WEDNESDAY: There's little sign of paralysis...

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

...from Red America's messaging persons: Has anyone ever changed as much as JD Vance weirdly has?

We're speaking about the two Vances:

The thoughtful, humorous JD Vance who published Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, then sat for a series of high-profile interviews in support of the widely praised memoir.

The JD Vance who exists today—the JD Vance of the ugly "the Haitians are eating Ohio's pets" claim of the 2024 campaign.

How did the first person turn into the second? At Mediaite, Colby Hall offers the latest dope about that second person:

JD Vance’s Warning About Trump ‘Death Bed’ Misinformation Was… Misinformation

Vice President JD Vance just pulled off a very 2025 trick: warning about fake news by making some up.

Following a few days of bizarre and baseless rumors—primarily from far left social media trolls and influencers—about President Donald Trump’s health, Vance logged onto X and wrote:

“If the media you consumed told you that Donald Trump was on his death bed because he didn’t do a press conference for 3 days, imagine what else they’re lying to you about.”

It’s a neat line. Punchy. Timely. But also false. No credible outlet—not The New York Times, not CNN, not Fox, not even the most fringe clickbait—reported Trump was on his death bed. The story existed only in rumor mills and the viral, self-feeding algorithms of social media, mainly on the cesspool that X has become...

And so on from there. 

In fairness, the new Vance can hide behind the ambiguity of the slick and useful term, "the media." But today, at the age of (just turned) 41, is there any bogus claim this once genial fellow isn't ready to peddle?

This week, we're searching the early stories of Joyce, focusing on the theme of societal "paralysis" and metaphorical death. Among the messaging agents of Red America, there's little sign of any "paralysis" at the present time.

In our view, those messaging agents are characterized by their apparent inability to regulate their anger and their endless sense of grievance. Paralysis isn't them!  As an example of what we mean, consider what happened last night, when Suzanne Scott pried the lid off the can at 10 p.m. (7 p.m. out on the coast) and Greg Gutfeld came slithering out.

He was supported by four flyweight guests. There was little sign of "paralysis."

If you're willing to watch this angry, dimwitted child, you can see him pursue his favorite targets and themes in his opening two or three minutes of jokes:

Themes of opening jokes: September 2, 2025
Favorite target Greta Thunberg has an unsightly haircut.

Favorite target Rosie O'Donnell allegedly has herpes—and she got it from a toilet seat!

Favorite target Rashida Tlaib has an unsightly mustache.

Little "paralysis" is evident in the behaviors of this emotionally crippled child. (He turns 61 next week.) Needless to say, favorite target Jerry Nadler also turned up in a set of jokes which featured the standard perspective:

GUTFELD (9/2/25): Representative Jerry Nadler announced he is retiring after 34 years in Congress.

AUDIENCE: [Cheering, applause]

GUTFELD: He is citing a need for change, referring to his trousers.

I'm not going to say he ruins a lot of pants, but his dry cleaner did kill himself. 

But if I know Nadler, we haven't heard the last from him.

[Sounds of a flushing toilet]

That's the first time we've used sound effects in a joke, and I think it went really well.

Judged by any recognizable standard, something is wrong in this strange fellow's head. The paralysis starts when Blue America's timorous elites agree that they should refuse to report or discuss his behavior.

Other favorite targets were soon hit in Gutfeld's "issue monologue." That included favorite target Taylor Swift, who is typically derided on this prehuman, braindead show because she's "just a 5."

For the record, the little guy opened his program with a favorite unsupported rumor about favorite target Ilhan Omar. For PolitiFact's fact-check of the tired old rumor, just click this. For the Snopes fact-check (rating: Unfounded), you can just click here.

Very little paralysis holds this nutcase back. Paralysis enters the world of our dying society's failing discourse when Blue America's timorous tribunes all agree that his braindead, destructive behavior must, at all costs, be ignored.

He starts with poop, slides downhill from there. We do advise you to pity the child, but he and his nitwit "cable news" guests make it quite hard to do that.

Suzanne Scott pries the lid off the can. This stupid, sad garbage slides out.

THE DEAD: The analysts screamed when Stephanie Ruhle...

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

...tried to perform a fact check: It's increasingly painful to observe what sits in the place of our failed American discourse.

Last night, for example, Stephanie Ruhle was back from a late summer absence. Sadly enough, reality forced her to deal with these statement by the sitting American president:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (9/2/25): Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now...

We'll, we're going in [to Chicago with federal troops]. I didn't say when, but we're going in...

We have the right to do it, because I have an obligation to protect this country. And that includes Baltimore...

 I’m very proud of Washington. It serves as a template. And we’re going to do it elsewhere. But Chicago is certainly going to be high.

Baltimore, "what they need is housing." No, they don’t need housing. They need is to get rid of the criminals.

We're showing you the snippets that Ruhle ran. "In the wickedness of the times" (Plato), we know of no place where a citizen can see a transcript of the president's full remarks. 

In the next day or two, the invaluable Rev may produce such a transcript. Or then again, possibly not.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our discourse is barely breathing. Before we elaborate on that remark, we offer a minor aside:

We ourselves just spent a glorious weekend in one of the hellholes in question. The weather was astoundingly good, as was the glorious walking.

The longer weekend, mixed with the broadcast of several intriguing football games, produced a fugue-infested weekend here on the streets where we live. We recall what sacred Thoreau wrote in Walden, at the start of the chapter called Solitude:

Solitude

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath...

No, it wasn't quite that good. But we were out and about, in glorious weather, inside an American hellhole. 

No hellhole is visible on the streets where we live. There may well be hellholes elsewhere in "fair Baltimore, the beautiful city"—in particular neighborhoods, on particular streets, within particular homes.

There may be hellholes elsewhere here. That said, the rantings and the rage of this disordered man won't likely be helpful at any point—and Ruhle was soon trying to fact-check his statements.

More specifically, she tried to offer a fact-check of this Truth Social post by the ranting commander in chief:

CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

In the end, such ranting won't likely be helpful. 

It was still just 11:01 p.m. when Ruhle tried to perform a fact-check. The analysts groaned, then tore at their hair, when they saw her say this:

RUHLE (9/2/25): For fact's sake, Tijuana, Mexico has the highest homicide rate in the world. And despite Chicago being the third biggest city in America, its murder rate falls below red state cities like Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and St. Louis, Missouri.

Sad. According to FBI data, Chicago's murder rate is, in fact, far lower than the murder rates of quite a few American cities. But sad! 

The size of a city isn't directly connected in any way to its murder rate! Please don't ask us to explain this remarkably bone-simple point.

Is Chicago "THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD," in the predictable way President All Caps decided to rant? This morning, we traveled across the pond to The Times of London in search of clarification.

As usual, the Times of New York is glossing—seems to be disappearing—President Trump's "hellhole" remarks. By way of contrast, The Times of London was actually willing to speak:

Trump to send National Guard to ‘hellhole cities’ in governor showdown

[...]

Trump has so far deployed members of the National Guard, a state-based reservist force, to Los Angeles and Washington, citing the high crime rates. On Tuesday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”

However, the three cities that had the highest murder rates in the US last year are all in Republican states, according to the latest FBI data. Birmingham in Alabama, St Louis in Missouri and Memphis in Tennessee recorded more than 40 murders per 100,000 people.

The next two cities with the highest murder rates in the US—Baltimore and Detroit—are in states with Democratic governors. Chicago recorded 17.5 murders per 100,000 people last year.

In fact, according to the FBI data, Chicago's murder rate is dwarfed by those in Birmingham and St. Louis. It's less than half the murder rate found in Memphis. 

That said, none of this has much to do with the desire to address the horrors of violent crime. Neither does the incessant clowning of the clown-car sitting president.

The analysts screamed at the statistical illiteracy Ruhle introduced into her program. Soon, her producers were flashing her standard, embarrassing slogan as she introduced her first panel of guests:

LET'S GET SMARTER

By the time they were forced to see that silly slogan flash on the screen, the youthful analysts were openly weeping. In our minds, we returned to the themes of paralysis and (metaphorical) death found in the fifteen stories of Joyce's famous collection, Dubliners.

You may think we're picking nits when we complain about Ruhle's bungle. If you have some such reaction, we're forced to report that you're wrong.

With respect to the young Joyce's collection of stories, the question to which we return is this:

In some way, can we modern Americans see ourselves reflected somehow in his early stories? In the stories about the spiritual paralysis he though the saw within the Ireland of the early twentieth century?

Blinded by the flooding of the zone and by the speed of the modern news cycle, we Americans need to learn to see ourselves with more clarity. Can we possibly see ourselves in the early Joyce's first stories?

Was their "paralysis" our paralysis? Joyce described his intention in letters to the timorous publisher who kept refusing to publish Dubliners.

The publisher wanted certain parts of the stories to be softened, thrown away—disappeared. Joyce described his purpose thusly:

JOYCE (May 5, 1906): As for my part and share in the book I have already told all I have to tell. My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis...I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written. 

JOYCE (May 20, 1906): You cannot see anything impossible or unreasonable in my position. I have explained and argued everything at full length and, when argument and explanation were unavailing, I have perforce granted what you wished, and even when you didn’t ask, [sic] me to grant. The points on which I have not yielded are the points which rivet the book together. If I eliminate them, what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country. 

Joyce had just turned 24 when he wrote those letters. He believed that he had composed a "moral history of [his] country." 

Rightly or wrongly, he believed that the Ireland of his youth was trapped is a form of "paralysis"—and the lengthy story which closed the collection bore this famous title:

The Dead

He believed he saw a type of paralysis gripping his nation back then. Is our own failing nation tapped in a type of paralysis now?

Unfortunately, there's little "paralysis" in the caterwauling emerging from the tribunes of Red America on a round-the-clock basis. If some such paralysis exists, it's found over here, with us Blues.

The analysts screamed when Stephanie Ruhle introduced that bone-simple bungle. The Times of London has already critiqued what the president said. As with other presidential screeds, it's being hushed up over here.

At any rate, the weather was beautiful, all weekend long, here in the heart of a hellhole. Children were attacking the sidewalks with chalk. Click here to enjoy a forgotten old song, the song called "The Baltimore Fire."

This afternoon: It came from the garbage can

Also, the lyrics: As sung by the New Lost City Ramblers:

"Fire, fire" I heard the cry
From every breeze that passes by
All the world was one sad cry of pity.

Strong men in anguish prayed
Calling out to heaven for aid
While the fire in ruins was laying
Fair Baltimore, the beautiful city.

TUESDAY: When the president went there again...

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2025

...none of the friends said a word: Is there a type of "paralysis" infesting come significant portion of our failing nation's population? Could some of the people so infested be thought of as "The Dead?"

We took the crazy gamble this morning of flirting with such questions. 

We're starting our new narrative year with the speculative possibility that we Americans are trapped in some sort of "collective paralysis." That certain segments of the society are, metaphorically, among the spiritual dead.

Who might we have in mind? It's hard to attempt an analysis of the American discourse without citing the endless profusion of events such as this:

Trump WH Roasted For Wild $8 Trillion Whopper: ‘Amazing–And Insanely Wrong!’

The Trump White House sparked a wave of condemnation after Labor Day Weekend with a social media post boasting it had taken in a whopping “$8 trillion in tariff revenue.”

The White House posted an image of Trump and the caption, “President Trump’s protectionist trade policies have helped drive more than $8 trillion in new U.S. investment, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.” The image also included the caption, “$8 TRILLION IN TARIFF REVENUE, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF NEW JOBS.”

Critics were quick to point out obvious, glaring errors in the post—and others made over the weekend. The conservative Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Reidl shared the post and added...

You can click to see what Riedl said. Reason's Nick Gillespie offered this:

“Amazing–and insanely wrong! Trump claims ‘$8 trillion in tariff revenue.’ In all of 2024, total imports came to $3.7 trillion.”

There our tribunes went again, using the language of mental health—but using it only in a colloquial manner.

For whatever reason, the White House seems to have issued an astonishing howler. Because its presentation dealt with tariff revenue, we thought back to the early moments of Monday's Fox & Friends program—to the magic moments we briefly mentioned, then passed over, in this morning's report.

Yesterday morning, in real time, we were struck by how quickly the propaganda starts on Fox News Channel programs where everyone on the panel will agree, by force of law, with everything that everyone else has said. You may remember who the three friends were this day:

Fox & Friends: Monday, September 1, 2025
Lawrence Jones: co-host, Fox & Friends
Emily Compagno: co-host, Outnumbered
Johnny Joey Jones: Fox News contributor

There they sat at 6 a.m., ready to advance the various mandated messaging points. At 6:03, Compagno enthusiastically offered this about the amazing economy:

COMPAGNO (9/1/25): The president himself is weighing in, putting this on Truth Social...

With that, she read the president's post. It involved the miracle of tariffs. Here's the text of what she read:

"Prices are ‘WAY DOWN' in the USA, with virtually no inflation. With the exception of ridiculous, corrupt politician-approved ‘Windmills,' which are killing every State and Country that uses them, Energy prices are falling, ‘big time.' Gasoline is at many-year lows. All of this despite magnificent Tariffs, which are bringing in Trillions of Dollars from Countries that took total advantage of us, for decades, and are making America STRONG and RESPECTED AGAIN!!!"

There the fellow went again! Try to ignore the other claims, including the claims about windmills. But with respect to the magic of tariffs, there he went again!

Once again, there he went, seeming to say that tariff revenues are submitted to the treasury by foreign governments or other foreign entities. Tariff revenues are free money! The president said it again!

Nothing seems to stop him from making this groaning misstatement. Presumably, Jones or Jones or Compagno herself must have known that the president's representation was bogus.

Did Jones and Jones and Compagno know? We'll assume that at least one of them did! But Compagno politely read the text of the president's post—and none of the friends said a word.

Has a paralysis affected these players? Could they possibly be thought of as the (metaphorical) dead?

At this site, we think of them as messenger children, but also as "Unrecognizables." We'll have more on this type of conduct as the week proceeds, but we're thinking of a different group when we encounter Joyce's language—his language from Dubliners, culminating with The Dead.

There the president went again! Meanwhile, how odd:

Red America's corporate "friends" refuse to talk about President Trump. Meanwhile, Blue America's progressional journalists refuse to talk about them!

We regard the friends as "Unrecognizables." What can we say about the people who refuse to report or discuss the various things they say and do?

It was 6:03 on Monday morning. Compagno tread the text of the howler and she and her friends moved on!

THE DEAD: The Stupid is general over the culture!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2025

Also, perhaps, the dead: Last week's endless "cabinet meeting" brought an earlier event to mind.

The "cabinet meeting" ran a full three hours and seventeen minutes. It opened with President Trump orating for 48 minutes. 

At that point, the president threw to "Bobby"—to his frequently criticized Secretary of Health and Human Services. Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can peruse a transcript of all that transpired—of every word that was said.

A somewhat peculiar exchange between the president and the secretary brought the earlier event to mind. In this news report, the New York Times recalled the earlier incident:

How the Trump-Kennedy Alliance Is Pushing the Boundaries of Public Health

Before he began his remarks on health care policy at a White House event earlier this summer, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. first felt the need to praise one of President Trump’s passion projects.

Mr. Kennedy said that Mr. Trump’s new Oval Office décor had “transformed” a White House that comparatively looked “drab” when his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, filled it. “Under your stewardship, it looks extraordinary today,” Mr. Kennedy said as Mr. Trump nodded in approval. “So thank you, Mr. President.”

During a three-hour cabinet meeting this week, it was Mr. Trump’s turn to support Mr. Kennedy’s endeavors: researching any link between vaccines and autism, a theory that many medical professionals and studies have debunked....

And so on from there. 

For the record, the earlier White House event took place on July 30. Before discussing health care policy on that earlier occasion, Kennedy had apparently felt the need to blather on like this:

KENNEDY (7/30/25): Thank you very much, Mr. President and I just want to begin by making a comment that is irrelevant to what we're gathered here today to talk about. 

But I've been coming to this building for 65 years and I have to say that it has never looked better. And I've spent some time—I've spent some time in the Oval Office, which really has—it's been transformed.

And I was looking at a picture of the Oval Office the other day when I was there, when I was a kid with my uncle and it was an extraordinary—it's always an extraordinary to go into that sacred space. But I have to say that it looked kind of drab in the pictures, and they were black and white pictures but looked drab, and it looks the opposite of drab today.

[Addressing reporters] And I think—I know all these portraits. I hope you get a chance to look at them when you go out there, that they were hand-picked by the president. And many of them hijacked from other agencies that were trying to keep them.

But I mean, you know, my uncle, my Aunt Jackie, who were deeply committed to design, to beauty and who understood that it's important to have our public buildings be beautiful because it inspires us, it elevates the human spirit. It's one of the—it's a template, it's an exemplar for democracy, the releasing through freedoms of the creativity of the human spirit and this building, of all buildings, should look beautiful.

And under your stewardship, it looks extraordinary today. So thank you, Mr. President, for that. 

That earlier event had started with the president orating for more than ten minutes. When Kennedy was finally asked to speak, he burned away two additional minutes with that "irrelevant comment."

Even Aunt Jackie couldn't match the president's mastery of design and beauty, the admiring secretary admiringly said. 

As he did, he enhanced his branding as a Trump-admiring Kennedy, while orating within an increasingly peculiar realm. Some observers have begun to think that the realm in question might be North Korea adjacent!

The spectacular dumbness of the secretary's remarks in July has become a bit of a trademark. Leaders from around the world seem to have decided that the only way to approach the sitting president is with words of fawning praise.

To appearances, Russian patriot Vladimir Putin has become a master of the technique. Today, he continues to add to the dead of Ukraine, weeks after President Trump applauded him as he disembarked from his plane at Alaska's subarctic summit.

The president applauded the strongman that day, back on August 15. In a recent interview, he now seems to have said he got fooled by his Russkie darling and friend during the ballyhooed meeting.

"I thought I had it done" that day, the president somewhat oddly said, during a lengthy interview with a very young journalist from the very pro-MAGA site, The Daily Caller.

The young journalist who conducted the lengthy interview is three years out of college (Hillsdale College, class of 2022). She may go on to become a truly outstanding journalist. Also, there's no law requiring her, or anyone else, to be anti-MAGA.

For now, rightly or wrongly, she may be very pro-MAGA. She seemed to enjoy the president's sense of humor when he "announced a new piece of art in the White House—a portrait of former President Joe Biden’s autopen." 

The sheer stupidity of such events never ends at this point. Here's the start of Mediaite's report on that bit of news from the sitting president:

Trump Mocks Biden’s Autopen With a Portrait in the White House: ‘This Is Going To Be Very Controversial’

President Donald Trump has announced a new piece of art in the White House—a portrait of former President Joe Biden’s autopen.

The president shared the detail in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, which published the full transcript of Trump’s conversation with reporter Reagan Reese on Monday.

“We put up a picture of the autopen,” Trump told Reese, who responded, “Oh, that’s hilarious.”

It is not exactly clear where the portrait will hang. The Daily Caller’s transcript said Trump showed Reese multiple versions of the picture and what it “will look like in the Rose Garden,” but portraits are not typically displayed in the outdoor space. Either way, Trump said the painting will be unveiled in about two weeks.

And so on, oddly, from there. All in all, the beautification of the White House continues, as does the support of journalistic admirers. Under present arrangement, no matter what the president does, the troops are there to support him.

At this site, we regard that "portrait of the autopen" plan as an example of sheer stupidity. Others will assess it differently.

That said, the cheerleading conduct extends through the days at the Fox News Channel. Yesterday morning, we were struck, as we often are, by how quickly the spread of propaganda starts.

It was 6 o'clock on Labor Day morning. A trio of friends had been assembled to message on the weekday show, Fox & Friends.

Given that it was a holiday, two of the friends were substitute friends. The lineup looked like this:

Fox & Friends: Monday, September 1, 2025
Lawrence Jones: co-host, Fox & Friends
Emily Compagno: co-host, Outnumbered
Johnny Joey Jones: Fox News contributor

The propaganda—and the comical misstatements of fact—started with remarkable speed.

Given how way leads on to way, we may never be able to get back to the stream of silly remarks uttered by those corporate messenger children. That said:

At 6:07, the analysts came right out of the chairs when Compagno chided observers from the liberal world who like to weigh in with their views "in a siloed fashion." And yes, she actually said it!

There is no way to keep up with the steady stream of inanity which now defines the successor to the American national discourse. But as the aforementioned Russkie patriot continues to add to the ranks of the dead, you can be sure that you'll never see any friends on that "cable news" channel offer anything resembling fair and balanced coverage of our sitting president's exploits.

Long ago and far away, Joyce published a famous story—a story called The Dead. It was part of the collection called Dubliners

Joyce had written all the stories by 1907, when he was just 25. It took him seven more years to get someone to publish the famous collection.

The Dead is the longest and the final story in Dubliners. According to the leading authority on the story, "T. S. Eliot called [it] one of the greatest short stories ever written in English." It may seem dry as dust to the contemporary reader, since most of us will have little idea of the context within which it was written.

As we recently noted, that leading authority says that The Dead "offers a critique of a society that has been gripped by a deadening paralysis of the spirit." In its treatment of the Dubliners collection, that same authority tells us this:

Dubliners

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, written from 1904 to 1907. First published in 1914, Dubliners presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early twentieth century.

The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. Joyce felt Irish nationalism, like Catholicism and British rule of Ireland, was responsible for a collective paralysis—a theme permeating much of the work. He conceived of Dubliners as a "nicely polished looking-glass" held up to the Irish and a "first step towards spiritual liberation."

The young Joyce felt that Ireland was in the grip of a deadening paralysis. He might have been right or he might have been wrong, but could that analysis possibly hold a mirror up to usto the metaphorical dead of our own failing society? 

It sems to us that we all need to step outside the "operation warp speed" of our current imitation of a national discourse. We may need to seek ourselves out with the help of various works of literature. 

Is some collective paralysis of the spirit possibly here among us? Who among us, Red or Blue, might be part of the collective paralysis—might perhaps be identified as the walking and talking dead?

We need to put our warp speed away. The blinding speed of our imitation of discourse is only going to fail us.

Tomorrow: The paralysis is Us?


MONDAY: Tomorrow starts a new narrative year!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2025

Michael Palin, but also The Dead: There are various types of year.

The calendar year starts on January 1. The fiscal years starts three months earlier, on October 1.

Within our own experience, the school year always started on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Southern and southwestern states often started earlier than that.

Tomorrow, we'll be starting the new narrative year. We'll be trying to define the state of play here within our own split nation as the existing United States continues to come undone. 

We've described the ongoing circumstance as a "revolt from below." By our own reckoning, this involves an ongoing war which we denizens of Blue America have quite possibly already lost.

Tomorrow, we'll start to try to sketch that scenario with greater clarity. We'll continue along with this award-winning premise:

To understand the ongoing situation, we need to step back from our failing culture's 24-second news cycle.  Instead, we need to understand the nature of the current warfare through portrayals which already exist in the pages, and in the verses, of pre-existing literature.

Borrowing from Frost, we need to step "back out of all this now too much for us"—back out of that bewildering flooding of the zone. 

That's our prescription for a fuller understanding of what has already occurred. For the record, we know of no reason to think that any such strategy might allow Blue America to withstand the ongoing "night assault."

Along the way, we've worked from various literary texts. Readers groan when these titles reappear:

The Iliad: Homer
The Plague: Camus
My Antonia: Cather
humanity i love you: Cummings
People: Yevtushenko
I Pity the Poor Immigrant: Dylan
The Gift Outright: Frost

Also, we've frequently cited this text—the most ignored text in the cosmos:

Too Much and Never Enough: Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.

This week, we'll be adding two titles to the list:

The Dead: Joyce
Michael Palin in North Korea: Palin

Michael Palin in North Korea? The leading authority on the program tells us this about that:

Michael Palin in North Korea

Michael Palin in North Korea...is a travel documentary presented by Michael Palin and first aired in the UK in 2 parts on Channel 5 on 20 September and 27 September 2018.

Program history

The program was made by ITN Productions, who had proposed a North Korean documentary to various channels under the title Let's All Go To North Korea. Channel 5's Director of Programs Ben Frow was not interested in the project at first, but after Michael Palin was hired to front the program, he changed his mind and decided to commission it for the channel.

Michael Palin in North Korea recorded viewing figures of 4.5 million viewers and was nominated for two BAFTAs...

International airings

The documentary aired on 30 September 2018 in North America on National Geographic with the title North Korea From the Inside With Michael Palin.

Episodes

In the first episode Palin arrives in North Korea on a train from China. He is greeted by his guides, a woman named Li Soo-young and a man named Li Kyung-chul. Palin's guides bring him to sites across Pyongyang, including statues of the first leader of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, and his son and the DPRK's second leader Kim Jong-il.

In the second episode Palin celebrates his 75th-birthday in North Korea, and travels to the Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South Korea, the ancient Korean capital at Kaesong, Mount Kumgang, and the coastal city of Wonsan. Palin then flies from Wonsan to Mount Paektu on the border with China before returning to Pyongyang, where he visits members of the North Korean national taekwondo team.

The synopsis omits the core of the program—Palin's friendship, and his barely disguised romance of the heart, with his charming young North Korean minder, Li Soo-young (spelling uncertain). Late in Episode 2, that narrative backbone culminates in the scene which YouTube presents in full:

Michael Palin: North Korea—Criticizing The Leaders Is Criticizing Ourselves

It's part of the way we humans are wired. For ourselves, we're inclined to see Brother Palin as smart and very wise.

At some point, the program migrated from National Geographic on to PBS. When the program re-aired on a local PBS channel this weekend, we sat there and watched it, fascinated, for the second time. 

It seemed to us that it gives us a way to describe the furious foot soldiers who are currently waging war from within the "hermit kingdom" ruled by President Trump. 

(We're speaking here about employees of the Fox News Channel and other such figures. We are not talking about the tens of millions of neighbors and friends—and fellow citizens—who voted for President Trump.)

Online, you can watch the entire program—through the auspices of National Geographic—simply by clicking this.

What's actually happening here at home, within our failing nation? We think Palin's fascinating program starts to provide a bit of the language with which that question can be answered. 

Starting tomorrow, we'll also be returning to The Dead to describe the "paralysis" which infests our own Blue American nation. We'll be moving past Gretta Conroy and on to Joyce's apparent view of her husband, Gabriel.

According to Camus, the citizens of his fictional Oran weren't up to the task of recognizing and addressing a plague which had come upon them. Here at this incomparable site, we see that same problem infesting us in Blue America as a furious group of angry foot soldiers keep coming over the walls in an endless night assault.

Tomorrow we start a new narrative year! Knowing how way leads on to way, we think it may be late for any such effort to help.

Tomorrow: "Paralysis," he said

That one additional text: We should have listed the account by Professor Knox of the death of sacred Troy. 

We've cited that portrait again and again. We think it's highly instructive.


SATURDAY: We show you again what the poor fellow said!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30, 2025

We advise you to pity the child: This morning, we want to show you, once again, what the "poor fellow" said. 

Before we do, we'll offer five words:

Temecula Valley Unified School District

You'll hear about it soon enough. For today, we'll only say this—this story helps explain why the messengers on the Fox News Channel can never be totally wrong.

(For the Snopes fact-check on the matter at hand, you can just click here.)

Also this:

With Labor Day approaching, last night was an evening of substitute hosts on the Fox News Channel. This helped produce an evening of astonishing claims, many of which (though not all) had been captured at Mediaite by the time we arose this morning.

We'll try to list the astonishments on Monday, before we start the new narrative year on Tuesday, September 2. For now, we'll only say this:

The Achaeans are coming over the walls again. Sacred Troy met its death in the original iteration.

With that, we move to today's main point. 

We want to show you, once again, what the "poor fellow" said. We refer to the furious Greg Gutfeld, spilling with rage about who the monsters turn out to be and about what the monsters do.

We think it's important to see what he said. On Thursday, viewers of The Five had learned these things about the monsters, but also about who the A-holes and assholes are, by 5:04 p.m.—2:04 out on the coast.

For additional context, see yesterday's report. Accepting a throw from the inexcusable Dana Perino, the furious fellow spilled with this:

GUTFELD (8/28/25): This is why none of these A-holes can lecture anyone on compassion. 

The most compassionate people on the planet are trying to stop the trans delusion. The least compassionate are the people in the media, academia and politicians who enable this hysteria of horror. 

What is so glaring about the trans cult—apparently, your identity is the only thing that matters until you do something awful. Then it's the least important variable. Then you look at everything else. You talk about guns. But suddenly, it is like all of a sudden we can't talk about that—what was it? The other trans shooter that hid her identity. 

In this manifesto that this creep wrote, he said he was tired of being trans, and that he wished he had never brainwashed himself. What more do you need, straight from the monster's mouth?

Politicians, activists and teachers—you built this! You could have listened to the warnings. We were talking about this on this show for years. You amplify the hysterical—a hysterical, literally hysterical phenomenon that was going no place good.  

You created a poisonous program that twisted young minds for destruction, a nihilistic place to be when you deny biology and they have nowhere to go. So all of these media arguments, what you are seeing there among those people, it is to escape their own culpability and the reality they created. 

So forget the layer of mental illness and gun control. The origin of the evil, the evil lies in the creation of a mindset that indulged a delusional self, ruining connections with fellow human beings 

So that trans, by ascribing extreme aggrieved mentality, then gets directed against society. So this person feels justified in killing children. His killing resulted from that ideology. And if you don't believe that, you're one dumb asshole. 

Excuse me.

We regard that as ugly, stupid, murderous, strange. Did we mention the fact that the Achaeans, once again, are coming over the walls?

With respect to Gutfeld himself, we advise you to pity the child. 

His Serra High sits one mile down the Alameda—down the Alameda de las Pulgas—from "our dear Aragon, stately and serene." (We're quoting what the school song said on the day the school opened.)

On the one hand, it's sad to think that such a poisonous mentality could have emerged from such a sunny land. On the other hand, we've read snippets and clips in which Gutfeld describes certain aspects of his experience, both as a high school student and then in later life. 

On that basis, we advise you to pity the child. We also advise you to wonder why Blue America's major elites are prepared to avert their gaze from the poisonous behavior of the adult—of his corporate channel's $9 million man.

With apologies, we think you should read, and contemplate, what the furious fellow said. We regard it as ugly and poisonous and horribly stupid, but massive death and destruction occurred the first time these angry Achaeans breeched those towering walls.

One last point:

On yesterday's edition of The Five, this angry fellow put the pathetic practice on display again.

We refer to the practice known as Tarlov Interruptus. You see, Master Gutfeld does a very poor job regulating his anger and his vast sense of grievance.

The nation's most-watched "cable news" program starts as four against one. Before long, one or several of the furious four start interrupting and overtalking as they shut down the one.

That's what "fair and balanced" has come to mean on this corporate messaging channel. Yesterday, the interruption of demon Tarlov started at 5:08 p.m.—2:08 out on the coast.

You can see the fellow doing that here. The four get to speak in polite, perfect silence. By the antique rules of the prehuman game, the one has to be shut down.

Also this: What's the correct definition of love? As the culture is being torn down, David Brooks thinks he may have the answer! 

(As we noted yesterday, we've long admired his work.)

THE DUEL: "Typical chick," the cable star said!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2025

Before that, he gave us our monsters: The new column by David Brooks appears beneath a touchy-feely headline. 

Brooks has become our new whipping-person at this vaunted site. His column appears in today's print editions, and it begins like this:

The Wrong Definition of Love

The time I used to spend on Twitter I now spend on Substack, and my life is much better for it. There are a lot of interesting, eclectic writers in the world. This week, for example, I stumbled across a post from Antonia Bentel, who asked six strangers and friends about how they fall in love.

One woman responded, “I fall in love when someone sees me in a way I didn’t know I could be seen.” A young man answered, “Falling in love is like seeing yourself reflected in someone else’s mind.” Another woman said, “I fall in love when I don’t feel like I’m performing competence.” She added that love happens “when someone sees you in the absolute mess of it—your pain, your pettiness, your unpaid parking tickets.” Another man replied, “Falling in love is like entering a room you didn’t know existed in your own house.”

Bentel makes it clear that this is far from a scientific survey, but what struck me about these answers is that they all had a common definition of love—that love blooms when somebody else makes you feel understood and good about yourself.

That's how the column starts.

We have a lot of respect for the work Brooks has down in the years since he switched his focus, moving away from standard politics and toward an attempt to clarify values.  In the current column, he ends up saying that Antonia Bentel's recent work involves "the wrong definition of love."

"Given the wickedness of the time" (Plato), it seems to us that a column like this may involve the wrong idea of appropriate journalistic inquiry. It seems to us that a ship is sinking, and that people like Brooks are up on the deck as the band plays on.

It seems to us that Brooks is hiding. Consider what happened yesterday on the Fox News Channel "cable news" program known as The Five.

The Five is the most-watched program in American news. Yesterday, a makeshift panel had been assembled as the Labor Day weekend approached:

The Five: Thursday, August 28, 2025
Trey Gowdy: host, Sunday Night in America
Jessica Tarlov: rotating co-host, The Five
Johnny Joey Jones: Fox News contributor
Dana Perino: co-host, The Five
Greg Gutfeld: co-host, The Five

Two or three regulars were on hand, depending on how you were counting. Gowdy sat in the Judge Jeannine chair, which remains unfilled on a permanent basis. Seemingly as a mercy, Jones was sitting in the Jesse Watters chair.

There they sat, arrayed in the standard fair-and-balanced format, in which four pro-MAGA panelists will gang up on the one Democrat. And let the word go forth to the nations:

The correct definition of love would not be on the docket this day! Meanwhile, did we mention a salient fact?

This is the most-watched program in the American "cable news" firmament. Here are the relevant viewership numbers from Monday, August 18:

Total viewers: Monday, August 18, 2025
The Five: 3.85 million
The Rachel Maddow Show: 2.01 million
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell: 1.46 million
Deadline: White House: 1.15 million
The Beat with Ari Melber: 1.04 million
The Arena with Kasie Hunt: 695,000

Rachel Maddow still puts up a fight on a Monday-only basis. Other than that, The Five basically triples the score on the most-watched MSNBC programs. On that particular day, it more than quintupled the score on CNN's most watched program.

Also this: On that same evening, Jesse Watters Primetime and the Gutefld! show each attracted more than three million viewers. The Fox News Channel is basically lapping the field.

For better or worse, The Five is powerful "cable news" medicine! It also represents an assault on the very possibility of maintaining an American discourse or a modern American nation, definitions of love to the side.

We can't begin to cover all of what happened on this degraded program last night. For starters, let's turn to co-host Greg Gutfeld, the first person called upon to discuss, or to pretend to discuss, the program's initial topic.

Cast in her role as the program's den mother, Dana Perino had introduced the topic. She played the standard, extremely brief bits of videotape, allegedly from "the media who think that prayer in this moment is useless."

"This moment" was Wednesday morning's mass shooting in Minneapolis. Perino had also played videotape of Jacob Frey, the Minneapolis mayor, saying this:

"Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity. We should not be operating out of a place of hatred of anyone. We should be operating out of a place of love for our kids."

There would be no discussion this day of why Frey might have said that. But now, Perino threw to the endlessly furious Gutfeld—and when she did, the endlessly furious jack-a-napes angrily traveled a rather dark road.

To watch the videotape, you can just click this:

GUTFELD (8/28/25): This is why none of these A-holes can lecture anyone on compassion. 

The most compassionate people on the planet are trying to stop the trans delusion. The least compassionate are the people in the media, academia and politicians who enable this hysteria of horror. 

What is so glaring about the trans cult—apparently, your identity is the only thing that matters until you do something awful. Then it's the least important variable. Then you look at everything else. You talk about guns. But suddenly, it is like all of a sudden we can't talk about that—what was it? The other trans shooter that hid her identity. 

In this manifesto that this creep wrote, he said he was tired of being trans, and that he wished he had never brainwashed himself. What more do you need, straight from the monster's mouth?

Politicians, activists and teachers—you built this! You could have listened to the warnings. We were talking about this on this show for years. You amplify the hysterical—a hysterical, literally hysterical phenomenon that was going no place good.  

You created a poisonous program that twisted young minds for destruction, a nihilistic place to be when you deny biology and they have nowhere to go. So all of these media arguments, what you are seeing there among those people, it is to escape their own culpability and the reality they created. 

So forget the layer of mental illness and gun control. The origin of the evil, the evil lies in the creation of a mindset that indulged a delusional self, ruining connections with fellow human beings 

So that trans, by ascribing extreme aggrieved mentality, then gets directed against society. So this person feels justified in killing children. His killing resulted from that ideology. And if you don't believe that, you're one dumb asshole. 

Excuse me.

We did our best to transcribe that angry presentation. Some of it was a bit hard to follow.

At any rate, it was now 5:04 p.m. Eastern, 2:04 out on the coast. Millions of viewers had already been told that "none of these A-holes can lecture us any more." 

They had also heard that, if you don't agree with this furious man, that means that "you're one dumb asshole." You're a dumb asshole too!

"Excuse me," he then thoughtfully said. So it went in the first four minutes of this failing nation's most-watched cable "news" program as the holiday weekend approached.

Perino didn't bat an eye. Instead, the den mother simply threw to Gowdy, placidly saying this:

PERINO (continuing directly): Trey Gowdy, great to have you on the show...

These A-holes can't lecture us any more, the furious Gutfeld had said. Also, If you don't agree with my presentation, that makes you one dumb asshole!

Amazingly, the presentation by Johnny Joey Jones during this segment may have been just as striking as Gutfeld's overwrought rant. Below, we'll show you the way Gutfeld ended the second segment of yesterday's show—a segment during which he staged the latest serial interruption of Tarlov as she tried to make a perfectly sensible point.

We don't have the strength today to try to present a full critique of Gutfeld's angry presentation about the poisonous, nihilistic and evil "trans cult." We'll only say that the phenomenon which we now call "transgender" has been visible around the globe, within the world' many cultures, since roughly the dawn of time.

In that sense, he seems to be part of the "biology" that Gutfeld's God created. It wasn't invented by Gutfeld's teachers at Serra High, or by the politicians for whom he doesn't vote.

It wasn't invented by the liberal and Democratic women he constantly compares to horses, cows, pigs and whales on his own demented 10 p.m. "cable news" program. Also, we'd recommend this obvious fact to this overwrought fellow:

The vast majority of mass shootings are committed by people who are what is now sometimes called "cisgender!" Gowdy himself had noted this obvious fact on Wednesday afternoon's Outnumbered program, triggering fury through parts of the Fox News world.

With respect to yesterday's show, we blame Perino more than Gutfeld. Transparently, he seems to be crazy; she isn't. Presumably, she's there for the money—and the money is large.

She has long accepted the den mother role on this astonishing program. She's been assigned the task of creating the debatable impression that the pro-MAGA panelists on the program aren't all out of their minds.

That said, the longing to create an entire class of "monsters" and "creeps"—an entire class to demonize—seems to be deeply bred in the bone. 

In the 1950s, Tailgunner Joe sought the Communists out. Today, Gutfeld demonizes those who belong to the "trans cult"—but so does the New York Post, whose front=page headline on Thursday morning pathetically said this:

DEMONIC
Transgender maniac shoots up Catholic school morning Mass, killing two kids

To see that front page, just click here. You'll never seen a headline like this from this Murdoch newspaper in one of the far more numerous cases:

DEMONIC
Yet another straight white male shoots up [insert rest of headline]

You'll never see a headline like that—nor should you, of course. But again and again, the Murdoch empire takes us back to Salem Village, and people like Gutfeld are prepared to cast themselves in the leadership role.

Jones' presentation in that first segment may have been even more startling than Gutfeld's. The second segment of yesterday's program dealt with a different topic—in this case, with a pseudo-topic. One of the chyrons beneath the clowning said this:

NEWSOM GOES ON DERANGED ANTI-TRUMP RANT

In all honesty, Newsom hadn't gone on a deranged anti-Trump rant. But if you click the link and continue to click, you can see a common phenomenon on this program—you can see the practice by which Tarlov is aggressively overtalked and interrupted as she attempts to state her point.

Yesterday, it was Gutfeld performing this corporate service as the permissive den mother looked on. The segment ended with Gutfeld derisively saying this about Tarlov, scoring the segment's last word:

GUTFELD: Typical chick!

For the record, Tarlov is smarter than Gutfeld is. What a disordered man!

Greg Gutfeld is 60 years old! But so it goes on this demonic "cable news" channel. As it does, David Brooks is typing away on a mountaintop, writing about the correct way to try to be loved.

David, listen up! The American nation, such as it ever has been, is now being eaten alive. When are you going to put the Fox News Channel on and tell readers what you've seen?

What we saw yesterday at 5 p.m. was a furious "revolt from below."  We've called it "the revolt of the D-minus students," but it's only one part of the current ongoing duel. 

It's enabled by "the haplessness of the elites"—by the silence of David Brooks, by the silence of so many others.

They won't search for the truth about President Trump. They won't mention The Five at all.

THURSDAY: "Troubled times had come..."

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28, 2025

Mayor Scott speaks with Ana Cabrera: We've admired Ana Cabrera's calm demeanor dating back to the CNN days.

We think she pretty much did the right thing on yesterday's MSNBC program, speaking to Mayor Scott. There is no perfect thing:

MSNBC Anchor Reminds Mayor His City Has One of the Highest Crime Rates After He Snaps Back at Trump

MSNBC anchor Ana Cabrera reminded Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) that his city suffers from some of the highest crime rates in the country after he celebrated a 50-year low in recorded homicides in response to President Donald Trump.

Scott joined Cabrera on Tuesday, where he responded to the president’s insults against Baltimore. Trump called it a “hellhole” after Maryland Governor Wes Moore (D) invited him to walk the streets with him. Moore’s comments were to push back on Trump’s suggestion that he could deploy National Guard troops to cities like Baltimore to crack down on crime, as he has already done in Washington, D.C.

Scott argued that he is already leading the effort to reduce violent crime in Baltimore, referencing programs focused on rehabilitation and the targeting of illegal guns.

[...]

As Cabrera also pointed out, there have also been dozens of homicides in Baltimore this year. As of August 1, the city has seen 84 homicides this year, a drop from 111 during the same time in 2024.

And so on from there.

At present, Baltimore is on pace to record roughly 150 homicides this year. Would that represent a 50-year low?

Sadly, yes—it would. Let's take a look at the record.

We came to Baltimore in September 1969. We stopped being a college senior, instead becoming a fifth-grade teacher in the Baltimore City Public Schools.

According to Wikipedia's numbers, Baltimore recorded 237 homicides hat year. According to Wikipedia's numbers, that represented 26.2 homicides per 100,000 residents, while the nationwide homicide rate that year was only 7.3.

From there, the numbers bounced around—sometimes below 200, more often over. As happened almost everywhere, the big jump came in the early 1990s:

Homicides / Homicide rates, Baltimore City
1990: 305 (41.4)
1991: 304 (40.6)
1992: 335 (44.3)
1993: 353 (48.2)
1994: 321 (43.4)

As was the case elsewhere, the numbers eventually began to recede, dropping to 196 (31.3) in 2011. Then they went up again. For whatever reason, they didn't fall back from Covid-year levels until the past few years:

Homicides / Homicide rates, Baltimore City
2020: 335 (57.1)
2021: 337 (58.3)
2022: 333 (58.4)
2023: 261 (46.0)
2024: 201 (34.3)
2025: 150, projected

Yes, those numbers are dropping. That said, in 2023, the national homicide rate was only 5.5, as opposed to Baltimore's 46.0. 

Mayor Scott was elected mayor in November 2020. For whatever reason, the numbers have plainly dropped on his watch.

Who dies in all those homicides? At least two of our former fifth graders, back in the 1980s and 1990s. Also, NAME WITHHELD, under whose barely perceptible coaching we played alongside Marvelous Marvin Webster in the Baltimore Neighborhood Basketball League in the summer of 72.

(Even with Webster, we only went 9-9 that summer.  Wes Unseld was the citywide association's hands-on commissioner. Years later, we were told that our coach, a very genial person, had been murdered while driving a cab.)

It largely depends on where you live, or possibly on what you have to do to earn a living. Also, Wikipedia's entry says this:

Homicides in Baltimore are heavily concentrated within a small number of high-poverty neighborhoods. According to a 2016 Baltimore Sun investigation, around 80% of the city's gun homicides are committed in 25% of the city's neighborhoods...

Gang-related crimes are usually clustered in drug territories and mostly affect people involved in drug dealing, particularly narcotics and rival gangs.

Elsewhere, homicide rates are lower. In 2017, London's homicide rate was 1.6 per 100,000. (For Montreal, click here.) The high rate of homicide in the U.S. is something we Blues sometimes like to discuss, though mainly in certain contexts. 

In large part, the ultimate story behind all this tragedy stretches back into our nation's history, as everyone surely knows. 

On a nationwide basis, the first big jump in homicide rates seems to have started in the late 1960s. Bruce Springsteen described one part of that situation in "My Hometown:"

Two cars at a light on a Saturday night
In the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed, then a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come
To my hometown.

"Troubled times had come," he said. Has any song in the annals of popular music ever been more tightly written?

THE DUEL: The dumbest children in the world...

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28, 2025

...performed on three "cable news" programs: We start with a statement of gratitude to the invaluable Rev.

The invaluable site seemed to have taken a hike in the past few weeks. As of yesterday, it was back to providing an invaluable service—it was once again publishing transcripts of such events as the bizarre "cabinet meeting" which took place two days ago.

The "cabinet meeting" ran for three hours and seventeen minutes. The invaluable Rev lets you read the statements of its various players, but especially of President Trump.

Given "the wickedness of the times" (Plato), that's an invaluable service. We expect to sample the president's endless orations at that event over the next several days.

For today, we move on to a basic question. At present, is a duel really taking place—a duel of this description: 

The Revolt of the D-Minus Students v. The Haplessness of the Elites?

For starters, is there really some such thing as "a revolt of the D-minus students?" For those who would doubt the things we say, we take you to this report from Mediaite:

Jesse Watters and Brian Kilmeade Discuss ‘The Most Attractive First Lady Ever’

Fox News hosts Jesse Watters and Brian Kilmeade debated on The Five, Wednesday about who was “the most attractive first lady ever.”

Reacting to a report which claimed a Vanity Fair editor had threatened to walk out of the company with half of her staff if First Lady Melania Trump was featured on the cover, Watters questioned, “Was Jill [Biden] on the cover?”

“Twice, I think,” replied Kilmeade.

The conversation continued...

Full disclosure! Yesterday afternoon, we ourselves had the misfortune of watching this inanity as it occurred in real time. 

Were Watters and Kilmeade once D-minus students? We can't answer that question.

That said, their imitation of a conversation was taking place on the nation's most-watched "cable news" program! As they continued, the well-matched pair of corporate dimwits proceeded to discuss the nation's news in the following manner, with guest co-host Kennedy, the former VJ, trying to make the boys stop:

WATTERS (8/27/25): She was on the cover twice?

KILMEADE: And then you have—

WATTERS: Was Michelle Obama on the cover?

KENNEDY: Three times.

KILMEADE: Three times.

WATTERS: Okay. Do you think those two women are prettier than Melania Trump?

KENNEDY: You’re not gonna answer that. Not gonna answer that! Not gonna answer that!

WATTERS: No, do you think they’re prettier?

KILMEADE: No, no. Melania—

WATTERS: Is it not about pretty? Is it about fashion? Because Melania’s also more fashionable.

KILMEADE: Right. She is—she’s the most attractive first lady ever. Let’s be honest. I have not seen Martha Washington.

WATTERS: Martha Washington?

KILMEADE: I have not seen her.

WATTERS: She’s not your type?

KILMEADE: The problem is, when you have portraits instead of pictures—

WATTERS: You can’t really get a good look.

KILMEADE: Thank you.

WATTERS: What about Jackie O?

KILMEADE: All right, what’s your point? Why am I [inaudible]—

WATTERS: What’s my point? What’s your point? You said she [co-host Kennedy] is going to start dating somebody...

And so on, inanely, from there. Videotape is included at Mediaite's report.

"What's your point?" the one nitwit finally said. Did we mention the fact that this imitation of a discussion was taking place as an imitation of human life on the American nation's most-watched "cable news" program?

In fairness, we must say this. This imitation of a discussion was nowhere near as stupid as a discussion which occurred, two hours later, near the start of the same "cable news" channel's Ingraham Angle program.

Three hours after that, the second half of last night's Gutfeld! program was raw stupidity as raw and as stupid as raw stupidity ever gets. Greg Gutfeld himself wasn't present last night, but these imitations of humanity were:

Gutfeld!: Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Tyrus: former professional "wrestler"
Michele Tafoya: former sideline reporter
Kat Timpf: acting moderator
Jamie Lissow: comedian
Tom Shillue: comedian

Their discussions last night were jaw-dropping. We expect to expose you to those transcripts in the course of the next several days. But make no mistake:

The manicured dumbness of these discussions is the lifeblood of the programming on the current Fox News Channel. The channel's CEO, Suzanne Scott, hires the flyweights in question to offer this service, even paying them for their labors.

https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20250827_210000_The_Five/start/2580/end/2640

Also, in fairness, this: 

The flyweights on The Five were attempting to discuss this exclusive news report from the tabloid, The Daily Mail:

Vanity Fair staff erupt in fury over proposed Melania Trump cover with foul-mouthed meltdown

In fairness, if the exclusive report was accurate, we'd be inclined to regard its contents as the latest example of "the haplessness of the (Blue American) elites." 

The silly children on The Five were enjoying their silly fun. Later that evening, the bloated blowhard who performs as "Tyrus" extended a standard practice on the Gutfeld! show, offering the latest oration on the theme of what an unattractive dog Taylor Swift really is.

It's hard to overstate the sheer stupidity this corporate channel provides, or the throwback nature of its sexual content. But this is all part of what we mean when we refer to "the revolt (or revenge) of the D-minus students"—when we refer to the way their D-minus culture is seizing control of our flailing nation's culture.

A version of that destructive culture was on display in the "cabinet meeting" transcribed by the invaluable Rev. Though Blue elites preferred to focus on the conduct of the cabinet members, it was the endless orations of the sitting president which put this problem on its most vivid display.

Thanks to the invaluable Rev, it's possible today to revisit one of the endless strange claims which emerged from the sitting president's endless array of rambling, self-glorifying filibusters. In yesterday's report, we briefly sampled the claim in question. 

With the transcription now complete, we can offer the presentation at greater length. The oration concerned "my darling Vladimir." We hope you have plenty of time:

REPORTER (8/26/25): On Alaska, you had mentioned that there would be severe consequences if Vladimir Putin did not agree to a ceasefire. After that summit, that was rolled back, given the negotiations. Is he back on the clock now?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I want to see that deal end. It's very serious what I have in mind if I have to do it, but I want to see it end. 

I think that in many ways he's there. Sometimes he'll be there, and Zelenskyy won't be there. It's like, who do we have today? I got to get them both at the same time. But I want to have it end. We have economic sanctions. I'm talking about economic, because we're not going to get into a world war.

I'll tell you what! In my opinion, if I didn't win this race, Ukraine could have ended up in a world war. We're not going to end up in a world war any more, but it would've ended up possibly in a world war. That would have been a, that would have been a— 

They were ready to trot. But just like India and Pakistan were going to end up in a nuclear war if I didn't stop them. 

It was sort of strange. I saw they were fighting, then I saw seven jets were shot down. I said, "That's not good." That's a lot of jets. $150 million planes were shot down. A lot of them. Seven, maybe more than that. They didn't even report the real number. And I'm talking to a very terrific man, Modi of India, and I say, "What's going on with you and Pakistan?" Then I'm talking to Pakistan, on trade. I say, "What's going on with you and India?" And the hatred was tremendous.

Now, this has been going on for a hell of a long time, sometimes with different names, for hundreds of years. But I said, "What's going on?" I said, "I don't want to make a trade deal." 

"No, no, no, we want to make trade deal." 

I said, "No, no, I don't want to make a trade deal with you. You're going to have a nuclear war. You guys are going to end up in a nuclear war." And that was very important to them. I said, "Call me back tomorrow, but we're not going to do any deals with you. Or we're going to put tariffs on you that are so high." 

You were there, Howard, right?

LUTNICK: Yep.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: We're going to put tariffs on you that was so high, I don't give a damn, your head's going to spin. You're not going to end up in a war. 

Within about five hours, it was done. It was done. Now, maybe it starts again. I don't know. I don't think so, but I'll stop it if it does. We can't let these things happen. 

The Russia-Ukraine situation. Last week, 7,012 soldiers—seven thousand oh twelve—soldiers died. They were Russian, they were Ukrainian, they weren't American. So a lot of people would say, "What do you care? They're not American." I care. 

Over the last couple of weeks, over 12,000 people died in two weeks. We're talking about crime where somebody's killed here? Think of it:

You have your son leaving Russia, leaving Ukraine, their little house, wherever they live with their parents. They're waving goodbye, just like our parents would wave goodbye. And they're waving, "Goodbye, son." And then a week later, his head's blown off in a stupid war by a drone. A whole new form of military problem.

So no, I'd like it to stop. I want to get it to stop. And it will not be a world war, but it'll be an economic war. And an economic war is going to be bad and it's going to be bad for Russia, and I don't want that. 

Now I have to also see, because not everybody—you know, Zelenskyy is not exactly innocent either OK? You know. It takes two people to tango, and I say it all the time, you got to get them together. I get along with Zelenskyy now, but we have a much different relationship because now we're not paying any money to Ukraine. I stopped that. We're paying money to ourselves. What's happening is NATO is buying all of the equipment and paying in full.

But even with that, forget about that. I want to get it stopped because it's a lot of lives that are being lost. Every week it's seven thousand, five thousand, six. I get the reports and I see battlefields. I'd rather not see them. And you read about Gettysburg, and you see those thousand, 600,000 people, but in that war in particular was really bad. Like 150,000 or something. Just dead bodies. 

I'm seeing the same. I see pictures, I see satellite pictures of heads over here, arms over here, legs over here. And this is like a modern age? It's no different than the worst wars that I've ever seen. And if I can stop it because I have a certain power or a certain relationship? I had a very good relationship with President Putin. Very, very good. That's a positive thing, again. 

And I think I'm probably the only—Steve Witkoff would tell you I'm the only one that can solve it. I don't know. He's told me that a few times. Unless he was saying that just to build up my ego, but it's not really. I have no ego when it comes to this stuff. I just want to see it stop. 

Thousands of young people, mostly young people, are dying every single week. If I can save that by doing sanctions, or by just being me, or by using a very strong tariff system that's very costly to Russia or Ukraine or whoever we have. But I stopped seven wars and three of those wars were going on for more than 30 years. 

You know, if you look at Congo, if you just look at any of them, almost all of them were going on for extended period of time. Now interestingly, one had just started, it was two days old and you know that one. That we did that one when we were in Scotland negotiating, it was two days, but there were two thousand dead bodies laying on the border, and I got that one stopped too. And I'm very honored by that. 

But I still—the one that I thought would be the easiest is turning out to be the hardest. That's President Putin and President Zelenskyy, but I think I'll get it done.

REPORTER: Why do you think—

PRESIDENT TRUMP: You never know, it's war. With war, you never know, right?

War's very tricky, very horrible. But with war, you never know. Things change. 

People go into war, think they're going to win the war, and then they get their asses kicked and they lose their country and they lose millions of lives. 

Nobody goes into a war thinking they're going to lose. They go in—I'm sure that Ukraine thought they were going to win, It's going to be, you know, "We're going to win." You're going to beat somebody that's 15 times your size? Biden shouldn't have let that happen. Biden shouldn't have—I mean, the man was grossly incompetent. He should have never been there. That would've never happened. But you don't go into a war that's 15 times your size.

Videotape of the whole event is available thanks to C-Span.

So went that oration. As the three-hour mark approached, the rambling disquisition consumed a full seven minutes, complete with a set of tales about the seven wars the president says he has brought to an end.

One of his miracles took only five hours! He has already stopped quite a few world wars.

The original question was never answered—the question about whether his darling, Vladimir Putin, was once again "on the clock" concerning a possible ceasefire. Last night, his darling bashed downtown Kyiv with a massive new set of attacks. Arms and legs and heads were everywhere, but the sitting American president can't seem to quit this man.

At the end of that wandering, occasionally ghoulish oration, we had heard about the arms and legs and the severed heads of the people who die in Ukraine. 

We had heard about the deaths at Gettysburg. The president still hadn't offered an assessment of his good friend, Vladimir—and he ended with that puzzling statement about the way Ukraine had somehow chosen, decided or agreed "to go into this war."

As we've watched videotape of this "cabinet meeting," we've thought that something seems to be visibly wrong with its principal participant. That would, of course, be a human tragedy, but it would also be a serious national problem.

Over here, our Blue American elites preferred to mock the cabinet members, who struggled to keep their eyes from closing as this very strange man droned on. He thinks he's probably the only one who can stop it—or at least, that's what Witkoff constantly says.

Is something wrong with President Trump? In Monday's report, we linked to the leading authority's lengthy report on the clinical term, "Grandiosity." But over here in Blue America, our tribunes don't know how to discuss that type of question, and they've agreed that they must never try.

Tomorrow, we'll tell you what we mean by that. Also, we'll visit more of this Tuesday's wandering orations. 

To see some pushback to the odd claim that Ukraine somehow chose to go into this war, you can peruse this additional report from Mediaite. But as the Fox News Channel keeps dragging the D-minus students out onto the air, they keep saying that Taylor Swift is really just a 5. They're extremely limited children.

Thye keep saying that Swift is a 5. Over here, in Blue America, our tribunes don't know how to discuss that part of their revolt either.

Tomorrow: Discussions of mental health


WEDNESDAY: When President Trump locked Washington up...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2025

...his approvals jumped five points: As is true of every poll, the new poll by AP-NORC is only one poll.

No poll is ever perfectly accurate. If some poll was perfectly accurate, there would be no way to know that it was.

Polls provide approximations. That said, here's the way matters stand according to AP-NORC, Mediaite reporting:

Trump Surges to Best Approval Rating Ever in New AP Poll

President Trump is more popular than ever, at least according to one new poll released on Wednesday, with his approval rating jumping 5 points in the last month—an increase that coincides with his administration’s crime crackdown in Washington, D.C..

The poll results, from the The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, shows the president has a 45% approval rating nationwide. That is the best approval rating Trump has received from the AP-NORC poll in either his first or second term.

Trump’s handling of crime received a thumbs up from 53% of Americans who were polled; a whopping 88% of Republicans said they approved of the commander-in-chief’s approach to crime, while only 16% of Democrats said they liked what Trump is doing.

Some other key points on crime: 55% of respondents said it is “acceptable for the U.S. military and National Guard to assist local police in large cities,” according to the AP-NORC, but only one-third of Americans said they would support the federal government taking over police departments in American cities. The nationwide poll also found 80% of Americans believe crime is a major problem in big cities.

The report by Sean James continues from there. For the official report by AP-NORC, you can just click this.

For the record, the numbers in this poll aren't exactly "good"—but the numbers there are better. With respect to Trump's approval rating, AP-NORC had it at 42% back in March. It slid to 39 in April and June, then went to 40 last month. 

Now it's up to 45. The jump could be a statistical anomaly—or then again, probably not.

By the way:

Crime is "a major problem in big cities." When we Blues don't know how to say such things, we're looking for ways to lose.

THE DUEL: The Stepfords get mocked and the president walks!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2025

Blue elites fail you again: We started telling you more than a decade ago:

It's all anthropology now!

At roughly that same time, Professor Norman O. Brown's presentation popped back into our heads. We don't know how or why that happened—but once again, here's part of the strange thing he said:

Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis

[...]

I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery...and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...

There comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries...by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.

For the fuller passage, just click this

Whatever he was talking about, he said that in May 1960, as part of this Phi Beta Kappa address. At that time, Professor Brown was becoming very hot in progressive circles. 

He said that in 1960; he may have been wrong at the time. Plainly, though, the problem he said he believed he saw has deeply infested us now. 

We refer to yesterdays "cabinet meeting"—to the more than three hour televised spectacle which Blue America's failing elites have described in a uniform manner. 

To the extent that they're bothering with the event at all, they're mocking the Stepfords—the cabinet members—but largely rushing past the president's extremely strange conduct. As the Stepfords are being mocked for their embarrassing conduct, the president deeply peculiar behavior is largely being disappeared. 

Likely through no fault of her own, Katie Rogers was assigned to discuss the event for the New York Times. Despite the astonishing conduct in question, her "news analysis" doesn't appear in today's print editions.

Yesterday afternoon, it appeared online. Headline included, her analysis starts like this

NEWS ANALYSIS
What, Exactly, Was That Cabinet Meeting?

What do you get for a president who commands everybody’s attention, all of the time?

For members of President Trump’s cabinet on Tuesday, the answer was apparently this: a televised meeting at the White House that lasted almost half the workday.

In front of a wall of cameras, the old “Apprentice” host offered a clear window into the way he was running his administration, starting with an ego that appeared to need frequent feeding, and blustery stamina: “This has never been done before,” the president said at one point, in between calling on secretaries to speak and marveling over the waiting reporters’ abilities to hold microphones and cameras aloft for several hours.

There in the Cabinet Room—which is starting to take on the gilded-cage look of Mr. Trump’s Oval Office—all of the president’s men and women took their turns, each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Mr. Trump praise and to assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances.

It's true! Rogers starts with a glancing comment about the president's ego. We're even told that yesterday's bizarre event "offered a clear window into the way he was [sic] running his administration."

The tone about Trump is lightly mocking all through the Roger piece. Quickly, though, she starts to focus on the embarrassing conduct of the cabinet members:

On the embarrassing conduct of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the labor secretary who "implored the president to come to her agency to look at his own 'big, beautiful' face on a banner."

On the embarrassing conduct of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; "who once sawed the head off a whale and drove it home." 

On the embarrassing conduct of Secretary of State Marco Rubio; "who in his spare time is Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development;" .

But also on the ludicrous conduct of Steve Witkoff, whose embarrassing conduct yesterday was this:

And then there was Steve Witkoff, a billionaire whose praise was so slavish that even the president seemed to pick up on the overkill. During his turn, Mr. Witkoff, the president’s peace envoy, complimented Mr. Trump’s leadership in the Israel-Gaza conflict, a war that continued this week with Israeli strikes killing 20, including journalists, at a Gazan hospital. He suggested again that Mr. Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted.

“There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about,” Mr. Witkoff said.

When he was finished, the billionaire received a round of applause from his colleagues.

Greetings from North Korea! And yes, they all knew to applaud.

For what it's worth, the conduct by the long list of sycophants—by the assembly of Stepfords—was truly astounding this day. As such, it teaches an anthropology lesson. 

Until you see such conduct occur, you might not know that it would be possible to get a room full of American adults to behave in such embarrassing ways. Plainly, yes, it's more than possible—and that was Rogers' focus.

As her "news analysis" proceeded, Rogers maintained her snarky tone—and she focused on the subordinates. Also this:

By paragraphs 6 and 7 of her analysis, she had even sought escape in this:

Mr. Trump, a pop culture maven, had relatively little to say about what was arguably the biggest news of the day: the engagement of Taylor Swift, whom he has publicly insulted and threatened for not supporting him, to Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end. The event rattled on for so long that the president was asked to comment on news that had broken during the meeting.

“I wish him a lot of luck,” Mr. Trump said. “I think he’s a great guy, and I think that she’s a terrific person. So I wish them a lot of luck.”

"Arguably," the engagement was "the biggest news of the day," the New York Times journalist said. She failed to see that the actual biggest event was the extremely strange presidential behavior she was now refusing to describe.

Rogers told us what the president had to say about that high-profile engagement. She didn't tell us about the endless array of very strange things he said in the course of the three-plus hours, or about the very strange demeanor he had displayed.

She didn't tell us what was plain to the eye:

Something plainly seems to be wrong with this very important person. To anyone with eyes to see, that fact should be hard to miss.

In fairness, it wasn't just Rogers. All over the Blue American firmament, Blue elites offered mockery of the cabinet members while sliding past the disturbing state of affairs which was sitting right there before them.

Maggie Haberman did it on CNN. On MSNBC, Jen Psaki started last night's program with an essay about how strange the cabinet members had been

At 6 o'clock this very morning, Morning Joe started the same way, The cabinet members had demeaned themselves, Morning Joe viewers were told. The fact that something seems to be wrong with the sitting president is something these people can't say.

In yesterday's report, we made a certain statement about Monday's press events. We said we thought it had never been more clear that something seemed to be (tragically) wrong with the sitting president.

Yesterday, the president's weird demeanor and weird behavior were even more apparent. At Mediaite, the correspondents were perhaps a bit more frank about that fact than others who sit at higher stations.

They noted the president's very strange conduct. They did so in a string of reports which sat beneath headlines like these:

Trump Claims ‘Scum’ MSNBC Is Worse Than Violent Gangs

Trump Declares, ‘I Have the Right To Do Anything I Want’ Because ‘I’m the President’

Trump Says America Would Accept a Dictator in Exchange for Less Crime

Trump Tells Fake ‘Greatest President Of My Lifetime’ Story Hours After Fox News Busted Him—With Video

Trump Crows About His Economy, Falsely Claims Gas Is Below 2 Dollars In the South

Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich Notes ‘Unusual’ Moment When a Reporter Boosted Trump Rhetoric With Personal Story

Trump Pushes Wild Autism Claims During Cabinet Meeting With RFK Jr.

To their credit, they tried to capture some—and only some—of the president's very strange claims. Journalistically, it's much more difficult to describe his remarkably strange demeanor

How strange were many of the president's claims? Yes, he actually said that the people at MSNBC are worse than violent gang members. And no, he didn't seem to be joking, as one other Mediaite reporter decided to say.

Such claims were general over the meeting. Consider the report which started like this:

Trump Tells Fake ‘Greatest President Of My Lifetime’ Story Hours After Fox News Busted Him—With Video

President Donald Trump told a fake story about being called “the greatest president of my lifetime” by a Democratic governor—hours after a Fox News host showed the claim was false by going to the videotape.

During a photo op on Monday, Trump told the tale of how Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) came up to him at a football game and couldn’t stop praising him:

[Transcript from Monday's event event]

Hours later, Fox News dug up the behind-the-scenes video of the scene in question—from Fox Nation’s Art of the Surge — and it proved that while Gov. Moore was respectful and collegial while discussing the Key Bridge disaster, he never said anything remotely resembling what Trump claimed.

It's true! As you can see in the full report, the president had made an extremely unlikely claim about something Governor Moore had allegedly said. But, as happenstance had it, videotape existed of the exchange in question. 

As the (Fox News) videotape showed, Moore had said nothing like what Trump had claimed—but then again, so what? During yesterday's event, "Trump told the story again—and even falsely claimed the video proved it."

Tommy Christopher provides the transcripts and the tapes of this remarkably strange bit of behavior. Such bizarre behaviors were given no place in Rogers' "analysis" piece.

Colloquially, the president's behavior might be called delusional.  Was it also diagnosable as some sort of clinical affliction?

We don't know how to answer your question. But late in yesterday's event, as he rambled and blustered, heaping mountains of praise on himself, the very strange American president took sides, once again, with his darling Vladimir. 

He offered this during a lengthy walk in the woods concerning the war on Ukraine. We apologize for the deletions, but the rambling side trips are endless:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/26/25): You know, Zelensky's not exactly innocent, either, OK? You know, it takes two people to tango...I have a very good relationship with President Putin—very, very good. That's a positive thing, again.

[...]

Nobody goes into a war thinking they're going to lose. They go in—I'm sure that Ukraine thought they were going to win. It's going to be, you know, "We're going to win," you're going to beat somebody that's fifteen times your size...But you don't go into a war that's fifteen times your size. 

Under the circumstances, how was Ukraine supposed to avoid "going into" this war? Strange presentations of that type littered the countryside during yesterday's "cabinet meeting"—but it was the president's rambling presentations which ate the bulk of the three hours, not the bizarre behavior of the Pyongyang-adjacent sycophants he had gathered around him.

All over Blue America, tribunes have focused on the mountains of praise heaped on Trump by the Stepfords. They have ignored the much larger mountains of praise heaped on Trump by Trump himself as he told rambling, absurdly fact-challenged stories about his own inescapable greatness.

To our eye and to our ear, something plainly seems to be wrong with this important man. Long ago, Hans Christian Andersen sketched an anthropological lesson which is being enacted here:

We humans are often unable, or unwilling, to see our monarchs as they actually are. We refuse to see what's right before us. Instead, we "look over there."

Blue elites have fought, every step of the way, to avoid discussing what seems to be obvious about the sitting president. At the Times, they haven't even been willing to build a journalistic framework around this basic question:

Why does this man insist on saying things which are baldly and wildly inaccurate?

No president has ever behaved in the crazy way this president does, but the Times keeps saying there's nothing to look at. Instead, let's talk about the cabinet members, or about that engagement!

Watching tape of his conduct yesterday, it seemed tragically obvious to us that something seems to be wrong. Something's also wrong with the sycophants, but something plainly seems to be wrong with the man in charge. 

That is, of course, a human tragedy—but so is the conduct of the Blue elites, who continue to run in fear from what is sitting right before them.

Andersen wrote it; our Blue elites live it. Do we need the discovery of a new mystery?

We'll guess that it could be too late.

Tomorrow: Unhelpful ideas about "mental illness"

Friday: Are we sure Maureen Dowd has it right?