GENDER: Psaki presented a brilliant segment!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2026

But first, the sitting misogynist: We're sorry to say that we agree with Sam Stein—with what he said in the first hour of today's Morning Joe.   

He said he isn't completely sure that the astonishing campaign ad in Ohio isn't going to work. Given the money being thrown in behind it, he said it's possible that Vivek Ramaswamy's gruesome ad could actually help him win.    

We're sorry to say that we agree with that provisional assessment. If we were betting, we'd bet that Candidate Acton will be elected governor of Ohio on November 3. But we also think that the force field of the moral squalor of this age may turn out to be quite hard to escape—harder than many pundits are currently imagining. 

Last night, we saw a brilliant cable news segment—the 21-minute opening segment of The Briefing with Jen Psaki on MS NOW. Psaki spoke with Jennifer Siebel Newsom about the source of so much of that furious moral squalor—the throwback feelings about gender and sexuality which are currently driving so much of the MAGA right. 

We'll link you to that segment below. First, here's Michelle Goldberg's summary of the basic facts concerning the gruesome campaign ad which is now being pimped by the sitting American president: 

The Meaning of the Republican War Over Ramaswamy’s Vile Ad 

[...] 

As you might know by now, the story behind Ramaswamy’s ad involves child sexual abuse. His Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, was 12 when her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, known as Bud, was arrested and indicted on charges of raping her, though he skipped town before he could be tried. Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, stood by him and lost custody of her children; she never saw her daughter again. (Bud Arthur died in 2004.)

In 2020, when Acton was serving as Ohio’s health director, Donna Arthur, fashioning herself as a concerned Christian, gave an interview to the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue attacking her estranged daughter. It was deeply if unintentionally self-incriminating. Arthur speculated that Acton got the idea to say Bud Arthur raped her from his daughter from a previous marriage, who’d made a similar claim. By Donna Arthur’s own account, then, she brought a man accused of sexually abusing his child into her children’s home.   

Now Ramaswamy’s campaign has dug up this elderly woman to make a video calling her daughter a liar who can’t be trusted to lead the state...   

Goldberg continues from there, as does the horror show of Ramaswamy's behavior. Yesterday, along came the sitting president to offer an endless Truth Social post. In it, he presents what has become the official MAGA Storyline: 

Official (Braindead) Storyline:
Acton's mother has called her a liar. Ramaswamy had the courage to state that important fact.  

Yes, that's what the president actually said. With apologies, here's the latest fruit of his ongoing madness, offered to you in full:   

Truth Details 

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump 

Vivek Ramaswamy put up a very powerful Ad about a mother saying that her daughter, Amy Acton, who is running for Governor of Ohio, is a liar, and much worse. The Press, in a concerted and well coordinated attack, is trying to get Vivek Ramaswamy to “take down the Ad.” Frankly, anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in Office, let alone the Office of Governor. If my mother, the legendary Mary MacLeod Trump, said anything bad about me, the Fake News would play it up. The Dumocrats would be totally supportive, and it would go down as the Ad of the Decade—Maybe the Century! It would win Awards for Excellence in Advertising. But, because Vivek, who will be a GREAT Governor, put it out, the “Artificial” News has teamed up against him in order to damage, demean, and embarrass a Republican who is leading in the Polls. Our RINO Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, who I unfortunately helped get elected years ago, when he was losing by 16 points prior to my doing a Rally for him was, as usual, disloyal to the Republican Party. He strongly suggested that Vivek should, “take down the Ad.” He probably wants a Dumocrat to win, and certainly doesn’t want someone who will do a much better job than he is capable of doing. I suggested, on the other hand, that Vivek should keep it up, and let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals! I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse. That took a lot of courage to do but, essentially, what she was really doing was saving Ohio from making a truly horrible choice! The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, “hitting pay dirt.” The fact is, Lyin’ Amy Acton, who I’ve never even heard of before, has been lying about Vivek for the entire Campaign. I know the real Vivek, he is a brilliant and outstanding person who will cut Taxes, stop Crime and, MAKE OHIO GREAT AGAIN. He will be a fantastic Governor! President DONALD J. TRUMP   

 Oct 22, 2026, 2:38 PM   

That lunacy is the fruit of the sitting president's "untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen." We're quoting his niece, Mary L. Trump, Ph.D., with the key word being "untreated." 

That key word points to a personal tragedy, but one which is very dangerous.

(As we've endlessly noted, Blue America's leading journalists and top academics, to a man and to a woman, have refused to discuss this dangerous state of affairs. Stating the obvious, the people we Blues have been taught to trust have all taken a dive on what is sitting right there before us. For ourselves, we began to notice this overriding lack of quality during our freshman year at Harvard.)  

Trump and Vance, and others inside TrumpWorld, will be doubling down on that Madhouse Storyline. We don't think there will be any type of easy path back out of the crazy world this sitting president has brought us.   

Much of that madness stems from matters of gender—emerges from the fury put on display by furious, disordered men who loathe the people they think of as women. Last night, Psaki interviewed Siebel Newsom, a film-maker who doubles as first lady of California (officially now as "first partner"). 

In our view, it was one of the most instructive conversations we've ever seen on cable TV. We expect to discuss it more next week, but the basic background runs like this, or so says The Hollywood Reporter:  

Jennifer Siebel Newsom Thinks It’s Time Tech Leaders Faced Accountability...   

A lot has changed since 2011. The urgency of talking about the way women are represented in media, unfortunately, has not, according to Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

The documentary filmmaker and the current First Partner of California initially tackled the subject of media’s impact on the underrepresentation of women in positions of power in her 2011 documentary Miss Representation. Around 15 years later, she’s returning with a follow-up, Miss Representation: Rise Up, which chronicles how social-media platforms and AI tools are undercutting women and girls, enabling harassment and supercharging misogyny.

Like its predecessor, the film, which premieres in New York theaters on Thursday, with more screenings to come, enlists a series of high-powered female interviewees to make its point. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Amy Klobuchar, Jameela Jamil and Gretchen Carlson all make appearances. They show up in between footage showing young students speaking about the way social media has impacted them (“It makes me feel like, what is wrong with me?” asks one) and showing female candidates describing online abuse and harassment in political races...   

And on and on and on and on, tracking back to the Rage of Achilles at the dawn of western literature. 

In our view, Psaki and Siebel Newsom created a brilliant discussion last night about the harm done to girls and your women, but also to boys and young men, by that supercharging of misogyny.   

The monster Gutfeld was looking on, along with Watters and an assortment of tools. 

We'll report on Psaki's segment next week. If you want to watch it today, you can start by clicking here.  

Psaki does an opening chunk. Siebel Newsom's film comes on here.

Tomorrow: Briefly and quickly, The Five, including Jessica Tarlov

THURSDAY: There's nobody like Vice President Vance!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026

Unless it's President Trump: Vivek Ramaswamy's gruesome ad has shown us how low things can go in this, the era of the sitting president.   

We'll extend credit to those who have known what to do about the gruesome ad. Here is Ohio's two-term (Republican) governor, Mike DeWine, speaking to reporters today, with tape at Mediaite:

 DEWINE (10/21/26): The ad, on its face, is deeply, deeply troubling. But when you know the rest of the story, when you know the backstory, when you know that the husband of the mom was indicted by a grand jury after hearing testimony, and then he took off along with the mother, and the children never saw, I guess, the mother after—when you know that, it just, to me, makes it more serious. It makes it just more wrong. 

So it’s wrong to run this ad. And even at this late time, my friend saw the ad run this morning on TV. I would just urge the Ramaswamy campaign to take this down. It’s just—it's just wrong.  

So the sitting governor has said. Meanwhile, Mika Brzezinski was superb again on Morning Joe, describing the ad as "arguably the most depraved, monstrous and evil ad in American politics," and as "a chilling act of depravity." 

Perhaps the strangest assessments have come from Vice President Vance, speaking yesterday in Cincinnati and then a bit later in Sharonville, Ohio. Here was his statement in Cincy, delivered right around noon:

VANCE (10/21/26): Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern. What is my concern is who's going to govern the next generation of American government. Who is going to win the Senate race in the state of Ohio. Who's going to win the governor's race in the state of Ohio.

And I got to be honest that, when I see Republicans, people in my party, reacting so strongly, especially elected officials— Look, have the opinion you want to have on that ad. If you think it was too tough, say it was too tough. If you think it wasn’t tough enough, say that.   

But I have to admit that I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country, who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.  

If you think the ad wasn't tough enough, you should simply say it?  

Citoyens, please! This isn't a question of how "tough" the ad was. It's a question of the fact that the ad was grossly misleading concerning a series of sexual assaults committed against the Democratic candidate for governor when she was as young as nine years old. 

Concerning Vance, is there anything he won't say? Later, and astoundingly, he even said this:   

VANCE (10/21/26): The media, and the Democrats in the state of Ohio, are obsessed because—guess what? 

Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar. And my message, ladies and gentlemen, is very simple. Whatever you think of any of the TV advertisements, focus on the substance and focus on the facts.

Ramaswamy had the audacity to call it out like it is—to call Amy Acton a liar? It won't be easy to solve our nation's ongoing crisis of values.  

The sitting president's slippery statement wasn't a whole lot better. To see these disordered men as they defend Ramaswamy's behavior, you can just click here.

UPDATE: According to the sitting president, the ad is true all the way down.

GENDER: Gurov spoke of "the lesser breed!"

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026

Routinely, so does Gutfeld: We don't regard it as his "fault." But the Fox News Channel's Greg Gutfeld is almost surely the dumbest mother-frumper ever assigned to take part in a major American news program.   

How dumb is this dumb mother-frumper? We don't regard it as his "fault," but he's so dumb that he went out last night and offered this braindead attempt at a joke at 10:01 p.m. Eastern—one minute into his brain-dead "cable news" program. To see him do it, click here:  

GUTFELD (10/21/26): JFK Airport held a plane crash drill, complete with fake fire and screaming actors.   

And to make it absolutely realistic, they even had a female pilot.   

AUDIENCE: [On balance, general puzzlement]

In short, this guy is so stupid it squeaks. He's so locked into his loathing of the people he thinks of as women that he persists in presenting insulting jokes about the various things such lesser beings can't do—in this case, about the way a woman couldn't safely fly a plane. 

Believe it or not, it gets dumber. The little guy is so committed to the brain-dead stereotypes of the past that he offers jokes which drive the theme that women (and people of Asian ancestry) are horrible drivers of cars! More often, though, his spectacularly stupid concept of "conservative attack comedy" moves down this uglier path:   

GUTFELD (10/19/26): Greta Thunberg has found a new cause—supporting the riots in France. 

Although she still hasn't succeeded in her most urgent crusade, which is to find someone who will finally [BLEEP] her.  

For what it's worth, we know of no reason to say that Greta Thunberg, who's now 23, has supported the riots in France. None of that has anything to do with the ugly place the mind of Gutfeld inevitably goes when discussing the people he thinks of as women, with storebought tools like Tyrus and Timpf pathetically urging him on.   

(We don't regard it as his "fault" that his mind inevitably goes there. We've long said that Greg Gutfeld, age 62, deserves and seems to need some help, and that his criminally negligent corporate employer ought to be providing it.) 

In yesterday afternoon's post, we linked to Pemberton's guest essay in the New York Times. For non-subscribers, his essay is stuck behind a paywall, but it starts like this:    

I Have Never Seen the Online Right So Happy

The online right has that old spring in its step. The infighting brought on by President Trump’s chaotic second-term agenda has settled down, and the anonymous accounts have been posting at a furious clip. What is the source of this newfound unity? The accusations brought by Jane Doe against seven men at Cornell have given the online right what it’s been missing most: a woman to hate on.

The social media celebrities and talking heads of the right have jumped at the chance to pick apart Jane Doe’s allegations of a gang rape—labeling it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Unable to dispute the basic narrative of the assault, including a lurid fraternity group chat, they’ve elected to argue that Jane Doe is the actual aggressor, a once-willing participant in sexual debauchery now seeking vengeance against her hapless partners.   

Her most hostile critics on the right have sought to portray Jane Doe as a kind of out-of-control sexual fiend or “super slut,” as the conspiracist Alex Jones has labeled her...

Sad! But Pemberton continues from there. Indeed, angry misogyny has been a feature of the angry "conservative" internet ever since the internet was born. Incel-adjacents like Gutfeld are part of this wider throwback culture—a culture which traces back to the sawn of European literature with "The Rage of Achilles" in Book I of the Iliad.

We think today of an early passage from Chekhov's famous, widely lauded story, The Lady with the Lapdog. 

At its heart, Chekhov's story is about a man who is surprised by the discovery that he's capable of loving the woman he loves, a person who is "in no way remarkable."

"He thought and dreamed," Chekhov writes. It's a stunning four-word sentence, offered at the point when this discovery dawns. Early on, though, Chekhov ventures inside Gurov's previous loathing of the people he thought of as women:

The Lady with the Dog 
(Constance Garnett translation)

[...]   

He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago—had been unfaithful to her often, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them "the lower race."

It seemed to him that he had been so schooled by bitter experience that he might call them what he liked, and yet he could not get on for two days together without "the lower race." In the society of men he was bored and not himself, with them he was cold and uncommunicative; but when he was in the company of women he felt free, and knew what to say to them and how to behave; and he was at ease with them even when he was silent. In his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature, there was something attractive and elusive which allured women and disposed them in his favor; he knew that, and some force seemed to draw him, too, to them.

Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people—always slow to move and irresolute—every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing.  

That's very, very sad. He refers to them as "the lower race," can't live two days without them.

We'd rather that a different kind of care had been taken in the portrait of Gurov's wife. But Chekhov's picture of Gurov's anger at "the lesser breed" (David Magarshack translation, Penguin Classics) may take us closer to an understanding of Gutfeld's horrible conduct.

Gurov is attractive to women. His problem is that he was married, at an early age, to a woman with whom he's poorly aligned, and in the Russian society of the time divorce was not an option.

For the many boys and men in online incel culture, the problem takes a substantially different form. But for heterosexual boys and men, the ability to be happy in the world will likely be directly connected to their ability to form a union with someone from "the lesser breed."  

The fury which spills from people like Gutfeld, with people like Timpf and Tyrus urging him on, will routinely come from their inability, for whatever reason or reasons, to form such pleasing connections. On his nightly "cable news" program, Gutfeld keeps instructing boys and young men in the braindead attitudes which will only extend their problem.

In Monday's report, we started the week with a simple question: 

Should Shane Gillis have said what he said? 

Should Gillis have gone on Saturday Night Live and said that women are dressing like whores when they go the gym?  In our view, the answer is fairly obvious. More on that tomorrow.

Gurov emerges as a person in Chekhov's famous story. Can a modern America really expect to find its way in the face of the apparent misogyny which spills from unreconstructed people like Gutfeld—in the face of their endless denigration of the people who are often, simply put, much better people than they?  

From the sitting president right on down, the rage of Achilles is back with a vengeance. Should full-grown American men and women accept this state of affairs?

Tomorrow: The braindead world of The Five

WEDNESDAY: He's never seen them quite so happy!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2026

Also, an apparent ongoing decline: Dear persons! This site covers the mainstream press corps' various organs. Nathan Pemberton, late of the New York Times, "writes about influence and the new right."   

In a new guest essay for the Times, Pemberton describes the world's oldest obsession as displayed by the online right. Angry boys and boy-men have never been so happy, he says.

Headline included, his essay starts like this:

I Have Never Seen the Online Right So Happy

The online right has that old spring in its step. The infighting brought on by President Trump’s chaotic second-term agenda has settled down, and the anonymous accounts have been posting at a furious clip. What is the source of this newfound unity? The accusations brought by Jane Doe against seven men at Cornell have given the online right what it’s been missing most: a woman to hate on.

The social media celebrities and talking heads of the right have jumped at the chance to pick apart Jane Doe’s allegations of a gang rape—labeling it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Unable to dispute the basic narrative of the assault, including a lurid fraternity group chat, they’ve elected to argue that Jane Doe is the actual aggressor, a once-willing participant in sexual debauchery now seeking vengeance against her hapless partners.   

Her most hostile critics on the right have sought to portray Jane Doe as a kind of out-of-control sexual fiend or “super slut,” as the conspiracist Alex Jones has labeled her. Not content to simply degrade her, Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist streamer and self-proclaimed virgin, has used the Cornell case as an opportunity to espouse his vision of male dominance by suggesting not only that Jane Doe should be “put in jail” but that he would “absolutely beat” a woman who behaved like her.   

And so on from there. 

As a general matter, we don't follow those celebrities and talking heads ourselves. Sadly, we don't find it hard to believe Pemberton's observations. 

(Also, brace yourselves, then help yourselves to Megyn Kelly's analysis of the Cornell matter, as excerpted by Mediaite. Don't forget to brace yourselves before you see what she wrote.)   

On the presidential end, the apparent cognitive decline seems to be more obvious than ever—almost, it seems, on a daily basis. At Mediaite, Kathryn Wilkens starts a new report like this:

Trump Explains Sizing Up ‘Ass’ of Republican Senator: ‘I’m Studying His Body’

President Donald Trump offered an eyebrow-raising explanation for why he was examining the “ass” of Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), insisting he was “studying his body.”

Trump’s first reference to Husted’s “ass” came during a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, last week, when he gleefully told the crowd he had begun “examining” Husted’s body after recently learning that the senator was a former All-American defensive back at the University of Dayton.

“I looked, and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass, and I looked at the whole– and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws,” the president marveled on Oct. 12.  

The comments about Senator Husted's physical person have traveled with Trump to other states in the week since then. As reported by Wilkens, here's what he told a rally gathering yesterday, this time in North Carolina:  

So, he’s over here. I’m over here, and I’m studying his body. I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it—of course. [laughs] I always precede it by saying, “Nothing wrong,” but it’s never been my thing, to be honest with you.

But I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs. I said, “His ass, sh*t, it’s like, it’s like a pile of muscle.” Then I looked at his legs, and I said, “Man, his feet are big.” Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. He’s like a piece of steel. I said, “This guy’s a monster!”   

In this way, he hoped to help the Republican Party win the North Carolina Senate race.

As we always tell you, serious cognitive decline is a human tragedy. It's a tragic loss of human capability which can hit friend or foe, loved one or rank stranger.

In this case, the sitting president's powerful position would make some such decline a major societal danger. 

We wait and we wait, then we wait and we wait, for some major journalist or major news org to interview major medical specialists about the apparent change in capacity which seems to be right there before us. 

What will it take before our major Blue American orgs choose to serve—before they choose to report, in a serious way, on the apparent state of the world?

GENDER: She was 12, and her brother was 9!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2026

Ramaswamy moves in: Last evening, we were negatively impressed by the way Anderson Cooper reported the basic facts of the case—by the initial way he presented the latest appalling events from the gubernatorial race in Ohio. 

When Lauren Fox reported live and direct from that state, her performance wasn't much better.   

Later in the segment, it fell to former Republicans Gretchen Carlson and Alyssa Farah Griffin to build appropriate context around the appalling behaviors at issue. Freed up now to express his personal view of the events in question, Cooper also joined in. 

There was no dispute about the squalor of the campaign ad at issue:   

COOPER (10/20/26): I do want to just talk to the panel about this. I mean, this has got to be the most disgusting ad I've seen.   

GRIFFIN: Honestly, the grossest ad I can think of. I was racking my brain for something worse. I don't—anyone behind it should be ashamed. 

[...] 

CARLSON: In the last ten years since MeToo has come to life, and as somebody who works in the sexual assault space, I've never seen anything like this. 

On this morning's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski spoke with outrage but also with control about the events in question:

"When you look at the whole story, it’s almost hard to believe how depraved this effort is," she said. Speaking of the campaign which created the ad, she added this:  

“There seems to be no lie too ugly for them. No trauma they won’t weaponize. No line they won’t cross for power.”

But then, increasingly so it goes inside this endangered nation.

David Gilmour provides videotape of Brzezinski's full remarks in this report for Mediaite. (Three cheers for David Gilmour!) The headline on his report reads like this:   

‘As Sick as It Gets!’ Mika Brzezinski ‘Shook’ By Ramaswamy’s ‘Depraved’ Attempt to ‘Dirty Up’ Rival with Her Past Trauma

For the New York Times account of this matter, you can just click here. 

The background to this event looks like this:

Dr. Amy Acton, 60 years old, is the Democratic Party's nominee in the current race for governor of Ohio. She's a former director of the Ohio Department of Health.   

Dr. Acton has earned the right to be held in high regard. It isn't clear that her Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, still just 41 years of age, rises to that level at this point in his noisy, loud, boisterous life. 

The backstory here involves a basic set of facts. We're sorry to report this fact:

Dr. Acton's stepfather was indicted for raping her when she was 12 years old. (And yes, that's right—indicted.) We'll let this Associated Press report present the other basic facts about Ramaswamy's appalling new ad—and yes, that astonishing headline is accurate:   

Ramaswamy takes responsibility for ad with Amy Acton’s mother and will spend millions to promote it  

[...]   

The advertisement features Acton’s birth mother, Donna Arthur, calling her “a liar” and insinuating she has mental health issues. Acton, Ohio’s former public health director, has made no secret of facing homelessness and abuse as a child. Arthur lost custody of her children after their stepfather was indicted for raping Acton. 

[...]  

Acton spent Tuesday condemning Ramaswamy for the ad even before his campaign confirmed its provenance.    

“I won’t normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is just something I’m complaining about, who today just released an ad using my birth mother, who I was removed from at the age of 12 for severe abuse and neglect, and sexual abuse,” she told Spectrum News, a cable news outlet in Ohio. 

[...]   

Acton’s campaign released a statement from her brother, Philip Stearns, who said the two were removed from their mother Donna Arthur’s custody as children after their stepfather, Arthur’s husband, was indicted for raping Acton as a child. Acton has not seen Arthur, whose last known address was in Pennsylvania, since they were in a courtroom together in 1978.

Later Tuesday, the Acton campaign released a video featuring Stearns, who recalls his older sister taking “the worst” of the abuse they faced as children in order to protect him and disparages Ramaswamy and his allies for exploiting the situation.  

According to police and court documents obtained by The Associated Press, Cledith Arthur was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter, then 12, in July 1978, after Acton’s biological father reported him to authorities. The abuse allegedly happened from December 1976 to April 1978.

Cledith Arthur pleaded not guilty. He was indicted by a grand jury that September, but failed to show at a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981. He has since died.   

Out of the gloaming came the man Ramaswamy, running well behind in the polls and hoping to turn things around.   

Pity the state of Ohio! In 2024, it was Ohio which JD Vance used at the set for his astonishing claim—he later acknowledged that he'd known it was false—that Haitian guest workers were eating one city's pet cats and dogs. 

This week, along comes this other being with this ugly, deranged campaign ad.   

That said, our nation exists in a world of such hurt in this, the age of Trump. And that president; whose behavior is plainly stranger by the day, is going to be in office for two more years plus two more months after the events of November 3.  

“I won’t normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is just something I’m complaining about," Acton said. 

Last evening, on a Fox News Channel "cable news" program, a 61-year-old San Mateo boy—a San Mateo child who has long needed help—decided to offer this otherwise puzzling joke: 

GUTFELD (10/20/26): A new study shows that children who grew up with positive experiences have a lower risk of depression when they get older. 

And an earlier study shows that children who grew up with negative experiences should just keep their traps shut.   

We don't know why this misogyny-adjacent nutcase decided to go with this "joke." Is he nutty enough to have been aiming at Acton?   

Yes, he actually is—and no one in all of Blue America is willing to discuss what he and his various stooges do on his nightly primetime program.  

Our country currently lives in a world of deeply threatening hurt. The people who get sold to us Blues as reporters and commentators are an ongoing part of this problem.  

Tomorrow: Back to The Five (we hope)