseas. For example, here is a very concise (under two minutes) explanation of the war decision in Iran. Agree or disagree, Rubio makes the argument for a non-nuclear Iran perfectly and succinctly, just like a person in his role(s) should be able to do.

Here is video of J.D. Vance being vice-presidential in Hungary. Speaking to reporters, Vance explained that the dispute over whether Lebanon was included in the ceasefire arrangement had started from honest misunderstanding. The Israelis are willing to dial back their bombing campaign against Hezbollah to increase the chances of a successful ceasefire, Vance said. He articulates the policy and defends it, which is what a vice president should do.

Domestic differences are also less than they seem. Vance has been associated with ‘groypers’, the fans of shock jock podcaster Nick Fuentes, who are supposed to be the scary new threat to democracy from the right wing parts of the internet. In reality, Fuentes is all over the political map, throwing out opinions with little or no ideological underpinning to the whole, saying whatever it takes to keep his audience in thrall.

Buckley Carlson, Tucker Carlson’s son, is a deputy press secretary for Vance. However, Buckley is not Tucker, and Americans do not like the game of inherited guilt. I do not think the association will hurt him. Neither Vance nor Rubio has any connections to the insanity of Candace Owens or Alex Jones.

The reader may object that Jones gave Trump a platform once upon a time, and that is true. It also happened nearly seven years before the Sandy Hook verdict, and is utterly irrelevant to Vance or Rubio, neither of whom will carry Trump’s pre-2025 baggage. What they own instead are his second term actions in office. Megyn Kelly can try to get Vance or Rubio to disown and critique Trump’s specific policies, but she will never succeed in getting either of them to repudiate Trump.

Vance and Rubio will both want to define themselves differently from Trump without a brutal public feud, so the 2028 Republican primary race will be the best season of The Apprentice ever. These two men will compete at rolling out their brands, Trump will make his feelings known, and then the fans of the show will make the call.

Within that prospective scene, there will not be much room for the crazies. Madness will be marginal to the outcome. That describes the portrait of 2028 that Republicans look forward to.

This midterm year, however, most Republicans are waiting on events. They want to see how the Iran war shakes out before committing themselves to an interpretation of it. Most of their Democratic opponents have already staked out adversarial positions that may not be tenable later. Open criticism of Trump is still a greater risk for them than the war is.

I fully expect the president to be vindicated in his expectation that Brigitte Macron wins her litigation against Candace Owens. Owens cannot derail the trial of Tyler Robinson with fake news about bullet forensics, and the accused will probably continue showing up to trial in his transgender tie to ensure we all know his motivation for killing Charlie Kirk. Whether these trials will play out before November 2026 is another question entirely.

Republicans face the usual midterm headwinds of the party in power, though as we noted this week, that pendulum effect has diminished in the polling. To the extent that the podcasting fringe elevated the Trump ticket before, they have no power in, or over, the Republican Party today. The pragmatic coalition that fell in line behind Trump — conservatives and tech — has not fallen apart.

What might be missing in November are the low-frequency voters who put Trump over the top in 2024, making up nearly half the electorate and breaking for him by 8 points. Historically, turning them out for midterms is very hard to do. Polling is soft enough to make this a real question for Republicans.

These are the MAGA voters who either never voted before, or missed prior elections in their voting history. They are younger and more diverse than past conservatives, and skew male. The Trump-Vance ticket put serious resources into winning these voters, and Turning Point Action targeted them as well. They are exactly the voters that turncoat podcasters seek to demoralize when they attack Trump. Shady news stories that sensationalize a perceived drop in support for Trump, turning variations in approval ratings into headline coverage, are propaganda aimed at demoralizing this demographic.

Donald Trump clearly intents to spend the campaign season rallying crowds to support the Republican candidates he supports and punish the ones he wants to punish. He still controls the party and disciplines its ranks. If the GOP seems to lack a unified direction right now, it is not for lack of a leader, or Trump’s approval ratings. He simply has not issued orders, yet.

November will likely become a battle for control of the US House of Representatives by a narrow margin. Being conservatives, the Republicans in the House are toeing the line for Trump and sticking to the plan. The leader of the party will tell them what the plan is. After November, the apprentices can begin sticking it to each other over whose plan the party will follow next.

The most disruptive aspect of the second Trump administration, from a partisan historical perspective, is not his foreign policy, but his control and discipline of the Republican Party. For better or worse, the future path of the GOP has largely been determined already for at least the next two years. This would actually be quite remarkable for a lame duck president, especially a Republican.

Normally, “hubris, burnout... scandal, party infighting, [and] lack of legislative success” define the last two years of a second-term president. The end of the Eisenhower administration was associated with the rise of the Goldwater wing. Reagan was subject to criticism from Republicans after the Iran-Contra scandal, which split traditional conservatives from pragmatists. George W. Bush lost Congress to Democrats in 2006, precipitating a bitter blame-game between neoconservatives, isolationists, and fiscal conservatives.

To be sure, the Strait of Hormuz is not fixed yet, and there is a long way to November. An economic disaster could doom Republican control of the House, and Democrats will do their best to goose turnout in any way they can. Politics is a blood sport, after all.

Still, this is impressive party discipline, even for the party known for discipline. Critics will call this discipline names, and call Republicans stupid and ignorant for following their leader, when in reality the GOP is behaving according to program, and Trump is just very good at leading them.

It remains to be seen how his apprentices work out, but neither of them is going to depart very far from the administration they both served, and the party seems almost entirely okay with it. The most historic result on Election Day might be what does not change.

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Of course, things will not stay this way. A lot will happen between now and November. However, the clear implication of this polling data is that voters will not punish the Republican Party over Trump. As the Democratic Party became ideologically narrow, substituting unpopular identity politics for popular causes in the time of Trump, its mass support has suffered commensurately. No matter what Americans think of Donald Trump, or the GOP, they think even less of Democrats, and this is not going to change because Democrats refuse to change.

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Put another way, Democrats are unwilling to change back to what they believed before the advent of woke progressive ideological straitjacketing deranged them as a party. For example, here is the late Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada explaining succinctly that unrestricted immigration leads to theft of public services for American citizens. Few Democrats are able to articulate this point, anymore, much less admit their soft immigration policies have been taxpayer robbery. Instead, they spout slogans, No one is illegal on stolen land! being the most obnoxious.

Speaking of frauds on the taxpayer: First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli tells The New York Post that Gov. Gavin Newsom has allowed “hundreds of billions of dollars” of fraud in the Golden State. In fact, there is so much patent fraud going on that he does not have enough prosecutors to punish all of it. “I think it would be the end of a lot of people’s careers in Sacramento” if a full investigation took place, Essayli said.

Essayli suggested the enormity of such alleged fraud will be difficult to tackle, but told The Post they’ll go with a “quantity over quality” approach to prosecute as many fraudsters as possible.

“So maybe we just do a bunch of the smaller frauds. Most frauds are not in the hundreds of millions. Most of the fraudsters are taking a few 100,000 or one or 2 million, that’s the majority of the fraudsters. But those numbers add up really quick when you multiply by the amount of people engaged in this,” he said.

Reader, do you remember the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in which American taxpayers bailed out the global banking and monetary systems to the tune of trillions of dollars? Anyone 25 or older ought to remember how controversial this was. Set aside whatever you thought at the time, however, because history has weighed in. About half of the allocated $900 billion was loaned out, and all but $31 billion eventually repaid.

Let us do the math together. TARP, the single biggest controversy to happen parallel to the election of Barack Obama, ended up costing American taxpayers about $50 billion in today’s dollars. The current conflict with Iran has so far cost about $50 billion. Every hundred billion dollars of California taxpayer fraud is as expensive as two whole 2008 bank bailouts or two wars with Iran.

This ripoff has been wide, deep, and systematic. Christopher Rufo recently reported that Medicaid and Medicare fraud in California alone add up to $146 billion ripped off the taxpayer. Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz notes that eliminating fraud would double the expected life of the Medicare trust fund. Appearing on Fox News, he called out Democrats for avoiding accountability.

Dr. Oz described a whole-of-government approach to the investigation and an emerging pattern of fraud centered in immigrant communities that “don’t share our values”. California “does sloppy work, or frankly looks the other way” rather than enforce laws or regulations that prevent fraud, Oz said. He mentioned Flushing, New York, where Chinese adult day care centers have come under scrutiny for hundreds of millions of dollars in alleged fraudulent billing.

Blue or red state, the fraud is endemic — Oz averred that there are more medical equipment suppliers than McDonalds restaurants in southern Florida, with possible Cuban government ties to the fraud. Like Americans, Oz is asking each state: “Is this a flaw, or a feature, of these programs?”, and the answers are decidedly bad for the bluest states. Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Maine have all created permissive environments for fraud, whereas Idaho, Florida, and Ohio are cracking down.

Minnesota has been particularly notorious for soft judges issuing light sentences to people convicted in the schemes, with repayment being a small fraction of what was stolen. Feeding Our Future fraud defendant Abdul Abubakar Ali, who pleaded guilty to a count of wire fraud in 2022, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. He has paid just $92,500 in restitution out of his $3 million share in a $250 million fraud. The second defendant has gotten off even lighter. Prosecutors insist that the earliest defendants get the best deals, but the overall impression the public is getting, right now, is of a famously-blue state letting favored immigrants rip them off.

Blue-state administrators have created environments where fraud thrives, and certain immigrant networks have exploited them at industrial scale. Voters are noticing both the cultural overreach and the fiscal rot. This scandal began with the ‘Quality Learing Center’, but child care is just one of a thousand ways that Somalis have allegedly bilked the taxpayer: autism services, meals for the poor, Medicaid services, assisted living, all at “industrial scale”, to quote federal prosecutor Joseph H. Thompson. Rep. Ilhan Omar clearly does not share American values, least of all honesty and transparency in her personal finances.

There are enough billions in fraud to occupy a whole midterm election cycle with discoveries of Democratic ties. Gov. Tim Walz is a lightning rod who cannot stop making statements of fealty to his favored immigrant group. The ads write themselves. More to the point, political advertising does not pay for itself, which brings us to the most consequential fraud investigation of the year, from the perspective of Democrats.

Democrats are completely dependent on ActBlue, which has effectively monopolized their small-dollar donations, for their access to grassroots campaign funding. That is, ActBlue has become the singular financial entity through which Democrats can lay claim to being a popular political party. It is therefore not good news, indeed it is terrible for Democrats, that ActBlue appears to be under investigation by the Department of Justice for knowingly laundering foreign donations in violation of federal law.

The New York Times dropped this story last week. However, muckraker James O’Keefe found elderly Democrats listed submitting hundreds of daily donations that they denied making in 2024, clear evidence that fraud (‘smurfing’) was being committed in their names, potentially to launder foreign cash. As the NYT does acknowledge, this scandal was “years in the making”.

During 2025, three US House committees opened investigations into potential fraud at ActBlue. Thereafter, seven senior ActBlue officials, including their last in-house lawyer, reportedly resigned after the Covington & Burling law firm warned CEO Regina Wallace-Jones that the company’s testimony to Congress may have been criminally false. The company’s written statements to the committees were “revised”.

“It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections,” one memo states. “In addition, because ActBlue’s staff was aware that its system was not as robust as necessary, it could be alleged that these violations were ‘knowing and willful,’ a standard that both increases the penalties the F.E.C. might seek and gives the Justice Department jurisdiction for a potential criminal investigation.”

This would be a more manageable scandal if not for the pre-existing shortfall in large donations after the fiasco of the Harris/Walz ticket in 2024, which still has the big donors leery of a repeat. At roughly a seven to one ratio of contributions, Republicans have a persistent and growing cash advantage: “The DNC has just $15.9 million in cash on hand compared to $109.3 million in the RNC’s coffers” with “nearly $17.4 million in debts and obligations, including a $15 million loan taken out last October.”

Add in the cash advantages of outside groups, and the GOP will have no funding problem to put out endless ads across media telling voters that they cannot afford to elect Democrats who use the word “affordability” while sucking the taxpayers dry: We can’t afford Democrats, the ads will say. And they will have the virtue of being truthful.

Abigail Spanberger, who ran on the “affordability” platform in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial election, has already seen her approval ratings sink to just one point above water — 47 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval. In office, she has already raised the cost of living for Virginians, leading to this “stunning” decline, as Larry Sabato calls it.

The basic problem for Democrats is that they cannot deliver on their campaign promise of making things affordable through government action. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will find the rich resist being cannibalized to feed the masses. From AI to the minimum wage, the investor class is no longer buying what the progressive left is selling. Meanwhile, Democrats are trapped by ideology, unable to admit they have any problems.

At the moment, they are depending on the fog of war to promote themselves as the saviors of the nation. But Democrats will have to run against Republican opponents who are not named Donald Trump, while the Republicans make endless use of prominent Democrats, and seemingly-endless fraud scandals, to frame their opponents as an expensive mistake. If the only response Democrats have is to call Republicans racist, it’s going to be a bad November for them, historically-speaking. As unpopular as he becomes, they are even less popular.

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Like most of America’s cultural and political elites, Robert De Niro just cannot reconcile himself to Donald Trump winning the popular vote in 2024. Now he says he wants “a screening process that everyone has to go through”, which is very rich coming from a man who endorsed Kamala Harris.

Journalist Freddie Hayward was backstage with De Niro recently. Hayward “suggested that, perhaps, this is what we call an election”, whereupon the actor doubled down on his statement that a “screening process” should be added to the American elections system.

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The interview took place at the recent “State of the Swamp” counterprogram to the State of the Union speech, where De Niro appeared with a man in a frog costume. On stage, De Niro compared patriotism in the time of Trump to an “abused spouse professing love for their abuser.”

Backstage, De Niro suggested to Hayward that some sort of deliberative body ought to have prevented Trump from running again. Now 82, De Niro may be suffering from memory loss, and therefore unable to recall the many ways in which Democrats tried to prevent Trump from being able to run for president again.

He may also have forgotten that a country exists which has constitutional organs to do exactly the thing he describes. De Niro is describing the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, drafted by none other than Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In Iran, an Assembly of Experts chooses the Supreme Leader, while the Guardian Council decides who is allowed to run for president. Khomeini distrusted democracy, so he created these institutions to prevent exactly the sort of scenario that has made Robert De Niro so sad.

De Niro would probably enjoy life on the island of Cuba as well. There, the National Assembly of People’s Power selects the president and prime minister by absolute majority, cutting out any popular vote at all.

For that matter, the Electoral College was supposed to be a filtering mechanism against presidents with too much popularity in any one state or group of states. As far as I can tell, Robert De Niro has never expressed an opinion about the Electoral College. Perhaps he needs to educate himself on the topic?

Hollywood made a mistake by letting its actors speak their political minds. I am not being snide when I say that wish I knew less about Robert De Niro’s dumb opinions. In 2024, Democrats had a selection process that cut out popular democracy and put a vapid Kamala Harris in a contest she could never win. Our elites are still mad about it, still taking revenge on us, still unable to understand why Americans don’t do what they want.

They wanted us to see One Battle After Another. The message of the film, which depicts violent revolutionaries taking revenge on America, was so important that the Academy gave it six Oscars, including Best Picture. But the movie audience betrayed Hollywood by staying home, and then going to see Project Hail Mary instead.

We don’t vote for their woke candidates. We don’t buy tickets to see their woke garbage films. They hate us for it, so they want to change the rules, now, and make us suffer for our sins. They think of us as sinners, and themselves as the saints. In that way, they are exactly like the mullahs of Iran.

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It is not an April Fools Day joke that actual Communists were behind the No Kings rallies last weekend. Neville Roy Singham, an American billionaire loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, funds more than 500 organizations across the country with $3 billion a year to promote the interests of the CCP in America. His wife, Jodie Evans, is the co-founder of the pacifist protest group Code Pink. As the COMINTERN of 1937 decreed, “the Communist Parties of all capitalist countries must fight against military expenditures”, and Code Pink exists to agitate “against militarization measures taken by capitalist governments, especially the militarization of youth.”

For in the socialist paradise of workers, militarization of the youth is the exclusive domain of the revolution. “Here’s our pledge to you, our Somali Minnesotans, your great grandchildren will still be here when that orange clown is in the dustbin of history,” Tim Walz told a No Kings rally crowd. Ilhan Omar sent her daughter to Cuba with Code Pink to enjoy the first class hotel and the only electricity generators left on the island. Minnesota is the home of the new Young Communist International.

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“I’ll kill you”, one No Kings protester told a Breitbart journalist in Pennsylvania. In Portland, Isaiah Lee climbed onto the federal building, destroyed security cameras and committed other acts of vandalism. Lee, 26, was arrested. In Milford, New Hampshire, a young No Kings protester who refused to stop blocking a sidewalk was tackled and arrested by police. Meanwhile, No Kings organizers are increasingly leaning on local business communities to leave anti-crime programs using threats of boycott.

“There is only one solution, communist revolution!” chanted the No Kings crowd in Manhattan as they waved Soviet flags. “These No Kings rallies actually look pretty representative, to me, of the Democratic coalition”, Scott Jennings remarked on CNN. “I saw people flying the hammer and sickle in New York City. I saw Hezbollah flags, Hamas flags, I saw Palestinian flags, I saw trans signs, I see weirdo liberal boomers out there, this is pretty representative”.

“A well-functioning society educates the baby stuff out of its citizens”, Matthew Hennessy writes at the Wall Street Journal. “That doesn’t happen here because the people who do the teaching tend to be communist sympathizers, if not outright believers.” Indeed, the teaching profession is lost to ideological communism and this explains why our angsty kids are out in the street protesting instead of learning to read.

The No Kings rallies lacked diversity and many commentators noted the irony. “This is not for people of color to be on the street”, one white boomer lady told an interviewer in Manhattan, explaining “they are at risk when they do that. If anybody’s gonna get arrested here, it’s gonna be a Black person. It’s not safe for them and they don’t need to participate.” Soft bigotry sets the lowest expectations.

“We need to walk in their name”, the would-be white savior said. Otherwise, “white Christian males” will take over with gerrymandering and voter ID laws, tear up the Constitution, and make Donald Trump a literal monarch. These appear to be actual talking points from a parallel Metaverse where people like this woman share them to buttress their collective faith in the political religion of woke. I know them. They are real, and really this wrong.

Put another way, the revolution is a project of old people — Americans who can remember the 1970s — radicalizing the young, whom they have relieved of all meaningful education and sense of responsibility for their own behavior. Intersectionality and diagnosis give the kids their identities now instead of that toxic masculine patriotism stuff American students used to learn. Who needs the cisheteropatriarchy setting standards and promoting merit with the stars and stripes? Better to teach them to hate themselves, their country, and civilization itself.

Communism worships weaker gods than the United States Constitution. Faith in criminals to be on their best behavior, accompanied by racialized forgiveness of crime, is the essence of wokeness. Because this god is weak, it must be imposed on the population as a necessary moral crusade, all doubts shouted-over. The more violent or outrageous the crime, the more virtue Communists signal to us by coddling the criminal and approving the crime.

Feeding Our Future fraud defendant Abdul Abubakar Ali, who pleaded guilty to a count of wire fraud in 2022, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison on Monday. Having stolen $250 million along with dozens of co-defendants, Ali has paid just $92,500 in restitution out of his $3 million share. He would likely spend more time in prison if he just stopped paying taxes. The same judge just gave another guilty defendant just six months. For capital-C Communists, this is the intended outcome. Kulaks suffer far more than criminal fraudsters under Communist despotism.

Jessica Blinkhorn is a Platonic archetype of the No Kings protester. Wearing a BDSM mask, anti-ICE tattoos, and a leather tube top while rolling in her motorized wheelchair with a man in a Donald Trump mask on a leash, Blinkhorn calls herself “the DOGEWALKER”. For some reason, a man danced beside her in a J.D. Vance mask and a sandwich board reading: “Have u said thank-u yet?”, which is probably a reference to Ukraine.

Remember, lots of these anti-war people at the No Kings rally are pro-war-in-Ukraine. Moral consistency is not in fact their strong suit. Moral hectoring is their strong suit. Ukraine is not a strategic consideration, to them. Rather, Ukraine is a marginalized community. This is why their intended support of Ukraine consists of other people’s money.

But public piety becomes ridiculous when someone like Blinkhorn, a self-described performance artist whose visual work “depicts individuals with physical disabilities in hypersexualized poses and situations”, shows up to the No Kings rally in Mad Max headgear and then complains about people on the internet being mean to her.

This turns out to be the real Ms. Blinkhorn, a Georgia State professor. Imagine what the kids are learning from this woman. I bet they are learning nothing about art from her that will make them better artists — unless they are studying surrealism, in which case she will serve as a good model for confusing and repelling the audience.

Ms. Blinkhorn has a GoFundMe. She wants to take her act on the road, nationwide. And she has words for her new critics. “I take a seemingly powerless, worthless, burdensome, fat, disabled, queer form and I juxtapose it against the end-all, be-all, senility, ferality [sic] and masculinity that Donald Trump thinks he is”, Blinkhorn explained in a video. She is “here to educate you — because that’s what I do.”

She wants you to stop and think about these politicians who need to be reined in. “There’s an undercurrent of sexuality, but that’s not what it’s about”, she insists, and you are the one with the dirty mind for thinking so. A broken-brained Epstein accusation is the cherry on this shit sundae of stupidity. Blinkhorn has “the right to take up space” and be abnormal if she wants, including her psychology.

If you disagree with her, it is because “you made the wrong choice and you fucked up”. You will not be forgiven for your heresies until you agree that ‘normal’ is bad and ‘queer’ is good, and that Trump is bad and LGBTQ race communism is good, and that ICE is bad while unrestricted immigration is good. Such a character was too perfect in every possible way to not satirize. Comedy had to happen. It was fated:

Reader, the No Kings people are telling us all what they intend to do. They are serious when they talk about running Kamala Harris again because she is the ‘qween’. All the hippie talk about war and peace and fighting racism and queering normality is psychological validation of their real intentions. They wish to restore the ideological hegemony of the woke with super-Constitutional powers of oppression and make us all sorry for electing Donald Trump.

The reason so many No Kings protesters do not seem to have a grasp on real issues is that they are the current incarnation of the late 1990s email forward from your conservative in-laws. Whereas your conservative in-laws were fun at Thanksgiving, the No Kings activist is prone to cut off family, their closest friends, and strangers alike for thoughtcrimes, such as voting for Trump. In their informational ecosystem, nastiness is the energy that makes nonsense viral. The nastier, the more they like it.

Last week, as American airline passengers met a surge of ICE personnel helping to relieve congestion at the nation’s airports, a number of cocksure liberals posted images of their most hated federal agency expressing surprise and indignity that so many of its personnel are Black and Hispanic. In fact, ICE is probably the most-diverse federal agency, which ought to make it very popular with those liberals.

Instead, white liberals question the racial consciousness of minority Americans who would enforce American laws and police American borders. They say that no one is illegal on stolen land, which is ostensibly about correcting the past but actually lets slip their plans for the future: the Communists want to steal our country out from under us and give it to other people.

It never occurs to the No Kings crowd that Black and Hispanic Americans might not like Communism very much. Excuses about safety are a cope for the fact that most Black and Hispanic Americans have nothing in common with Jessica Blinkhorn and do not share her desire for queer body positive revolution.

The proof is online, now. Hundreds of thousands of users fled the “toxicity” of X.com for Bluesky, an app that recreates Twitter in 2017, but it has turned out they were the toxicity all along. Reddit has likewise become notorious for woke thought policing. Both websites are dying because their respective ‘communities’ demand to use the platform for free, being Communists.

The Communists are revolting. They are always revolting. Both revolutionary and too often unwashed to impress normal people offline, or else too old and sanctimonious for anyone to take them seriously, Communists literally and metaphorically stink. Tim Walz and Code Pink both stink of Chinese influence.

Donald Trump is all these people have, and he has broken them. When he is gone, they will not know how to cope with it — at least, not until Singham gives the useful idiots their instructions from Beijing.

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I am uprooting once again, transplanting myself across North America to where I came from, heeding the call of family. My father took a bad fall recently and the old folks will need me around to help. Dad will want to read my book draft anyway, so it’s good to go home.

In truth, I had not anticipated staying in downtown Oakland p…

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The Our Duty USA website is here.

You can watch Erin Friday’s new podcast here.

Her X account is here.

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Here I am with another very dumb joke to open a digest post of everything I have been writing and podcasting around the intertubes of late.

The internet is actually a series of tubes, according to the Ted Stevens Foundation, a Washington think tank. These are links to all the electrons I pumped out to fill up those tubes.

What Washington actually needs …

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César Chávez became a friend and imitator of Charles Dederich, founder of Synanon, during the 1970s. Dederich established control of his initiates through The Game, a regular practice of Maoist struggle sessions in which everyone engaged in verbal attacks on one another to break down egos and inculcate obedience.

Chávez was clearly impressed by the resu…

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Elizabethan plays and joke books printed in London during the 1630s featured the “bull.” As humor historian William Linneman writes, a bull is “a proposition containing a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker.”1 For example, a young Irishman thought that a thermos was the most amazing technology ever invented, “because it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold. How does it know?”

We laugh at the silly person. It feels good to laugh, especially when we laugh along with other people. This time, the person is Irish, but the bull-speaker could be from anywhere, have any background, and the joke would still be funny.

In the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell subdued the Irish and sent all the troublesome ones away to the New World as indentured servants. A few decades later, “the existing bull configuration … was transferred in its entirety to the Irish,” according to historian Brian Earls.2 This process started in joke books during the 1680s and then spread to the British stage in 1703.

The “bulls are consistently (and evidently with some deliberation) woven into the speech of the Irish characters, where they are placed in revealing juxtaposition with the standard speech of the English interlocutors,” Earls writes. In this comedic performance, the English were the “straight man” while the Irish character in the “double act” was the “comic partner” saying the bulls.

This is how the British music hall tradition produced a stereotype so uproarious that people could hear the infectious laughter all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

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The word “bull” is likely French in origin, its original meaning being fraud or deceit. It is the word from which TS Elliot coined the term “bullshit.” This was always the implied spirit of the comic bull trope: someone said some bullshit, and then everyone laughed at the bullshit. Except for the straight man, of course, because his job — per the job title — is to maintain a straight face. Stiff upper lips and all that.

“The tradition thus established pervaded the representation of Irish characters on the eighteenth century stage,” Earls writes. “It carried over into the nineteenth century on the English, Irish, and North American stage, in the works of Dion Boucicault and others, as the bull-uttering comic servants and adventurers of the previous century were replaced by bull uttering peasants.”

Ireland, and stereotypes associated with the Irish, were incorporated into an Atlantic literary comic world before the United States of America became a country.

There were of course complaints about representation. “Although writers from Irish and Anglo-Irish backgrounds made a significant contribution to the stereotype, and there is evidence that it was popular with domestic audiences, Irish commentators tended to resent the resultant caricature which was perceived as a misrepresentation of English origin,” Earls writes.

However, as R.L. Edgeworth explained in the first English language essay on the so-called Irish bull, creatively titled “Essay on Irish Bulls,” in 1802, examples of the comic trope originate all over the world, including Ireland. Local circumstances lead to revised and repurposed jokes.

For example, the bull I used in the opening — an Irishman exclaiming that a thermos is the most amazing technology ever invented, “because it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold. How does it know?” — is almost as old as the thermos. It was used by computer programmers in the 1980s. We also find a version of this joke in a book of Alabama-Auburn jokes, for example.3

Auburn student: I think the most amazing thing in the world is the thermos, because it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.

Bama student: Well, what’s so amazing about that?

Auburn student: How do it know?

The Alabama-Auburn college football rivalry began in the early 20th century. It has nothing obvious in common with jokes the Irish tell about one another. Yet here are just a few examples of the many jokes that appear in both the Auburn-Alabama joke book as well as the Bumper Book of Kerryman Jokes.4

A terrible fire at the University of Alabama burned the library completely to the ground. Both coloring books were destroyed.

And:

Have you heard about the Kerryman whose library was burned down? Both books were destroyed and one of them hadn’t even been colored in.

Did you hear about the Auburn boys who tried to blow up the Alabama bus? They burned their mouths on the exhaust pipe.

And:

Have you heard about the Kerryman who tried to blow up a bus? He burned his lips on the exhaust pipe.

Did you hear about the Alabama students who hijacked a submarine? They demanded one million dollars and three parachutes.

And:

Have you heard about the Kerryman who hijacked a submarine? He demanded a million euro ransom and a parachute.

How do you define gross stupidity? 144 Alabama students.

And:

What is gross ignorance? 144 Corkmen.

Did you hear about the Alabama student who thought bacteria was the rear entrance to a cafe?

And:

Have you heard about the Kerryman who thought bacteria was the rear entrance to a café?

The University of Alabama football team no longer has any ice water. The player with the recipe graduated.

And:

Why do you never get ice in your drink in Kerry? The fellow with the recipe emigrated.

An Auburn housewife was crying at the kitchen sink when her husband walked in.

“What’s the matter dear?” He asked.

“I was washing the ice cubes with hot water and now I can’t find them.”

And:

Why did the Kerryman lose his job as a barman? He rinsed the ice-cubes in hot water and spent half an hour looking for them afterwards.

A small Alabama town purchased a new fire truck. The next time the councilmen met they discussed how to dispose of the old one. The Crimson Tide councilman suggested they keep it and use it for false alarms.

And:

What are old Kerry fire engines used for? False alarms.

The lawyer, who was a graduate of Alabama was irate. “Do you know the penalty for perjury?” he shouted at the witness. “A few minutes ago you told this court that you have only one brother. Now your sister swears that you have two brothers. Let’s have the truth!”

And:

Why was the Kerryman confused? He couldn’t understand how he only had three brothers while his sister had four.

By dint of long tradition, people from the county of Kerry are framed as the rednecks of Ireland, the Irish that other Irish people are supposed to look down upon. Auburn and Alabama have similarly punched down on one another for generations. Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant used to refer to Auburn as “that cow college,” for example. And there are jokes about other Irish people in the Bumper Book of Kerryman Jokes, too.

None of this is consistent with the 21st century ethos of “not punching down” in comedy. On the contrary, comedians have been “punching down” since Aristophanes’ first show run at the Theatre of Dionysius. Mockery is as necessary to getting along together as any other social interaction.

Without all the jokes about the Irish, and by the Irish about each other, the Irish might never have become Americans.

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Listed above are ten examples that I found in two joke books separated by an ocean and a college sports culture. They point to a common body of Atlantic humor that existed in print before the phonograph, radio, or TV, and before the black or Jewish comedians of the 20th century club scene.

As Earls explains in his essay, during the 19th century, the humor of most Irish bulls resided in a dissonance between the new, still-standardizing English language and the various dialects of Irish people who were mostly still illiterate and transmitting their culture orally. Similarly, some bulls “were noted as having been uttered by English country people or the lower classes in the towns.” Making fun of yokels is universal.

Victorians actually seem to have regarded bulls as a form of education. Published in 1989, The Book of Bulls, Irish and Other by G.R. Neilson wrote that “in addition to the amusement which is caused, the reading of good collection of bulls” tends to “encourage clearness of thought and style, and correctness of speech and writing.”

In the early 19th century, “the Irish were the immigrants with the most definite stereotype,” Earls writes. Stereotypical Irish men had “a derby hat and a dudeen pipe, a belligerent attitude, and a love of whiskey.”

“Thus, when the first American humor periodicals began in the 1830s, the stereotype was ready for them, and the comic Irishman became one of the staples of American comedy.”

He was caricatured as a hirsute, muscular laborer, with cheek whiskers, a broad upper lip, a button nose, and prognathous jaws. Sometimes the features were distorted to give a simian aspect.

[…]

The Irish of the comic papers lived in a shanty: the chimney was a jointed stove-pipe that might lean in any direction. In New York, Shanty-town was located on the cliffs of Coogan’s Bluff, and the Irish were pictured climbing ladders to get to their houses. The typical Irishman had several children and a termagant wife who took in washing. Houlihan dreamt that he had died and was admitted directly to heaven: Saint Peter told him that the time he had spend with Mrs. Houliahn was purgatory enough.

Irish cooks and servants were demanding and domineering. Irish workers were unruly. Irish politicians were corrupt. Irish hatred of England brought foreign disputes to America. Though there was substance to some of these stereotypes, they were increasingly seen as stereotypes after the American Civil War.

“These twisted drawings began to disappear somewhat toward the end of the century,” Earls explains. A prominent magazine “mentioned that where it had been once the fashion to malign the Irish, they became better thought of after Americans experienced other types of foreigners.”

Modernity was arriving fast. The pace of change had quickened in the 19th century, for now many more people were literate; mass culture had arrived. Many of the bulls Earls has found in the archives show Irish people with struggles that would have been familiar to most people living in the bourgeoning shopkeeper culture of America in the 1890s. They had become sitcom characters:

Mike had no faith in life insurance: his brother had put hundreds of dollars in a policy and died anyway. All the company did was to give the widow two thousand dollars to run through with her next husband.

And:

When Pat was told that his boss was going to buy him an automobile truck to drive instead of a team, he decided he would have to subscribe to the Scientific American to learn how to swear at the thing.

And:

When Mike told Pat about the millionaire that had lost $2,000,000, Pat replied that it was better to have happened to the millionaire than to some poor man who could not afford it.

Even as negative stereotypes receded, however, the Irish accents remained. “A priest admonished another widow for being miserly and told her she should lay up treasures in heaven. ‘Och, where I'd niver see thim agin?’” Earls records.

Bridget, a popular character in the 1850s, asked prospective employers: “How many avenings can I have out o’the wake fer coortin’? Does the masther belong to the Laigue of Deliverance? Have ye anny objections to me pore old mither and me husband’s lame nevvy slapin’ in the kitchen?”

It was half the fun of Irish comic tropes, and now the Irish-Americans began to perfect their own comic brogue in English print.

Finley Peter Dunne was a Chicagoan who could write, turning from a newspaper office hand into a police reporter while he was a young man.

As a sportswriter, he coined the term “southpaw” for a left-handed pitcher. He covered presidential nominating conventions. Dunne had a considerable impact on the shape of American journalism — and newspaper writing sharpened his wit to a fine point. Bulls were pithy, and therefore perfect for his style.

Literary historian John O. Rees praises “Dunne’s extraordinary virtuosity in the medium” of written Irish-accented English.5 Dunne told an interviewer in 1899 that “his sole object was to give a faithful impression of the dialect spoken in communities like Bridgeport, the outlying settlement where most of Chicago's Irish under-class lived and worked,” Rees writes.

In Bridgeport, he told his readers, one could hear “all the various accents of Ireland, from the awkward brogue of the 'far-downer' to the mild and aisy Elizabethan English of the southern Irishman, and all the exquisite variations to be heard between Armagh and Bantry Bay, with the difference that would naturally arise from substituting cinders and sulphuretted hydrogen for soft misty air and peat smoke.”

It was mythmaking. “In fact Dunne had picked up his brogue expertise not in Bridgeport but at home as a boy, in the small, prosperous Irish neighborhood on the west Side where his parents immigrants from Kilkenny and Queens County, had settled before the Civil war,” Rees reveals.

Whereas at first Dunne “risked only a few departures in orthography and punctuation from ordinary conversational English,” he “was mindful of the excesses that most local colorists of the day were committing with dialect, as they mistakenly strove for slavish phonetic accuracy.” He criticized writers who made their work unreadable.

During a series of humorous fictional sketches based on the travails of a local politician, “many more contractions” began to appear in the dialogue of his characters. Dunne “never strove for anything resembling absolute authenticity with his brogue, even in its final form,” Rees writes in 1989, for he wanted his readers to be able to read it.

Not unlike his friend Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Dunne managed to suggest the vernacular, with adroit simplification and stylization: he highlighted only a few repeated, striking features, including "iv" for "of," "thr" for "tr," "a" and "r" phonemes lengthened by hyphenation, and occasional carryovers from the mother tongue ("soggarth," "omadhon," "gossoon").

A new reader of Dunne’s style “soon comes to terms with its novel sound patterns and punctuation, and finds that the consistently clear syntax and idiomatic logic make for piquant but quite acceptably easy reading,” Rees says.

“Ye know what orig-inal sin is, Hinnissy,” the titular Mr. Dooley explains in Dunne’s “Mr Dooley’s Philosophy.”

Ye was bor-rn with wan an' I was bor-rn with wan an' ivrybody was bor-rn with wan. 'Twas took out iv me be Father Tuomy with holy wather first an' be me father aftherward with a sthrap. But I niver cud find out what it was. Th' sins I've committed since, I'm sure iv. They're painted red an' carry a bell an' whin I'm awake in bed they stan' out on th' wall like th' ilicthric signs they have down be State sthreet in front iv th' clothin' stores. But I'll go to th' grave without knowin' exactly what th' black orig-inal sin was I committed. All I know is I done wrong.

The original sin of the Irish was to be in the way of the English. By the dawn of the 20th century, the stereotypical sins of the Irish had transformed into all-American jokes. We are still telling some of them to one other, about each other, in Alabama.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

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Donald Trump has defeated proletarian internationalism in Cuba. President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on Friday that his government is negotiating the terms of their surrender with the Trump administration, capitulating rather than attempt ‘resistance’ to internal and external forces it cannot overcome.

They need energy, which can be cut off at any time, and has effectively been cut off for weeks, now. Today, the entire island’s electrical grid reportedly failed. Keeping the lights on is a basic requirement for the proles to feel the least bit of solidarity with their democratic dictatorships. Cubans were not happy in the first place, since they lived in a communist state, and now the proles are absolutely furious at their dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Democratic Socialists of America are a proletarian internationalist organization within the Democratic Party coalition. DSA amplifies and echoes the proletarian internationalist propaganda of foreign antagonists, notably Cuba. A group of DSA representatives decrying the effective blockade of the island is planning to visit Cuba this week to find out for themselves just how real Cubans feel.

Of course, the ‘real Cubans’ they meet will be fellow Communists. It would be hilarious to watch them meet with the Cubans who riot and set police stations on fire, or the political prisoners released on Friday, or the entrepreneurs about to unleash capitalism, which is already part of the surrender. But I doubt that will happen.

Cuba is becoming libre before our eyes. Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a grandson of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, has already been floated as a new transitional figure: Castro III, basically, because the Cuban proletarian communism appears to be another hereditary proletarian communism like North Korea.

One wonders what Karl Marx would make of his intellectual progeny who have replicated the old system of inherited monarchy. I suspect he would be utterly confused by the gay space communists, that is, the DSA members with rainbow progress flags and bizarre hair colors.

For that matter, I bet Zohran Mamdani would offend Marx with his Intersectionalist Third Worldist form of communism — though Stalin and Mao would appreciate Mamdani’s autocratic habits.

Reader, have you heard that the real communism, the one that works, has not been tried yet? DSA will tell you it is true. They are ready to explain it, at length, if you have the patience to listen.

I would pay money to see how that hackneyed shtick is received in the actual Cuban streets, right now, but there is a blackout going on, so we will just have to wait for the results of this happy experiment in useful idiocy.

Patience is easy for me, as I know that when Cuba is effectively Libre, the truths behind many old lies will emerge, and it may very well change the American political landscape.

Cuba and Iran are two of the five key strategic antagonists to American interest promoting the most propagandistic visions of America, and both nations hold secret truths that Democrats, DSA perhaps most of all, fear more than nuclear bombs.

This essay is about Cuba. I started thinking about old stories that might change, soon, and this got long enough that I had to follow my rule of putting up a paywall — because I am not a Communist.

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Defensive walls are a universal technology. When Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539 to explore the American southeast, he found “a well inhabited and a fat country” with “some great and walled towns, and many houses scattered all about the fields, to wit, a crossbow shot or two, the one from the other.”1 These walls were built “of great posts thrust deepe into the ground and very rough, and many long railes as big as ones arme laid acrosse between them, and the wall was about the height of a lance, and it was daubed within and without with clay, and had loope holes.”

Defensive walls are also an entirely bourgeois construction; the concept of a gated community existed in the New World before Columbus. One Native American capitol called Pacaha was “very great, walled, and beset with towers, and many loopeholes were in the towers and wall” with “a great lake, that came neere unto the wall: and it entered into a ditch that went round about the towne, wanting but a little to environ it round”, suggesting enormous expenditure of community resources. Each fortified town was close enough to support the others, a peer among equals, but also separated from the others, the palisades creating exclusion rather than inclusion.

This pattern is not unique to the New World. A similar, if smaller, 10,000-year old Siberian site at Amnya was clearly meant to be seen and respected. Similar ditch-and-palisade constructions appear globally in the archaeology.2 From the first appearance of palisaded communities, wooden walls and ditches were high-visibility markers of status, a form of conspicuous consumption before the invention of money. All defensive structures are designed to manage risks, however, and palisades are consistent with risk management in a world of raiding activity. Grim archaeology shows that these defenses were necessary, and not simply for show.

This essay is cross-posted for premium subscribers from Polemology.net, where it will be locked until 2027. It is presented here for premium subscribers to Osborne Ink.

Polemology Positions

The Walls Of Cahokia And The Palisaded Communities Of The Middle Mississippian

Defensive walls are a universal technology. When Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539 to explore the American southeast, he found “a well inhabited and a fat country” with “some great and walled towns, and many houses scattered all about the fields, to wit, a crossbow shot or two, the one from the other…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

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The Gays Against Groomers website is at this link.

Michael’s X account is at this link.

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You would not know it from the climate science we have all learned together, but periods of climate warming are consistently associated with the success of the human species, while periods of climate cooling are associated with human suffering. Contrary to the expectations of doomsday, the more likely outcome …

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