GENDER: Sitting president tells a tale...

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2026

...of 125 different genders: Yes, these things actually happened. 

We'll start with some of the president's new claims concerning matters of gender. We'll be remembering, as we've done in the past, that gender and sexuality have always been challenging for us humans to deal with.   

We'll start the with president's Truth Social post before yesterday's rally in Kansas. In his post, he made endless claims about Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Party's nominee for Senator Roger Marshall's Kansas Senate seat  

He made a series of very strange claims. Some claims dealt with gender:   

Truth Details 

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

Senator Roger Marshall’s opponent, Adam Hamilton, is a Radical Left Phony who is pretending to be a moderate because he does not have the courage to tell Kansas the truth about who he really is. Hamilton opposed my Travel Ban to keep Terrorists and Extremists out of our Country. He supports flooding Kansas with unvetted refugees from the most dangerous places on earth. Adam Hamilton used church dollars to fund anti-religious transgender activists who openly mock Jesus. He promotes a document listing 125 different genders, and directs his followers to 7 different websites to make children transgender. Adam Hamilton stated that he believes America is systemically racist. He said that white people must “repent” for being white, and that Kansans should repent for eating beef because you are causing global warming. He donated to Kamala Harris, Crooked Joe Biden, and Barack Hussein Obama and, very importantly, Adam Hamilton wants to take away your guns...

That's the first half of the lengthy screed. To peruse the full post, you can just click here. 

Now it's time for a question:

According to the leading authority, here's a bit of background on the Democratic nominee. Are you sure that this person has chosen to "openly mock Jesus in the manner described? 

Adam Hamilton (pastor)  

Adam Joseph Hamilton (born July 12, 1964) is an American Christian theologian, minister, and author. He is senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States, based in the Greater Kansas City area.

Raised in Prairie Village, Kansas, Hamilton graduated with a bachelor's degree from Oral Roberts University in pastoral ministry and a Master of Divinity from the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He has written more than 30 books about Christian faith, biblical hermeneutics, and contemporary issues. His video-based lessons for Sunday school classes are widely used by Protestant Christians in the United States for instruction in the faith.

Hamilton is the Democratic nominee in the 2026 United States Senate election in Kansas.

[...]   

Hamilton is founding pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas. The church began in 1990 with a few people meeting in a small chapel at a local funeral home and grew into the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States. It has an average weekly attendance of about 25,000 across its nine locations and its online and televised services. 

[...]  

Hamilton says the Bible is inspired by God and that God speaks through scripture, and he defends the Thirty-nine Articles' confession that "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation." In accordance with neo-orthodox theology, he rejects both theological liberalism and fundamentalism. In biblical hermeneutics, he supports the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, affirming that reason, revelation, and experience take precedence over tradition. His preaching states that Jesus is the only means by which humanity can be reconciled with God and leaves open the possibility that individuals may be saved in extraordinary circumstances...Those who reject it in knowledge of its validity are condemned.   

We don't share this candidate's religious / cosmological beliefs. But do you feel sure that he has been openly mocking Jesus by doing such things as "promot[ing] a document listing 125 different genders," or by "direct[ing] his followers to 7 different websites to make children transgender?"   

Here on this campus, we watch the Fox News Channel more than most Blue Americans do. Watching extremely peculiar programs like Gutfeld!, we're struck by the extent to which MAGA anger is fueled by issues involving gender—by attitudes which seem to involve the loathing of women, but also by constant focus on transgender topics. 

Issues of sexuality and gender have always been hard. Last night, at his rally, the sitting president did in fact keep playing these highly emotional themes.

For the full transcript, just click here. This very morning, videotape of much of this was seen on Morning Joe:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (10/19/26):  In 15 days, we're going to reelect Roger Marshall, one of the greatest. And we're going to defeat the Communists, the jihadists, and the corrupt anti-American lunatics once and for all. We're gonna put them back. We've gotta set them back, gotta hit them hard. 

So Roger's opponent— I did a lot of work on this... So I understand what I'm saying. 

Adam Hamilton used to say, like, bad things about me, really radical left things. I mean, he would talk like— I said, "This guy's a radical left lunatic."   

...I didn't know. I'd never thought he'd be running for office, but I used to hear about this lunatic up here. I said, "What the hell is he doing in Kansas?"     

But he'd say bad crap about me. And I don't like—I don't like people that do that. But he's a radical left phony who's pretending to be a moderate because he does not have the courage to tell Kansas the truth about his belief and really who he is. 

Hamilton opposed my travel ban to keep terrorists and extremists out of our country, and he was vicious about it. What kind of a president would want to keep killers, thugs, lunatics—but he didn't say that—out of our country? [sic]

He supports flooding Kansas with unvetted refugees who go around killing people literally for no reason. 

[Audience boos]    

And they come in. He says it's okay for people to come in. From the most dangerous places on earth, they can pour into Kansas. 

Adam Hamilton used church dollars to fund anti-religious transgender activity—activities. 

[Audience boos]     

I mean. And so, he used a lot of church money to fund all of this transgender crap that you're reading about, who openly mocks Jesus and he openly mocks Jesus. He promotes a document listing 125 different genders—you think Talafreako's bad, he was only six—and directs his followers to seven different websites to make children transgender.        

He believes in letting children and making children transgender. Do you know that? I mean, I'm not saying this just out of the blue...

With respect to gender fury, it was the same stuff from his Truth Social post, with "Talafreako" thrown in. In short, our nation's in a very dangerous world of very serious hurt. 

Tomorrow, we hope to return to what Shane Gillis said on SNL—to the way the stooges on The Five pretended to handle the topic.

Tomorrow: Even Jessica Tarlov complies

MONDAY: Sitting president confronts crazed lunatic!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2026

The problem we all face: Yes, it's an actual post.  

Even worse, it's an actual Truth Social post, from the sitting president. NBC's Channel 4 in Washington, D.C. provides the basic background:

East Potomac golf course closure and overhaul will start ‘immediately,' Trump says

President Donald Trump on Monday said his plans to close a historic public golf course in the nation's capital for 15 months and redevelop it despite an ongoing court challenge to his long-sought renovation will begin "IMMEDIATELY!"

Trump posted on social media on Sunday about his intent to shutter the East Potomac Golf Course, not far from the White House, starting Nov. 15 to make it “one of the Best and Most Spectacular Golf Courses anywhere in the World.”

A judge last week, however, ordered a halt to his redevelopment plans until at least Oct. 26 after scolding the government for starting a large-scale tree removal at the course over a holiday weekend while providing little notice to the court or the plaintiffs trying to stop the makeover.

Trump did not acknowledge the legal fight in his initial post, but early Monday morning he took to Truth Social again, calling the judge "a crazed lunatic."   

And so on from there.

This may seem like a hill of beans compared to the president's apparent tilt in the direction of trying to let Vladimir Putin achieve his conquest of Ukraine. The president's recent behaviors in that arena are being condemned by observers from all sides of all aisles.   

Compared to that onrushing disaster, this act of large-scale tree removal will likely seem less important. But here's the sitting president's complete Truth Social post:  

Truth Details

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

The United States Department of Interior wants to take a terrible and very unsafe golf course, and make it into a great, safe, and prestigious golf course. They have an absolute right to do so. It’s as simple as that! The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane? The tapes have been blocked from usage by the judge. The random golfer bringing the ridiculous lawsuit has ZERO STANDING! The experts at “Interior” are allowed to do this First Class renovation “as of right.” [sic] They do not need an approval. Work is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY! The finished product will be World Class, and bring income and great prestige back to D.C. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT   

Oct 19, 2026, 6:08 AM   

Were sorry, but no! Judge Ana C. Reyes shows no sign of being "a crazed lunatic whose courthouse...may be insane." 

Under an alternate reading of the garbled post, Judge Reyes also shows no sign of being insane herself.   

No, Virginia and the entire D.C. region: the judge doesn't seem to be crazed in the slightest. But the president who issued that post will be free to behave any way he pleases on the international stage for two more years and two more months after November 3. 

In short, it's a dangerous time here in our struggling nation.

GENDER: Should he have said what he said?

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2026

Shane Gillis host SNL: Should Shane Gillis have said it?  

Gillis is a somewhat / fairly well-known comedian of the occasionally controversial kind. He's 38 years old as we speak.

On October 10 of this very year, his guest host stint on Saturday Night Live produced one such public discussion. Three days later, NBC News published this report about one part of the backlash against the gentleman's opening monologue on the well-known NBC program:

Former ‘SNL’ star Ego Nwodim mocks Shane Gillis monologue about women’s gym outfits

Former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Ego Nwodim appeared to respond to Shane Gillis’ controversial monologue from his latest hosting stint Saturday, during which he said that women who wear short shorts to the gym are dressing like “whores.”

“Whore reporting for duty,” Nwodim captioned an Instagram story Monday that featured a photo of her in the gym wearing black leggings, a black long-sleeved shirt and a black baseball hat.

She then posted a photo of her post-workout meal, writing, “Getting my 30 grams of protein in after heauxing,” with “heauxing” being slang for “whoring.”   

Gillis’ monologue garnered backlash online in the days since, with people calling the raunchy comedian “tone-deaf” for making a comment about women’s bodies, especially as the country reckons with the scandal over an alleged sexual assault at Cornell University.

Say what? He said that women who wear short shorts to the gym are dressing like “whores?” 

In the most obvious sense, we'd have to say that the answer is yes. In the most obvious sense, that's a fair account of what the host seems to have said. 

You can watch his seven-minute opening monologue just by clicking here. Shortly after the two-minute mark, these were the comments in question:   

“I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now. Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe-- Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. The shorts? Have you seen the shorts? Those neon, they're like artificial bait-colored, and the wrinkles go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. 

“And don’t look! You’re not allowed to look...”  

That was the passage in question. For ourselves, we haven't seen it. (We haven't been to the gym since  the days when Covid began.)

If we assume that he was reporting his real experience, Gillis said that he has.   

The gentleman said that he's seen it, but is it actually true? Is it true that "women"—All women? Some women? A handful of women? Two women he saw in one gym?—are actually dressing like whores? 

How many women are dressing like whores? Gillis didn't say. Beyond that, a second question arises:

Is there really "no other way to describe [it]," because that's what the fellow seems to have said. Is there  no other way to describe it, or is Gillis simply a comic of the type described by Emma Specter at the start of this opinion column for Vogue?   

I Am So Over Comics Who Simply Don’t Like Women   

Being a stand-up comedy fan since childhood has often been an exercise in disassociation.

Watching specials by Louis C.K. and Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais on my mom’s work computer late at night, I learned to put space between myself and “other women”—that is, the women those comics took aim at. “Other” women were silly, flighty, embarrassing, annoying (such as those referenced in Burr’s 2017 riff about how there’s “plenty of reasons to hit a woman…you just don’t do it”). When I grew up, I vowed, I would be a Gone Girl-style Cool Girl, one who made the jokes instead of suffering them.   

As I got older, however, I discovered new comedian lodestars. I delighted in John Mulaney and Nick Kroll embodying Upper West Side alter kaker in Oh, Hello, and Conner O’Malley doing bizarre performance art as the fake tech entrepreneur Richard Eagleton. Not all of their material was inherently feminist or affirming, but at least I could watch it without being distracted by basic misogyny disguised as “edgy humor.”   

Sadly, those who tuned in to Saturday Night Live over the weekend got just that. “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now,” host Shane Gillis said during his opening monologue. “Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe [it]..."  

And so on from there. In Specter's view, Gillis had offered basic misogyny disguised as “edgy humor." He was a comic who simply doesn’t like women. 

As she proceeded, Specter quoted Dan Levy, who said this In a video later posted to Instagram: 

“Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”  

In that way, the name-calling continued.   

No people are uninteresting, the Soviet and Russian poet Yevtushenko once said, and we've long affirmed his claim. That said, in our view, some people who think of themselves as men have been slow to relinquish the desire to exercise control over the people they think of as women.   

As we've noted in the past few years, this control is driving the action at the start of the Iliad, at the dawn of European literature. The problem begins when Agamemnon, lord of men, is told he has to relinquish Chryseis, the teenage girl he has stolen from her father, a priest to Apollo.

The lord of men is deeply offended. He's reported to have said this:   

The girl—I won't give up the girl. Long before that,
old age will overtake her in my house, in Argos,
far from her fatherland. slaving back and forth
at the loom, forced to share my bed! 

In the end, he does "give up the girl." As compensation, he takes Achilles' "prize," the teenage girl Briseis, triggering the rage of that greatest warrior.   

The attitude lodged in that famous war poem has never quite gone away. Today, the attitude can be found all over the Fox News Channel, but also out in major regions of the Bro Terrain. 

It's met with complete and total silence from Blue America's major camps.   

Tomorrow: On The Five, even Tarlov buys it

SATURDAY: Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world?

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2026

The president gay-baits Ossoff: We want to show you two bits of text from last night's Anderson Cooper program on CNN. 

In this, the first of these clips, the president is gay-baiting Senator Ossoff. Cooper is speaking with Tim Pawlenty, the former (Republican) governor of Minnesota, a person who never engaged in this kind of conduct:   

COOPER (10/16/26): Governor Pawlenty, I just want to play another part of the president's speech in Georgia today.

PRESIDENT TRUMP (videotape): I call him Pee-Wee Herman. Pee-Wee Herman, he looks like Pee-Wee. His name is Jon Ossoff, highly overrated. 

Somebody said he's a good-looking man. I don't think he's a good-looking man. I actually think Mike Collins is a good-looking man. And he's all man. He's all man. I'm not sure about Ossoff. 

If I am casting a movie for a senator, I like the white hair. I like the big, strong build, big, strong guy. But that's what I want. But he's a respected man.

COOPER: I'm not sure what he was insinuating about Ossoff, but why does he keep commenting on men's appearances? I mean, it's sort of fascinating to me.

PAWLENTY: You know, he says all kinds of things that are sort of entertaining. But you know what the voters want to hear is what's going on with my pocketbook, what's going on with affordability, what's going on in the economy...

Obviously, Cooper knew what the president was saying about Ossoff. (Pawlenty also avoided the obvious.) Next week, we expect to note the way this sort of thing is currently driving so much of MAGA (and Fox News Channel) politics.   

In this, the second clip, the president is Muslim-baiting Abdul El-Sayed. Cooper is speaking with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times:   

COOPER: And Lulu, I want to play you something else the president said today about Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

PRESIDENT TRUMP (videotape): He's as bad almost as Mohamed Abdul El-Sayed. 

You know, I took a lot of heat for calling him "Mohamed." And I said, I don't care, I'm the president of the United States. I can call you whatever the hell I want. I can call you whatever I want, Mohamed.

And then today, a guy sends me something. His name is actually "Abdullah bah-bah-bah-bah-bah"—Mohammed El-Sayed. So, his middle name is Mohamed. So, I was right, almost.

Oh, by the way, how about that guy? He's a Jihadist. He's a radical left person. He hates our country.

COOPER: How do you think? I mean, do you think that works for the people he wants to turn out?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: No, I mean, I think it's racist, obviously. He's using "Mohamed" as a sort of slur, when it's the name of the prophet and for Muslims. And then beyond that, it's just more of the same...

By any normal standard, that was astonishing conduct by the sitting president. 

It was obvious Muslim-baiting. We were struck by the fact that Cooper was only willing to fashion a question as to whether this obvious baiting would "work." 

(In response, we wouldn't have used the highly general term "racist" ourselves.)

By the way, here's a quick thumbnail of the man who was being baited by our sitting president—the man who hates our country:

Abdul El-Sayed

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed (born October 31, 1984) is an American epidemiologist and politician who is the Democratic nominee in the 2026 United States Senate election in Michigan.

Born and raised in southeast Michigan, El-Sayed graduated from the University of Michigan and was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in public health. He then earned his medical degree from Columbia University. He then became an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University School of Public Health. He was the executive director of the Detroit Health Department from 2015 to 2017. From 2023 to 2025, he served as director of the Wayne County Department of Health, Human & Veterans Services.   

[...]   

In 2003, El-Sayed graduated from Bloomfield Hills Andover High School, where he was a three-sport athlete and captain of the wrestling, football, and lacrosse teams. He then attended the University of Michigan...He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest distinction in 2007 with a bachelor's degree and gave that year's student commencement speech. 

Once captain of his high school's football team, he hates the U.S. today! Along somewhat similar lines, here is some background on Ossoff, whose background is not widely known:

Jon Ossoff   

Thomas Jonathan Ossoff (born February 16, 1987) is an American politician who has served as the senior United States senator from Georgia since 2021. He is the youngest incumbent U.S. senator, and a member of the Democratic Party.

[...]

He attended The Paideia School, a private school in Atlanta. While in high school, he interned for civil rights leader and U.S. representative John Lewis. Ossoff is a 2009 graduate of Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service with a Bachelor of Science degree in culture and politics. He earned a master of science degree in international political economy from the London School of Economics in 2013.   

[...]   

Ossoff is married to Alisha Kramer, an obstetrics and gynecology doctor at Emory University, where she completed her residency in 2023, and a graduate of Georgetown University and Emory University School of Medicine. Ossoff married Kramer in 2017 after 12 years of dating. On the night of Ossoff's election to the United States Senate in January 2021, Kramer was working an overnight shift in Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. They have two daughters, born in December 2021 and June 2025.  

Just a guess: Those two girls got a very good deal when the gods selected their parents.

At any rate, despite the president's recent gay-bating, Ossoff doesn't seem to be gay. Of course, as (almost) everyone knows by now, many millions of good, decent people are.  And we don't have a person to waste, as Bill Clinton used to say.

In recent weeks, the gay-baiting and the Muslim baiting have been general over MAGA elites and the Fox News Channel. With respect to that sad situation, we speak to this obvious question:   

Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world? What the heck's up with that?   

Our record-shattering answer:  

We Americans can't fact-check or name-call our way back out of our current national mess—"back out of all this now too much for us," as Frost confusingly had it. 

Instead, we'll need to emerge into a world of deepened American values—some of them seeming to be a bit Reddish, some of them tilting toward Blue. 

We need a deeper connection to happiness. More on that to follow.