THURSDAY: We're living in Alice's wonderland now!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2025

Our press corps won't tell you about it: We correct ourselves for the second time concerning Jen Psaki's program.

Last evening, she did report and discuss what the president did--what he did for the second straight day. As you can see by clicking this link, her segment started like this at 9:47 Eastern:

PSAKI (12/3/25): Today, Donald Trump doubled down on his disgusting racist attacks against Somali immigrants. And to spare you some of the bile, I'm only going to play part of it. But I think some of this hateful rhetoric from the president of the United States is worth bearing witness to.

As you can see by clicking that link, she then played tape of the president's second-day assault. She then interviewed Rep. Omar, who the president had dismissed as "garbage" the day before, about the fellow's behavior.

As to why the president behaved in this way, it seems to us that he has perhaps been spiraling downward of late. Several medical specialists have recently advanced that thesis, though we'll set that possibility aside for another day.

We remain puzzled by the minimal way the president's disordered behavior was covered on other MS NOW programs. For today, we thought you ought to see what viewers of the nation's most-watched "cable news" show were told about this two-day event.

We take you to the set of The Five, where an all-MAGA panel had been assembled for yesterday's imitation of life. Indeed, the former VJ Kennedy sat in the "liberal" chair. On such days, this ludicrous four-on-one program become a five-to-zero parody of a panel "news" discussion.

A bit of background: The second segment of the show was built out of recent events in Minnesota, starting with the widespread fraud event reported in this lengthy front-page report in Sunday's New York Times:

How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

From the Blue political / policy perspective, it's a horrible news report. We were struck by the fact that the Times included Governor Walz right there in its headline.

It was the sudden prominence of those fraud prosecutions which led to the president's outbursts this week. But what were viewers of The Five told about those poisonous outbursts themselves?

We can't recommend that you watch the whole segment. The conversation involves the usual fact-challenged inanities performed by co-hosts Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld. Also, a lengthy side-trip about public corruption in Sierra Leone was conducted by co-host Dana Perino.

To watch the whole segment, start here.

Sad! That said, near the end of this imitation of life, what were Red American viewers told about the president's poisonous outbursts? Believe it or notand with a minor surprise yet to comethis is what viewers now heard:

GUTFELD (12/3/25): Oh, one last thing! It's kind of refreshing to see Trump be able to say that stuff about Omar and not be called all these names, because that whole "identity politics" thing doesn't work any more...

According to Gutfeld, it was "kind of refreshing" to hear the things President Trump had said over the prior two days! To hear him say that Rep. Omar was "garbage." To hear him say that Rep. Omar's friends were "garbage" too!

Yes, that's what this very strange "newsman" said. But now we give you the kicker:

Viewers had never been shown the videotape of the poisonous things the president had said! As you can see if you watch the whole segment, viewers had seen the videotape of Omar's rebuttal to Trumpand Gutfeld went on to criticize her for saying that Trump's remarks were racist, without letting viewers see what he had actually said.

Gutfeld and Watters and Perino oh my! We're all in Alice's Wonderland now, and the timorous Blue American press corps still won't tell you about it!


ILLNESS: When he came for the Somalis again...

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2025

...MS NOW stars kept their traps shut: Yesterday, there he went again! Just as he'd done the previous day, the sitting presidentPresident Sanitizedcame for the Somalis again.

He came for them for the second straight day! But if you're a person who watches MS NOW, you had to go to Mediaite to learn that he'd done this again. 

At Mediaite, Sarah Rumpf has reported what the president said during yesterday's second assault. She then stated her opinion of what he had said in a separate opinion column.

First she reported, then she opined. We include the headlines atop her news report about yesterday's encore performance:

Trump Rants About Ilhan Omar: ‘Should Be Thrown the Hell Out of Our Country,’ ‘Shouldn’t Even Be Allowed’ in Congress

President Donald Trump called for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to be thrown out of the country and said she and other Somali immigrants should not be allowed to be in Congress.

The president was responding to a reporter’s question about his comments Tuesday that he did not want any more Somalis moving to the U.S. and specifically attacking Omar, calling her “garbage” and “a terrible person.” Trump’s comments were widely viewed as racist and sharply criticized.

On Wednesday, Trump took questions from reporters in the Oval Office, and one reporter asked about his comments about Somali immigrants.

Rumph offered a transcript (and videotape) of Trump's remarks on this second day. Among other things, he said that Rep. Omar "shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman" and that she "should be thrown the hell out of our country."

Also, "the Somalians should be out of here," he said. "They have destroyed our country," he crazily said, and so on from there.

So it went, on the second day, when the president came for this group. Later, Rumph offered this opinion column:

Opinion: Trump’s Hateful Oval Office Rant About Somali Immigrants Shines a Harsh Light on the Cowardice of His Cronies

President Donald Trump launched into a rant Wednesday attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other Somali immigrants, saying they should be “thrown the hell out of our country” and not allowed to serve in Congress, an unhinged moment that revealed not just the president’s animosity towards a group of Americans, but the cowardice and complicity of the cronies gathered around him from Congress and his cabinet.

On Tuesday, Trump attacked Omar as “garbage” and “a terrible person,” and expanded his vitriol to all Somali immigrants, declaring “I don’t want them in our country” because “they contribute nothing.” His comments were—rightfully—loudly criticized as racist.

Trump aggressively defended his comments during a Q&A session with reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Rumph's column continues from there. For the record, Trump didn't use the word "garbage" this day. It's possible that somebody clued him.

At any rate, Rumph's opinion column continues from there. As she ended, she went where we ourselves had gone when we watched the first day of these broadsides:

(from Rumph's opinion column)
If we don’t want this chapter of American history to be recorded as “First they came for the Somalis…” then it is incumbent upon those around the president, who have influence in this administration and in Congress, to speak up

UPDATE: Retired NY Daily News reporter Helen Kennedy posted a list on her Bluesky account of the people who attended the Oval Office presser with Trump. “I think it should be noted who stood there,” she wrote.

Rumph savaged the cronies who stood behind Trump on this second day. They said and did nothing as he "came for the Somalis" again.

That said, those cronies weren't the only people who said nothing about these two daysthe two days during which, to our ear, the president has finally seemed to identify his target population of choice.

Another group has said and done nothing for two days and two nights. As best we can tell, the stars of MS NOW have also maintained their silence, presumably in response to a directive from the corporate suites.

Who has stayed silent in the past two days? We refer to Scarborough and O'Donnell and Hayes and Psaki and, as best we can tell, to everyone else on the Blue America cable news roster. 

As we noted yesterday, we were shocked on Wednesday morning when the Morning Joe gang said nothing about what the president said on Tuesday afternoon. As we noted, the New York Times was reporting the president's "shocking" conduct at the very top of its web site, but the Morning Joe gang stayed silent all through its opening hour.

What were they choosing to disregard? According to that Times report, here's what the president had said in Tuesday's diatribe:

Trump Calls Somalis ‘Garbage’ He Doesn’t Want in the Country

President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday, calling them “garbage” he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.

Even for Mr. Trump—who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries—his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry. And it comes as he started a new ICE operation targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.

“These are people that do nothing but complain,” Mr. Trump said at the tail end of a cabinet meeting at the White House, during which he sometimes appeared to be fighting sleep. But when the subject turned to immigration, Mr. Trump made a point of lashing out.

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.

He said Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

Rep. Omar is garbage, and her friends are too. The president had continued from there. Yesterday morning, at the top of its website's front page, the New York Times called his behavior "shocking."

That's what the president said on Tuesday afternoon. Yesterday, he continued this onslaught, but we can find no instant sign that two straight days of this behavior has been mentioned on MS NOW programs at all.

On Morning Joe? On The Last Word? On All In? On The Briefing with Jen PsakiWe can find no sign that two days of this behavior has even been mentioned on these programs. 

CORRECTION: Last night, Psaki aired the videotape of Trump's second-day presentation fairly late in her 9 o'clock hour

Yesterday, we criticized Scarborough for his silence. He was silent again this morning, leading us to assume that the orders came from the corporate suites above.

We stand with Sarah Rumpf's flash reaction to this remarkable matter. When we happened to watch the president in real time on Tuesday afternoon, it seemed to us that he was finally naming the population he wanted to target in the ultimate irresponsible way. 

As to why he would do such a thing, we now confess to this:

We have assumed, for some time, that this president has been, all along, in the grip of a type of "illness."

As we noted yesterday, t's an "illness" of the second kind. That particular use of the word is apparently going out of favor when it comes to situations like this.

As opposed to a basic physical illness, it's the kind of illness which is conceptually complex and confusing. 

The president's niece is a doctorate-wielding clinical therapist. As we've noted many times, her assessment of her adult uncle's "psychopathologies" runs exactly like this:

Prologue

[...]

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a [clinically diagnosable] narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

So the niece assessed. We've long assumed something else:

According to the leading authorities, the condition colloquially known as "sociopathy" can be at least partly inherited. It can be passed along in the genes to the unsuspecting child. 

With that tragic fact in mind, we've long advised you to "pity the child" in the case of this particular human tragedy. Also, according to the leading authorities, something like five percent of adult men are diagnosable for this "personality disorder." 

In essence, a wire is hanging loose in some of our imperfect human brains. People so afflicted don't react to situations in the (admittedly limited) way the rest of us humans may do. 

Their physiology may limit their reactions and their moral understanding. There but for the grace of God go the rest of us limited people.

Our journalists don't have the slightest idea how to talk about this. In part for that reason, they've agreed that this president's possible or apparent mental state must never be discussed or assessed, not even by medical specialists.

Somehow, this seems to have bled over into the silence of the past two daysthe silence from the millionaire "cable news" hosts we Blues have been told we should trust.

Just a guess! Somewhere up in the corporate suites, some executive seems to have made a decision about what the president did. For whatever reason, that person decided that viewers of MS NOW shouldn't be told about the onslaught the president has aimed at this "garbage" of the upper Midwest.

In this follow-up news report, the New York Times has reported the fear within Minnesota's Somali population in the wake of Tuesday's initial outburst. Quoting from the report:

A widespread sense of anxiety and foreboding was palpable in Minnesota, home to the largest diaspora of Somalis in the world, a day after President Trump in the Oval Office referred to Somalis as “garbage” amid his administration’s new crackdown on East African immigrants in the state who may be subject to deportation.

“What is happening now goes far beyond immigration enforcement,” said Abdiqani A. Jabane, a Somali American immigration lawyer in Minneapolis. “It is creating an atmosphere of xenophobia, where an entire community feels targeted and unsafe.”

Yesterday, the president did it again. He came for the Somalis againbut if you get your news from MS NOW, you haven't been told about this.

The president came for the Somalis? Was Rumph over-reacting when she framed it that way?

Was the scribe out over her skis? We can't really say that she was!

This afternoon: Good God! What viewers were told by The Five


WEDNESDAY: What did he say and when did he say it?

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 3, 2025

Here we go again: Did Pete Hegseth commit a war crime? We suppose it's certainly possible that he actually did.

That said, the knives are out for the highly erratic, widely scorned Secretary of Defense. In some quarters, that has produced a familiar type of chase, with creative paraphrase being widely applied to the several things Hegseth has now said about the events of September 2.

Full disclosure:

The analytical skills of mainstream journalists are frequently rather poor. When they settle on a group target, the embellishments and the slippery paraphrase are rarely far behind.

In the case of Hegseth, the current uproar about the second strike on the disabled boat (and on its two survivors) began with a rather fuzzy report in the Washington Post. Headline included, this is the way the current chase after this new target started:

Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack—the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere—ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

[...]

The commander overseeing the operation from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to two people. He ordered the second strike to fulfill Hegseth’s directive that everyone must be killed.

The chronology there is less than precise. We know of nothing Hegseth has said which is inconsistent with that first fuzzy account.

According to that account, Hegseth gave a spoken order at some unspecified time. "The order was to kill everybody," one person is said to have said.

(Would some such order be a war crime in itself? We have no idea.)

It sounds like the first strike on the boat came soon after that. (It sounds that way, but the Post's report doesn't explicitly say so.) According to Hegseth's latest statement, he then left the scene.

He says he did so before "the smoke cleared." When the smoke cleared (how long did that take?), that would have made it possible for Admiral Bradley and / or others to see there were two survivors.

Is that possible? Of course it is! But is that what actually happened? 

We have no idea.

That said, the Post account explicitly says that it was Admiral Bradley who decided to order the second strike. If Hegseth had still been present on the scene, wouldn't he have been the one to make that second decision?

(Maybe yes, maybe no. We don't know how these things work.)

The mob is now attempting to hang Hegseth high based on a comment he made about "the fog of war." All he seemed to saying was this:

The smoke from the initial strike obscured everyone's vision for a while. By the time the smoke had cleared, he had left the scene.

Has Hegseth described events as they actually happened? We have no way of knowing.

We do know that some of the semi-usual suspects are on the hunt again. (Joe Scarborough was horrendous on Morning Joe this morning.) 

Instead of waiting for audio / video recordings to establish what was said and done, the chase is on for the highly erratic man who prefers to call himself the Secretary of War. As this chase has moved through the streets, the attempts at paraphrase have been highly creative.

That said:

We know of nothing Hegseth has said which contradicts the initial Washington Post report. We know of nothing he has said which contradicts his own handful of statements.

We're simply going to have to wait if we want to establish what actually happened. In the meantime, a few of the jackals are back in the streets, advancing the versions of this story which they themselves prefer.

We've been on this beat for 27 years. Al Gore said he invented the Internet!

We've seen them do this before!


ILLNESS: Is it time to say that the president's ill?

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2025

Morning Joe takes a dive: As we've noted in the past, "illness" can be a challenging term. Not when we speak about physical illness, but when we try to speak about that other way to be "ill.".

What kind of "illness" do we mean? We've posted the relevant passages before. The leading authority declaims:

Mental disorder

A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness, a mental health condition, or a psychiatric disability, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. A mental disorder is also characterized by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotional regulation, or behavior, often in a social context...

[...]

The definition and classification of mental disorders are key issues for researchers as well as service providers and those who may be diagnosed. For a mental state to be classified as a disorder, it generally needs to cause dysfunction. Most international clinical documents use the term mental "disorder," while "illness" is also common. It has been noted that using the term "mental" (i.e., of the mind) is not necessarily meant to imply separateness from the brain or body.

So the authority says. The fraught term "mental illness" is apparently giving way to the kinder and gentler term "mental disorder." That doesn't mean that the affliction in question isn't physiologicalis  "separate from the brain or body."

Mental "illness" can be physiological too. It isn't necessarily just a bunch of lousy, immoral choices. 

With that, we move to the top of the New York Times web site. To their credit, the editors had placed a certain news report at the top of that page as of 5 o'clock this morning.

Let word go forth to the nations! With respect to yesterday's event in the Cabinet Room, the Times wasn't taking a dive.

Has the time come for journalists to say that the president is mentally ill? In their report for the Times, Kanno-Youngs and McCreesh used the alternate term "bigoted." 

We can't call their choice wrong.

The Times reporters described a "shocking" event. Headline included, their report starts like this:

Trump Calls Somalis ‘Garbage’ He Doesn’t Want in the Country

President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday, calling them “garbage” he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.

Even for Mr. Trump—who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries—his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry. And it comes as he started a new ICE operation targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.

“These are people that do nothing but complain,” Mr. Trump said at the tail end of a cabinet meeting at the White House, during which he sometimes appeared to be fighting sleep. But when the subject turned to immigration, Mr. Trump made a point of lashing out.

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.

The reporters spoke of bigotry, xenophobia, nativism. These are terms of morality, not of illness, disease or disorder. 

That said, as their report continued, their accurate description of what occurred only became that much worse. We would describe this behavior as "shocking" too:

(continuing directly from above)
He said Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

Mr. Trump has used this kind of rhetoric throughout his rise in politics, including in his first term as president, when he demanded to know why the United States would accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, which he described as “shithole countries,” rather than, say, Norway.

[...] 

Robert Pape, a professor at University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years, said such language from the Trump administration was dangerous.

“They’re not just like nasty metaphorsthey’re especially dehumanizing metaphors,” Mr. Pape said. “‘Garbage.’ You’re not thinking of something that is human, you’re thinking of it as something that can be easily thrown away, so that is exactly the kind of metaphor we have just found for really decades is likely to increase support for violence.” 

Is Rep. Omar (D-Minn.) "garbage?" How about her friends, none of whom the resident would likely be able to name?

Is it true that these people are "garbage?" At such times, we're forced to ask whether we're willing to say that any person is. 

("No person is uninteresting," Yevtushenko said.)

Meanwhile, sad! By 7 a.m., someone at the New York Times may have had a change of heart concerning this shocking event. By 7:10 a.m., this report had been removed from the top of the Times' front page. A reader had to scroll quite a distance down the page to find a link to this report.

This morning, also this:

From 6 a.m. until 7:02, we sat and watched, in surprise, as Morning Joe took a dive on this shocking event. The president's outburst was mentioned just once, at 6:52 a.m., and it was mentioned in thoroughly glancing fashion. 

If a viewer didn't already know what the president had said and done, that viewer wouldn't learn from Joe Scarborough, who took a serious dive today about this remarkable conduct.

The president went on and on about the Somali garbage. The C-Span videotape doesn't show Vice President Vance during these remarks, but you can see Secretary Lutnick gesturing to Vance soon thereafter, in a way which would seem to support the account of Vance's conduct the Times  reporters gave.

(To see the president's full remarks, click here for the C-Span videotape, click ahead to the very end.)

What does it mean to be "mentally ill"in evolving medical parlance, to be afflicted with a (serious) "mental disorder?" Given the imperfection of our human capacities, that remains a difficult question to answer at this point in time.

That said, we think the time has finally come for our journalists, such as they are, to start to make an overt attempt to come to terms with that question. That would involve our front-page reporters, but it would also involve the opinion columnists and cable news stars who continue to duck this fairly obvious question, even at this late date.

It's time for them to stand and speak. As we say that, we remind you of what we've said before:

As a general matter, our high-end journalists won't have the slightest idea how to talk about this topic. 

For starters, they don't know how to talk about the obvious possibility that the president may have inherited a type of mental disorderthat it may have come to him in the genes, that it may have been bred in the bone.

Professor Brabender, the great anthropologist, once described the way we tribal humans work. This is what he was quoted saying about our human behavior here on this earth:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.

After that, we start to hit! We're inclined to unloose the verbal bombs which come from the realm of morality, ethics and insult. Traditionally, that has included the claim that someone with a serious "mental disorder" is crazy or nutsor is "mentally ill."

The possibility that we might "pity the child"or discuss the state of the medical scienceisn't within the reach of our current journalism. But in such ways. those of us in Blue America make it less likely that we can approach this situation in a way which will let us achieve the goals we claim to seek.

Sorry, Morning Joe! At this site, we weren't about to take a dive on the "shocking" way the president behaved. By way of contrast, the dive was aggressively taken on today's Morning Joe.

Essentially, the president's conduct went unmentioned. In place of any such discussion, the Morning Joe panel continued a jihad aimed at Pete Hegsetha jihad which is based, it must be said, by a great deal of embellishment and "creative paraphrase" concerning the several things Hegseth has now said.

(More on that in this afternoon's post.)

"Illness" is a challenging term with respect to this kind of affliction. We hope to return to General Washington when do our Saturday morning post. 

We hope to return to that topic this weekend. For today, there was no way we were going to walk away as if nothing happened yesterday in the Cabinet Room.

He doesn't want that garbage, he said. We suggest that you pity the childand that you consider the various thing his niece said about her uncle, the adult, in her best-selling 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough

Speaking as a doctorate-wielding clinical therapist, she said he was almost surely seriously disordered ("mentally ill") in the clinical sense. She also said it had quite possibly been bred in the bloodpassed down biologically from his father, "a high-achieving sociopath."

(What happens in the minds of such people? Why don't you react in the ways they do? Have you ever seen any journalist ask?)

People remember the great forgivers. Nelson Mandela forgave his jailer. President Lincoln stood in public and shockingly said: 

If this war continues until we've lost every cent and until we've shed much more of our blood, who could deny that the judgments of the Lord are just and true forever?

In his first book, the young Dr. King expressed his pity for the southern whites who had been misled about racial decency "even by their pastors." These are the people whose moral greatness is remembered down through the ages. 

Faulty as all humans are, we Blues have been more strongly inclined to rail and call names and accuse. Or perhaps to take a dive on shocking presidential behavior.

It seems to us that that instinct is politically self-defeating. But as that great anthropologist once said, it's the way we humans are inclined to react:

We make a tiny effort at talk. At that point, we start to hit!

Tomorrow: Inheriting money and genes

This afternoon: The several things Hegseth has said


TUESDAY: No two people are just alike!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2025

She'd like to see them bleed out: Did it start with five years of Donald Trump's birtherism? Was that where it started?

For us, that was the start of a remarkable era in which we learned how many people out in the world seem to be out of their minds. Today, as President Trump continues to possibly spiral downward, he provided the latest implausible account of the amazing difficulty of the "cognitive test" he still claims he aced in spectacular fashion.

Concerning that lengthy account, we can only say, Wow! Last evening, he also did this:

Trump Fires Off Over 160 Truth Social Posts in Frenetic, Late-Night Blitz

President Donald Trump unleashed a frenetic, late-night posting binge on Monday, flooding Truth Social with more than 160 posts in less than five hours, in a wild spectacle that saw him teeing off on political opponents and policies.

From 7 p.m. to nearly midnight (ET), the president reposted an endless stream of clips, some of which were duplicated in what appeared to be an automatic loop, amplifying MAGA-friendly pundits and conspiracy theories.

Among them was a clip of Alex Jones, featuring Bed, Bath and Beyond founder Patrick Byrne, whose video carried the bizarre caption: “Michelle Obama may have used Biden’s autopen in the final days of his disastrous administration to pardon key individuals.” Other posts lauded his vow to nullify all of Biden’s Autopen orders.

He also posted what appeared to be an AI-generated video of Elon Musk discussing Trump’s vow to “immediately” revoke temporary protections for Somali migrants.

It goes on from there. The New York Times and all its columnists continue to hold that this sort of thing shouldn't be reported or discussed, not even with qualified specialists.

Meanwhile, did Pete Hegseth order a second strike? We'll all have to wait, and some day we may all find out what happened. 

Along the way, it has always seemed to us that something seemed to be wrong with Hegseththat he seemed to need (and deserve) some help. Regarding the sitting president, we have advised you to "pity the child" even as you search for ways to restrain the adultthe adult we Blues almost surely helped get elected. 

That said, our press corps has agreed that possible or probable "mental disorders" must never be discussed with medical specialists where a political person is involved. That was always a good idea until it finally wasn'tbut our press corps will cling to that shibboleth until the very end as the society keeps sliding sideways.

Hegseth always seemed to be disordered, even back in the old Fox & Friends Weekend days. Yesterday, the principal friend on that morning program showed up on Outnumbered to say that we all need to maintain the United States as a Christian nation:

Fox News host urges defense of America’s 'Christian Culture' against communism

A Fox News host is urging viewers to defend America’s “western Christian culture” and to think “communism” whenever they hear about feminism or secularism.

Rachel Campos-Duffy, a “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host, told [Outnumbered] viewers on Monday, “I think it’s really up to us to reclaim our culture.”

“We can sit and complain about it, but when we give in to those atheist groups that keep suing, we should come right back—this is our culture,” she said. “I’m not going to let, you know, pro-Palestinian or whatever they’re putting forward—these are all fronts for, you know, whenever you see any of these groups, just think feminism, secularism, just think communism. This is what they’re really about.”

“It’s always been about communism,” Campos-Duffy insisted.

“Making the state the center, removing the power of religion and family from our culture. It’s up to us to make sure that our culture remains what it is, which is a Western Christian culture with a beautiful history...

As we've often noted, Campos-Duffy is a deeply genial person, at least among her own. She's sensational morning show "talent."

Stating the obvious, there's no reason why she shouldn't hold the religious views and values she does hold. But she also seems to be such a true believer that someone who pities the regular people of suffering Gaza can only be engaged in a front for Communism, or so it apparently seems to her.

(For extra credit only: Does that make her a bad person? Or does it only make her a person person? Compare and contrast. Discuss.)

That said, we Blues have often been a tiny bit nutty too. Every time Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) manufactures another incident like this, another Trump voter decides to hang onto his or her wings. Fox has been dining out on that absurd own goal for roughly a week, and its viewership is very large.

That said, we'll leave you today with this report about Megan Kelly's desire to see the people on those apparent drug boats suffer before they drown. She spoke with Mark Halperin on her eponymous podcast. Here's part of what she said:

Megyn Kelly Complains Trump Isn’t Prolonging Deaths of Alleged Drug Traffickers: ‘I’d Really Like to See Them Suffer’

Megyn Kelly defended the Caribbean boat strikes ordered by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, not only calling the criticism “manufactured” but also complaining that the people on the boats were being killed too quickly and she would prefer to “see them suffer.”

[...]

"So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little. Like I’m really having a difficult time ginning up sympathy for these guys who ten seconds earlier almost got taken out by the initial bomb, but because they managed to get ejected, you know, a little too soon, had to be taken out in the water. I realize legally it may make a difference, but truly, Mark, this is a tough case to really gin up the sympathies of the American people."

She's like see them lose a limb and be forced to hang on a while as they slowly bleed out. (We'll admit we don't have that same reaction. Plus, there's an endless array of basic, unresolved facts to sort out.)

It's beginning to seem that no too people are just alike! Our overall views at this point would include these:

All these people are fellow citizens. We'll guess there are some people who could use some help.

Some such people may even be over here in the Blue camp! We assume that something is wrong with President Trumpsomething which may have come to him through the genes. (Under the rules of the game, no such obvious possibility can be reported or discussed.)

We feel sorry for the perpetually furious, tortured Hegseth. We leave you with a basic question:

Would you want to be him?


OUR KIND: Lusting for the horrors of war!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2025

War with one's own people: The principle dates to antiquityto the dawn of "European literature."

(Prepare for a somewhat arcane discussion. We think a key point is involved.)

The principle is voiced by Nestor, the seasoned charioteer, in Book IX of the Iliad. The headstrong young Diomedes is threatening to lead young warriors back home, away from the faltering siege of Troy. In council, Nestor scrambles to his feet.

Agamemnon, lord of men? The headstrong but powerful Diomedes is prepared to tell him to stuff it! Praising Diomedes for his eloquence, Nestor gives voice to the ancient principle, as translated by Professor Fagles:

Few can match your power in battle, Diomedes,
and in council you excel all men your age.

[...] 

But it's my turn now, Diomedes.
I think I can claim to have some years on you.
So I must speak up and drive the matter home.
And no one will heap contempt on what I say,
not even mighty Agamemnon. Lost to the clan,
lost to the hearth, lost to the old ways, that one
who lusts for the horror of war with his own people.

In Homer's account, Nestor "always gave the best advice." With this speech against the horrors of tribal division, he regains the allegiance of the cheering young warriors back and the siege of Troy continues.

Even then, Nestor delivered a heartfelt account of an unmistakable fact. Vast harm may await the headstrong young person "who lusts for the horror of war with his own people."

Vast harm may await older warriors tooand to our ear, we heard a call to that kind of war on at least two occasions over the Thanksgiving weekend. 

Such as it has been, the American story has often seemed to begin on this holiday. But over this weekend, the Fox News Channel seemed to be selling us war with our own:

GUTFELD (11/27/25): So Colby, we're not paying for the [construction of President Trump's ballroom]—it's being handled privately. So why are the liberals so outraged?

COVINGTON: I mean, they're just outraged because they're outraged about anything, you know? ... They're just despicable people and they hate America and they hate our country...

On Thanksgiving night, we saw that remarkable statement rebroadcast as part of a special "best segments" Gutfeld! show. Then, on Sunday morning's Fox & Friends Weekend, we saw a member of Congress say this:

JENKINS (11/30/25): I just can't get past how in the world a candidate who hates Nashville is going to get possibly elected by Nashville voters.

BURCHETT: ...It just shows you how much the Democrat [sic] Party hates this country—hates our values.

[...]

The reality is, this is the current state of the Democrat [sic] Party in this country...If you look at the Democrat Party today in Congress, this is what they represent. They want an open border. They disrespect our military. They hate our country.

For links to videotape and further context, see yesterday's report.

Colby Covington is a superlative athlete and an MMA fighter. Rep. Tim Burchett (D-Tenn.) is a folksy member of Congress who may not have meant any harm.

Neither man may have meant any arm when they made those sweeping statements! But, at least to our ear, when you issue statements like those, you've signed on as a person who seems to be lusting for the wages of war with your own people. 

Or at least, you're doing so within the context of the modern nation-state--within the context according to which we all form the aggregation called "the American people."

We heard it first on Thursday evening, rebroadcast completely by choice. We heard it again on Sunday morning. When we did, we thought we might "feel the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe," or something a small bit like that.

Within the context of the nation state, you're going to war with your own people when you issue such a sweeping denunciation of so many tens of millions of peoplepeople you can neither name nor know. But then again, what else is new? Back in August, then again in early October, the sitting president of our flailing nation had reposted this:

THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL AND SATAN
The Democratic Party Is Dead!

The Democrats are "the party of Satan!" To see the repost on Truth Social, you can click right here.

The siege of Troy was a full military war, fought with the military weapons of the Late Bronze Age. The Fox News Channel (joined by some others) now seems to be aggressively engaged in a type of political or culture war.

That said, enormous harm can be caused by such Red on Blue warfare in this Information Age. Plainly, that has already occurred in the current example. But now we switch to an earlier choice--a choice by General Washington.

Two weeks back, Ken Burns et al. explored the choice George Washington made at the very dawn of the American nation.

Burns broadcast a 12-hour film on PBS called The American Revolution. We liked some parts of the film a great deal. Others, perhaps not so much.

(We sometimes get the impression that Burns, a good decent person, loves the smell of napalm in the morning. It may be that's just us!)

Back to Burns et al.:

Assisted by a hive of historians, the screenplay describes an eight-year war which, as the screenplay clearly says, was in part a civil war. 

(Was it also, in part, a secession? Compare and contrast. Discuss.)

Before the week is done, we'll quote some of this film's account of the viciousness which resulted from this highly consequential piece of world history. Yesterday, we quoted Frost's poem about that same war. Today, we do so again:

The Gift Outright

[...]

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward...

To the land vaguely realizing westward! According to Burns' scholars, that was part of Washington's thinking about his endorsement of this war. We'll briefly visit that point before the week is through.

At any rate:

In this case, "the deed of gift" was indeed many vicious deeds of war. As for General Washington himself, we've long wondered why he chose to sign on for this long, brutal conflagrationfor a lengthy war with his own (British) people.

As the Burns film makes clear, he was an extremely wealthy manand, like the 22-year-old Nathan Hale, he could imaginably have been hung by the neck until dead had he ever been captured. Why would a person so well positioned have signed on for such a risk?

When General Washington lent his support to that war, he was also, rightly or wrongly, waving the starter's flag for the many vicious acts which befell many innocent people. When the CEO of the Fox News Channel wants her millions of viewers to hear that we Democrats hate the values of our own countrythat liberals hate the country itselfshe's partly padding company coffers. But she's also bringing on a loss of the hearth and the old waysa loss which can be deeply consequential.

Why did Washington choose as he did? In choosing to go to war with his own (British) people, he was endorsing a war which would, inevitably, involve vast (collateral) harm.

The Fox News Channel is walking that path as it dumbly consigns us Others to hatred and to Hell. Meanwhile, how about us Blue Americans? What are we like over here?

Leave it to sacred Thoreau! In Walden, he quotes (Sir Walter) Raleigh at one point, describing a type of error to which "our kind" may be inclined. By our kind, Raleigh meant our human kindthe way we're all inclined to be as (imperfect) people.

At present, Red America is being encouraged to walk away from Nestor's ancient advice. The Fox News Channel CEO is rather plainly pushing that line. So in this nation's highly erratic president, even as the New York Times works to avert its gaze.

Red America is being pushed toward a desire for that kind of war. How about us in Blue America? Is it possible that we Blues have sometimes been lusting for that type of civil war too?

This story goes back a fairly long time. "Our kind" is inclined to behave certain ways. 

The Fox News Channel is (unwisely) lusting for war. But how about us Over Here?

Tomorrow: Citizen Washington's choice