Rule 5 Monday: Everything Stops For Tea

Posted on | May 18, 2026 | No Comments

Apologies for the late, late posting. Things were weird and difficult this weekend.
I feel remiss for not mentioning this earlier – but if you blog, and post the occasional Rule 5, feel free to contribute your link!
The more, the merrier!
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Hires Root Beer, Donnie’s Angels, “Viva Las Vegas”, MAGA Vance/Rubio 2028, Israel Independence, Robin Hood, Jamestown Ferry, Sydney Sweeney – She’s Not Retarded, and “Mama Said”

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Leaping into the Weekend with Taylor Carpenter, Fish Pic Friday – Yukai.sk, Tattoo Thursday, The Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Palm Sunday, and Maryland has Crabs

BACON TIME: Rule 5 – Yes, I Will Have A Beer

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Deals on Premium Beauty Products
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

Category: Rule 5

What’s the Over/Under on How Soon Barrett Brown Gets Arrested Again?

Posted on | May 18, 2026 | No Comments

Barrett Brown, interviewed on NBC News, 2011

Given all the trouble in the world right now, my hunch is that Barrett Brown is somewhere near the bottom of the list of federal law enforcement priorities. It’s been nearly five years since I last devoted a post to him here (“Oh, Dear God: Barrett Brown Again!” July 13, 2021), after he’d gotten himself arrested in England. However, last year, I mentioned Barrett in discussing the Nazi-adjacent YouTube “historian” Ian Carroll, in the context of the dangers of amateurism.

Longtime readers know the whole history, dating back to Ye Olde Blogspot Days, of Barrett Brown’s tiresome obsession with me — an intermittent obsession, I hasten to add. He’ll go for months or years without bothering me, then erupt in a frenzy of accusations. That’s what happened last week, and when I investigated, I discovered that Barrett has recently started a Substack. It’s been about a month since I posted anything on my own Substack, so I thought, how convenient:

It’s a gloriously sunny day here in the foothills of Appalachia, so why am I wasting it this way, typing out an update about somebody you probably never heard of? It’s not as if there aren’t enough newsworthy events I could be writing about — a Louisiana senator lost his seat in the Republican primary Saturday, the first time a sitting senator has lost a primary in more than a decade. But there are other journalists getting paid to do reporting and commentary on serious news like that, and rather than jump onto the dogpile, instead I’ll give you the latest on Barrett Brown.
We go back, Barrett and I. One afternoon in October 2009, he emailed me to call my attention to something unflattering he’d written about me. At the time, Brown was the communications director of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee (a/k/a Enlighten the Vote), while I was gearing up for a road trip to cover the Doug Hoffman campaign in upstate New York . . .
Well, the 2010 midterm campaign came and went, and then in February 2011, someone sent me an email informing me that Barrett Brown had “evidently become a public-relations agent for the hacker group ‘Anonymous,’ which launched cyberattacks against critics of WikiLeaks” . . .

You can read the rest of that 3,000-word opus, in which I mention the possibility of contacting my friends at the Department of Justice to inquire whether it’s true (as someone told me a few years ago) that Barrett skipped out to England as a way of evading his court-ordered restitution payments. There is alleged to be a sealed indictment waiting for Barrett if the feds ever get their hands on him again.

Currently, of course, with Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the UK, it’s unlikely that British authorities would cooperate with U.S. officials seeking extradition and, as I say, despite his (alleged) status as an international fugitive, Barrett Brown is probably very low on the priority list at the DOJ. Could that change? Well, our boy craves attention, so maybe he’ll do some crazy stunt that makes Kash Patel take notice.

Also, meanwhile, Barrett Brown keeps poking Neal Rauhauser. If ever two people deserved each other as enemies, it’s Neal and Barrett.

Category: Barrett Brown

FMJRA 2.0: Marking Time

Posted on | May 18, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

No baseball stuff this week, just a poke at Nolan’s inane, politically-correct version of the Odyssey.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Trump Derangement Syndrome Reaches Terminal Stage as Democrats Seethe
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Waiting for the Winter Meetings
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

It’s a Long Way to Hope
EBL
357 Magnum

Rule 5 Sunday: Chocolate
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Do You Hate Communism Enough?
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 05.11.26
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 05.12.26
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

This Should Not Need to Be Said
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 05.15.26 (Afternoon Edition)
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 05.15.26 (Evening Edition)
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Memorial Day Sale – Up To 40% Off
Best Sellers – Office Products

Category: FMJRA Award

‘There Is No Truth … Only Power’

Posted on | May 17, 2026 | No Comments

French degenerate Michel Foucault

Before he died of AIDS, Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and also sodomized boys in Tunisia. These facts are not unrelated.

Any argument must stand or fall on its own merits. As every educated person knows, attempting to refute an argument by attacking the personality of its proponent is a logical fallacy known as ad hominem. Nonetheless, it has been my observation that advocates of unusual arguments — ideas that seem destructive or counter-factual — generally have something in their biography which helps explain their motives.

Communism is the classic example of this phenomenon. Even if a naïve idealist had been persuaded in the early 20th century that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, et al., had found the secret of liberating mankind from oppression and poverty, the idealism that won him over to Communism as a theory could not have survived the reality of Communism in practice under Stalin. Indeed, the cynical swindle of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had the effect of causing a great falling-away among Communists in America, who suddenly realized that all the anti-fascist “Popular Front” rhetoric of the 1930s had been a monstrous lie. What are we to make, then, of those who continued to support and defend Communism after 1939? In every case, the biographical factors must be considered.

Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements addresses this issue, classifying the types of personalities that are attracted to such movements. And I have summarized this insight simply: Bad causes attract bad people.

We know for a fact that Communism leads to mass murder, killing as many as 100 million people in the 20th century, and therefore must question the motives of its defenders. Hence, we can disregard the accusation of committing an ad hominem fallacy in so doing.

Something similar can be said for the philosophers of “postmodernism.” Michel Foucault was an influential French intellectual and also a homosexual pedophile, and this is not a coincidence, you see.

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l’après-68, nous avons…

— Brivael Le Pogam (@brivael) May 15, 2026

French libertarian Brivael Le Pogam writes:

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).
We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.
We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality — everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.
Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.
For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.
Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.
That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.
It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.
What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them—that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.
So, forgive us. And back to work.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: France, Intellectuals

In The Mailbox: 05.15.26 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | May 16, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: A Conversation About Firearms, also News Flash – EV Range Drops Cold Weather
Doug Ross: Fauci’s WMD
EBL: Shucking Scallops, Donnie’s Angels, and “Viva Las Vegas”
Twitchy: Rep. Angie Nixon Arrested After Storming DeSantis Office, U.S. Delegation Dumps Every Single Gift, Badge, & Burner Phone Before Leaving Beijing, and NYC’s Islamist Mayor Honors When Arabs Tried & Failed To Finish Hitler’s Work
Louder With Crowder: Ken Paxton forces Texas Children’s Hospital to pay back the $10 Million they billed Medicare for child sex change operations, Drag Queen Demands Access To Youth After Officials Ban Pride Month At Libraries, Spencer Pratt drops new banger LEGO-themed ad to say “Karen Bass is Awful”, Kamala Reveals The Left’s Plan For America, and It’s No Joke, and Spencer Pratt drops the PERFECT response to his socialist opponent’s attempt to ban you from BBQing in your backyard
Vox Popoli: The Real Reason, Owen on Tucker, The Strategic Cost of War, Mr. Tubcuddle’s Last Ride, and The Irrelevance of Acclaim
According To Hoyt: Kingship By Consent, The Blind Leading The Blinkered, The Great Water Conspiracy, Knowledge of the Ancients, and You Impostor!
Stoic Observations: The End of Western Thinking, also, Ending WAF Paranoia

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Texas Children’s Hospital Compelled to Create Nation’s First Detransition Clinic in Landmark Settlement with AG Paxton, Justice Department Alleges Yale Medical School Discriminated Based on Race, CIA Director Meets With Senior Cuban Regime Officials in Havana, DHS Pushes Forward With Large-Scale Immigration Detention Hubs, and How to Persuade Iran to End War…and Give Up Its Nuclear Program
BattleSwarm: Followup: Flashy Car Daycare Commie Fraudster Indicted, LinkSwarm For May 15, and Who Is Behind Pro-Cornyn “Association of Texas Conservatives”?
Behind The Black: SpaceX launches cargo Dragon to ISS, The barren hills west of Jezero Crater, Intuitive Machines buys British ground station company, Northrop Grumman completes successful test of new nozzle for its solid-fueled boosters, and Virgin Galactic releases ’26 first quarter financials; stock at new low under $3
Cafe Hayek: A Small Step Toward Saving More Lives of People In Need of Kidney Transplants, The Hollow Ring of “Hollowed Out”, An Old and Tired Movie, and Competition Soars
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: Good news about Tina Peters, History Friday – Mr. Mulholland’s Big Oops! and Paxton Shines
Don Surber: Trump conquers Red China
First Street Journal: Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen, Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen (2), and Propaganda from the credentialed media will not change reality
Flopping Aces: Is it time for the base to go nuclear on the GOP Senate?
Gates Of Vienna: Jihadis In Our Midst: It’s a New Ballgame — More Americans Refusing to Go the Way of Europe, R.I.P. Takuan Seiyo and Max Denken, Jihad Attack on the Louvre Thwarted, Catastrophic Failure, and Service Restored
The Geller Report: Muslims Outside Of A London Mosque Threatening to Behead Jews, Bernie Sanders and Occasional Cortex Propose Legislation To Kill AI Data Centers Construction, “SHOCKING LEVELS OF FRAUD”, Iran Strikes, Sinks Indian Vessel Near Oman, Seizes Tanker, and Speaker Mike Johnson Warns of ‘Mini Mamdanis’ Taking The Country ‘Far, Far Left’
Hollywood In Toto: When Late-Night Rivals Fought Like Cats and Dogs, This Five for Fighting Musical Duet Will Melt Your Heart, The Free Speech Fight That Kimmel, Legacy Media Ignore, Goodbye, Stephen Colbert: Let Them Eat Cake, and Mandalorian and Grogu Faces Even More Box Office Woes?
Legal Insurrection: Venezuela Presses Guyana Land Dispute at U.N. as U.S. Secures Nuclear Material, Cornell President Cleared of Wrongdoing In Parking Lot Incident, Texas Military Vet Leaves Penn State Law School Over Mandatory Anti-Racism Course, US Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Stay Of Virginia Supreme Court Redistricting Ruling, and Newsom Reveals Democrats’ ‘Break the Glass’ Plan to Stop GOP Sweep in Governor Race
Nebraska Energy Observer: The American Way of War Part 2, Hmmmm, and Anglosphere DNA
Outkick: Caitlin Clark honored for massive career milestone before Fever fall to Mystics, Nationals unveil latest exciting/horrifying snack, Golden Knights’ Mitch Marner doing the funniest thing with postseason explosion, Horse dies at finish line in first race during tragic start to Preakness weekend, and Jena Sims covers her butt with a ribbon – NFL saves us from Tony Romo – Is Star Wars dead?
Power Line: What Happened In China, The Supremes decline, Our Violent Democrats, Pope Leo doesn’t make a statement, and A Political Revolution?
Racket News: Note From Editor – Translator Needed
Shark Tank: DeSantis Expands School Guardian Program to State Colleges & Universities
Shot In The Dark: Avenging…What?
The Political Hat: The Non-Jewish Roots Of Marxism, Quick Takes – Nature Can Do Anything: Co-Author A Paper; Get Married; Be A Politician’s Constituent, and Firing Line Friday: Resolved: That We Should Move towards Privatization, Including the Schools-Part II
This Ain’t Hell: Caution…may just p*** you off, Royal Navy to Provide Force Package to SoH, Right to Repair, and Valor Friday
Transterrestrial Musings: The New Democrat Party, Hamas’s Failure, SpaceX’s Louisiana Purchase, Blue Origin’s Finances, and The New Anti-Semitism
Victory Girls: Minnesota: Different Day, More Fraud, Occasional Cortex Is Not Kamala Harris — And Republicans Should Notice, and Kamala Harris Lost The Election. Now She Wants To Redesign The Country
Watts Up With That: Climate Pseudoscience Debunked: Livestock Methane Fears are Baseless, The Electricity Myth: Data Centers Aren’t the Villain, Ed Miliband vows permanent shutdown of the North Sea, Disaster? NYT Op-Ed on Demoting the Climate Pitch, and Wildebeest, Buffalo, and Cattle, Oh My!
The Federalist: Nebraska’s Homeschool Crackdown Is Harming Kids And Infringing On Parental Rights, Paxton Scores A $10 Million Victory In The Fight Against The ‘Trans Kids’ Industrial Complex, Here Are The Plug-And-Play Templates Your State Needs To Pass Secure Election Laws, There’s Nothing MAGA About 500,000 Student Visas For The CCP, and Worst Prosecutor In America Struggles To Explain Why Democrats Keep Protecting Illegal Alien Murderers
Mark Steyn: Live Around the Planet – The Twain Meet, The Frog Slog, and A Society Entirely Without “Division”

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Tools & Home Improvement
New Releases – Tools & Home Improvement
Amazon Essentials

Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 05.15.26 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | May 15, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Probably not going to get caught up, but I’ll do what I can.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

Great self-own, or greatest self-own?

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Australia Is a Defenseless Victim Zone, also, ABC News Censors Story on Disney Cruise Lines
Doug Ross: Diagnosing & Treating Trump Derangement Syndrome, The Day Wall Street Fell Off The Earth (1929),
EBL: Triggerfish, MAGA Vance Rubio 2028, Israel Independence, Hot Smoked Salmon, and UK Prime Minister Starmer Refuses To Go Away
Twitchy: James Woods Putting John Thune On Blast Over The SAVE Act Is A Beautiful Thing, “Promises Made, Promises BROKEN”, and Mamdani Rails Against Swastikas And Then Goes Home To His 10/7 Cheerleader Wife
Louder With Crowder: Kamala Harris calls for a Democrat “no bad ideas” brainstorm, then lists the WORST possible ideas, Democrat senator makes bonkers comment about there being “abortion in the water,” and Lee Zeldin is as confused as we are, Nolan’s Odyssey Backlash Explodes and Hollywood is Blaming Elon Musk, John Fetterman effectively ends his political career calling out the communists destroying his party (and America) BY NAME, and American Idol alum turns Tina Turner classic into anti-Karen Bass anthem, even Spencer Pratt finds it catchy
Vox Popoli: The Neocon’s Despair, OOTS Now in Print, Replacement Migration is Real, Reddit Takes on PROBABILITY ZERO, and Give Them Grass
Upstream Reviews: Saving The Dodo, also, Storm-Dragon
Cedar Sanderson: Freedom of the Clouds, also, Building Castles in the Air
The Bugscuffle Gazette: Chicken Soup
Hans Schantz: 2026’s Top Based Books – So Far
Ammo.com: The Easiest States In Which To Buy A Gun
Weird Catholic: The Feet of the Ascension
Jim McCoy: Pastime Pictures Monster Summer
Stoic Observations: Claude Has An AHA! Moment

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Carriers – Not Dead Yet, And Unquestionably Not Unloved, also, The Lesson of Murderer’s Row – Two Layers Deeper
Dana Loesch: The Woke Reich Tears Off The Mask, also, MTG Crashes Out Over Questions On Congressional Trading
Don Surber: Pax Annexa, also, 10,000 rulings from 10,000 maniacs
STUMP: NYC Pension Watch – Balancing the Budget by Shorting the Pensions,

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Snacks & Sweets
Survival Food
Amazon Essentials

Category: Linkagery

This Should Not Need to Be Said

Posted on | May 15, 2026 | No Comments

It has been remarked that the demand for racism now exceeds the genuine supply by such a great margin that there is an incentive to manufacture phony racism — thus explaining the frequent hoaxes wherein the alleged victims of oppression claim to be assaulted while, for example, going out to get a Subway sandwich in Chicago.

Such is the latest fake outrage involving a New York Democrat, a Virginia Republican and a Richmond radio talk show host. The New York Times:

“Racist Remark” — flatly asserted as a fact, as if Kiggans had dropped the N-word, and what, pray tell, was this most grievous insult?

A vulnerable Republican congresswoman in Virginia set off an uproar from Democrats after she agreed with remarks by a local radio host who said that Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader and a Black man, should keep his “cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.”
The dust-up surrounding the congresswoman, Representative Jen Kiggans, who is facing one of the country’s toughest re-election battles, is the latest chapter in Virginia’s redistricting saga. Ms. Kiggans was speaking with Rich Herrera, the host of a conservative morning talk show in Richmond, to discuss the fallout from the State Supreme Court’s ruling that invalidated a new congressional map that Virginia voters had approved in an April referendum.
During their conversation, Mr. Herrera lamented a discussion that Mr. Jeffries and Democratic members of the Virginia congressional delegation had on Saturday in which lawmakers discussed the idea of having the entire Virginia Supreme Court replaced in a long-shot effort to restore the voter-approved map.
“If Hakeem Jeffries wants to be involved in Virginia politics, then I suggest he does what a bunch of New Yorkers are doing — leave New York, move down here to Virginia, and run for office down here,” Mr. Herrera said. “If not, get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.”
Ms. Kiggans replied: “That’s right. I, ditto. Yes, yes to that.”
After a Democratic opposition research group, American Bridge, circulated a clip on social media of Ms. Kiggans’s response to Mr. Herrera’s remarks, Democrats denounced Ms. Kiggans, with some calling for her to step down from office.

So, Mr. Herrera — who I assume, from his surname, to be of Hispanic ancestry — used a common colloquialism to object to the New York Democrat’s interference in Virginia politics, a sentiment heartily assented to by Rep. Kiggans, a Navy veteran whose district includes Virginia Beach. According to the New York Times, the phrase “cotton-picking” is inherently racist, which is certainly news to me and every other Southerner who ever used it, among them a singer from Memphis:

Samson told Delilah
Loud and clear:
“Keep your cotton-picking fingers
Out my curly hair!”

That song, incidentally, was written by a black man, Claude Demetrius, who became wealthy overnight when “Hard-Headed Woman” hit No. 1 on the charts and was included in the soundtrack of King Creole.

WHITE PEOPLE PICKED COTTON, TOO!

To suggest or imply otherwise is counter-factual. My parents picked cotton in Alabama, as did my aunts and uncles and grandparents. Basically everybody who lived in the rural South prior to World War II picked cotton, and there is zero evidence that, historically, the adjectival phrase “cotton-picking” had any racial connotation.

Now, let me introduce you to Matt Osborne, whom longtime readers may remember as part of the Team Kimberlin crew back in the day (circa 2012) when myself, Aaron Walker, John Hoge and others were engaged in various courtroom entanglements with the pro se pipsqueak pipe bomber. Osborne was a leftist until, at a progressive conference in 2018, he had an unpleasant encounter with fanatical proponents of the transgender agenda. Osborne has since taken a right-hand turn and, at least privately, apologized for his misdeeds on behalf of Team Kimberlin. It is my habit to work in “file-it-and-forget-it” mode. There’s too much craziness in the world for me to commit neural resources to remembering past grievances, and I do not harbor too many grudges (a few cherished grudges will do). So it’s not as if I am in a position to make a grand gesture of magnanimously “forgiving” Matt Osborne; I’m just too busy (or too lazy) to bother Googling the reasons I should still hate him. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you want to keep hating him, don’t let me stop you. Meanwhile, however, here’s what Matt Osborne wrote about this bogus “cotton-picking” controversy:

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term ‘cotton-picking’ has been used as an intensifier since at least 1917. The entry also lists the word as “damned” due to its supposed racial connotations, but this is a modern projection on the past, because slavery had disappeared for two generations. By the time people said ‘cotton-picking’, two-thirds of sharecroppers were white. Old white people in the south still remember their cotton-picking family members.
Spare me your commentary on the Civil War and slavery, please, because sharecropping was a form of economic bondage that applied to blacks and whites in proportion to their share of the southern population for decades after it.
In T.S. Stribling’s The Forge (1931), which is set in north Alabama during and after the Civil War, Miltiades Vaiden and his sister harvest $2,000 worth of cotton themselves because no labor, free or slave, is available. Stribling based his book on a real family; the Scruggs & Vaden cotton gin still exists in Lauderdale County, though it is completely modern.
Despite many patents issued from the 1850s on, no one could produce a practical machine at scale to replace hand-picking of cotton until the 1940s. International Harvester was the first to do this. Even though the first fully-mechanized cotton field was in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the south was slower to adopt mechanized cotton picking than California, which passed the 50% mechanical tipping point in 1951. Hand-picking was not fully replaced in the south until the end of the 1960s.
‘Cotton-picking’ was a thing that poor white people did for almost a century and the phrase was always part of southern life. It was not exclusively or primarily used as a racial epithet, and it never referred to slavery. Rather, the ‘racial undertone’ only exists today in the minds of the recipients who want to hear it as racist.
Such people take umbrage because they wish to feel offended, not because the phrase was ever offensive. No one gets to skip over the parts of history that fail to conform to their priors. This is as true for the postwar sharecropping period as it is for the antebellum south.
So the reader will excuse me if I refuse to join in the tumult of stupidity over Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia agreeing with a radio show host that Democratic Rep. Hakim Jeffries should get his “cotton-picking hands off Virginia”. The NAACP is demanding that Kiggans apologize for saying “That’s right. Ditto” in response.
This is yet another fake affront from race-baiting activists. Kiggans was clearly agreeing with the sentiment that Jeffries should leave Virginia alone. Neither she nor Rich Herrera, who is Mexican-American, meant ‘cotton-picking’ as a racist epithet any more than Bugs Bunny did.
Rev. Cozy Bailey, President of the NAACP Virginia State Conference, made it very clear in his statement that politics are the actual purpose of the contrived backlash. Virginia Democrats broke the laws of the commonwealth to pass a redistricting plan that the state supreme court predictably overturned.
Bailey complained that “a large percentage” of the ‘Yes’ voters “are people of color, particularly Black people. And so we are very sensitive in this moment to anything that continues to be oppressive or suppressive to our thoughts.”
Translation: I am being overly-sensitive and feigning oppression because I am actually mad about something else. Literally no one is oppressing or suppressing Bailey’s thoughts, or Jeffries’s thoughts, or anyone else’s thoughts with the phrase ‘cotton-picking’. On the contrary, it is Bailey who wishes to oppress and suppress the spoken thoughts of other people.
Kiggans gave a statement to WDBJ7’s sister station in Richmond, WTVR, agreeing that Herreira “never should have used that language, and of course that’s not the sentiment I was agreeing to.” This was not good enough for Bailey, and we can hope Kiggans will ignore calls for further apologies, because America is exhausted with political actors playing the race card on the flimsiest of pretexts. Cotton is not racist. It is a plant. Picking cotton is not racist. It is agriculture.

Hear! Hear! My only addition to what Matt said is to note that it wasn’t just “sharecroppers” who picked cotton. This involves unfortunate stereotypes surrounding so-called “poor whites” in the South. My ancestors were land owners and respectable people. However, as the old saying had it, they were “land rich, but cash poor.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, and continuing for some 75 years thereafter, poverty was an almost universal condition of the rural South. As my beloved Aunt Pat Huber said, “We didn’t know we were poor — everybody was poor!”

While I could write many paragraphs in defense of the Southern yeomanry, my point is that the stigmatization of self-sufficient farmers, who earned their living by honest labor — including, among other arduous tasks, picking their own cotton — is an insult to people who certainly were not “white trash.” Professor Wayne Flynt’s prize-winning book Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites is highly recommended, for anyone who cares to educate themselves on this subject.

To see liberals engage in race-baiting by ignorantly inventing a racist “dog-whistle” connotation for a common phrase makes me angry. It’s so absurd it should not require an answer, and I regret the necessity of having answered at such length. Don’t provoke me again.