"Good Ole Rockytop"

 I hurriedly cut and pasted this this morning.   I normally try to prep the post the day before....not today...The democrats have been gerrymandering for decades, they have totally squeezed all the republican representation out of the northeast and out of illinois.  Finally the GOP is doing the same thing and the donks are crying fake tears of outrage.  I believe it took Trump to put spine in the normally jellyfish GOP.

Dems are having a less than optimal week. SCOTUS tanked racial gerrymandering, Tennessee redrew its boundaries to eliminate a Humanoid Hemorrhoid named Steve Cohen, and SCOVA aborted the 10-1 redistricting love child of Obama, Extreme Hakeem, and Abby Spanberger.

There is probably nothing less racist than the redistricting fight in Tennessee this week, despite the immediate cries of racism from the usual corners. What happened was not racial. It was political. There is a difference, and pretending otherwise is part of the reason Americans no longer trust the people framing these debates.

It is no secret that African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democrat. In Memphis, those voting patterns are among the most predictable in the country. Once the Supreme Court substantially narrowed the role race can play in redistricting decisions, Tennessee Republicans did what Democrats have been doing for decades in states like Illinois, New York and Maryland: they targeted an opposing party stronghold and tried to dilute its political influence. That is not some uniquely Southern tomfoolery.

It is just modern American politics practiced openly and aggressively by both parties. The move by Republicans in the Volunteer State was naked political aggression, but legal naked political aggression.

The key point is this: Memphis-area voters were not targeted because they were black. They were targeted because they reliably elect Democrats, specifically longtime Congressman Steve Cohen. If Memphis had been a heavily white urban district voting 80 percent Republican for forty years, Democrats would be trying to carve it apart with exactly the same enthusiasm Republicans are showing now.

What makes the outrage especially selective is the history of Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District itself. The modern majority-minority version of the district did not emerge naturally from geography or community cohesion. It was largely engineered during the redistricting cycle following the 1980 Census, when lawmakers centered the district around the heavily African American urban core of Memphis. That configuration emerged during the peak era of Voting Rights Act enforcement and under enormous federal pressure to create districts where minority voters could reliably elect candidates of their choice.

No federal judge sat down with a map and drew the district personally. Tennessee legislators drew the boundaries themselves, but they did so under the unmistakable understanding that failing to create or preserve majority-minority districts could bring lawsuits, Justice Department objections, or direct federal intervention. Throughout the South, heavily African American urban populations were consolidated into safe Democrat districts while surrounding suburban and rural districts became whiter and more Republican. Both parties quietly benefited from the arrangement.

In other words, the district itself was already the product of intentional political engineering. The only thing that changed this week is which party benefits from the engineering.

And that is where the whole performance becomes difficult to take seriously.

Is the most entertaining part that the congressman representing this “racially sacred” district is himself white? Steve Cohen has represented a majority-black district for years without Democrats objecting that the seat somehow “belongs” to an African American representative.

Or is the more revealing part that Democrats have spent staggering sums of money ($80-$100 million) over recent election cycles trying to prevent a black Republican woman from winning election to the House from Tennessee?

Apparently racial representation is vitally important and sacrosanct right up until the minority candidate stops voting the way progressive activists demand.

That contradiction exposes the real issue. Much of modern political rhetoric about race is not actually about race at all. It is about preserving political power while framing opposition as morally illegitimate. When Democrats draw districts to maximize partisan advantage in New York or Illinois, it is called protecting democracy. When Republicans do the same thing in Tennessee, it suddenly becomes an existential threat to civil rights.

Americans are expected to pretend these are fundamentally different activities when they are often nearly identical tactics wrapped in different moral packaging.

None of this means redistricting is noble, but it does mean melanin content should never have anything to do with it.

Gerrymandering is ugly no matter who does it, and I have never been a fan of it, but as long as Democrat states where Republicans get 40% of the vote but have zero Republican representatives, they can spare me their crocodile tears and threats. If Americans are going to have an honest discussion about representation, then honesty has to begin with admitting that both parties manipulate district boundaries for partisan gain whenever they possess the power to do so.

Tennessee did not invent that game. It simply stopped pretending not to play it.

Florida is doing the same.

Being a Ole Miss fan, I can’t stand that god-awful orange. It’s not in my color palette but I am not above a rousing rendition of Rocky Top to celebrate Republicans finally growing a set and playing some bare-knuckled politics.

"Heads I win, Tails, You are a threat to Democracy"

 Was supposed to drop last Thursday....but it didn't happen, and I didn't catch it until Sunday Morning.

I clipped this from Michael Smith off farcebook,  The cartoons came from my *Stash*

Interesting to watch Democrats take both sides of arguments.

For example, when they make arguments for and against gerrymandering at the same time (good when they do it, bad when someone else does) and the same when it comes to free speech (our speech is protected, yours is disinformation and violence, so not protected), you begin to understand how a political party that has come to be built on radical, irrational positions can survive.

When you consider how standing on both sides can be true, you come to understand that their power is based on two things - process and structure - and the control of both - and not the will of the people.

They depend upon controlling the processes of government and defining a structure that gives them permissions that are denied to anyone else (packing the Supreme Court, racially gerrymandered districts, and potential statehood for DC and PR are “structural” changes that would advantage Democrats).

The last thing they want is a true representative republic that freely expresses the actual will of the people. That, my dear friends, is why they drone on and on about “democracy” because through process and structure, the outputs of “democracy” can be controlled and managed to produce a desired outcome - and when it doesn’t, it can be ignored.

At first glance, this looks like hypocrisy. At a surface level we all understand, it is, but stopping there misses the more important point. This isn’t random inconsistency or careless contradiction. It reflects a deeper operating logic and one that prioritizes control over process and structure rather than persuasion or consensus.

If you can control the process, you don’t have to win the argument. If you can shape the structure, you don’t have to rely on the unpredictable will of the electorate.

That’s where the conversation moves from rhetoric to strategy. Consider the recurring calls to restructure foundational elements of American governance: expanding the Supreme Court, admitting new states like Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, or drawing districts in insane ways to lock in durable advantages. Each of these proposals is framed in moral or democratic language of fairness, representation, and equity, but each also has a clear and predictable partisan effect. They are not neutral reforms, they are structural adjustments designed to produce specific political outcomes.

From this perspective, the apparent contradictions begin to make sense. If your primary objective is to secure and maintain power through institutional means, then consistency in argument becomes secondary. What matters is whether a given position advances or threatens that objective in the moment.

This also helps explain the persistent emphasis on the language of “democracy.” It is invoked constantly, almost reflexively, as both justification and shield but the word itself does a lot of heavy lifting. Democracy, in its pure form, suggests majority rule—the unfiltered expression of the people’s will. Yet the reality of modern governance is far more mediated. Processes can be designed, rules can be written, and structures can be built in ways that shape outcomes long before a single vote is cast.

In other words, if you control the inputs, you can largely predict—and manage—the outputs, and when the outputs don’t align with expectations, the response is often not reflection but recalibration. Change the rules. Adjust the structure. Redefine the terms. The goal is not to abandon the system, but to refine it until it produces the “correct” results.

I think the 2020 election is a prime example.

I have stated before that I personally don’t have evidence the 2020 election was corrupt – but I also don’t have evidence it wasn’t. I think the brilliance of Democrat operatives was that while the GOP was snoozing, they began efforts in key states years before election day 2020 to shape the process to their advantage – the Covid pandemic was a godsend that shot a mix of steroids and adrenaline directly into mainline arteries of a sort of legal malfeasance and gamesmanship.

Mail out/mail in ballots that were simply not traceable, ballot “drop boxes” and ballot “harvesting” served to create a situation where ballots could be corrupted before they were counted under prying eyes, and combined with relaxed validation processes, made finding proof of chicanery virtually impossible. No amount of recounting cooked ballots, the origin of which was impossible to determine, would change the outcome but it would produce results consistently enough to defend against challenges. Or as we saw, would reveal only minor issues that could be used to substantiate the “it’s just a very few bad actors but not enough to change outcomes” defense.

Ironically, finding just a few fraudulent operators served to justify the premise the entire election was clean – the most secure ever as we were told.

To me, this kind of “management” of outcomes is why the tension between a true representative republic and the modern conception of managed democracy is becoming harder to ignore. A representative republic depends on the idea that political outcomes should reflect the will of the people, even when that will produces inconvenient or undesirable results. A system focused on process and structural control, by contrast, seeks to minimize that unpredictability.

So, what looks like contradiction on the surface is, in reality, a kind of coherence just not the kind rooted in consistent principles. It is a coherence of method. Control the mechanisms, define the framework, and the results will follow.

Once you see that, the Democrat double arguments aren’t really confusing anymore.

 

I heard this coming into work...and it prompted my "Monday Music", LOL, and Yes I have it on my "Funny Bones Favorite" Ronco Record, LOL

"Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" was inspired by the comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz, which featured a recurring storyline of Snoopy imagining himself in the role of a World War I airman fighting the Red Baron. The song was released approximately one year after the first comic strip featuring Snoopy fighting the Red Baron appeared on Sunday October 10, 1965. Schulz and United Features Syndicate sued the Royal Guardsmen for using the name Snoopy without permission or an advertising license. (The Guardsmen, meanwhile, hedged their bets by recording an alternative version of the song, called "Squeaky vs. the Black Knight"; some copies of this version were issued by Laurie Records in Canada.) UFS won the suit, the penalty being that all publishing revenues from the song would go to them. Schulz did allow the group to write more Snoopy songs.
The song begins with a background commentary in faux German: "Achtung! Jetzt wir singen zusammen die Geschichte über den Schweinköpfigen Hund und den lieben Red Baron," which is a purposeful mistranslation of the English: "Attention! We will now sing together the story of that pig-headed dog Snoopy and the beloved Red Baron" and features the sound of a German sergeant ("eins, zwei, drei, vier" after the first verse), and an American sergeant (after the second verse) counting off in 4s; a fighter plane; machine guns; and a plane in a tailspin (at the end of the last verse). The song (1.46-1.54) quotes the instrumental chords from The McCoys' version of "Hang On Sloopy". In the original recording of "Snoopy", the lyrics "Hang on Snoopy, Snoopy hang on" were sung at this point. This led to some initial speculation that the Guardsmen were the McCoys under a different name. Prior to release, these lyrics were removed to prevent copyright issues.

"5 Hard Lessons from the Animal Farm Box Office Debacle"

 

I remember seeing this book in the late 70's in school and calling it "The Pig Book", shows what I know...couple of years later I had to read it for school and it was *dammmmm*  as a history nut even back them I could get the references and parallels if the history of animal farm and the history of the soviet Union.  I have a copy of that book i bought soo many years on a bookshelf in my bonus room.  Its funny that a socialist like George Orwall wrote a warning about communism.   

      I remembered seeing the previews for this movie and I had an interest in seeing it, but apparently it bombed pretty bad.

5 Hard Lessons from ‘Animal Farm’s’ Box Office Debacle

No one apparently wanted a re-imagined take on George Orwell classic

Christian Toto  Follow on TwitterSend an email5 days ago

 7,838 3 minutes read

Andy Serkis’ “Animal Farm” did the impossible.

The “new” take on the George Orwell classic alienated just about everyone, and it somehow united audiences in the process. The film proved too heady for kids but not meaty enough for their parents.

Few rallied to its side, even with its overt culture war implications.

Animal Farm | Andy Serkis | Official Trailer | In Theaters Now | Angel

Conservatives raged against it for discarding the source material’s attack on communism for an anti-capitalist bent. Liberal film critics weren’t pleased with it in general, giving the film a terrible 24 percent “rotten” rating.

The only people who liked it? Tucker Carlson and Riley Gaines, apparently.

The film earned a measly $3.4 million over the weekend. What went wrong? In a word, everything.

The title’s rollout should be a primer for how not to bring a film to the public. Here are some key takeaways from the debacle.

Stay In Your Lane

Angel Studios has done a remarkable job producing quality films on a budget. The shingle does so by telling stories that the majors won’t go near, often involving faith-driven plots or uplifting angles. It’s the anti-Hollywood, and it matters.

Think “Sound of Freedom,” “Cabrini” and “Bonhoeffer.”

An adaptation of “Animal Farm” is the perfect fit for the studio, assuming the film hews close to the source material. It didn’t. Now, even diehard Angel Studios admirers are crying foul.

Don’t Insult Your Fans

We’ve seen this story before. A woke company produced a woke dud, and the folks behind it attack the fans instead of taking responsibility for their woke handiwork. This often happens with geek-friendly content tied to “Star Wars,” “Star Trek” or “Doctor Who.”

“Bleep you, bigots!” It’s anti-PR at its worst.

Yet Angel Studios released a comedic short addressing the rancor tied to the project. Along the way, the clip gently attacks those who didn’t appreciate the film. (The studio apparently took down the clip in question)

That’s just dumb.

Editor’s Note: It’s a brutal time to be an independent journalist, but it’s never been more necessary given the sorry state of the corporate press. If you’re enjoying Hollywood in Toto, I hope you’ll consider leaving a coin (or two) in our Tip Jar.

Hollywood, Inc. Is Not Your Friend

Angel Studios roped in some high-caliber voice talent in acquiring “Animal Farm.” Woody Harrelson. Seth Rogen. Glenn Close. That might have been great for the company’s sense of self, but those stars aren’t aligned with the studio’s point of view.

Co-star Laverne Cox, a trans performer, used the film’s promotional circuit to promote trans issues. That’s all well and good for progressive Hollywood, but chances are the average Angel Studios fan wasn’t keen on hearing that argument.

Kids Don’t Want Income Inequality Screeds

Children love going to the movies, and PG-rated fare has helped Hollywood survive through some rough economic times. This year’s hit parade includes kid-friendly titles like “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Hoppers” and “GOAT.”

“Animal Farm,” with its $3 million opening weekend, won’t come near those films. Why? Children likely aren’t invested in income inequality riffs or laments about consumerism gone wild.

If It Ain’t Broke …

There’s nothing wrong with tweaking classic material. The modern James Bond would never swat a woman on the bottom a la old school 007. Changing it so much that it’s barely recognizable?That’s different.

We saw how audiences responded to the extreme “Snow White” makeover last year. We’re witnessing something similar play out here.

"5 fast food that are high in protein and less than 600 calories"

 I shamelessly cribbed this from "Art of manliness", I am losing weight again and when the fast food munchies hit, I get tired of eating "rabbit food" I saw this and it helps keep the craving in check, and portion control.

If you’re trying to lose weight, one of the challenges you’ll face is what to do about those times when you find yourself at a fast-food restaurant.

The offerings at these establishments are typically incredibly high in calories. A Big Mac meal at McDonald’s can set you back 1,300 calories. Damn! If your calorie goal for the day is 2,400 calories, that’s more than half your daily calories in a single meal.

The typical advice for people losing weight is to just avoid fast-food restaurants altogether. And with some preparing, thinking ahead, and good decision-making, you can accomplish that most of the time.

But not 100% of the time. Sometimes, life throws a wrench in your plans.

Maybe you’re on a road trip, and your friends decide to stop at Carl’s Jr. for lunch.

Maybe your kid’s soccer team decided to go out to dinner to Chick-fil-A after the game.

Maybe you’re just really pressed for time and need to grab something fast at a drive-thru on the way from work to another engagement.

What to do?

Well, what if I told you you don’t have to choose between convenience and your fitness goals? You can have your fast-food burger and eat it too—all while staying on track with your weight loss.

When you want to lose weight, you want to choose foods that are lower in calories and higher in satiating, muscle-building protein.

Thankfully, most fast-food restaurants now offer options that meet this criteria. With a bit of creativity, you can easily select meals at pretty much all the major fast-food restaurants that will give you 30+ grams of protein (which is a good minimum goal for a meal) and only clock in at around 600 calories.

Below, we provide some suggestions for meals that meet these metrics that you can get at five popular fast-food restaurants. One thing to keep in mind is that while you can reduce the calories in your fast-food orders, it’s hard to reduce the amount of sodium. These are going to be sodium bombs. So they’re not great for everyday dining, but they’ll do in a pinch.

Whether you’re looking to shed a few pounds or maintain your hard-earned gains, this guide will show you how to navigate the pitfalls of fast-food menus and stay on track with your goals.

General Guidelines to Keep Your Fast-Food Meals Lower in Calories

Before we get into specific meals, here are some general guidelines to follow that will allow you to keep your meals lower in calories, regardless of the fast-food establishment you visit:

• Food tracking apps like MyFtinessPal are your friends. I use the app all the time when I’m at fast-food restaurants. Quickly look up the calorie and macro count of foods and piece together your meal with that info.
• Choose grilled over fried meats.
• Choose lean proteins. While you can still enjoy a beef burger, protein sources like turkey or chicken breast generally have fewer calories.
• Ask for extra protein. Adding extra protein, like extra meat, can help increase satiety while keeping calories low.
• Skip the fries. If you’re looking for a side, get fruit or salad instead. Also, hot take: fries aren’t that good anyway!
• Skip the high-fat sauces, dressings, and condiments. Ask for lower-calorie options instead.
• Load up on veggies. Satiety is premised in part on volume; calorically dense foods won’t fill you up and will leave you feeling hungry. To increase volume and nutrition, add low-calorie veggies to your meals like extra lettuce, tomatoes, and onions.
• Choose water or unsweetened drinks like diet sodas.

Finally, don’t be afraid to enjoy yourself with a no-holds-barred high-calorie fast-food meal every now and then. I love getting a double cheeseburger on occasion. You can just adjust your macros and calories accordingly and eat less the rest of the day. Or just chalk it up to an anomalous indulgence, and get back to your diet the next day. You don’t have to eat perfectly 100% of the time to still lose weight and stay healthy.

Fast-Food Meals That Are 600 Calories or Less With More than 30 Grams of Protein

McDonald’s

McDonald’s is a tricky place to get a high-protein meal that’s low in calories. They used to offer grilled chicken and salad options here in the United States, but they got rid of them back in 2020.

You can still get a meal that’s a little more than 500 calories and 30 grams of protein by pairing a McDouble burger with an order of McNuggets.

McDouble + 4-Count McNuggets

• On the burger, ask for no cheese and extra pickles, lettuce, and onion for added volume.

Total calories: 530 (If you don’t eat the burger’s bun, you can knock off an additional 100 calories.)
Protein: 30 grams
Fat: 27 grams
Carbs: 43 grams

Taco Bell

Do you want to Live Más but without all the extra calories? Try the Cantina Chicken Bowl at Taco Bell. Choose grilled chicken instead of roasted chicken to keep the calories down but the protein high.

Cantina Grilled Chicken Bowl

• Ask for three servings of grilled chicken.
• Ask for it with no rice and no avocado ranch sauce
• Keep the black beans, cheese, and low-fat sour cream.
• Ask for extra lettuce, pico de gallo, and cabbage for added volume.
• Use hot sauce packets to add flavor.

Total calories: 460
Protein: 56 grams
Fat: 18 grams
Carbs: 20 grams

Chick-fil-A

Boy, do I love Chick-fil-A. My usual go-to is the spicy chicken sandwich with extra pickles. I usually get two of them as a meal.

If I know I’ll be having Chick-fil-A for dinner, I’ll cut back on my other meals during the day to make room in my macro budget for those two spicy chicken sandwiches.

But sometimes we have nights where we have Chick-fil-A unexpectedly and getting my regular two-fisted sandwich order would put me way over my calorie count for the day.

Thankfully, Chick-fil-A offers some tasty high-protein, lower-calorie grilled options.

Here’s an order with just 420 calories and a whopping 50 grams of protein.

Grilled Chicken Cool Wrap + 4-Count Grilled Chicken Nuggets

• Use buffalo sauce to add some low-calorie flavor.

Total calories: 420
Protein: 50 grams
Fat: 15 grams
Carbs: 30 grams

Panda Express

A lot of take-out Chinese food is loaded with fat. But you can get a solid meal at Panda Express that has 600 total calories and 72(!) grams of protein.

Plate Meal: 2 servings of Grilled Teriyaki Chicken + 1 serving of Super Greens

Total Calories: 600
Protein: 72 grams
Fat: 30.5
Carbs: 25 grams

Subway

Sandwiches are a great fast-food option if you’re looking for something high in protein, but lower in calories. At pretty much every sandwich chain, you can create a custom sandwich that’s loaded with satiating, lean meats like chicken or turkey and plenty of filling, high-volume veggies.

Subway isn’t the tastiest of the sandwich chains, in my opinion (we’re bigger fans of Jersey Mike’s around here), but its outposts are ubiquitous. Here’s an example of a nutritionally solid sammie to get there:

Grilled Chicken Sandwich

• 6-inch artisanal bread
• 3 servings of grilled chicken
• 2 servings of provolone
• Lettuce, tomato, onion (ask for extra)
• Sweet teriyaki sauce

Total calories: 540
Protein: 70 grams
Fat: 16 grams
Carbs: 47 grams

Allowing for fast food in your weight loss journey isn’t just about damage control—it’s about creating a sustainable strategy for long-term success.

By being flexible with your diet, you’ll be more likely to stick with it in the long run. Research shows that a flexible approach to nutrition, allowing yourself to enjoy a variety of foods—yes, even fast food—can lead to better adherence and, ultimately, better results.

"Confusion to Clarity" The machine that made them.

 Came back late last night, and I am tired.  So this is loaded into the scheduler thingie. LOL

I thought Mr. Wood did a pretty good job 'splaining things. so I shamelessly clipped it off farcebook.

THE MACHINE THAT MADE THEM

Political Violence, the Folk Heroes, the Comments,

and the Record They Don't Want You to Read

From Confusion to Clarity

April 26, 2026

Last night I posted two updates about the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Together they have been shared more than 2,000 times. I have not had time to respond to the many kind and thoughtful comments, and I want to say to those readers first: thank you. You saw something ugly happen to your country and you responded with prayer, with moral clarity, and with the kind of decency that makes me feel encouraged that our great Republic has many Americans who will stand and fight for what is right.

I hope to thank more of you. But first I need to deal with some other comments. Because they are the story.

I also posted a pretty long essay this morning (always fun to read the "TLDR" and "War and Peace" comments) that I will link in the comments here and not rehash here, but the material is rich and the arguments I think are vital to a dangerous moment we are in as Americans.

I want to start with something simple before I get to the manifesto, the video footage my liberal friends swore to me did not exist, the murder that became a cultural celebration, and the data that no one in the mainstream press will assemble for you in one place.

I am raising sons. When they hit each other, I do not accept the justification. Almost every time, one of them has a version of the same argument: he was mocking me. He gave me a mean look. He started it. My answer is always the same. You are responsible for what you chose to do with your hands. A look does not excuse a fist. A word does not excuse a shove. You do not get to transfer the responsibility for your own actions onto the person who provoked you, because the moment you accept that logic there is no floor. Every act of violence becomes defensible as long as you felt sufficiently provoked first.

By the time my boys pass thirteen, they understand this.

My sons also know that murder is wrong. Not, "complicated," wrong. Not situationally wrong depending on whether the target deserved it. Wrong. Full stop. They know that the righteousness of your grievance does not transform what you do with a weapon into something other than what it is. And they know they are responsible for their own choices regardless of what the other person did first.

I want to introduce you to a great many adults who have not gotten there yet.

Part One: The Comments

These appeared under my posts last night. Real names. Real photographs. Employers listed in bios. Children in profile pictures.

Justin Hegedusic: "Cole Tomas Allen is a real american patriot."

Bradley Lozekar: "Hopefully the next one is successful."

Rodney Brisebois: "why cant these shooters shoot better."

Chris Hand: "What a pity he didn't succeed."

Bernardicus Brunet: "Not cheering for assassination, but I admit I've got Champagne in the fridge for that wonderful day when the Grim Reaper comes for this evil man."

Megan Rios: "Unfortunately he is still alive and well."

Rob Gee: "feel sorry for those poor servicemen and women who have to put their lives on the line for that piece of excrement. as for why 3 attempts, trump is now reaping what he sowed."

Then a second group, who did not celebrate but dismissed:

Phil Carlson: "Obviously staged."

Mark Campbell: "Come on Clayton, everyone can see they have all been staged and you have been stooged."

Joey Phillipo: "Another STAGED EVENT........nice try GOP."

Charmaine Belbin: "CAN ANYONE SAY ANOTHER FAKE STAGED."

Sheila Keppler: "Is this just another publicity stunt of Trumps!"

And Mike Fitz, who offered what he believed was a logical argument: "Trump mocks everyone he does not like that have died so who cares if people who don't like Trump mock him?"

I want to respond to these comments seriously, because they deserve a serious answer.

To the celebrators: One Secret Service agent took a real bullet. His vest held. He went home to a real family. The man who fired that weapon wrote a ranked target list before he arrived at the hotel. He designated Cabinet officials as primary targets by seniority. He chose buckshot over slugs to reduce collateral damage to hotel staff he considered innocent. He considered the agent he shot a potential acceptable casualty in a righteous mission.

Cole Tomas Allen is not a patriot. He is a man who was told, by voices with credentials and platforms and Senate seats, that the people in that hotel were not merely wrong but evil, not merely political opponents but existential threats who needed to be eliminated. He took those voices at their word. The distance between the rhetoric and the target list is shorter than the people who built the rhetoric want to acknowledge.

To Bernardicus Brunet specifically: You wrote that you are not cheering for assassination. Then you described the champagne waiting in your refrigerator for the day the President of the United States dies. I want you to sit with that sentence. You have pre celebrated the death of a human being. You have a bottle chilling for it. You do not consider this cheering for assassination because you have decided the target does not qualify for the moral protections you extend to other human beings. That decision, that act of reclassification, is precisely the mechanism that produced Cole Allen's target list. He also decided the people in that hotel had forfeited their moral standing. The only difference between you and him is that he acted on it and you are waiting for someone else to do so.

To Mike Fitz: Your argument is that Trump mocks people who die, so mockery of his near death is acceptable. I raised this argument with my sons when they were in elementary school. It did not survive contact with basic reasoning then either. The standard you apply to others applies to you. If mocking the deaths of political opponents is wrong when Trump does it, it is wrong when you do it. If it is acceptable when you do it, you have just extended that permission to everyone, including people whose targets you care about. The logic has no floor and no loyalty. It will not stay on your side when the power shifts.

To the staged crowd: A Secret Service agent took a real bullet. If the event was staged, the staging required a real bullet, fired at a real agent, who survived because a real vest absorbed it. At what point does the staging theory require you to believe the United States government is shooting its own protective personnel to generate sympathy for a president? The staged argument is not a theory. It is a way of not having to feel anything. It is the same emotional function as the champagne in the fridge, arrived at from the opposite direction. Both groups found a way to be comfortable. Neither group had to reckon with what actually happened.

It also shows just deranged and deluded folks are. A 31 year old in California was in a long con to pretend to kill Trump? He got on bluesky and posted knowing he was part of a glorious plot to get a ballroom built that is already being built? Some folks are exposing their wickedness, but many more are exposing their foolishness.

Part Two: The Manifesto

Before Saturday night, Cole Tomas Allen wrote it down.

He wrote down who he planned to kill, in what order, and why he felt entitled to kill them. He designated Cabinet officials as primary targets, prioritized from highest to lowest rank. He designated Secret Service agents as targets only if necessary, and expressed genuine hope that they were wearing vests, because in his words, center mass with shotguns messes up people who are not. He described the dinner attendees as complicit because they chose to attend a speech by someone he called a pedophile, a rapist, and a traitor.

He thought it through. He prioritized. He showed mercy to hotel employees and guests. He chose buckshot over slugs to reduce penetration through walls.

This was not a man who snapped. This was a man who planned.

Cole Tomas Allen is thirty one years old. He is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology. He is a teacher. He brought a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives to the Washington Hilton, shot a Secret Service agent who survived because of his vest, and was taken into custody.

He will spend a very long time in federal prison.

But Cole Allen did not arrive at that hotel lobby from nowhere. He was formed. And the people who formed him are not in prison. They are on television. They are important political elected officials and leaders. They have tenure.

Part Three: The Video They Said Did Not Exist

I want to address something personal, because it happened in the last six months and it illustrates the broader disease with precision.

Alex Pretti is dead. He was shot by federal agents in Minneapolis, and the circumstances of that shooting remain genuinely contested. I want to be honest about that. Whether the manner of his death was justified is a legitimate legal question that has not been resolved to my satisfaction, and the agents involved were placed on administrative leave. I am a lawyer. I do not make categorical arguments about police or federal shootings.

What I will tell you is what happened before the shooting, because my liberal friends were texting me in real time to assure me it did not happen.

They told me that Alex Pretti was a sheepdog and that ICE were the wolves. That he was a peaceful man, just protecting women with his chivalry.

Video authenticated by the Associated Press, PBS, Snopes, and multiple other outlets shows Alex Pretti at a Minneapolis protest eleven days before his death. He is seen spitting toward the driver's side of a federal vehicle. As it drives away, he delivers two kicks, the second of which shatters the taillight and leaves it dangling. He shouts an expletive at the officers. When agents exit the vehicle and take him to the ground, a handgun is visible in his waistband, though he does not reach for it and agents did not appear to see it.

The first video, my friends told me, only showed him defending a woman who was blowing a whistle in the ears of officers. They did not categorize blowing a whistle directly into someone's ears to cause pain as assault. They called it legitimate protest. Alex Pretti intervening physically and then spitting on the vehicle and kicking out the taillight was, in their telling, a righteous response to federal aggression.

That is not a legal argument. It is not a moral argument. It is the same logic my sons use before I explain to them why it fails. You cannot designate your own provocation threshold as the standard for when violence becomes acceptable. The moment you do, you have handed yourself permission for anything.

The people who told me Pretti did not do what the video shows were wrong. Some of them knew they were wrong. And that willingness to look at authenticated footage and deny it in service of a political narrative is not a minor problem. It is the same mechanism that produces Cole Allen's rules of engagement document. Both require you to have already decided that your side's violence is a different category of act than their side's violence.

Saint Alex Pretti is a fiction that can only exist in the minds of those who are deeply deluded. You can share with me real concerns about his shooting. You cannot say he was murdered for protesting. He was somehow allowed to attack police while armed once, and sadly that seems to have given him boldness to do it again in a way that cost him his life.

Part Four: Luigi Mangione and the Folk Hero Problem

In December 2024, Luigi Mangione shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back outside a Manhattan hotel in the early morning. Thompson was ambushed. He had no chance to respond or flee. Mangione had planned the killing, traveled to execute it, and prepared a manifesto. His diary entries, obtained by prosecutors, show he studied the Unabomber and deliberately chose a target he believed would generate public sympathy rather than revulsion. He was charged with first degree murder.

He was right about the sympathy.

His legal defense fund raised nearly 1.4 million dollars. He received nearly 6,000 letters of support in prison. Billboard trucks in New York City carried the slogan "Free Luigi." Murals appeared in Seattle. UnitedHealthcare was forced to turn off Facebook comments after a post about Thompson's death received more than 36,000 laughing reactions.

The polling on this needs to be stated carefully, because I want to be precise and not overstate it. Overall, Americans view Mangione unfavorably by 43 to 23 percent. But among adults under 30, the numbers reverse: 39 percent view him favorably, 30 percent unfavorably, with a large share having no opinion either way.

Among Americans 65 and older, the split is 5 percent favorable and 63 percent unfavorable. A separate Emerson College poll found that 41 percent of adults under 30 considered the killing of Brian Thompson acceptable, compared to 40 percent who considered it unacceptable. Among Democrats overall, 22 percent found it acceptable, compared to 16 percent of independents and 12 percent of Republicans.

If you are reading this as a Republican and wondering if the woke right, the racists, the incels, the groypers are real? Look at that sentence above again. 12 percent of Republicans in that age range support the cowardly murder of an executive. We need to get them deprogrammed as quickly as possible, and the big tent is not big enough to allow them to stay in it as they are.

Older Americans find this incomprehensible. They are right to. But before they settle too comfortably into that incomprehension, they should remember that some of them were young once and found the Weather Underground romantic rather than criminal or thought the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst was striking a blow for justice.

This is not new. Bill Ayers planted bombs. He told the New York Times on September 11, 2001, that he had no regrets and wished his group had done more. Barack Obama launched his political career in Ayers' living room. The media shrugged. Susan Rosenberg, connected to multiple bombings including of the United States Capitol, had her sentence commuted by Bill Clinton. She later served on the board of a fiscal sponsor connected to Black Lives Matter. Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of murdering a police officer, became a cause for the American left. Che Guevara, a man who participated in mass executions, appears on dorm room posters and college t-shirts without controversy.

The left's relationship with political violence has never fully separated itself from the logic that some violence, directed at the right enemies, is righteous. Mangione is the latest version of a very old pattern. He is a cold blooded murderer. He ambushed and killed a man in the back on a public street. And to a significant and vocal portion of the American population, he is a hero.

What is new is that nobody hides it anymore. There are murals. There is merchandise. There are 6,000 letters. The shame that once made this sentiment private has been removed. And that removal did not happen by accident. It happened through years of telling a generation that certain people have so thoroughly forfeited their moral standing that celebrating what happens to them is not violence. It is accountability.

Cole Allen applied that framework Saturday night with a different target set. The logic was identical.

Part Five: The Protest Record

People can cite surveys all day. I want to talk about what actually happened, with real crowds, in the real world, over real decades.

The March for Life has been held in Washington every year since 1974. It regularly draws hundreds of thousands of participants. I have greatly enjoyed taking part both locally and in DC. Across more than fifty years of marches, the arrest record is effectively zero.

Promise Keepers filled stadiums throughout the 1990s. The 1997 Stand in the Gap assembly brought between 600,000 and one million men to the National Mall. Arrest record: zero.

Tea Party rallies from 2009 through 2012 drew millions of participants across thousands of events nationwide. Tea Party demonstrators were documented leaving venues cleaner than they found them. Local law enforcement in city after city confirmed no significant incident history.

Now look at the other column.

BLM associated protests in the summer of 2020 produced property damage assessed at between one and two billion dollars, making it the costliest period of civil unrest in American insurance history. At least twenty five people died in connection with the unrest. More than two thousand law enforcement officers were injured. In Portland, rioters took to the streets for more than one hundred consecutive nights.

Occupy Wall Street encampments documented assault, rape, and drug distribution within the camps. Multiple cities documented extensive property damage during evictions.

The comparison is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of kind. And the same media that described 2020 as "mostly peaceful protests" applied the word "insurrection" to January 6th, where no protester carried a firearm and no sustained occupation occurred.

If the standard were applied honestly, only one conclusion is possible. It is never applied honestly. That tells you something important about who sets the standard and why.

Part Six: The Data They Won't Put Together for You

In October 2025, liberal commentator Mike Pesca hosted Dartmouth researcher Brendan Nyhan to push back on what they saw as inflated polling numbers about support for political violence. Nyhan's critique of some survey methodologies is legitimate scholarship. Some of the rougher headline numbers deserve skepticism.

But notice what Pesca's corrective conclusion was. After all of it, after examining all the data, his solution was: Democrats should win more at the polls.

That is the corrective. Not: the years of rhetoric calling Trump a fascist war criminal who must be eliminated have produced actual human beings with actual guns. Not: the institutions that normalized calling a sitting president insane, dangerous, and an existential threat to democracy bear examination. The corrective, in his telling, is: Democrats should win more.

He does not see the loop he is standing inside. He is not alone in the pundit and commentary and journalist class.

Here is what the more careful data actually shows.

A PBS/NPR/Marist poll found that nearly a third of Americans believe political violence may be necessary to set the country on track, up from 19 percent just a year and a half prior, with Democrats driving much of the increase.

Brookings Institution researcher Dana Fisher, tracking actual participants at No Kings Day protests, found that support for political violence among left leaning Americans rose nine percentage points to 26 percent, while support among right leaning Americans fell twelve points to 17 percent. Left leaning Americans now show higher support for political violence than right leaning Americans. That is Brookings. It is not a talking point.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that 2025 marks the first time in more than thirty years that left wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right. Those numbers themselves were absurd. They counted all the white prison gangs as "right wing" so they could claim that right wingers were the biggest threat to America. That FBI under Biden with that claim, stopped a total of zero attempts to assassinate him. That followed 8 years of Obama, where zero attempts were made to assassinate him.

And Nyhan's own Bright Line Watch survey found that 2 percent of expert academic respondents described Charlie Kirk's assassination as a benefit to democracy. Fourteen academics, people shaping the minds of American students, looked at a man being shot dead and said: that helped us. That same survey ranked thirteen Trump administration policy actions as greater threats to democracy than Kirk's actual murder.

These are the people forming the next generation. These are the credentialed voices telling young Americans that political opponents are not just wrong but evil, not just mistaken but dangerous, not just people to be defeated at the ballot but existential threats requiring elimination.

Cole Allen was listening. He took them at their word.

Part Seven: The Hat. The Double Standard. The Formation.

A not insignificant number of Americans have now decided that certain symbols worn by private citizens in public constitute a form of provocation serious enough to shift moral responsibility for any resulting violence.

Find me the videos of people attacked for wearing Biden hats. Find me the keyed Subarus. Find me the conservative mobs surrounding cars at intersections because of bumper stickers.

Now find the footage of people attacked, surrounded, and physically beaten for wearing a hat in support of a president who won with over seventy seven million votes. It is not hard. There are hours of it.

If you are a moderate Democrat, a classical liberal (Lockean liberal describes me in many ways) and you think left wing violence is exaggerated by me, I urge you to do some field work. I do not own one, but I bet I can help you find a red MAGA hat without paying for it to wear to a meeting of the left soon. Let me know how that goes for you.

Senator Chris Murphy, who called the President an insane war criminal, posted "Awesome" in response to Iranian propaganda during active American combat operations, and then threatened to use government power to break up media companies for their editorial choices, has faced no censure motion, no front page demands for accountability, no roundtable on whether his rhetoric is producing the Cole Allens of the world.

Trump said to march "peacefully and patriotically". That sentence was buried by nearly every outlet that covered his January 6th speech that was used as the basis for two impeachment proceedings and a federal criminal indictment.

The standard was never about rhetoric. The standard was always about which side was speaking.

Part Eight: The Honest Reckoning

None of this is an argument that there is no violence on the right, or that no Trump supporter has ever done something terrible, or that every conservative comment section is a model of civil discourse.

I said as much in "The Violence Standard" (see comments), and I mean it.

The honest argument is simpler. The comments I showed you at the top of this piece appeared under my posts about the attempted murder of the President of the United States. They appeared under real names. The people who wrote them did not consider it necessary to be anonymous, to be careful, or to soften their language. One of them has champagne chilling. One of them wants to know why the shooters cannot aim better.

That comfort, that openness, that complete absence of shame, is the story. Not the number of people who feel this way. Not the survey percentage. The fact that they do not think they need to hide it.

Someone built that. Someone told them that the targets of their feelings had forfeited the protections that ordinary human beings receive. Someone did it with credentials, with camera time, with Senate seats and years of sustained institutional repetition.

Cole Allen was listening. He took them at their word. He wrote it down and drove to a hotel.

That is the thing that should force circumspection and a moral reckoning. Not that one Caltech graduate from Torrance, California brought three weapons to a hotel lobby. But that the cultural infrastructure which forms men like him, celebrates men like Mangione, watches authenticated video of Alex Pretti kicking a federal vehicle and calls it legitimate protest, and greets each new assassination attempt with either silence or satisfaction, is sitting in full public view, credentialed and verified, and much of America and our moral and political leadership does not treat it as the emergency it is.

Cole Allen is in custody.

Luigi Mangione is awaiting trial.

Alex Pretti is dead.

The machine that made all three of them is still running.

Name it. Link The Violence Standard in your feed. Use your real name when you do. And do not let them change the subject again.

They are right there in the comment section. Under real names. With the champagne already cold.

Clayton Wood

From Confusion to Clarity

April 27, 2026