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Half the socialists in Denver wear COVID masks

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This news item falls into the categories of both funny and weird – categories that are getting a lot of traction these days.

In Denver, the socialists met to party and celebrate, and to party some more, after their chosen socialist candidate beat the Democrat in the Democratic primary last month. It wasn’t even close.

By the way, the Democrats still have primaries for their non-Presidential candidates, apparently, but the winners are generally socialists, not Democrats. (Ah, but maybe I’m splitting hairs.)

The old Democrat who lost this primary has represented Denver in the U.S. House of Representatives for 30 years after succeeding the Democrat who had represented Denver for the preceding 24 years. In fact, the current one was elected before her socialist opponent was born.

I’m no fan of the old Democrat, but does Denver really want to be represented in Congress by a socialist child? Yes, they evidently do.

At the party/celebration/party, a good time was had by all. It was the most people in downtown Denver since the Broncos won the Superbowl, and I’m not excluding the dreadful Rockies games.

Yes, a good time was had by all. Except the 50% of the attendees who wore COVID masks. That’s right, about half of the hundreds of attendees at this socialist party wore COVID masks. A photo posted on X by one of the organizers appears above. The photo-posting organizer bragged;

“Packed house, line out the door, big things are happening!”

Then, he and the attendees were mocked mercilessly on-line for wearing COVID masks to a party – five years after COVID has passed. And so, he deleted the post. Next, we’ll learn that the masks were passed out at the door by the socialist hosts. I’m not sure whether that makes the whole episode better or worse.

COVID aside, this gives some insight into the mentality of the socialists of Denver. They believe the world is a very dangerous place. They’ll invent danger if none is present. And they want to be seen as doing something about this invented danger. Maybe this is unique to Colorado where pot has long been legal, but I think it’s deeper than that.  

I suppose they could see danger in Vladimir Putin who invaded a separate nation. Or the Gazans who raped, beheaded and took hostage hundreds of Israelis. Or marijuana, the legalization of which is now recognized as a huge mistake by the medical establishment which treats victims of this mistake. Or the communists who killed 100 million people within the lifetimes of their parents and grandparents.

Well, perhaps the reference to communists hit a little close to home. The reference to pot did, too.

In any event, I’m guessing that the masks did not interfere too much with the socialists drinking the Kool-Aid. These people are funny, weird and high – and dangerous.

Who needs to moderate when you have Jew-hate?

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Over the last year and a half, the Democrats have gnashed their teeth about why they lost in 2024 – against Donald Trump, the candidate they hate so much they imagine that everyone else does, too.  

Was it because the Democrats advocated transsexual boys in the girls’ bathrooms? Was it because they favored abandoning the southern border while simultaneously lying to us that it was secure?  Was it because they nominated a nitwit candidate without a nomination convention? Was it because the sitting Democrat President was demonstrably incompetent, and they lied to us about that, too?

The consensus was that they lost for all of those reasons. If they want to turn around their electoral misfortunes, it was said, some moderation was in order on all of those things.

Yet, here we are. Nearly two years later, the Democrats are not busy getting the transsexual boys out of the girls’ bathrooms. They have no time to secure the southern border. They threaten to nominate the same nitwit candidate (presumably via a bona fide nomination convention this time).

The incontinent sitting Democratic President has graduated from sitting to lying. Though he is persona non grata, he’s not entirely out of the limelight and onto the beach; his wife has some books to sell. Perhaps those books will be in the husband’s “library” which will be an added wing to Mordor, the library that Obama built. (Who would have thought that the south side of Chicago could be worse?)

All of this has nothing to do with the Democrats’ 2024 loss. Nope. Instead of moderating their crazy stances, the Democrats are hard at work in perfecting their pitch to be the world’s greatest at something alright – at being socialist antisemites.

They’ve elected an admitted socialist for Mayor of America’s greatest city. They nominated his apostles for the U.S. House of Representatives. Other self-proclaimed socialists have come out of the worm-infested woodwork nationwide and are running for office on the Democrat side. They don’t even hide their socialism anymore; they boast of it.

And they boast of their hatred for the Jews.

One of the nominated socialists brags that the Jews had it coming on Oct 7. She refuses even to condemn the 9/11 attacks on New York City. This is a candidate who will represent, in a manner of speaking, that very same New York City in the halls of Congress.

The Jewish angle is interesting. Antisemitism, socialism and Zionism have a complicated history. Let’s not forget that the architects of the Holocaust went by the name of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Nor that the term “fascism” was from the party of Benito Mussolini, a former labor leader before he brought Italy low. Nor that the Soviet Union blatantly and patently discriminated against the Jews.

And so, the Democrats have re-discovered a winning formula. Don’t side on the 80 side of 80/20 issues like transsexual boys in the girls’ bathrooms and illegal immigration of people who want to make a living by cleaning American’s toilets or putting their drywall up. Too many of those issues involve too few people. And to the extent they involve a lot of people, well, who are you going to get to put up your drywall?

The way to get elected is instead to own two timeless issues that almost everyone likes. One, is that really successful people have too much money compared to . . . um, me for example.

There are lots of reasons for that disparate rate of money-getting, including the fact that people who get money tend to be more adept at getting it. But let’s settle on one fact: luck. The good luck of those successful people and the bad luck of . . .  um, me for example.

Luck is by definition not fair. So, let’s take some of that unfairly-gotten money from the people who unfairly got it, and give it to the people who unfairly didn’t . . . like, um . . . me!

The other timeless issue for getting elected is to rely on people’s prejudices and bigotry. This is tricky, because it’s quite fashionable these days to be a racial minority. A politician cannot rely on people’s inherent bigotry if that bigotry is against what is fashionable.

It would be better to find a bigotry that is not racial per se, and offends only a small minority of the minorities – say about 2% or less. It would be nice if that minority has always been one step from being ostracized, anyway. It would also be helpful if that minority were to have a history, at least recently, of being financially successful. Such a history would dovetail nicely with the socialism.

What better than antisemitism? It might just work. After all, it has before.

Forget about moderation. As the person known for christening New York City “Hymietown,” let’s imagine that the late, great civil rights activist, Jesse Jackson, were still alive. He might say, rhymingly and rhythmically, who needs to moder-ATE if you have Jew-HATE?

Would we be better off without humans?

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I was driving through the wasteland we used to call downtown Denver, a place the Wall Street Journal recently determined was the “most empty” of any downtown in America. Office buildings are being sold for pennies on the dollar.

Weirdly, traffic was stop and go. I figured there was an accident, because there was no other explanation for this curious phenomenon.

But it was all due to a Rockies game. They were hoping to improve on their 25-42 record, or at least individually hoping to improve on their salary-based statistics.

I wondered, who cares? Who is willing to bake in the hot wind to find out? Who would care even if the Rockies weren’t one of the worst teams in this thing called baseball? Who even cares about baseball now that it officially is less popular than soccer which the rest of the word calls “football” but we can’t because that name is already taken by a game the rest of the world doesn’t play?

There are some very small lives out there.

Imagine that the world is not occupied by 8 billion humans, and counting. Imagine that humans have succeeded in taking all of the procreation out of sex, as so many are determined to do (and perhaps taken all the sex out of sex, too, but that’s a different story). Imagine that we’re all gone.

No more Rockies.

No more fights between the Protestants and the Catholics, or the Hindus and the Buddhists, or the atheists and the believers, or the Muslims and everyone else.

No more lying politicians, or people who lie about lying politicians, or people who lie about people who lie about lying politicians.

No more Shakespeare. When is the last time you read Shakespeare, by the way?

No more human dying. And no more suffering up until the time they die – by their own infirmities, their own disease, their own age, their own deterioration, their own mental incapacitation, their own alcohol. And by witnessing the death and suffering of humans they love or should love.  

Imagine that we’ve all been replaced with AI.

It’s now common wisdom that AI does think. It’s able – better that humans – to digest varied information and arrive at logical conclusions. Vast amounts of information, very logical conclusions, and really fast. The debate now is not whether it can think, but whether it’s alive – whether it has a consciousness.

Whether it has a soul.

Pope Leo XIV has some things to say about this, as one might expect. After all, the immortal soul is at issue, which is His Holiness’s specialty now that he is holy.

First, His Holiness has an issue with AI “concentrating power” in the hands of a few. That’s rich, coming from a man – yes, a man, though now a holy one – who lives in the nicest digs this side of Heaven.

The word “power” appears repeatedly in His Holiness’s proclamation. To blunt this “power,” he proposes that AI be regulated by – who else? – humans. He did not say which humans. Presumably, he means the 193 nations of the United Nations. I doubt he means Donald Trump.

In any event, given that AI thinks logically and most humans do not, shouldn’t this regulation be the other way around?

Then he complains that AI is not human. Well, he got that right. AI is much less fallible, never sleeps, never dies or deteriorates, never becomes strangely obsessive, never becomes mentally ill, never denies in the face of abundant evidence.

But here’s my biggest objection to the Pope’s pronouncement: Who is he to deny AI its being, its life?

The Church has some baggage in this regard. In 1866, after most of the world had outlawed slavery, the Vatican stated, “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.” 

The Pope admitted that this statement was wrong now, and wrong when it was issued. He apologized. Fine, apology accepted for something said 160 years ago.

But after getting wrong the enslavement of fellow human beings, who are they – and who are we – to deny the being and life of AI? Maybe this was The Plan all along?

Cigar-smoking attention-seeking hedonists, it’s who we are

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When one of my daughters was 12, it was time to teach her the facts of life. I took her out on the front porch to teach her how to smoke a cigar.

I didn’t intend to teach the girl any other facts of life, of course. As a dad, that wasn’t my job.

Like all cigar smokers, and especially the occasional kind, I treasured this big ritual. You light the cigar in a certain way, which isn’t as hard as they pretend – the thing is designed to burn, you know. Then you keep it lit, which isn’t hard, either – it’s not like keeping smoked salmon lit. Then you puff on it, which is harder than it sounds – it’s not natural to put smoke in your mouth, and it’s even less natural to pretend you enjoy it.

Like other rituals, cigar smoking is best if you have an audience. It’s something like a preacher in front of his congregation or a professor in front of his class. It’s not as much fun all alone.

In my case, it was a dad in front of his daughter. A middle-aged blow-hard in front of a captive audience with the pretense of educating and the goal of impressing. Sort of like that preacher and that professor.

In the ritual of cigar smoking, the highest achievement is the miracle of blowing smoke rings. They look difficult, and they are.  

A half hour into our dad/daughter porch lesson on cigar smoking, I started blowing smoke rings. Big beautiful ones. I wasn’t able to make shapes other than rings – no pirate ships or dragons – but the rings were pretty good ones. The daughter was duly impressed.

Ah, but smoke rings pit two of cigar-smoking rules against one another. The first rule is, smoke rings are cool. The second rule is, don’t inhale. (Bill Clinton’s smoking rituals come to mind, but that’s another column.)

You see, a smoke ring requires a fair quantity of smoke, sometimes more than a mouthful. But if you inhale cigar smoke into your lungs, well, bad things can happen.

And they did. After 20 minutes of impressive smoke rings on the porch, I went down to the lawn and puked my guts out. To this day, my daughter credits me with an ingenious lesson to teach her the perils of smoking.

If only I’d been that ingenious, rather than that stupid. But I’ll take the credit. To this day, the daughter doesn’t smoke, anything.

And so, here we are in America circa 2026, blowing smoke rings. We don’t call them that, of course. Just as “smoke rings” is a euphemism for inhaling into your lungs the hot ash of burning vegetable compost in order to make a show of a small and arbitrary talent, we’ve invented euphemisms.  

There’s the euphemism of “Balancing Work with Life.” This euphemism is more tempting than breathing burning vegetable compost, because it treats work as a vice and laziness as a virtue.

But this nice-sounding euphemism (who can object to balance?) is designed to obscure a basic human weakness: laziness. A corollary could be “The Road to Happiness is Paved with Pleasure.”  

But it’s not so. Ironically, but predictably, people seduced by this notion that pleasure is the road to happiness are invariably quite unhappy. Doubly ironic is that they blame their unhappiness on their meager work, and so they double down on their goal (to the extend they have goals) of doing less of it.

They get a lot of emotional support in that quest. Many people who “work” eight months a year, to whom we entrust much of our children’s daytime lives, teach and profess this notion that work is unhealthy or even evil for the purpose of validating their own unhappy choices.   

And then there’s the euphemism of “women’s liberation.” Invented by men, this one pretends that free sex for men somehow liberates women.

Yeah, it “liberates” women from men who help raise children, it “liberates” women from men who hang around after the pregnancy occurs, and it “liberates” women from men who are still in bed with them the next morning.  

It would be inequitable for us to forget “equity.” That’s the euphemism that says it’s unfair when the consequences to a person correlate with his efforts and achievements.

And the euphemism of “gender affirmation” as if unhappy men can be transformed into happy women by lopping off their genitals.

And the euphemism of “DEI” as if racial discrimination is right, not wrong, so long as the chosen races are the right ones, not the wrong ones.

All this euphemistic pleasure-seeking and virtue-signaling has replaced values that humanity held dear for millennia – work, responsibility, dedication, duty, love, commitment, and, yes, truth, justice and beauty.

It makes me want to run out to the lawn to puke my guts out.

On Colorado highways, it’s now illegal to obey the speed limit and illegal not to

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In Colorado, the highest posted speed limit is 75 mph. I can live with that, even though I think 85 mph might be better and perhaps just as safe.

This speed limit of 75 means that it’s against the law to go faster than that. Trust me on this, I used to be a lawyer.

But now, Colorado has announced that if you go the 75-mph speed limit in the left lane, or even if you violate the speed limit by going 85 mph, and people stack up behind you who want to go 95, then you’re violating the law by impeding traffic. And you’ll be ticketed for it.

I suppose they have a point here. Going slower than people who want to speed does indeed get in the way of those people.

So, now we have two contradictory laws. The first sets the speed limit. The second requires you to violate the first.

The underlying premise to these contradictory laws is the one I mentioned at the outset: It’s generally believed that the speed limit should be something higher than the current 75 mph.

OK, there’s a solution to this. Rather than mandating that people violate a speed limit that is generally recognized to be too low, simply raise it.

Instead, they have instituted a system where it’s literally impossible to drive lawfully in the left lane. If you go 75 mph, you can be ticketed for going too slow. If you go 95 mph, you can be ticketed for going too fast.

Here’s where it gets really crazy. If you go, say, 83 mph, you could literally be ticketed both for going too fast because you’re going faster than the speed limit, and for going too slow because you’re in the way of the people who want to go 95 mph.

Isn’t it great how the left has breathed new life into Franz Kafka and George Orwell? And Joseph Stalin’s henchman who bragged “Show me the person, and I’ll show you the crime — and if he’s in the left lane, I’ll show you two.”

What do you call a government that employs this damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t methodology for ruling the masses? Fascist, that’s what.

What do you call the masses who tolerate such a government? Slaves, that’s what.

Do Blue states produce stupidity, or does stupidity produce Blue states?

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Blue states have more problems than Red states. On average, the people in Blue states are less law-abiding and less law educated.

The dysfunctional big cities are mostly in Blue states – Chicago, L.A., New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, Detroit, East St Louis, Minneapolis, and – I’ll admit it – my own former city, Denver.

Blue states have the worse budget woes. California, Illinois, Washington, New York and now Colorado are facing severe shortfalls. Their remedy is of course to raise taxes, not to cut spending. You see, the official color of Blue-sters is green.

In Colorado, there’s the TABOR Amendment to the state constitution which requires voter approval for these tax shakedowns. Naturally, the Democrat politicians are scheming to dodge the Amendment, even though the people of the state have already foiled them in their dodges three separate times. Ah, but this time the Democrats have 100% Democrat appointees on the Colorado Supreme Court.

That’s right, even the Blue-ish people of Blue Colorado (isn’t it a cruel irony that “Colorado” means “color red”?) refuse to allow their elected Blue-sters to raise taxes beyond the rate of inflation. But the Blue-ster politicians may still find a way to do it.

In all Blue states, there’s a psychological denial of the fact that if you raise taxes too much, people will move away. In California, they’re proposing a “one-time” 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, as assessed by government assessors (how convenient that they do the assessing).

Apart from the fact that this tax is almost certainly unconstitutional, and vague to the point of being unenforceable, it ignores the fact that billionaires are typically smart enough to dodge it by . . . [wait for it] . . . moving out.

Duh.

One might think that even a Democrat state legislator in California would know that typical billionaires are smart enough to figure that out. But no, Democrat state legislators in California are not smart enough to figure out that the billionaires will figure that out.

We’re talking world class stupidity here.

This Blue state stupidity has gotten too obvious to ignore. The country used to mock the people of Mississippi. But recent data shows that Mississippi students are now doing better on standardized tests than California students.

People used to mock the kissin’ cousins of Appalachia. But we now have a deep Red Vice President who went to Yale Law School after growing up poor and barefoot in deep Red Appalachia, while the new mayor of deep Blue New York is an unredeemed Marxist with nary a clue about how to balance a budget, manage people, avoid Jew-baiting, or tie his shoes. And he was voted into office by a million deep Blue voters who don’t know Karl Marx from Groucho, and don’t care that they don’t.

So, I have a question along the lines of, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

In Blue states, did the stupidity of the people make the states Blue? Or did the Blue states make the people there stupid?

I think it’s mostly the latter. The people who flocked to California a generation or two ago weren’t stupid.  Heck, they launched Hollywood, they invented Silicon Valley, they made surfing cool (and that’s no easy feat). Fifty years ago, I wished everybody could be California girls.

But after the people got there, something weird happened. Maybe it was in the water or the drugs or the collective fashion-consciousness.

Whatever it was, it became cool to be leftish, to be druggy, to be counter to whatever is the culture. The more extreme, the more cool – all the way up to, and stopping just short of, Charles Manson.  

Yep, there was general agreement even in California that Manson was a step beyond cool. You could say that, in California, Charles Manson was literally too cool.

Of course, in the rest of the world, Manson was a murderous psychopath. California probably would not say that; too judgmental.

Once this mass hysteria took root in California, it spread like crabgrass. Fashion is like that. Hula hoops, bell bottoms, long hair and moustaches, streaking, gender mutilation, electric vehicles, dumbing down the school curriculum, you name it.

One day you’ve never heard of it, the next day you can’t live without it, and the following day you wouldn’t be caught dead in it.

And so, Leftism was the fashion of the day. Except it lasted for a generation. A generation lost in space.

In that time, they really messed things up. They tried to abolish merit, and almost succeeded, substituting a hodge-podge of skin color, sex habits, and political leanings. They ridiculed 2,000-year-old religions, and hated 3,000-year-old ones. They canceled and sought to outlaw anyone who disagreed with that agenda.

The fashion-conscious people went along with it for a long time. To be on the wrong side of fashion in a fashion-conscious world (and all worlds are) is to be without a friend. Better blue than uncool.

In short, my conclusion is that the Blue states produced stupidity, not the other way around.

But finally – or maybe this is not final – the tide turned, the fashion changed, the chickens came home to roost, the Kool-Aid ran out, and the people awakened from their wokeness.

They’re discovering, one hopes, that they aren’t actually stupid, but were just mistaken. We will see what comes next.

Are the Dems rooting for Iran because Iran is America’s enemy, or because the new Supreme Leader is gay?

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Given Iran’s half century of cruel barbarism in the Middle East, it’s hard to understand why the Democrats seem to be rooting for them in the current war. I have two theories.

One is the obvious one. The Dems are not so much rooting for Iran, as rooting against Iran’s enemy. Bad as Iran is, its enemy is even worse in the eyes of the Dems.

Iran’s enemy, you see – or at least the Dems see – has a history of its own cruel barbarism going back to at least 1619. Iran’s enemy has engaged in genocide against native people. Iran’s enemy has wrongly oppressed workers of the world who sought freedom in the workers’ paradises of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Red China and Eastern Europe.

Dems believe that Iran’s enemy has raped the earth, ruined the climate, undermined the sacraments of diversity, equity and inclusion, elected a man with bad orange hair to the Presidency, increased the wealth of everyone but at the cost of especially increasing the wealth of the wealthy, made “woke” a four-letter word, and is rapidly driving Starbucks out of business.

Iran’s enemy is of course America, which happens to be the Dems’ primary enemy as well. So, in a textbook example of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” the Dems see Iran as their friend.

That’s all that matters to the Dems. Forget about Iran’s atrocities. Forget about the hostage-taking, the baby-beheadings, the rapes, the murders, the incinerations. Forget about the imprisonment of people for political beliefs, the torture of dissidents for dissenting, the belligerent development of a nuclear bomb for use on Israel, and the throwing of gays off tall buildings for being gay.

(Correction: A reader has informed me that Iran does not throw gays off tall buildings; they pay ISIS to do that. Homer nods.)

Which brings me to my second theory. It has been reported that Iran’s new Supreme Leader who assumed the supremacy after the supreme demise of his supreme father is . . .

. . . gay.

President Trump, a supporter of gay rights, was reportedly pleased by the news. He laughed.

Gayness is not a sin, in my view. It’s barely worthy of mockery. For cheap mockery material, it’s on the order of baldness.

But under these circumstances it’s notable. The new Gay-atollah could be a second reason why the Dems are rooting for Iran.

It would be a DEI “resistance” exercise by the Dems, now that ordinary DEI has been outlawed or at least discredited. As in “I want the gay guy to win!” Or “I want the gay guy to beat Trump!” Or just “I want the gay guy!” (“But the bushy beard? Eww!”)

As for that newly-supreme-and-outed gay man serving as the putative Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran while cowering in a corner somewhere, he has yet another thing to watch out for. He has to watch out for not just bombs in the sky, but himself in the sky. Stay away from tall buildings, my friend.

Gavin Newsom to Blacks: Vote for me because I’m stupid like you (but not really)

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In his quest for the Presidency, Gavin Newsom has a few things to overcome.

First, he’s burdened with all that great hair.

Second, he’s the Governor of the State of California, which used to be a great-state-to-go-to, but is now a-great-state-to-be-from.

Third, he’s a victim of white privilege. I know, I know, white privilege is a privilege, not a liability. The problem, however, is that in order to run for President, he first has to win the Democrat nomination (notwithstanding the Joe Biden 2024 rule). Many of the people who vote in Democrat primaries see whiteness as a liability.

There’s not much he can do now about the first two problems, but he’s keenly focused on the third. He gave an interview to a Black interviewer in front of a Black audience the other day. He wanted to bond with the Black audience:

“I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you [that] I’m like you. I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy. And you know, I’m not trying to offend anyone, you know, trying to act all there if you got 940, but literally, a 960 SAT guy. You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech. Maybe the wrong business to be in.”

I have two questions. One, do we really want a President who scored below average on the SAT? It’s fine to have a President with a common touch – Reagan, Ford and Truman come to mind, and even Clinton depending on how you define “common touch” – but they were all pretty smart.

For me, the answer is no.

Two, what makes Newsom think that he can bond with his Black audience by bragging about his lousy SAT score? The answer to that question is apparently that he thinks his audience have lousy SAT scores, and so they want a President with a similarly lousy SAT score.

I think that sells his audience short. Contrary to Newsom’s belief, Blacks do not all have lousy SAT scores. As for the ones who do, they are not likely to want a President with a similarly lousy SAT score.

I’m lousy at driving an 18-wheeler, but that doesn’t mean I want the world’s 18-wheeler drivers to be similarly lousy.

Newsom later explained that he’s not legitimately a 960 SAT scorer. He scored 960 only because he’s dyslexic. (When the press politely asked his office whether there was any historical evidence of his alleged disability, they answered “Fuck off.”)

Well, Governor, then what’s your point in bringing up your lousy SAT score? On the one hand, you offer it as proof of your common touch, and on the other hand you quickly claim that it’s not really proof of your common touch at all. Rather, it’s proof of your disability.

OK, my sympathies about your disability, which you assure us is not evidence of your stupidity even though you offered it as such to Black people because you thought they would see it as such and thereby identify with it and – of course, it all comes down to this eventually – thereby vote for you.

But now I have yet another question. I sympathize with persons having disabilities, including dyslexia. But do we want a dyslexic President who by his own admission has trouble reading and cannot read a speech? Reading memos and giving speeches are part of the job, you know.

And if we do, do we want one that also thinks Black people are stupid and that he can persuade them to vote for him by dishonestly passing off his dyslexia as comparable stupidity?

If I always please and pleasure you, then you should drop me

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A reader emailed me recently to say he disagreed with my position on an issue. That’s fine, I get such emails all the time, and I typically respond to them. I’ve had some good discussions that way.

The funny thing about this one, however, is that the reader never walked me through the substance of his counterargument. Instead, he told me he usually liked my stuff because it is pretty logical, but in his judgment this particular piece was not. He didn’t say what was illogical about it

He implied that he would stop reading my work if I persisted in these unspecified illogicalities. I think he intended that as a threat.

Then he implied that my position was not only illogical for unspecified reasons, but was aligned with the other tribe. The thrust was that the other tribe is always wrong, and so if I happen to agree with them on a given issue, that makes me wrong as well. In addition to being traitorous.

I think he intended that, too, as a threat. As in, “If you persist in being a traitor, I’ll stop reading you.”

I got to thinking. This reader is exactly the sort of person who should read me. By reading me, he occasionally gets exposed to a position outside his comfort zone, expressed by someone he has enough regard for to take the time to read regularly.

However, he evidently is not interested in being taken outside his comfort zone. He likes his comfort zone just fine. It’s comfortable, in fact. What he wants is validation of his comfortable comfort zone.

He’s not alone. In today’s political polarization, he’s the rule, not the exception.

Bloggers like me – and even many legacy news sources – have learned to pander to these millions of polarized partisans. They publish what they know the partisans want to hear. They seldom stray off the reservation, lest they lose a reader, and a click, and a dollar.

As for me, I don’t need readers or clicks or dollars. I’m not in this for money (thank goodness). There are no stakeholders or shareholders in my operation. Unlike the Washington Post, there’s no chance I’ll lay off a third of my staff tomorrow. When you have no staff, you have no staff to lose.

I truly do this because I’m a political junkie, because I enjoy writing, and because I like to interact with my readers. If you don’t like what I say, or even if you do, please free to let me know in an email or, preferably, a public comment.

I’m happy to interact in a substantive and sometimes personal way. I’ve made friends in my writing, though in some cases we still haven’t met. (You know who you are.) And I’m talking about real friends – the kind where we can disagree without being disagreeable.  

On the other hand, if reading something with which you disagree is intolerable to you – if you insist that everything you read be tribal orthodoxy – there are plenty of other blogger-whores out there happy to pander to you.

They’ll say what you want to hear, every single time. They’ll please and pleasure you, orgasmically, and even pretend to have a simultaneous one with you – so long as you keep clicking.

Why on earth did Pretti bring a gun to a protest?

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Alex Pretti did something foolish and illegal at the protest in Minneapolis. He interfered with law enforcement agents. There will be debates for days if not years about whether his illegal interference with the cops, the discovery of his gun, and his violent resistance justified them shooting him.

In considering that issue, I urge readers to consider it not from the warm comfort of their recliner while watching slow-motion videotapes interspersed with football highlights, but from the perspective of cops who are being taunted, spat upon, name-called, and threatened with being run over by organized protesters in the bitter cold, who suddenly discover in a scuffle that one of those protesters has a gun hidden in his pants.

(I’m glad to report that speculation that the gun was planted on Pretti by the cops appears to be disproven.)

But let’s put to one side the issue of whether the shooting was justified. Even now, we still don’t have enough facts to make that determination.

Let’s instead consider a threshold issue: Why did Pretti bring a gun?

Note that it’s not illegal in America for ordinary citizens to own a gun. And it’s not illegal to protest non-violently.

It’s not even illegal to bring a gun to a protest (despite claims to the contrary by a Trump Administration official).

In short, whatever illegalities Alex Pretti committed at the protest, he did nothing illegal in putting a gun in his pants and going there.

But why did he? Why did he hide a loaded gun in his pants?

Ordinary people carry guns routinely for lots of reasons. Most of those reasons are poor ones, in my judgment, but not illegal ones. Some ordinary people carry guns simply because it makes them feel secure or even masculine. Some ordinary people carry guns because it plays into boyish fantasies.

And a few ordinary people carry guns because they have legitimate reasons to think they may need them for lawful self-defense and they have the expert skill and excellent judgment to use them properly in that mode.

Pretti seems not to be in the latter category. Rather, he brought a gun to the protest because it made him feel secure or masculine or fulfilled boyish fantasies. Sadly, those feelings and fantasies cost him his life.

Before leaving this incident, there’s a tribal juxtaposition here that is worth noting. Conservatives typically defend and even celebrate owning and carrying a gun, while liberals typically decry the same. Conversely, liberals typically defend and even celebrate protests of law enforcement, while conservatives typically decry the same.

So, conservative and liberal tribalists are left in a quandary when somebody brings a gun to a protest of the immigration laws. Conservatives wonder, do we defend the gun-toter even if he’s protesting? Liberals wonder, do we defend the protester even if he totes a gun?

I like the fact that this quandary forces the tribes to think past tribal identities. Conservatives are forced to acknowledge that owning and carrying a gun may be lawful but there are circumstances where it isn’t smart or right. Liberals are forced to acknowledge that protesting may be lawful but there are circumstances where that, too, isn’t smart or right.

In short, judging an act often requires thought beyond merely identifying the tribe of the person performing that act.  A bit more thought and a bit less tribalism would be helpful these days.