06/13/2026
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Hope, Protest, Repression

966 Words: Is Hope Enough?

I was fourteen years old when four Kent State University student protesters were gunned down by Ohio National Guard riflemen in 1970. Not two weeks later, a college student and a high schooler were killed by local police and Mississippi Highway Patrol officers who shot wildly at dorm windows on the Jackson State University campus during an antiwar, civil rights protest.

Kent State, May 4, 1970.

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Phillip Lafayette Gibbs (L) & James Earl Green, Jackson State Shooting Victims, May 12, 1970.

In the days between those killings, a mob of 1200 construction workers and well-dressed Wall Street hoods went on a rampage in New York City, stopping traffic, smashing windows, and beating the hell out of anti-war protesters and any passersby who appeared to them to be long-haired peaceniks. The incident was called the Hard Hat Riot.

A Hard Hat Pummels a Bystander, May 8, 1970.

I was 69, just a few weeks shy of 70, this year when protesters Renee Goode and Alex Pretti were summarily executed by federal ICE agents.

In October, a US Border Patrol agent who’d been helping round up people in the president’s Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, shot Marimar Martinez five times after the vehicle she was driving collided with the agent’s. Somehow she survived.

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Fifty six years have elapsed between the first and last of these incidents. I’d have bet, back when I was an idealistic, hopeful teenager that even though America’s Vietnam War was a colossal fiasco and this nation’s race relations were a miserable mess and armed and dangerous authoritarian thugs, both deputized and ad hoc, were visiting violence upon dissenters, that a half century hence we’d be living in a better place.

The year 2026 in America, I’d have been certain, would be a utopia of peace and harmony, with whatever technology that’d been invented making our lives a whirl of leisure, pleasure, and discovery.

Last I checked, things haven’t turned out quite that way.

That’s one of the beauties of youth. The young can dream. They can hope. The future is a world of infinite possibilities. Young people possess a certainty that they, unlike their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, can fix this world.

Well, that was one of the beauties of youth. It seems young people today are lonely, alienated, pessimistic, even hopeless. Too bad. A person without hope is the walking dead.

What got me thinking about all this was an interview I did this week for a Bloom magazine article. It’ll be about a new development at the Stone Age Institute, that world-renowned center of inquiry into human evolution just northwest of Bloomington. Founders Kath y Schick and Nick Toth are building a new wing on their facility to house a huge gift of materials and fossils that recently came their way. The wing and the stuff it’ll hold will  turn their academic operation into the world capital of research into early human history. It’s already one of the top places on the planet to come to for academics who are nosy about our species origins.

The Stone Age Institute.

If you’re curious about what’s going on there, you’ll just have to wait for my story to appear in the August/September issue of Bloom.

Anyway, I spent an afternoon with Kathy and Nick, who’ve been married for 49 years, for pete’s sake, and who attribute at least some of the success of their half century-long relationship to the fact that they spent countless nights in tiny tents at archeological digs in the Serengeti and other proto-human birthplaces. If the couple was heading toward one of those typical blowouts that young marrieds experience, they’d have to make amends fast because they’d be cooped up with each other all night long.

“You just can’t slam a tent door,” Kathy Schick says, laughing. “And there’s no place to go!”

Toth (L) & Schick in Kenya, 1977.

Kathy wasn’t laughing on May 4, 1970. That day, when four anti-war protesters were killed by National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus, she dodged a metaphorical bullet.

You see, Kathy Schick had been standing at almost precisely the spot you can see in the top photo, the iconic snapshot of the young woman, Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming in grief and terror over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, a Kent State student she’d just met moments before. That photo is sometimes referred to as the Kent State Pieta, after Michelangelo’s La Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

Kathy was protesting the Vietnam War that day. She was an undergrad at Kent State at the time, studying to become, eventually, a paleoanthropologist and archeologist. She’d earn her doctorate years later at the University of California-Berkeley.

She was damned lucky to be able to become a renowned scientist. That Monday, she was part of a small group of geology students and their professor among the larger mass of protesters. At one point the professor, in  tears, began imploring her students to leave the protest. The professor could sense that the confrontation was about to swirl out of control. “There are gonna be deaths if you guys stay here,” the professor said.

Kathy found herself in tears, too. Hers were caused by the clouds of teargas hanging over the grassy knoll Commons, a big open space on campus where the protesters and Guardsmen faced off against each other. Her eyes burning, Kathy rushed into a nearby campus building to wash the chemicals out. She could barely see. “I was just inside,” she says, “and the shots rang out.”

Some young people who dare to protest never make it to old age. Some do. It doesn’t matter if they’re optimistic or pessimistic. And that utopia of peace and harmony is forever tantalizingly out of reach. Maybe today’s jaded youth have a more realistic outlook than I had way back in 1970. But I had hope.

06/01/2026
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Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers

1030 Words: Rife With Contradictions

I’m always excited when I get my hands on a new, compelling book. Right now, I’m gobbling up Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of radical revolutionaries, longtime fugitives, and legal and education activists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

It’s the author’s memoir about his family’s years on the run. Mom Dohrn, Dad Ayers, and their two small boys (they called their dad Bill) lived out of their vehicles and in communes or roadside motels, assumed false names, and were constantly on the alert for tails and phone taps. Mom and Bill fretted endlessly that they’d be recognized in public or some trusted friend (of whom there were few) might blow the whistle on them. Bernardine had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List at the onset of their fugitive years (she was removed after some charges were dropped due to police misbehavior) but Bill never made the cut despite the fact that the two were co-founders of the Weather Underground that was responsible for bank robberies, bombings, and other crimes.

Bill, in fact, was one of the leaders of the Days of Rage, four days of mayhem in Chicago in October 1969 including pitched battles between street protesters and the cops, vandalism, and physical violence. Bernardine and Bill had been leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society and had grown disenchanted with the SDS’s talk-rather-than-action ways. The SDS was committed to demanding an end to the Vietnam War and for full civil rights for Blacks. Dohrn and others felt the war and the country’s endemic racism had to be challenged actively, passionately, and violently. So she  helped form a splinter organization called the Revolutionary Youth Movement which eventually morphed in to the Weather Underground, or the Weathermen (from the Bob Dylan lyric, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.”

The RYM/Weathermen declared “a state of war” on the United States and planted bombs on college campuses, at police stations, in  the US Capitol, and other places. Famously, three Weathermen were killed when a bomb they were working on in a Greenwich Village townhouse prematurely exploded. (Factoid: the then-unknown Dustin Hoffman lived next door; he wasn’t home at the time of the blast.)

Greenwich Village Bomb Blast, March 6, 1970 (Credit: Neal Bonzi/New York Times)

The Days of Rage, by the way, coincided with the start of the Chicago 8 trial. (That’s right, it was the Chicago 8 at first; Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, one of the original defendants, would be separated from the case by Judge Julius Hoffman.) I idolized the eventual Chicago 7. I was 12 through 14 years old when they became known for purportedly conspiring to riot at the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago through their trial and acquittal in federal district court. My high school nickname was Abbey, a misspelling honoring Abbie Hoffman, whom I thought was the coolest human ever to walk the earth.

(L-R, top row) Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis; (bottom row) Bobby Seale, Leew Weiner, John Froines, David Dellinger

Here’s a poster calling out for participants for the upcoming Days of Rage in the summer of ’69:

For this rebellious, theatrical teenager growing up in a profoundly racist, Mob-infested, crushingly provincial neighborhood, home to cops, firemen, politicians, and working class families, the Chicago 8/7 represented my own individuation, my statement that I was never gonna be like the rest of you people, that as soon as I could, I’d get the hell out of the northwest side’s boring Galewood precincts, and see the world. I wasn’t going to work in a factory. I wasn’t going to be a cop. I was scared of heights so being a firemen was out. And my hair was too long for me to be a politician. Oh, and the Mob guys were assholes who saw me as a hippie fag.

I could have fit in nicely with the Chicago 8/7.

That is, until I figured out too many of them were overbearing, spectacularly hypocritical stage hogs. As I grew older, I realized my own hunger for attention was better sated on the actual stage or by my newspaper and magazine byline.

Not that the 8/7’s dedication to ending the war and securing equity and equality for Blacks and other oppressed minorities of the world were false or wrong. Abbie Hoffman might have been a ham, Jerry Rubin a self-serving bullshitter, and Tom Hayden a prime example of male arrogance, but the things they opposed were worth getting busted for, getting clunked on the head with a nightstick, or running wild down Michigan Avenue to dramatize the madness of it all.

They were, in other words, human beings rife with all the contradictions of our species. Within every saint there is a sinner, and vice versa.

That’s why Zayd Dohrn’s memoir is so riveting. He reveals Bernardine, the true center and power of the family, as a complicated person, difficult to analyze, impossible to confine within a box, ultimately unknowable. She was constantly a center of attention yet she hated having all eyes on her. Humorless. Unyielding. Doubt is alien to her.  She was flamboyantly imperfect even as she sought a classless, communist, equitable — and, yes, perfect — society.

The statues of all my heroes are chipped, partially broken, discolored, and teetering. Mark Twain wrote a lot of crappy stuff. Mike Royko was a drunken brawler. FDR was a scheming charmer. JFK a slave to his dick. Too many of the men i revere share Kennedy’s addiction to sex. Perhaps that’s a feature, not a bug, of male “success.”

The women I lionize — Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, Dorothy Parker, Rebecca Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and others — seem less obsessed by accumulating a lengthy roster of sexual conquests but they, too, are imperfect, each in her own way.

So it is with Bernardine Dohrn. Seventy-five to eighty percent of what she has said and done are worthy of admiration. But that other twenty or twenty-five percent? Communism? Bombing restrooms in police stations? Forcing two little kids to live a life on the run from the law?

Nobody’s perfect. Me among them.

(L-R) Bill Ayers, Zayd Dohrn, Bernardine Dohrn (Credit: David Handschuh/AP)

05/27/2026
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Anti-intellectualism, Education

795 Words: Assembly Line Education

The late George Carlin had a bit about parents, kids, and schools. Carlin, for my money, was one of the few American standup comedians who could also be called philosophers. He and Will Rogers and Mark Twain.

And, yeah, Mark Twain was a standup comedian, arguably the first in history. He made a living mainly by making public appearances before packed houses around the world and…, well, talking. About life. About people. About current events. About god. About, for pity’s sake, everything and anything. His audiences, as a rule, laughed themselves silly.

Carlin joked about all the ubiquitous suburban moms with messages on their Dodge Caravans in the 1980s and ’90s. He ranted:

These people with bumper stickers that say “We are the proud parents of an honor student at the Franklin school,” or the Midvale Academy, or whatever other innocent sounding name has been assigned to the indoctrination center where their child has been sent to be stripped of his individuality and turned into an obedient, soul-dead, conformist member of the American consumer culture. Here’s a bumper sticker I’d like to see: We are the proud parents of a child whose self esteem is sufficient that he doesn’t need us promoting his minor scholastic achievements on the back of our car. Or, We are the proud parents of a child that has resisted his teachers’ attempts to break his spirit and bend him to the will of his corporate masters.

His audience roared. Like Twain’s. Carlin employed hyperbole. Like Twain did. And, like Twain’s, his exaggerations were firmly grounded on simple, unassailable truths.

Not that teachers are villainous tools of corporate America. They’re not. But schools are. And that’s one of the reasons, in these polarized times, that teachers are viewed as The Problem by the Right and heroes by the Left. That is, if you accept my assertion that the Right is firmly in the clutches of corporate America and has bought its self-serving messaging hook, line, and sinker. Teaching is one of those vocations wherein liberalism, progressivism, or woke-ism is endemic. If you define liberalism as an open, embracing, understanding, respectful, sensitive, non-rigid way of looking at the world — which I do — then teachers, artists, musicians, librarians, psychotherapists, journalists, homeless advocates, settlement house workers, day care providers, and many others are, almost by definition, liberal, progressive, or woke.

Hedge fund managers, surgeons, gun shop owners, military careerists, law enforcement workers, and many others tend not to be.

Of course, there are exceptions to both of the above generalizations but if you pick out a random cop and a random teacher and ask each whom they voted for in 2024, you’ll likely have been able to guess accurately beforehand what their answers’d be. Want evidence? A Princeton study looked at police officers’ voting patterns; the Educational Freedom Institute pored over teachers’ political campaign spending. Seems pretty clear to me.

For soldiers, inquisitiveness and empathy rank low as necessary traits. For reporters and social workers, they are paramount. Yeah, careers, by and large, can be categorized as liberal or conservative.

Teachers don’t want your kids to be brain-dead malleable consumers. But they’re forced to helm classrooms that really are factories turning out obedient, conformist products. Also known as graduates.

Those American graduates, according to one non-American observer, are “easier to manage.” That non-American is a woman named Samantha Waite. She offers a slicing, dicing, crushing perspective of American schools and the anti-intellectualism that is built into them over the last 200 years. She cites the outsized influence of educator Horace Mann, who traveled to Germany in 1843 and was spectacularly bowled over by the Prussian System of school teaching. Nothing illustrates that line of pedagogy (I hate that word, so forgive me) more than the Prussian “innovation” of bolting kids’ desks and chairs to the floor in rigid rows. Mann loved that idea and American school systems similarly ate it up.

The Prussian System and its subsequent American offspring, says Waite, became itself a factory. US industrialists and the American politicians they controlled, she argues, saw the Prussian System as the perfect assembly line for a workforce. She says:

Children sat in rows, faced forward, memorized what the teacher said, and did not question. They received, retained, and repeated. Teacher was the authority and the authority was never to be questioned. This model suited American industrialists perfectly. The country was industrializing rapidly. It needed workers who would show up, follow instructions, operation machinery safely, and did not organize. It did not need workers who asked why. The Prussian System delivered exactly what was required and it became the foundational architecture of the American public education system. Much of it remains intact today.

Aw, hell, why should I make Waite’s argument for her? Listen to her for yourself:

 

05/25/2026
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Artificial Intelligence

267 Words: Artificial Idiocy

As if you didn’t know, AI is full of shit. Or at least LLMs are full of shit; the overall term, AI, is more accurately described as a ticking time bomb, let’s leave it at that.

I had to google an old Electron Pencil post just now and the AI result read as follows:

The “Electron Pencil” is a publication run by writer and activist John Keith that frequently covers historical injustices and social movements, including the tragic 1985 MOVE bombing.The MOVE bombing was a catastrophic event in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985, when the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a C-4 explosive bomb on a row house in West Philadelphia occupied by MOVE, a Black liberation group. The resulting fire destroyed 61 homes and killed 11 people, including five children.For a deeper dive into the historical timeline and the aftermath of the tragedy, consult the resources below:The MOVE Bombing: Read the detailed historical background on Wikipedia’s 1985 MOVE bombing page.Media Coverage: Stream the PBS Newshour segment exploring the largely forgotten history of the event.Electron Pencil: Access the publication’s commentary on civil disobedience and history on The Electron Pencil.

I have no idea who John Keith is. And, for pity’s sake, I am not an activist, as that would entail me working with a group of people (and everyone knows how much I have an aversion to working with groups of people). The result at least did go on to accurately give my URL I did once ramble on about the MOVE bombing, too.

Bear with me a moment while I run to the bathroom and check the mirror to make sure I’m not John Keith.

Me. Not John Keith.

Okay, I’m back. I’m not.

 

05/19/2026
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Christie's Auction, The Painted Word

537 Words: Art 101

The auction house, Christie’s, sold more than a billion dollars’-worth of art last night.

To be precise, $1.1 billion.

Even in this era of wartime, post-pandemic inflation, that’s a lot of scratch.

If you spend, for instance, an average of $225 a week on groceries, $1.1 billion’ll keep you rolling in potato chips, bananas, Black Forest ham, and frozen peas for the next 94,000-plus years. That is, you, your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, and what the hell ever humanity evolves into following our species’ inevitable nuclear holocausts, climate disasters, the Trump presidency, and other horrifyingly adverse developments in store for us.

The artists whose works were peddled last night include Jackson Pollock, Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg. Of that list, eight won’t see a penny of the take because they’re dead. Only Johns remains alive but he’s 96 as of today, so I don’t think another few zeroes added to his savings account total would mean terribly much to him.

Then again, at least one artist’ll see a payday.

The art world is full of shit. We’ve known that for at least a half century. In 1975, the “New Journalism” author Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Word was published by Farrar, Straus. In it, Wolfe revealed and lambasted the kings of “Cultureburg,” the tight-knit little bunch of art critics who told the world what was good and what was not in the realms of painting, sculpture, and other creative pastimes.

Pastimes being the operative word here inasmuch as artists rarely make enough money to purchase even a ten-year old car but their artwork sometimes can enrich the already rich by millions, hundreds of millions, or, like last night, billions.

It’s a racket, I tell you.

Wolfe wrote that 20th century art had devolved from the representational — that is, pictures of things — to a lawyerly brief arguing nuances of Art Theory. In other words, bullshit.

In fact, a 2021 essay in the venerable British journal ArtReview was entitled, “Why We Tolerate the Art World’s Bullshit.”

Pollock, by the way, most specifically embodied the art world’s bullshit with his dribs-and-drabs, streaks-and-splotches canvases that resembled the colorfully oil-splattered jeans and smocks of countless painters, pros and hobbyists alike. A plumber viewing any of Pollock’s works might be ridiculed for commenting, “My kindergarten kid coulda done that,” even though that critique was more true and astute than a thousand reviews penned by the habitués of Cultureburg.

A woman contemplates a Pollock.

It puzzles me that some enterprising artist has yet to offer up her rainbowed blue jeans as an actual work of art and made scads of dough on them. Proof positive that artists, by and large, are lousy businesspeople. The greed monkeys who excel in business ought to have come up with this idea themselves but so far have not. Just wait.

As for Pollock, at least he did something, as infantile and pretentiously pointless as his work was, as opposed to the moneyed art collectors who bid obscene amounts for his painting at Christie’s last night. People cheered for and congratulated the winning bid as if the painting’s new owner had, y’know, actually made something.

Yeah, the art world’s full of shit.

 

 

04/23/2026
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InfoWars, The Onion

646 Words: The Joke’s on the Joker

Definitions from Merriam-Webster:

Laughingstock: Noun, an object of ridicule.

Joke: Noun, something said or done to provoke laughter or cause amusement, as a witticism, a short and amusing anecdote, or a prankish act.

If Alex Jones’ old InfoWars website wasn’t so hateful, deceptive, inane, hurtful, and…, and…, well, you get the picture, it’d have been a laughingstock. Jones was the noxious gasbag who, during the years of InfoWars’ ascension, polluted the airwaves and the internet with preposterous accusations and outright lies. For instance, Pink News in 2018 published a list of “The 11 Craziest Conspiracy Theories InfoWars Pushed about LGBT People.” Here they are:

  1. Barack Obama is having gay sex with 10 dudes a day
  2. Schools are turning your kids gay to make them want to have sex with your car
  3. Violent lesbians are coming to eat your brains
  4. Drag queens are putting chemicals in the water to recruit your child
  5. Joan Rivers was murdered for calling Michelle Obama transgender
  6. Anderson Cooper is an undercover CIA agaent sent to take down Donald Trump
  7. Lady Gaga is a Nazi stanic goddess and her Super Bowl performance was an eleborate ritual to summon the anitchrist
  8. The governemtn is putting chemicals in the water and turning frogs gay
  9. The US is getting ready to nuke the “fairies and pansies” in China
  10. LGBT people are creating cyborgs to destroy civilization

The eleventh item was just a catchall for Jone’s long history of mentioning, slurring, libeling, and obsessing about LGBTQI people.

Jones thought and opined about LGBTQI people a lot. A lot.

I wonder why. In any case, that’s a matter for him and his shrink.

Jones would go off on every other hot-button issue, too, making crazy shit up, amplifying other conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams, and demonizing anybody who didn’t own a pickup truck that rolled coal.

Alex Jones’ Kind of People.

By 2017, InfoWars was getting more than ten million views/listens/clicks a month. Jones made hundreds of millions of dollars peddling his fuckery. That says more about America than a hundred elementary school US history textbooks ever could. Oh, and guess who dug the hell out of Alex Jones — need I reveal this person now lives on Pennsylvania Avenue in DC?

It all came tumbling down for Jones after the horrifying Sandy Hook massacre. Jones screeched that the shooting and killings were staged, popularizing the term “crisis actors,” and convincing millions of coal rollers that all those grieving parents were in on the scam.

Those parents, doubly traumatized, responded by suing the bejesus out of Jones. They won and Jones was forced into the earthly hell of bankruptcy. Of course, I can only hope and pray there is an afterlife hell, if only to house the likes of Alex Jones for eternity.

Jones’ bankruptcy executors are seeking a purchaser for InfoWars, as a way to maximize financial payouts to the parents who sued him. Lo and behold, one of the potential buyers for the media operation is The Onion.

Yep. That fabulous, indispensable satiric website, one of my go-to reads since the early ’90s. Just this week, The Onion has proffered a plan to license the InfoWars name and infrastructure so it can begin publishing a parody version of it.

I hope the plan is accepted. There’s scads of legal folderol that have to be navigated, sure, but the sooner Jones and his evil creation become punch lines, the better.

You might say it’ll never be appropriate to laugh at such poison. I’ll counter with Mel Brooks’ masterpiece, The Producers. Staged on Broadway just 22 years after Hitler’s Nazi’s were crushed, The Producers brought down the house with ditties like “Springtime for Hitler.”

Don’t be stupid/

Be a smarty.

Come and join/

the Nazi party!

From the Movie, The Producers.

Brilliant! It’s never too soon to reduce the worst among us to laughingstocks.

Alex Jones and his Infowars were never jokes when they were at their height.

They are now.

04/20/2026
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Donald Trump, Intelligence

Lots of Words: The Showman’s Brain

Li’l Duce is not Hitler. That is, he’s not a Nazi.

Then again he is Hitler. Or, more accurately, just like him.

His ex-wife, Ivana, once said he kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table.

Which, by the way, you have to take with a grain of salt. Caligu-lite has never been known for book reading.

I’ve thought all along he’s always patterned himself after the Führer, but, hey, you can say that about a lot of people. Hitler was a showman. As he was ascending to power, he would pose and gesticulate in front of a mirror, practicing his stance, the look on his face, the messages his eyes and grimace conveyed, the force and determination his finger-pointing or air-punching implied. Hitler once hired a phographer to snap photos of him giving a pretend speech in his living room. He studied those pix obsessively, looking for the best, most effective poses and demeanors.

Funny thing, Bob Dylan used to stand in front a mirror as well when he was a rising young folkie, practicing his stance and look.

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Showmen all.

No, I don’t think 45/47 actually read Mein Kampf, at least all the way through. Most of it has to do with social classes, history, economic philosophies, Darwinism, human and animal behavior, means of production, international relations, bureaucratic structures, et cetera. None of which has ever interested our current president. He’s flamboyantly incurious about all that. About all everything, for that matter. Except power.

My guess is Donald Trump has always been fascinated by Hitler’s ability to hypnotize a nation, a very big, broad, sophisticated nation. It is not Nazism that attracts Trump; it’s the ability to hold a population in the palm of his hand. I can imagine Trump saying to himself, How in the hell did he do it? and then setting himself to the task of finding out and adopting the lessons from the master.

Anyway, the author and journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez today released a little essay on Trump and his intelligence on her Substack blog, The Pugilist. We err, she says, when we call him stupid. That doesn’t mean he’s an intellectual or that he’s well-read, because he’s not. That’s not the point.

The point is Donald J. Trump possesses a kind of intelligence particular to people like him, like Hitler, or even like a Mafia don. They all three possess an animal intelligence. Valdes makes the comparison to a shark: we don’t consider a shark stupid because it can’t do algebra, but it is intelligent enough to outthink almost every critter in the ocean. In fact, why don’t I just reproduce Valdes’s essay right here:

What Your Cat Understands About Donald Trump That Most Democrats Don’t

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for THE PUGILIST

Apr 19, 2026

This morning I received another comment on a recent post — the post in which I had compared Donald Trump to Vito Genovese — insisting the parallel was invalid. The reason given: Trump is an idiot. Too stupid to actually run anything.

I’ve been getting variations of this comment for years, always from people on the left, always offered as though it settles something. It doesn’t. It reveals, instead, a failure of perception that I believe is one of the most costly analytical mistakes Trump’s opponents continue to make.

When Democrats dismiss Donald Trump as too stupid to be effective, they lose. They’ve been losing that bet for a decade, and they will keep losing it for the same reason a person might call a shark stupid for not doing algebra. The shark isn’t trying to do algebra. That’s not what it’s for.

There are different kinds of intelligence in the world. A cat cannot discuss philosophy, but it can do lots of things we can’t. It can jump six times its own height from standing, catch a hummingbird in flight, and twist itself mid-fall to land on its feet. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. We do not call ourselves stupid for lacking gifts that simply fall outside another creature’s metric. We should extend the same analytical honesty to Donald Trump — not to admire him, but to see him clearly, which is something his opponents have catastrophically failed to do.

Trump is, by most conventional measures, a deeply limited man. His reading is reportedly poor. His attention span is narrow. His grasp of history, policy, science, and law is weak at best. At the kind of intelligence most of us value — the capacity for empathy, for genuine human connection, for moral reasoning — he is, by the evidence of his entire life, essentially deficient. But none of that intelligence is required to run the Mafia. Or, as it turns out, the government.

What Trump possesses instead is something rarer and more dangerous than most of his critics have been willing to name: he may be the greatest con artist and mob operator the world has ever produced — quite simply the most effective sociopath to ever walk this earth. Consider the scale of what he has accomplished. He convinced tens of millions of working-class Americans that a Manhattan real estate heir who spent decades extracting wealth from contractors, students, investors, and tenants is their champion against elites. That is a con of staggering audacity — and it has not merely survived exposure, it has fed on it. Every indictment became a fundraising event. Every scandal became evidence of persecution. He somehow engineered a fraud immune to the mechanism that ends all frauds. Is that stupidity? I’d say it’s a form of operational genius. Repugnant, yes. Not something most people would want to do or be proud of. But a kind of genius nonetheless.

The organizational structure around Trump is not merely like organized crime — it is structurally identical to it: loyalty oaths, omertà culture, intermediaries for dirty work, pardons dangled as currency, defectors punished, soldiers rewarded. No Mafia don in history ran that kind of operation at the scale of a nation-state, with a major political party as his instrument. The Gambinos controlled parts of New York. The Cartels each have their little patch of Mexico or Colombia. But Trump? He controls half of America’s political reality, and all of its government at the moment. He captured the judiciary and the house. And he did it by being a con man. The comparison to Genovese is not hyperbole. It is taxonomy.

His critics might object that Hitler, too, was this kind of operator — and they would be right, which is precisely the point. Hitler was also mostly a moron, but with one special, horrible gift. Hollywood has done us a grave disservice with its brooding, thoughtful Nazi officers, staring meaningfully into the middle distance. Screenwriters projected their own fantasy of what powerful evil looks like onto men who were, in most respects, idiots and buffoons — gifted only in the precise ways that mattered for what they were trying to do. Only Charlie Chaplin, working from the music hall tradition, understood that buffoonery and menace are not opposites. His portrait of the dictator in The Great Dictator is psychologically truer than almost anything that followed. Hannah Arendt reached for the same truth at Nuremberg, finding not a monster in the dock but a mediocre bureaucrat — the banality of evil, she called it, to the outrage of people who needed evil to be smarter and more interesting than it is.

Trump is not more interesting than he appears. He is exactly as venal, as shallow, as reflexive as his critics say. But he is, within his own operational domain, essentially unrivaled at being evil. His cunning is largely instinctual rather than strategic, for he, like all other serial killers, lacks a conscience entirely — he wins by smell more than by plan, which is why his operation is chaotic even when it’s effective — but the results speak for themselves. Decades of survival. A second term. A country reorganized around his appetites.

We do not need to think the rattlesnake is “smart” to respect what it can do. We do not need to grant Trump the kind of intelligence we value to acknowledge the kind he has, that most of us, mercifully, lack. Calling him stupid is not accurate, because it is a failure of perception — and it is one his most sanctimonious opponents keep paying for.

Where Trump outdoes his Third Reich and La Cosa Nostra mentors is his realm has been granted and ratified by plus-75 million people three times since 2016. Adolph Hitler and Vito Genovese had to slaughter people to keep them in line. Trump only has to entertain them to hold on to power.

He is the greatest showman of all time.

04/15/2026
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MAGA, Nihilism

638 Words: Nothin’ To Lose

Believe me, I’m happy as hell watching Li’l Duce‘s support erode with each passing day. He’s on a fast track to becoming one of least-approved presidents ever. That 35 percent of American voters whom he has leaned on for ten years, that rock hard base, is wearing away faster than the ratty carpeting in Caligu-lite’s office when he was being courted to host The Apprentice.

BTW, the lowest approval rating for any president came about in 1952 when Harry Truman could only muster a scant 22 percent of Americans thumbs-upping his job performance. His party got smushed in that fall’s elections.

Fingers crossed.

A similarity between Truman and Trump’s non-support (likely the sole similarity between the two anyone could ever find): each was prosecuting a war the general public just didn’t get. Truman’s successor that fall, an army general, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, for pity’s sake, swiftly got the US out of Korea. Will President Pritzker pull an Ike?

Toes crossed, too.

Peaceniks?

Anyway, we all, those of us on my side of the fence, are busy patting ourselves on the back as The Mad King’s cult withers away. As well we should.

Yet, there’s a nag. This house-of-cards-tumbling bodes something awfully disturbing. See, those who enrolled in the MAGA gang flocked to the orange arsonist largely because they’d lost faith in pretty much every American institution. Congress, they believed, couldn’t get anything done. All politicians are corrupt. All scientists are on some corporation’s payroll. Doctors are in the pocket of Big Pharma. University professors are commies. Union stewards are mob goons. School teachers want your kids to change their sex. All the news on TV and in the papers is fake. The country’s being overrun by illegal immigrants and they’re getting everything for free.

They believed, as Bernie Sanders has so astutely observed, the whole system was broken and they were getting screwed.

This holy land, they held, was going to hell in a handbasket and the only man who could stop the slide was Donald J. Trump. If they believed in nothing else, at least they believed in something. Him.

Now, though, more and more of them are losing faith in their savior even as he tries to re-position himself as that other Savior.

Jesus Christ!

For many MAGA-ites, the above now-deleted social media image is the last straw. They could excuse anything — Trump’s pussy-grabbing, his mocking of the handicapped reporter, his insulting of anybody who got in his way, his family’s slurping at the trough, his betrayal of America’s allies, his fomenting of the January 6th insurrection, his coziness with Vlad Putin, his stupid Iran War, jeez, the list could go on forever. Well, not quite forever. Nobody fucks with the Jesus, to borrow a line from The Big Lebowski.

Nobody. Not even Trump.

The man whom they trusted to save them from…, from…, well, from everything, from every evil in this rotten country, from transexuals in schoolgirls’ bathrooms, from fake news, from illegal Mexicans living high on the hog, from college professors trying to groom your kids, from feminists who want to force your wife to have an abortion, from USPS employees, from NPR, from liberals, from Democrats, from everybody and every thing that’s not them, now is losing their trust

And therein lies the problem. Once MAGA loses faith in Trump, they’ll have faith in nothing.

They’ll become nihilists.

And that’s a scary crowd. Nihilists can find no more meaning in life. They eschew morality. They trust no one, not even friends or family. They become depressed, even suicidal. They’re desperate to escape reality. They become violent. They want to tear everything down because, well, why not?

If Trump continues to lose his 35 percent, that gang’s gonna turn even uglier than it already is.

Fasten your seatbelts, friends.

 

04/10/2026
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American Schizophrenia

777 Words: American Duality

Franklin. Washington. Jefferson. Jackson. Brown. Calhoun. Lincoln. Davis. Morgan. Roosevelt. Wilson. Hoover (J. Edgar). Fr. Coughlin. Lindbergh. Roosevelt (another one). Truman. McCarthy. Kennedy. Kennedy (his brother). Wallace. Nixon. Reagan. Limbaugh. Obama. Trump.

All huge figures in American history. All left deep, indelible marks on the country and the world. And the lot of them constitute a range of morality that stretches from saintliness to arch-villainy.

Americans: Lindbergh (L) & Limbaugh.

Even the saints, though, whomever you wish to characterize in that fashion, possessed some level of mischief or even depravity.

There really are no saints. But there are sinners galore. Each of us carries within the capability to hurt, to harm, to rob, to lie, to shun, to insult. The best of us stand on our heads to resist the constant temptation to do any of those things.

I asked a guy once, Say you found a purse on the sidewalk. You look inside and see that it belongs to a 98-year-old woman and in it are any number of premium credit cards and a thousand dollars in cash. How long would it take for you to decide to do the right thing?

My thinking was, I’d fantasize for about seven seconds keeping the cash and rationalize it by saying obviously the woman is loaded and, anyway, she hasn’t got much time left on this planet, whereas I’m young, broke, and…, well, sure, I’d turn it in. Eventually. But I wouldn’t sprint to the police station to do it.

The guy, though, said I wouldn’t have a second thought about it. I’d turn it in immediately.

I didn’t believe him. I still don’t.

I’ve always felt it’s the second thought that makes us human, that makes us good people.

The worst of us obey only their first impulses.

That gang I listed above? An uncomfortable number of them are among the worst of us.

You can take any culture, any nation on Earth and create a similar roster of notables particular to it and say the same thing about them. There were great Indians and rotten Germans. Pious Thais and reprobate Congolese. Japanese capable of angelic love and hateful Brazilians.

Humans. Need I say more?

The United States of America, 250 years old this summer, is the most diverse country on Earth. People from every race and every nation live here, either because their parents or grandparents immigrated here or they were naturalized or their families have been here since the days of the Revolutionary War. Some Americans can even trace their lineage back to the Clovis people or the very first Asians who crossed the Ice Age land bridge at Alaska.

30,000-year-old human footprints found at White Sands, New Mexico.

America is home to Indians (Asian variety), Germans, Thais, Congolese, Japanese, Brazilians, and natives of every corner of the globe. There is, for pity’s sake, a community of Lhotshampa — Nepalis from Bhutan — living in and around a small Vermont village. Who knew?

Lhotshampa woman.

Because this holy land is home to every stripe of human, more so than any other land, holy or not, the United States of America embodies every possible quality of humanness. We are the best and the worst. The scales of our history teeter from one extreme to the other. We wrote a national charter forbidding royalty. We drew up a Bill of Rights previously unheard of in human history. We committed genocide upon Native Americans. We imported, bought, and sold slaves from Africa. We fought a war to put an end to slavery. We invented fantastic, fabulous machines. We brought electricity to the hills and hollows of Tennessee. We, slowly but surely, guaranteed freedoms and rights to nearly every citizen. We occasionally rescind those freedoms and rights. We welcomed immigrants from all over the world. We beat and robbed and scammed and imprisoned many of those immigrants. We helped crush the Nazis. We destroyed the Japanese warlords. We installed or propped up despots and tyrants in Iran, Vietnam, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other places.

Nothing illustrates this weird, contradictory, essentially schizophrenic way of life than today’s headlines. Not just today, as in these days, but actually today as in Friday, April 10, 2026. Just as four astronauts are scheduled to land in the Pacific Ocean off the San Diego coast after traveling farther out in space than any other humans ever have, this same nation stands arm in arm with a murderous Israeli regime in strafing, bombing, displacing, incinerating and, for all intents and purposes, committing genocide in the Middle East.

We can explore the heavens while at the same time slaughter other human beings. No nation is both as good and bad as this one.

03/27/2026
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ICE, Sheridan Gorman

953 Words: Democrats, Progressives: Stop Apologizing!

A terrible thing happened in my beloved hometown, Chicago, last week.

An 18-year-old freshman at Loyola University named Sheridan Gorman was out walking with a group of friends along the city’s far north side lakefront at 1:30 in the morning on March 19th. They’d hoped to take pictures of Chicago’s distant skyline from a pier.

The Jetty at Pratt Avenue on Lake Michigan the Next Morning.

Gorman, according to a Chicago Sun-Times story about the incident, was the first to reach the end of the pier. She turned around and saw a masked man, carrying a gun. The group began to scatter and then a shot rang out. Gorman was shot in the back. She died.

The young woman’s life was snuffed out at what might have been one of the most joyous, hopeful, promising moments she’d ever experienced. On her own at a university with her new circle of friends, taking in the sights of the big city, her entire adult future before her. I bet she was, in the words of the song, “as giddy as a baby on a swing.”

And some no-good son of a bitch took it all away from her.

The alleged shooter has been apprehended and charged. Of course, in this deranged American day and age, he turns out to be an immigrant in this country illegally. The White House and countless Trumpists on the internet all have become tumescent over the tragedy. You see, they’re bleating, that’s why we’ve got to round up all the illegal immigrants before they shoot us all.

Sheridan Gorman’s parents have issued a statement imploring people to stop using their daughter’s tragic death as a political talking point. Good luck with that.

Maria Hadden, the alderman of the 49th Ward where the killing occurred was asked about lakefront safety. She tried to assure neighbors and tourists that the lakefront is generally safe. She attempted to position the tragedy as an isolated incident. Gorman, she said, “was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

It would be impossible for her to utter a more innocuous statement. Sheridan Gorman, indeed, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her death was the definitive example of that old saw.

Yet, a disturbing number of media commentators have expressed outrage and callers to Hadden’s office have informed her that she should die for saying that. Their reasoning? She’s blaming the victim. Fox News and the New York Post have jumped on the fury bandwagon.

Hadden had to shut down her ward office for a few days this week because she and her staff were made jittery by the threats and the overall rage. In announcing her office’s temporary closing, Hadden apologized for saying what she did.

Let me repeat that. She apologized. It’s like the ghost of Sheridan Gorman apologizing to the man who pulled the trigger for getting in the way of his bullet.

This promiscuous apologizing business has got to stop. Especially that being done, obsessively, by Democrats, progressives, liberals, and pretty much everybody with whom I identify. Those on my side of the fence spend more time apologizing than coming up with effective strategies to prevent the Trump Party from turning this holy land into his personal fiefdom.

Just stop it.

But it ain’t gonna happen soon. Lest you think it’s just the MAGA mob who are pushing the memory of poor Sheridan aside to make room for their own gotchas or other tribal blatherings, keep in mind my old maxim: the worst thing about democracy is the people.

Another party felt the need to apologize in the fallout from Gorman’s killing.

The headline over a story on the apprehension and charging of the alleged shooter in the Loyola Phoenix, the university’s student newspaper, on March 23rd read: “Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved.” Again, it’s awfully hard to quibble with the headline. The man being charged was indeed an immigrant and, while many people who have come to these shores from other lands are law-abiding citizens or guests, a man who’s here without due authorization killing someone does indeed ring an alarm. If this nation had a reasonable, logical immigration policy as well as equitable, efficient enforcement thereof, the alleged shooter might not have been lying in wait for his innocent victim.

Instead, we have ICE, Trump’s schutzstaffel, busy rounding up as many brown-skinned souls as can fit in their unmarked vans to be sped off to some holding cage with few human comforts and next to no medical care. ICE was in Chicago this past winter, corralling scores of suspected illegal immigrants with impunity and killing at least one. Sheridan Gorman’s alleged shooter, by the way, somehow escaped the notice of ICE, despite its stated goal of apprehending “the worst of the worst” among undocumented immigrants. He, acc’d’g to reports, was arrested for shoplifting in 2023 and subsequently did not appear in court on that charge. Sounds like someone ICE ought to have been zeroing in on from the get-go.

Anyway, among all this tragic murdering, undocumented illegality, and private presidential police forcing, the Loyola Phoenix found it necessary to apologize for pointing out in its headline that the alleged shooter was an immigrant. Even worse, acc’d’g to its mea culpa, the newspaper referred to him in the body of the story as “illegal.”

The Loyola Phoenix got down on its hands and knees, as it were, groveled, and begged for forgiveness for using such horrifying language.

Meanwhile, ICE is taking over America’s airports in addition to Democrat-run cities. Its holding cages are still bursting at the seams while undocumented immigrants with criminal records are still at large.

And Sheridan Gorman remains dead.

Sheridan Gorman.

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