“…and everything was so much better when it was only at 32.67 trillion!”
Watching my Red Sox TV broadcasts from Boston(as the team I have lived and died for …metaphorically of course…most of my life inconveniently rose from the dead last month and forced me to take two and a half hours I don’t have time for out of every day to follow their adventures), it has been mordantly amusing to hear all of the Democrats running ads following a script that says they will “stand up to Trump” and “deal with the National Debt.” When anyone, including President Trump, promises to take any serious action regarding the National Debt, they are proving they are stupid, naive or lying. There is no fourth alternative.
Nevertheless, the Axis media (and others) have now decided that the newly minted $40 trillion National Debt is exponentially more alarming than the $39 trillion debt, or the $37 trillion debt, and far, far more disastrous than in 1992, when Ross Perot ran for President primarily on the platform that a debt that was then “only” $4.06 trillion and about 46% the gross domestic product was dangerous and irresponsible and Democrats mocked him mercilessly. So “National Debt reaches $40 million!” is being headlined everywhere, blathered about on CNN, MSNow and the rest because Republicans have control of the Presidency and Congress, and mid-term elections are fast approaching.
I wrote about this hypocrisy and deliberate dishonesty by the Left just four months ago. Any Democratic candidate who cites the current explosion of the National Debt as a reason to vote for him, her or Democrats (and especially Democratic-Socialists) are untrustworthy liars: the claim is signature significance. No ethical, competent, believable candidate would make such a promise even once. It is proof of organic mendacity.
I was temped to repost the last EA essay on the topic, Ethics Observations on the National Debt…, but you can read the whole thing if you want; the tag for the topic and all of the EA posts on it is here. I’ll just leave with this quote—as with the rest of the post, it is as accurate today as it was then:
Abdul El-Sayed speaks during a news conference at the Spirit of Detroit shortly after winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Democraic-Socialist, also anti-Semite, Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democrat Senate primary last week. This is remarkable for many reasons, few of them good. I have waited this long to post about it because I have been trying to keep my gorge down.
1. Not too long ago, it would be impossible to imagine a serious candidate for the U.S. Senate named Abdul El-Sayed. Americans just didn’t elect people who had non American-sounding names. It was a silly bias, but a comforting one. When I wrote my thesis hypothesizing an American Presidential type, I noted that no American President had been elected who didn’t have an American-sounding name. (No, nobody thought of Dwight Eisenhower as German, for obvious reasons.) Not only that, every American President from Washington to Bush except Richard Nixon has had blue eyes. Barack Obama blew that template to bits, both in name and in eye-color.
[Notice of Correction:Somehow, I left out “except Richard Nixon.” I don’t know how that happened: I thought I had written that. Well, it was too late I guess: I finished the post at one in the morning. But I certainly knew about Nixon’s eyes: there is a controversy over their color: he is stated in some sources as having black eyes, and others have them as dark brown. But he and Obama are the only brown-eyed boys: Trump restored the Presidency to its blue-eyed tradition.I apologize for the error, but a commenter who should know better accused me of being “racist” for #1 above. To be blunt, that pisses me off. The Name Game has a chapter in my honors thesis, which was,indeed a controversial one: three chair-holding professors in the Harvard Government Department reviewed it, and couldn’t agree on the grade; eventually they compromised on magna cum laude. The observation about Presidents’ names was not original, and I had it thoroughly footnoted to a historian who specialized in the narrow field of Presidential character. Perhaps today’s DEI, bias-over-reality, conservative thought-suppressing Harvard College would have slapped me down for that section, but then it no longer is a top tier, trustworthy institution. Fact: the template for the American Presidency in the minds of Americans is powerfully influenced another fact. Every President before Barack Obama was white, male, born on the mainland and raised by Christians. He changed that mold, and if he had been a good President and better human being, he would have changed it more.
I have reached the end of my patience with progressives and Democrats, yes, even Trump-Deranged friends, stooping to race-baiting when they have neither the information, the integrity nor the wit to counter opinions (and facts) they find inconvenient, as they appeal to emotion or worse. I wrote in the reply to an old and cherished friend’s accusation of racism in the comments to this post, “Shame on you.” Shame on all of them.]
In retrospect, I have concluded that Obama was not (and is not) a cultural American. Abdul El-Sayed being the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator in Michigan would be impossible without Obama’s toxic influence.
2. Abdul El-Sayed is by far the most radical and repellent candidate to emerge from the primaries yet. He makes Graham Platner look like Hans Christian Anderson. Hassan Piker ‘s pal** pledged support for the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in a 2011 article on HuffPo titled “Why the U.S. Should Support the Protesters in Egypt” in which El-Sayed argued for allowing the terrorist organization to grab control of Egypt. He campaigned with Amir Makled, who praised the terrorist group Hezbollah and Iran. He wants to end U.S. military aid to Israel, which he says is committing genocide in Gaza.
As far as state matters go, the aspiring Senator supports raising taxes on working-class Michiganders including waitresses, delivery drivers, and senior citizens receiving Social Security to pay for his “Medicare for All” agenda item. He supports defunding the police, saying on social media that “The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people” and that police funding is influenced by “systemic racism.” Naturally he advocates abolishing I.C.E., aka. “open borders.”
He has never held elective office.
3. So how did this guy win a primary in rock-ribbed American Michigan? Thank higher education indoctrination. The vote was close, just 1% separating the candidates with the margin of victory coming from college towns and Gen Z. El-Sayed didn’t win a single district dominated by voters without college degrees, supposedly the “working class” that crypto-Commies like El-Sayed claim to be standing up for.
4. About that margin of victory: pre-vote polls had El-Sayed crushing the incumbent. Lesson: our pollsters are still biased, incompetent, and untrustworthy, and most are loyal members of the Axis of Unethical Conduct.
Graham Platner seems like old news now that the Maine Democrats have another working-class hero to run against Susan Collins: a temperamental logger instead of a part-time oyster fisherman, Troy Jackson. I meant to post this Comment of the Day a week ago but got distracted: never mind. Ryan Harkin’s observations are still relevant, and, as always, he does a thorough and articulate job. This is the first half of a Ryan Harkins Comment of the Day double-header, with the second half arriving tomorrow morning.
I think the observations from various conservatives is correct about the Democratic Party’s embrace of Platner: they are looking for the Democratic answer to Donald Trump, and thought maybe they found him in Platner. The problems here are manifold, though. First and foremost, they don’t understand what makes Trump popular to conservatives. Second, in searching for a masculine model, they have no idea what actual masculinity is. They took Trump’s crass behavior and somehow reasoned that they needed someone crass. (As though all their foul-mouthed, guttersnipe-turned-millionaire grifters weren’t crass enough!) They noticed Trump’s promiscuity and thought they needed someone who treated women dirty. They saw Trump’s businessman persona, and they thought they could create a businessman aura around their candidate. The problem in all of this is the Democrats cannot (and have for a generation at least) see anything beneath the surface. They are so caught up in superficial details and labels that they cannot even fathom there are depths that have to be considered.
Conservatives don’t like Trump’s promiscuity or narcissism; they tolerate it for Trump’s other characteristics and Trump’s record. Trump professed a love for the United States, which Democrats can never do. Trump identified the problems conservatives have, especially the hostility they have felt at values that have underwritten the United States since its founding: faith in God, self-determinism, and hard work. They have felt repressed by governments who catered to anyone but them, and especially to those groups who specifically weren’t them. Faith in God was derided; self-determinism was racist, violent, and toxic; hard work was treated as something to be punished. They have been struggling with the feeling of being replaced by foreigners, all the while being told they were imagining things. They were forced to observe, and call phobic if they didn’t support, every alternative lifestyle they had always believe was detrimental to a healthy family life. The list goes on and on.
Behold the official website of the Democratic Socialists of America. Unless it is a false flag effort by frightened Democrats or sneaky conservatives, this is a metaphorical smoking gun of epic proportions. Yet its content should not surprise anyone who has any historical perspective or who has been paying attention for the last, oh, two decades or so.
As for me, my inner Fredo is again saying, “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everyone says!” I’d like to find the first time Ethics Alarms started warning that the American Left and the 21st Century Democratic Party was sliding into totalitarian goals and tactics, but I know it was quite a while ago. I also know that EA’s objective analysis of this terrible political development, which creates a genuine threat to democracy unlike the fake threats to democracy heralded by Axis propagandists, was perceived as a partisan tactic itself and attacked as such, here and elsewhere. That was and is wrong for I was and am right, and it didn’t take any Fox News script to lead me to the truth. I was paying attention. Democrats were using the playbook of Communist regimes while accusing their adversaries of doing what they were doing themselves. And it should have been obvious to everyone. I’m not that smart. Heck, Donald Trump figured it out.
Now, suddenly, after sowing these metaphorical dragons’ teeth and getting the predictable bumper crop, some progressives and Democrats are waking up to what their cynical pandering to the anti-American, radical and ignorant extremes on the Left has wrought. Bill Maher, Van Jones, James Carville, Joe Scarborough, Senator Fetterman and others are suddenly saying, “Hey, hold on a bit, these Democratic Socialists are crazy, and they are going to get us slaughtered in elections.” To which I respond with two Hollywood clips from the EA archive:
I have no sympathy for these fools, and the group includes a lot of my Trump Deranged friends and relatives. They allowed Bernie Sanders, the epitome of a communist “useful idiot,” to become the face of the Democratic party along with “the Squad” and now the mayor of New York City. They relied on the our broken education system’s indoctrination process to ensure the ignorance of much of the public, especially Gen Z and, to be blunt, stupid people. Now all those ignorant voters are threatening to expose just how irresponsible and unhinged the Left has become, making even the hated Republicans and their boorish POTUS look safe by comparison.
You really have to read the rhetoric on the website, but I’ll give you just an appetizer to get you started, as readers are told what like under a socialist (<cough!> communist <cough!>) regime will be like:
“You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities…OK, enough about bills. What do you do on your day off?…what if you were free to spend your time how you like without worrying about cost or dreading going back to work? What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries?”
I have to note that all of the graphics pander to “people of color,” like this sweet portrayal of the average American family:
Graham Platner, the professed communist and former Nazi admirer who has lied wildly about his past and is, as progressive Stockholm syndrome victim David Brooks explained on PBS, “a moral degenerate,” has now been credibly accused of rape.
Brooks went on, “The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist.” Rape would seem to be frosting on this particularly disgusting cake that Democrats were prepared to devour and say “Yum-yum.” Rape? Never mind. Democrats, including Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren have made it clear that they will support Platner in his race against squish GOP Senator Susan Collins because they want to win majorities in Congress no matter what values they have to trash and no matter what scum they have to support to do it.
Today another test of their resolve arrived. One of the named women the New York Times interviewed in its investigation into Platner’s sexual history, Jenny Racicot, 41, elaborated on her previous account to the Times by revealing that Platner raped her. She had originally told the paper only that she cut off contact with Platner after he arrived at her home drunk and engaged in “unsettling” and “reckless” behavior. Now she admits that the “unsettling” behavior was raping her.
Racicot did not disclose the sexual assault for fear of being labeled a rape victim, she told Politico, which broke today’s story. Politico also spoke to the man Racicot dated after Platner, and whom she confided in about the alleged sexual assault, reviewed communications between Racicot and her therapist discussing her decision to come forward, and reviewed communications between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned about getting involved with Platner.
As he has denied so many things that turned out to be true, Platner denied the latest allegation, telling Politico, “These allegations are troubling, serious, and false. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue.” He also posted a video to his Senate campaign’s X account shortly after the Politico piece was published in which he stated that the allegations of sexual assault were false and said he and his team are “taking time to reflect on the best path forward.”
I’m sure you remember that Platner also denied that he knew the large Nazi tattoo he had on his chest was a large Nazi tattoo when he got it. Platner is a serial applicant for an Ethics Alarms “Jumbo,” the award a public figure can acquire here when he or she emulates Jimmy Durante in the film of the musical “Jumbo.” Jimmy played a clown apprehended trying to steal the biggest elephant in the world from the circus. Caught elephant-handed and asked by a constable, “Where are you going with that elephant?,” Durante responded, “What elephant?”
Have I mentioned that here? I think I have; I think about 500 times since October, 2026. For example, there is this recent scandal out of Denver, where the Rocky Mountain High makes people woke and unethical, apparently.
The Denver City Council voted overwhelmingly against a lease for Key Lime Air last December after learning the charter airline had contracted with federal immigration authorities to transport illegal immigrant detainees. Of course Key Lime had to be punished for working with ICE to, you know, enforce that law thingy. How dare they?
That vote created a problem, however: it violated the law. Federal Aviation Administration rules bar cities from treating airlines unequally based on political grounds or any other reason. The council’s pro-illegal immigration action put $90 million in federal grant funding for the airport in jeopardy. According to multiple sources, City Attorney Miko Brown attended a meeting last January 6 with airport and Mayor’s Office officials including airport Chief Executive Phil Washington, airport attorney Everett Martinez, the mayor’s interim chief of staff Emily Garnett, and other senior airport and mayoral staff. They agreed on a cover-up plan that involved concocting an investigation into the airline’s safety record, so that could be cited as the reason for denying the lease, thus preserving the $90 million grant.
Imagine: not a single official in the room had the integrity to say, “Hey, we can’t do this. It’s wrong!” Huh. I wonder why…
It is a rhetorical question.
Ah, but when Martinez was later placed on administrative leave, he filed a federal lawsuit against the city and spilled the metaphorical beans. The suit alleges that Brown suggested at the January meeting that Denver International Airport investigate Key Lime Air’s safety record. (Martinez could justify revealing in his suit what would otherwise be a breach of lawyer-client confidentiality by citing the crime-fraud exception, although in my view it doesn’t excuse his participation in the meeting.)
I can’t wait to hear my Facebook friends blame Trump somehow.
Last night Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old Democratic Socialists of America. member defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in their primary. Chevalier’s stated positions will make her the most radical Democrat, or member of any party, elected to Congress ever if she prevails in November. She wants to abolish police, prisons, and borders. “All deportations are wrong,” she maintains, even when an illegal immigrant has committed a felony.
She was one of the founders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the militant student group behind the violent 2024 occupation of Columbia in support of Hamas. “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization,” she says. “We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one…” She complains that Bernie Sanders and AOC are too pro-Israel.
How could any American vote for her? Chevalier calls the United States “a fucking disgrace,” and as signature significance for a woke maniac whose brain raised its hand and asked to leave the room, refers to the United States as “occupied” Native American land. Naturally, she also wants the government to seize “all properties from landlords.”
Imagine: the Trump Deranged are so warped by hate and hysteria that they are willing to put people like this lunatic and Graham Platner in positions of power and risk allowing the party that supports them to get control of the nation. For the second time today, I am reminded of that guy who shot the nails into his head to stop his arm from hurting.
It’s stunning that anyone would have to explain to someone with functioning neurons that it is irresponsible to support candidates like Chevalier and the party that spawns them. But this toxin has been seeping into the American culture for a very long time, since the late Sixties at least. The vile conservative talk show host and author Michael Savage had a best-seller 20 years ago called “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.” I wrote several articles about how unethical it was for one side of the partisan divide to call the other mentally ill; to me it was redolent of the way the Soviets discredited, isolated and imprisoned dissidents. Savage is vicious, but he’s not stupid, however. I may have to admit that in today’s environment, that ugly title has the ring of truth.
There is no more mystery to be solved about Graham Platner, whom the Democrats really and truly want to inflict on the U.S. Senate, the nation, and the dumb people of Maine (if they vote for Platner, they are by definition dumber than planaria). As David Brooks explained on PBS, “The guy is a moral degenerate. The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist. It’s just — it’s a pathetic empty guy who postures in a way that’s kind of repulsive.” There was no rebuttal from his fellow leftists on the show because there is no rebuttal to be made. Jonathan Capehart, who had just endorsed voting for Platner (because Trump, and all Democrats are by definition better than all Republicans, so there!) could only mutter “I agree with you” and then go on to try to rationalize the indefensible, sounding, as usual, like an idiot.
This is the quality of the character of those urging Mainers to vote for the most repulsive major political party U.S. Senate candidate in recent history. Yes, even worse than Roy Moore (R-AL, 2017) and worse than Todd Akin (R-MO, 2012). [You remember Todd, don’t you? He was the genius who said that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from being raped, because her body would reject the sperm of a bad person, or something.] The woman in the video above, incidentally, is a journalist, Caroline McCaughey, who was at a Platner rally. Nice.
The “resistance” /progressive/ Democratic Party position is that Platner is worthy of a Senate seat over a moderate Republican, Susan Collins, because he might give the Democratic Party a Senate majority to do all of the irresponsible, proto-totalitarian things they crave, like packing the Supreme Court. They would take the same position if he said things as stupid as Akin or stalked little girls, like Moore. (To be fair, Platner wouldn’t stalk them, he would just text them photos of his penis.)
The Democratic National Committee decided to use Memorial Day to attack the President of the United States. Of course it did. Despite all of the party’s rhetoric about saving democracy (while it was undermining it to a degree never before seen in U.S. history—go ahead, challenge that!), this is a party that literally doesn’t like the United States (maybe hate is too strong).
That tweet was so offensive, even Democrats objected. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-Ill.) tweeted, “It is incredibly distasteful to use our heroic dead for a political attack on Memorial Day. I’m a Democrat and I condemn this post by the DNC.”
And the DNC pulled it, replacing it with this…
…without comment, apology, anything. Tweet? What tweet? But it was the fact it could be tweeted at all that is signature significance. The party is blaming the “kids” that it had in charge of social media during the holiday, but this just means the Gen Z radicals the party has indoctrinated in our schools and with its media don’t yet understand that the mask has to stay on a bit longer or else…
Can’t have that.
The DNC was just one example. I wrote yesterday about Democrats declaring the holiday “Celebrate a Dead Arrest-Resisting Street Thug Day,” including Minneapolis’s woke mayor, who had to be reminded it was also a holiday to honor patriots and heroes. I note that Fark, the often funny, left-biased satirical news aggregator, posted this yesterday…
If challenged, I’m sure Fark would say that it was satirizing the Trump Deranged progs who still think the Epstein files hold damning evidence against the President. You know the old saying though…”Fool me once..”? I’ve checked Fark for years. It’s about as non-partisan as Stephen Colbert. As for Fark’s favorite party—well, do you remember the Memorial Day message posted by Kamala Harris—you know, that whizbang, smart-as-a-whip candidate for President who only lost because American are racists and sexist? Here , let me refresh your memory…
A veteran EA commenter today who excels in the contrived “gotcha!” accused me of “name-calling” because I consistently describe today’s Democratic Party as aspiring totalitarians, Machiavellian, and cheaters, and say Democrats want to gut the Constitution. It reminded me of the objection in the Continental Congress (as portrayed in “1776”) over Thomas Jefferson’s use of the word “tyrant” to describe England’s King George. Jefferson’s justification of his choice of words: “He is a tyrant.” I bet my critic really be incensed as I write—now—that today’s vote in Congress indicates that the party is also silly, doctrinaire and…wait for it….moronic.
Because it does, and it is.
Democrats, along with a few Republicans who should go the way of Thomas Massey, voted to cancel the Smithsonian’s planned Women’s History Museum because Republicans added language to its astablishment bill defining women in a manner that leaves out Renee Richards, Caitin Jenner, and the fully, ah, “intact” male “transitioners” who have been slaughtering female competitors in amateur swimming, wrestling, volleyball, and track and field. You know, like this person known as “Lia Thomas.”
The measure to establish the museum was defeated 216 to 204. Not a single Democrat voted for it, so chained is the party to radical LGBTQ propaganda.
Amazing. Amazing. The fact that most women still support a party that is so hypocritical regarding women’s welfare and rights—this is the party, remember, who made serial sexual predator Bill Clinton the keynote speaker at its national convention proclaiming the “Year of the Woman”!— is as incomprehensible as the fact that so many American Jews still vote for the party that increasing supports Hamas.
In fact, irony and hypocrisy are everywhere in this vote. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the news media) like to say that Congressional Republicans refuse to swerve from the MAGA script, but the GOP virtually never gets 100% agreement. Every House Democrat, however, wants to see a Women’s History Museum that has a special exhibit honoring this recent Democratic administration official:
How “inclusive.”
Because the proposed museum wouldn’t be pandering to anomalies like Admiral Rachel Levine and the former cute-as-a-bunny actress playing Achilles in the new Odyssey film…
…Democrats decided en masse that American women who were crucial to the founding and development of this nation despite being marginalized, abused and discriminated against shouldn’t have their fascinating and inspiring stories told at all. Their museum wouldn’t sufficiently validate the social pathogen causing parents to allow their children to be mutilated and sports to undermine the cause of female athletes after they fought so hard to compete, you see.
An earlier version of the bill was co-sponsored by 127 Democrats. Republicans on the House Administration Committee added new language to the bill last month to dedicate the museum to “preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women.”
As opposed to, you know, men who decided they were women, wanted to be regarded as women, or pretended to be women.
Republican New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis resigned as vice chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus today in response to the Democrats’ ridiculous tantrum, being appropriately disgusted by the vote even though 20 Democrats on the caucus co-sponsored the bill. In a letter to the committee’s co-chairs, Malliotakis pointed to Democrats on the committee refusing to cross party lines on pieces of legislation.
“If not one Problem Solvers Democrat would vote for a straightforward measure to transfer federal land for a women’s history museum simply because it was amended through regular order, during the committee process, to ensure that only biological women are exhibited, then what can we actually rely on the Caucus’ Democrats to join us on? I therefore submit my resignation as vice chair and member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, effective immediately,” Malliotakis wrote.
Good for her.
[Incidentally, I am not unalterably opposed to a National LGBTQ Museum that includesaccomplished and significant trans individuals, if they ever stop killing people…]