In The Mailbox: 06.24.26

Posted on | June 25, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The Based Book Romance Sale Is ON!
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: USAID’s Color Revolution Machine Arrives In America
357 Magnum: Any Bets on This Library Being a Gun-Free Zone?
EBL: European Heat Wave, Pan Fried Fish, New York Jew Hating Islamic-Commies Win In Primaries, and Bannockburn
Twitchy: Mayor Mamdani Spots a “Fundamental Constitutional Right” Nobody Else Can Find, Families Of Jailed Antifa Terrorists Livid – Claim Government Lied, and The Most Insane Video Flashbacks From the COVID Era
Louder With Crowder: Joy Behar LOVES democratic socialism, though is shocked once she finds out what it is, Zohran Mamdani And His Communist Mob Promise To Abolish ICE, Democrat official lashes out at  meeting, claims ICE is running concentration camps , “Catholic” priest celebrates Pride month with his trans music minister, because “love is so important”, and Trump can’t help but notice Dems don’t call him a “Nazi” anymore, and he’s got a hilarious reason why
Vox Popoli: Paper Beats Blood, The Lady-in-Waiting, A Masterclass on Time, and No Chance in Hell
The Abbey of Misrule: The Kingdom of Trees
Cedar Sanderson: On The Wire
Upstream Reviews: The Boston Tea Party Conspiracy
Born Lucky: Can This Woman Save Heterosexuality?
Stoic Observations:: The Overbearing, also, The Metro Progress Report
John C. Wright: Amelia Sings “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”, also, Lest We Forget
Sensurround: The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Trump Cancels Signing of Bipartisan Housing Bill, Demands Congress First Pass the SAVE Act, Trump Says Vandals Cut 350-Foot Gash in Reflecting Pool, 6 Arrested, 7 Given Citations For Damaging Pool, DOJ Finds USDA Preferences for ‘Socially Disadvantaged’ Farmers Discriminatory, Mamdani-Backed Radicals Sweep New York Primaries, and Judge Strikes Down Trump-Era Courthouse Arrest Policy
BattleSwarm: House Investigates Austin’s Own Soros-Backed DA Jose Garza
Behind The Black: Smooth on Mars is apparently not so smooth, Boeing wins $2 billion satellite contract from Space Force, and  Some details about SpaceX’s secretive Starfall demo mission
CDR Salamander: NATO’s Upcoming Ankara Summit
Don Surber: Court allows Trump to do his job
Flopping Aces: FISA Finally Died, and the Intelligence Blob Started Screaming About Democracy
Gates Of Vienna:  Road Trip, also, A Marxist Jew-Hating Incel?
The Geller Report: No Vote for SAVE AMERICA, But Thune’s Senate Rushes Through a Toothless “Iran War Powers” Act to Hamstring Trump, MASSIVE FRAUD BUSTS: Mass Arrests in Fraud Scandals, BILLIONS STOLEN, Antifa Terrorists Sentenced to Hundreds of Years for Ambush, DOJ Investigating NYC Coffee Shop That Banned, Publicly Humiliated Jewish Congressman, and THE HATE SLATE: Mamdani-Backed America-Hating Communist Candidates Sweep NYC Primaries
Hollywood In Toto: Meet the Mind Behind Viral A.I. ‘Mary Sue’ Animated Clip, Supergirl – Joyless DC Flop is a Super Mess, Black Walrus Brims with Flatulence Gags, Not Politics, and Wait … Netflix Honors America’s 250th Birthday With This?
Legal Insurrection: Clean Sweep – A Very Good Night for Mamdani in New York Primaries, Minneapolis to Shut Down Off-Leash Dog Park Believed to be Native American Burial Site, DC Appeals Court Allows Trump to Fast-Track Deportations as Litigation Proceeds, Judge Blocks Trump From Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote, and Al Jazeera ‘Journalist’ Mourned by Mamdani was Hamas Terrorist, IDF Reveals
Nebraska Energy Observer: Innovation
Outkick: Caitlin Clark Shoved In Neck As Another Apparent Foul Goes Uncalled, FIFA Revokes Commentator’s Credentials Over On-Air Crashout, Scotland Fans Descend On Miami For Brazil Match After Drinking Boston Dry, Sophie Cunningham Protects Caitlin Clark With Ragebaiting Finger Wag, and Woman mourns loss of beloved White Castle in Queens
Power Line: Murder, the Deal, Socialism, Libel and the Supreme Court, Retraction, Quote of the day, At SPA, Matt Bauer’s lawsuit, and Antifa Gets What It Deserves
Shark Tank: DeSantis Reaffirms Push For Republican Gubernatorial Debate, Criticizes FL GOP
Shot In The Dark: Iran, Berg’s Law – Forward to the Foreword, and Berg’s Law – Forward
STUMP: RIP Alan Greenspan – On Parkinson’s Death Trends In The U.S. (1999-2025)
Transterrestrial Musings: SpaceX, also, The Second American Civil War
Victory Girls: Zohran Mamdani’s Socialist Wave Didn’t Start Yesterday
Watts Up With That: Some revealing screen dumps from the UK Met Office website, Lies, Damn Lies, and Climate Stats, The Forest Management Conundrum in the United States-Part 2, What Climate Crisis? Indonesia Taps Fossil Fuels, and Climate.gov Rides Again
The Federalist: Four Years Post-Dobbs, Corporate Media’s Abortion Fearmongering Proves More False Than Ever, Propaganda Media Gear Up To Whitewash New York’s Socialist Takeover, They Banned This Book To Keep You From Talking About Immigration, Senate RINOS Too Busy Scolding Trump To Pass Voter ID Bill, and The Disingenuous Schemer Ro Khanna Is A Model Democrat
Mark Steyn: Brexit at Ten, Live Around the Planet, and Musical Chairs

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Zizian Cult Update: Michelle Zajko Charged With Murdering Her Parents

Posted on | June 24, 2026 | No Comments

Zizian cult member Michelle Zajko

The most important part? “She did not act alone”:

A member of the cultlike group known as Zizians has been charged with murder in the [2022] shooting of her parents at their Pennsylvania home on her 30th birthday, and a prosecutor said Wednesday that authorities don’t believe she was acting alone.
Michelle Zajko, who has been jailed in Maryland on other charges since February 2025, has been charged with murder, burglary and conspiracy charges in the deaths of Rita and Richard Zajko, Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said at a news conference. The prosecutor said she did not act alone.
Rouse said that Zajko is known to have been among those who killed her parents “to the extent that if she wasn’t the one who actually pulled the trigger, she was certainly aligned with those who did.”
Online court records didn’t immediately indicate whether Zajko had an attorney in the Pennsylvania case as of Wednesday. An attorney representing her in Maryland did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment, and the Delaware County Public Defender’s office declined to comment.
The couple was shot to death in their home on New Year’s Eve after police say a neighbor’s doorbell camera captured video of a car pulling up to their home in Chester Heights, a voice shouting “Mom!” and another voice exclaiming, “Oh my God! Oh, God, God!”
Michelle Zajko has denied any involvement, and in court filings suggested her father might have killed her mother and then himself.
“I didn’t murder my parents,” she wrote in an April 2025 “ Open Letter to the World.”
Authorities, however, had long described Zajko as a person of interest in the double homicide, two of the six deaths linked to a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists who appear to share radical beliefs about veganism, animal rights, gender identity and artificial intelligence.

Murder victims Richard and Rita Zajko.

My suspicion is that authorities traced the bullets that killed Zajko’s parents to one of the guns that she is known to have purchased for her Zizian comrades. None of those currently in custody, including cult leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota and Teresa Youngblut, have cooperated with authorities, and if prosecutors have enough evidence to convict Zajko, she’ll likely continue denying her guilt even after she goes to prison while her accomplices go free. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

PREVIOUSLY:

• February 21, 2026: ‘Zizian’ Cult Member Gets Bailed Out
• February 17, 2026: Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Update: Maryland Trial Postponed Until June
• January 17, 2026: Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Update: Three ‘Zizians’ Make Court Appearance
• November 28, 2025: Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Update: Ziz Claims to Be ‘Genocide’ Victim
• August 14, 2025: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Feds Seek Death Penalty in Vermont
• June 29, 2025: LGBTQIA2S+ Pride Month Update: New Maryland Charges for Three Members of Radical Vegan Transgender Cult
• June 20, 2025: Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Update: Federal Weapons Charge Indictment
• April 21, 2025: Radical Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Brainwashed Zombie Praises ‘Ziz’ and Denies Killing Her Own Parents
• February 19, 2025: ‘Ziz’ Misgendered and Other Highlights of Tuesday’s Court Hearing for Cult Suspects
• February 18, 2025: Bail Hearing Today for Cult Suspects
• February 17, 2025: MUGSHOTS: Jack ‘Ziz’ LaSota, Michelle ‘Jamie’ Zajko, Daniel ‘Hastur’ Blank
• February 17, 2025: BREAKING: Cult Leader Jack ‘Ziz’ LaSota and Michelle Zajko Arrested in Maryland UPDATE: Third Suspect Also Captured
• February 17, 2025: ‘Remembrance’ for a Criminal
• February 16, 2025: Radical Vegan Transgender Death Cult Gets Mainstream Media Coverage
• February 2, 2025: Scott Siskind Didn’t Start the Fire: Rationalism, NY Times and the Zizians
• February 1, 2025: Real Murders, Fake Suicides: ‘Zizian’ Death Cult Fugitives Still at Large
• January 30, 2025: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Zizian ‘Anti-Law Enforcement Ideology’
• January 27, 2025: Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Implicated in Border Agent’s Death
Category: Crime, Maryland, Pennsylvania, The Transgender Cult


Feminists and Their Problems

Posted on | June 24, 2026 | No Comments



The 1979 psychological thriller When a Stranger Calls is a cult classic, famous for one line: “The call is coming from inside the house.”

That line came to mind Tuesday night after I learned about an interesting controversy on BlueSky, the left-wing echo chamber where many Trump-haters fled after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. A Canadian feminist, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, recently published a book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men. A website published a 23-paragraph excerpt of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s book and, when this excerpt was promoted on BlueSky, the book’s theme and its author were angrily denounced.

Of course, I immediately ordered the book from Amazon. Anything that sends the BlueSky crowd into paroxysms of apoplectic rage must be good. After skimming through the excerpt of The Last Straight Woman, however, I quickly located the nexus of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s problem, specifically in the sentence when she declares “we need to be looking for feminist approaches to female heterosexuality.”



“Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the Long Shadow of the ‘Lavender Menace’,” first posted here in July 2014, became the first chapter of my 2016 book Sex Trouble. What most people don’t understand about feminism is that, almost from the very beginning of the so-called “Women’s Liberation Movement” in the late 1960s, lesbians were influential in the movement’s policies and rhetoric. Lesbians were involved in the creation of the first Women’s Studies programs at colleges and universities, and the curriculum in such programs has always reflected the anti-male/anti-heterosexual bias of the lesbian faculty.

Anyone who cares to research the biography of Charlotte Bunch can understand this. Prior to becoming involved in the feminist movement, Bunch had a husband, but in 1971 she got divorced, came out as a lesbian and founded a radical commune/cult called The Furies. From there, Bunch went on to become a professor at Rutgers University and an adviser to Hillary Clinton. The incompatibility of heterosexuality with women’s liberation was the essence of Bunch’s feminist ideology:

Bunch’s 1972 manifesto, “Lesbians in Revolt” essentially declared universal lesbianism as the end goal of feminism:

Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal, and economic basis of male supremacy. The Lesbian threatens the ideology of male supremacy by destroying the lie about female inferiority, weakness, passivity, and by denying women’s “innate” need for men. …
Our rejection of heterosexual sex challenges male domination in its most individual and common form. We offer all women something better than submission to personal oppression. We offer the beginning of the end of collective and individual male supremacy.

This argument was expanded . . . by Margaret Small in “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women,” which was cited in such later books as Separatism and Women’s Community by Dana Shugar and The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz. In 2015, while researching my own book, I summarized Margaret Small’s argument:

[Small] offered a Marxist interpretation of “lesbian consciousness” as part of a “revolutionary struggle” to end women’s “oppression” in the “relationship of slavery,” as she called marriage. …
Invoking the historical theories of Friedrich Engels (colleague of Karl Marx and co-author of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”), Small declared: “Class society arose because of the oppression of women. . . . The exploitation of all women by all men made possible the exploitation of some men by other men. The more exploitative the relationship between men and women becomes, the stronger and more vital become the institutions of male supremacy.” …
“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” Small wrote. “In order for men to have a justification for exploiting women and an ability to enforce that exploitation, heterosexuality has to become, not merely an act in relation to impregnation, but the dominant ideology.”
Under male supremacy, Small asserted, women “become defined as appendages to men” in a system “which maintains the ideological power of men over women.”

Marriage is slavery, “heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” and if you don’t believe that, can you really call yourself a feminist? . . .

Read the rest of my latest Substack article and, while you’re over there, please sign up for a subscription to get updates regularly.





 

Category: Books, Gays, Liberals, Sex, Sex Trouble


In The Mailbox: 06.23.26

Posted on | June 24, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.


OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: How to Tank a Summer Blockbuster
Doug Ross: A Day In The Black Hole of Calcutta (1756)
EBL: Summertime, California Dreaming, Kingfish, and “If I Could Turn Back Time”
Twitchy: Majority-Muslim Michigan City Council Bans Pride Flag – AWFLs Upset, Popehat Banned From Bluesky Over Bizarre Musk Assassination Missive,  and Antifa Terrorists Who Led “Noise Demo” (With Guns) at ICE Facility Get 450 Years
Louder With Crowder: Jeff Metcalf Blasts Sunny Hostin For Trying To “Monetize” His Son’s Death With Fake News, Chicago Mayor Discusses Slavery After 40 People Shot Over The Weekend, AWFL people refuse to calm down, hysterically take out their emotions at an “anger retreat”, New unearthed comments show James Talarico claiming he’s a Christian…who hates Christianity, and ICE arrests illegal alien teacher tied to a triple murder case…who Democrats released from jail
Vox Popoli: On the Hook, Tears of a Clown, THE GHOST MASTER, Never Been More Wrong, and The Freaks of File 770
Sensurround: Citizen Vigilante
Ammo.com: Gun Violence Statistics 2026
Cedar Sanderson: Lightly Toasted Marshmallow Strip #7
John C. Wright: Orwell & Lewis
Stoic Observations: God Makes No Mistakes

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Antifa Goons Who Attacked ICE Facility in Texas Hit With Maximum Prison Sentences, Supreme Court Sides With Trump Administration on Removing Green Card Holders Accused of Crimes, Major League Baseball Players Won’t Be Disciplined Over Pride Night Bible Verses, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan Blocks Trump Admin’s Voter-Screening Database, and Judge Blocks DOJ Subpoenas of Walz, Other Minnesota Democrats in Immigration Probe
Animal Magnetism: Animal Magnetism LIVE Ep. 92 – Double Feature
BattleSwarm: Judges Tire Of Soros-Backed DA Krasner Lying To Them, Russia’s Military: Thermoclines of Truth (And Endemic Corruption) All The Way Down, Starmer Slithers Offstage, and $1 Billion In Medicare Fraud
Behind The Black: Scientists: Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas is very old, as much as 12 billion years old, Namibian government rejects Starlink, SpaceX to raise $20 billion more by selling bonds, China’s Shenlong X-37B copy deploys a satellite, and Leonardo da Vinci: An art director, a painter, and a man whose life epitomized the uncertainty of existence
Cafe Hayek: A Dinger of Misinformation, also, Call for Papers (Seriously)
CDR Salamander: Strategy Requires Storytelling & Pictures – The Right Pictures
Chicago Boyz: USA 250 – The Early Years – Movies, Vaclav Havel & Pride Month, USA 250 – The Early Years – Books, and What’s The Department of Education For Anyway?
Don Surber: Where’s The Regime Change?
Flopping Aces: Iran Got The Jackpot – But They Have To Stop Being Iran To Collect It
Gates Of Vienna: Charity for the Children of Shahids, also, Send Them Back!
The Geller Report: Israel Uncovers Massive Tunnel Network in Southern Lebanon, Far-Left Gunman Opens Fire In Jewish Neighborhood, Kills Police Officer, Guns Down Jewish Residents, Another Heinous Child Sex Crime, Another Illegal Arrested, US Waives Iran Oil Sanctions for Two Months in Payday Worth up to $10 Billion, and Elon Musk Threatens to Sue Ro Khanna Over False Claims that USAID Cuts Sentenced Children to Death
Hollywood In Toto: Mortal Thoughts – Is This Bruce Willis’ Career-Best Performance? The One Movie Hollywood Would Never, Ever Make, How Crazy Will Rosie O’Donnell Get as Kimmel’s Replacement? Young Washington – A Patriotic, Powerful American Biopic, and It’s Time for Nate Bargatze to Drop Good Guy Act
Legal Insurrection: Reparations Cartel – African and Caribbean Leaders Target U.S. and Europe’s Taxpayers, Education Dept. Investigating Maryland for Alleged Title IX Violations, NYC Cafe Faces Scrutiny After Refunding Rep. Goldman Over Pro-Israel Views, DOJ: 450 Defendants Charged for Alleged Healthcare Fraud for $6.5 Billion, and Activist Judge Strikes Down SNAP Junk Food Restrictions, Dealing Major Defeat to MAHA
Nebraska Energy Observer: This Week in Canuckistan, An English Conservative view, Freedom’s Starting Points, and Hullo, Mummy. Welcome to the Revolution!
Outkick: MLB Offense Up In Recent Week – Return of the Juiced Ball? Dana White Explains Why UFC Doesn’t Have Pride Night Amid Giants Bible Verse Flap, Stanley Cup Finals Ratings Show Olympic Hockey Fever Still Alive In US, WNBA Wants A Bigger Star Than Caitlin Clark But Ratings Point In One Direction, and After Milly Alcock Shoots Off Her Mouth, Supergirl Poised For $200 Million Loss
Power Line: Taking out the trash, Good Riddance, Senator Sheehy explains, At SPA, the Ottley response, and Revisionist History: Fact Or Fiction?
Racket News: The New Radical Chic
Shark Tank: Chamber of Commerce Endorses Byron Donalds For Governor
The Political Hat: Transgender Potty Madness, also, Catgirl Floodgates
Transterrestrial Musings: War In Space, The New SpaceX Millionaires, Nose Art, Dissension, and Human Use Of Fire
Victory Girls: A Fair-Weather Patriot is NO Patriot At All, Stop Noticing!! Keith Ellison Runs Away From Fraud Questions, Joy Reid Discovers Her Friend Group Is Not America, and Ro Khanna Vs. Elon Musk – This Could Be So Good!
Watts Up With That: No, One Momentarily Hot Spot on Antarctica Doesn’t Prove a Climate Crisis, The Forest Management Conundrum in the United States, Wikipedia’s Founder Gets the Wikipedia Treatment, New ICJ Climate Case Demands Australia Restrict or Cease Fossil Fuel Exports, and The Subsidy Clock
The Federalist: UK Needs To Ditch Censorship And Mass Migration, Not Just Keir Starmer, Ohio Man Had To Petition SCOTUS To Host In-Home Prayer Group, A High Octane Thriller For Men Asks Why Men Become Vigilantes, Socialists Now Run Or Are Fighting To Run Four Of America’s Biggest Cities, and MLB Commissioner Lies About League’s Left-Wing Activism In Letter To Hawley
Mark Steyn: Kings and Vagabonds (and Boutonnieres), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three – New York Goes Down, Soliloquy, Starmer Resigns, and Happy Father’s Day!

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Category: Linkagery


In The Mailbox: 06.22.26

Posted on | June 22, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Let’s see how much of this I can get done before I have to run out and do laundry.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.



Cruising for a bruising.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: The Fauci Coverup The NYT Hopes You’ll Never See, The Day The Sun Went Out Over New England (1790), and Another Horrifying Story The NYT Is Hiding From Its Readers,
EBL: The “Mistake” That Made The Mustang, Summer Fish Crudo, VP J.D. Vance Speaks On Iran Negotiations in Switzerland, Starmer Resigns as Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Father’s Day Baked Cod
Twitchy: Mehdi Hasan Notes Elon Musk Hasn’t Posted About White Pedo, CA State Senator Wiener Accuses Bible of Rainbow Hijacking, and Something Incredible (And Totally Predictable) Is Happening In Latin America Without USAID Meddling
Louder With Crowder: CA Democrat Claims Inflation Reduction Act Would Have Stopped Climate Change, James Talarico’s trans and queer “theologian” looks exactly how you’d picture they/them, Mamdani Claims Communist Takeover Of NYC Is “The Birth Of The New World”, Chicago Mayor ignores another bloody weekend to focus on something called a “Transfemicide State of Emergency”, and Joy Reid lashes out at the 4th of July, claiming black people don’t celebrate it because of how much they hate America
Vox Popoli: Watch the Wives, Another Failed Critique, Repent, We Haven’t Forgotten, and Canada Bans History and The Bible
Cedar Sanderson: The Sky Is Falling, also, My Father’s Eyes
The Bugscuffle Gazette: The best antidote to rumor
John C Wright: The Worm Ouroboros, also, Separation of Church & Spaceship
Upstream Reviews: Sneak Preview – Fossil Force, also, The Tangles of Old Sins
Sensurround: Britain Discovers An Exciting New Alternative to “The Rule of Law”
Defending The Wood Perilous: Stories – Who Owns Them?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Baldilocks: Poisoned by a Pissant, also, I Have a Little
CDR Salamander: Revitalizing The Arsenal of Democracy
Don Surber: Why Americans reject the metric system
Elizabeth Nickson: Lahaina, The Palisades, & The Crippled Economies of the West

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Rule 5 Sunday: Obligatory World Cup Post

Posted on | June 22, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Like most red-blooded Americans, I could care less about soccer. That having been said, I am enjoying the hell out of the tweets and other social media posts by Euros and other foreigners visiting parts of America outside the blue urban shitholes and discovering Buc-ee’s, Waffle House, barbecue, local diners, Bass Pro Shops, and other wild delights found only in the fruited plains of Red America. They’re having their minds blown by ranch dressing, free refills, and air conditioning, and it’s fun to watch.
Today’s appetizer is some fan art of Shouko Komi and her “forever 17!” mom Shuuko* from the last World Cup.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.


EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Emancipation, Thais Descufon, Corrupt – Jennifer & Gavin Newsom, Soccer fans, Samantha Crain, MAGA Iran Deal, “The Magna Carta Song”, The Black Donnellys, Flag Day, and Disclosure Day – Spielberg Should Stop

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Taylor Gallo, Trump Iran Ceasefire MOU Under Fire, Fish Pic Friday – Kristine Fischer, Dopamine, Gone Fishin’, The Wednesday Wetness – ??????, Tattoo Tuesday, The Monday Morning Stimulus and Sunday Sunrise

BACON TIME: Rule Five – A Trip To Hooterville

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

*From the recently concluded manga Komi Can’t Communicate.

 

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Category: Linkagery


Father’s Day: An Extremist Agenda

Posted on | June 21, 2026 | No Comments



The cast of ‘Father Knows Best’ (1954)

One thing about the passage of time is that, as you grow older, you begin to notice the shift of values. What was once widely accepted — the expected social norms of your childhood — come to be viewed as quaint, old-fashioned or perhaps even barbaric. When I was born in Atlanta in 1959, Dwight Eisenhower was still president, and the South was still governed by Jim Crow segregation. By the time I started first grade in 1965, the passage of the Civil Rights Act had eliminated segregation, although of course, the customs and attitudes of the Jim Crow era did not magically evaporate overnight. Because I was just a schoolboy at the time, the politics of all this was completely over my head. My parents’ generation, being raised with a stoic temperament and a concern for civility and courtesy, didn’t talk in front of the children about the various social upheavals of the 1960s, so I really can’t say with much certainty what their attitudes were. They were staunch Democrats (as everyone was in that time and place), and reasonably liberal as such things were reckoned in that era, but I don’t know much more about their beliefs.

By the 1990s, when I was married with a family of my own, and was viewing politics through adult eyes, the message of conservative Republicans had a lot to do with traditional family values.



John F. Kennedy and family, circa 1960.

How was it that what had been taken for granted in America just three decades earlier had become a right-wing political agenda? The standard answer is “the Sixties,” a reference to the multitudinous changes that destabilized our national culture during that tumultuous decade.

When I was a boy growing up in Douglas County, Georgia, practically all of the kids came from “traditional families.” Divorce was considered scandalous in my parents’ generation, and none of my childhood acquaintances were from “broken homes,” to use a quaint term. Whatever other problems we had, at least most kids in my generation didn’t have to deal with the confusing welter of household arrangements — stepfathers, stepmothers, stepbrothers, half-brothers, etc. — that had become so commonplace two or three decades later. No-fault divorce was one part of the problem, but by the 1990s, America also had a rapidly growing number of bastards, to use a word now considered taboo.

Some of y’all may be old enough to remember when Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book It Takes a Village was in the headlines, criticized for what it really represented, i.e., an argument for expanding government bureaucracy as a substitute for functional families. Living inside a cocoon of like-minded liberals, it is likely that Hillary Clinton never bothered to read the most important social policy book of the 1980s, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. What Murray demonstrated was that the social welfare programs created (or vastly expanded) in the 1960s (LBJ’s “Great Society” agenda, the so-called “War on Poverty”) had actually harmed the poor people that liberals said they meant to help, by incentivizing behaviors that increased poverty, while discouraging behaviors that could lead to a better life. Contrary to what Hillary and other liberals believed, the best thing to do for poor people was to stop “helping” them this way — cut the welfare budget and eliminate the programs.



Ralph Reed (left) and Pat Robertson (right) in 1997

The arguments made by Charles Murray in Losing Ground were aimed at policy wonks, but the way the “family values” agenda entered the mainstream of Republican Party politics was via a popular TV preacher, Pat Robertson. Beginning in 1966, Robertson began co-hosting a weekday TV show, The 700 Club, which I remember my Grandma Kirby watching regularly in the 1970s. The 700 Club became the foundation of Robertson’s cable-TV channel, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which launched in 1977. Robertson had a large nationwide following by the time he announced his candidacy for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. Even though he stood no chance against George H.W. Bush, the incumbent vice president, Robertson made a fairly respectable showing, collecting 115 delegates and more than a million votes during the primaries. Along the way, Robertson also developed a core group of grassroots volunteers (particularly in Iowa) and, most importantly, a mailing list of campaign donors.

The donor list from the Robertson 1988 campaign became the financial basis of the Christian Coalition, which in 1989 hired young Republican operative Ralph Reed to be its executive director. Reed’s success as a political organizer and strategist was crucial to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. While the lion’s share of credit for that belongs to Newt Gingrich — who himself praised the role of Rush Limbaugh in the 1994 campaign — a lot of the conservative “foot soldiers” who made that campaign a success were part of the army of activists that Ralph Reed had helped recruit and train. Thus you have a very condensed explanation for how “traditional family values” came to be seen as a right-wing agenda.

Most of what people think of in this context is opposition to (a) abortion and (b) “gay rights.” This is a very narrow and negative understanding of what has motivated Christian conservatives since the 1990s, namely, a desire to maintain (or restore) the middle-class married household as the defining institution of American life. As Charles Murray showed in Losing Ground, it was the decline of married-family households (or, viewed from the opposite end, the increase of children growing up in non-traditional households) that was largely responsible for a lot of other things that had gone wrong in America by the mid-1980s.

If there were any one thing I would like to stress in discussion of Christian conservatives and the so-called “Culture Wars,” it would be this: We cannot vote our way into heaven, nor can mere politics restore America’s “traditional family values.” Now let me tell you a story.



Gen. George B. McClellan

‘But You Must Act’

When he was first appointed to command the Union army defending the nation’s capital after the Yankees were defeated at Bull Run in July 1861, George McClellan was hailed as a heroic figure, destined for greatness. He set about training and equipping the rabble of raw recruits streaming into Washington, D.C., and began formulating a bold plan. Rather than marching out to fight the Rebels camped near the old Bull Run battlefield, McClellan instead would mount a massive amphibious project, transferring his army to the Virginia peninsula between the James and York rivers, thus to attack the Confederate capital of Richmond from the east. This would reverse the strategic picture; instead of the Union army being forced to defend the capital in D.C., instead the Souterners would be compelled to defend their own capital. The theater of war would be transferred from Abe Lincoln’s doorstep to Jefferson Davis’s backyard, so to speak. Lincoln approved this plan, but in consideration of concerns from Cabinet members and congressional leaders, stipulated that McClellan must leave behind in the vicinity of Washington enough troops to make sure that the Rebels didn’t make a leap at the capital while McClellan was busy shipping his army down to the Virginia peninsula. McClellan agreed to this, and as part of his arrangements, decided to transfer some troops that were then stationed in the Shenandoah Valley eastward to become part of the force defending the capital. With this problem taken care of, McClellan and his army of more than 100,000 men set sail from the wharves of Alexandria on March 17. The army disembarked at Fort Monroe, on the tip of the peninsula, and began moving inland, when disaster struck more than 200 miles away — disaster in the form of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.



Confederate Gen. Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Jackson commanded barely 4,000 troops in the Shenandoah Valley, and when he discovered that part of the Yankee army opposing him was being withdrawn, he resolved to attack the remainder immediately. It turned out that Jackson had underestimated the Union force that had been left in the Valley, and he suffered a bloody repulse when he attacked them at Kernstown on March 23. Despite this, however, Jackson’s aggression had a major strategic impact. Lincoln and others in Washington could not believe that Jackson had attacked with such a small force, and figured he must have at least 10,000 men in the Valley. McClellan being all the way down at Fort Monroe, Lincoln and his advisors set about to counter this perceived threat and, in the process, took a hard look at the actual number of troops that McClellan had left to guard Washington. What they found struck them as completely inadequate to the task — the capital seemed very vulnerable, and there was fear that Jackson’s attack at Kernstown might herald a Confederate offensive — which led Lincoln to withdraw from McClellan’s command an entire army corps, so as to make sure that D.C. was safe. Public criticism of McClellan’s slow progress in his Peninsula campaign was widely heard in the capital, as Bruce Catton narrates in Mr. Lincoln’s Army:

The clamour against McClellan deepened, became a clamour against Lincoln for keeping him in command. Lincoln tried to give McClellan an understanding of this increasing pressure as a factor which McClellan would have to keep constantly in mind when he made his plans; tried to show him that it was a pressure which, political conditions being what they so regrettably were, even the President of the United States might finally be unable to resist. On April 9, Lincoln wrote him: “And once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this.” He concluded the letter by assuring McClellan that he would sustain him as far as he could: “but,” he added, “you must act.”

“You must act” — that is the essence of the message I would share with young people on this Father’s Day. However much anyone might hope to accomplish through politics, in terms of preserving “traditional family values” in America, what matters more is what we actually do in our everyday lives. Many millions of dollars in campaign contributions have been spent, and untold hours of labor by activists has been done in terms of electing candidates and promoting legislation that might advance a conservative agenda. What have I done? Well, I’ve stayed married to the same woman for 37 years, sired and raised six children to adulthood, and occasionally do what I can to help with the grandkids.

What I have done is to live “traditional values,” rather than merely to talk about them, or to vote for them. Once upon a time, living this way wasn’t considered political at all. People fell in love, got married, had kids, etc., and because almost everybody was living that way, there wasn’t anything controversial about it. Nowadays, however, to live that kind of life — husband and wife, mom and dad, “till death do us part” — makes you some kind of right-wing extremist. The SPLC might even put you on their “Hate Map” for suggesting that this is the best way to live.

Be an extremist, and have fun doing it. Certainly, I’ve had a blast.

Happy Father’s Day to all you right-wing extremists everywhere!





 

Category: Culture, Family, History


FMJRA 2.0: Checking Out The Free Agents

Posted on | June 21, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Most of the managers have their keepers in, which means I can scroll through the free agent list and start wondering if any of the desirable players are going to last until the 9th round when I pick. We have four openings in Pete’s league, so if you wanted to scratch that general manager/field manager itch, now’s your chance.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.



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Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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