Yes, I know you’re disappointed. Try running my fantasy football team. Stupid bunch of @#?!&. Sorry, I’m a little frustrated. Let’s try to take our minds off of our political concerns by focusing on 2028.

Yes, it’s way too early for that. It’s also still politics, so it’s not really taking our minds off of it, but it’s that or my @#?!& fantasy football team, so we’re doing politics.

Let’s make it fun and throw out some predictions. We’ll start with the easy stuff first.

Impeachment

Yep, Trump will be impeached. Probably Hegseth and some others too. Hearings, hearings, hearings. Look on the bright side, though, if they’re holding hearings, they’ll have less time to work on stupid bills. Which brings us to...

Stupid Bills

The Democrats will try to pass something stupid. Options include:

1. A wealth tax

2. Student loan “relief”

3. Packing the Court

4. Killing the filibuster

They will fail. But why will they fail?

Well, California, one of the few states you’d think would have no problem passing a wealth tax, just failed to implement one - Proposition 40 just failed by a margin of 56% to 44%. What’s more, voters also passed Proposition 42, which amends the state constitution to permanently block the implementation of Proposition 40 (the billionaire wealth tax) and bars the state from enacting future taxes on financial assets or personal property.

If California can’t pass a wealth tax, what are the chances one would pass at the federal level where not even every Democrat is a left-wing loon?

Here are a couple of important questions:

1. Will the “sane” Democrats realize that they don’t need the DSA members to pass laws?

2. How “crazy” is the average progressive politician?

Here is a breakdown of Congress post-midterms:

I’m going to waffle a bit on the filibuster. It doesn’t require a law, so it all comes down to how short-sighted the Dems are.

Here’s another reason I’m confident nothing crazy will pass...

The Presidential Veto

The U.S. Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers to override a presidential veto. The Democrats don’t have it.

How much political capital are “normal” Democrats willing to expend on laws that will ultimately be vetoed? I don’t know about you, but if I were a moderate Democrat, I wouldn’t want my name attached to a wealth tax.

What about the other side of the aisle?

Executive Orders

And by “the aisle,” I mean Trump. The Congressional Republicans are lamer than the lame-duck President, so if said lame-duck wants to accomplish anything, he’ll be using executive orders.

Expect a lot of these. All-time record levels of them. Three cheers for democracy! Sigh.

2028

Ok, enough of the short-term stuff; let’s get to what really matters: who will be America’s next “Great Leader”?

Predicting who the nominee will be is harder than you might imagine. Here is a list of people who were front-runners for their party’s nomination 18-24 months before the presidential election but who failed to get the nomination.

It is possible, though, as this list shows:

This is my way of saying, “I’m going to take a guess.”

Let’s start with the Republicans.

Normally, the sitting VP would have an advantage. I’m not writing him off, but if the nominee were picked today, I think he’d lose because he’s too close to Trump. The fact that he’s blaming the Iran War, Trump’s baby, for the midterm losses may be an indication that he realizes this. The problem with distancing himself from Trump is what happens if Trump garners praise for (somehow) thwarting the Democrats for the next two years?

For that reason, I think Rubio has the best chance at being the nominee. He’s doing a lot of jobs for the administration. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor (very Kissingeresque). He was also Acting Archivist of the United States and Acting USAID Administrator. He’s done all this while being almost invisible. That gives him a unique advantage. He can argue that he’s experienced and competent while appearing both close to and far from Trump. He can then wait to see which way the wind blows before deciding which is more advantageous.

And the Dems?

I think it will be Hillary Clinton. Kidding. I hope. I’m sure she’d love to run again, but she’s probably smart enough to know she wouldn’t win.

Harris, on the other hand... Why should being a terrible presidential candidate stop you from being a two-time terrible presidential candidate?

Gavin Newsom (California Trudeau)? I don’t know. Yeah, he’d win California, but which Dem wouldn’t?

AOC? Too dumb... and that voice. Ugh!

Shapiro? Too Jewish - for the Dems, at least. Yes, they have an antisemitism problem.

Polymarket has Jon Ossoff leading. Before last week, I don’t think I’d ever heard of him.

Let’s call everyone else, including people we’ve never considered, “the pack.” My bet is it’s someone from the pack. Sure, that sounds like a dodge, but it makes my next question even harder...

Who will be America’s Next President?

I capitalized “America’s Next President” because I think Trump will turn the next election into a game show. You know he wants to.

The last time a candidate of the same party won the White House immediately after that party’s president served two full terms was George H.W. Bush in 1988 (succeeding Ronald Reagan). Normally this would put the Republican candidate at a disadvantage, but Trump didn’t serve two consecutive terms, so that might matter.

How the economy is performing two years from now is also important. As is who ends up losing the “Whose Crazier War,” the Democrats or Trump.

Share

You’re right, I’m stalling. Gun to my head?

America is a 50/50 nation, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I think we’re in for years, perhaps decades, of one-term presidents, so my pick is:

President “The Pack” (D).

So, there you have it. Pin these to your fridge and get the stars and glitter ready because if I get 8 or more right, that’s honor roll level predicting.

And if I get it all wrong? Well, you get what you pay for (hint, hint).

About the Author

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, history, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

I am a mother. I watched the numbers come in and felt something cold settle in my chest. The left’s entire offer is the same one it has always been: free everything, paid for by someone else, while the people who actually produce anything get poorer, weaker, and more obedient.

The party that believes in beating all dissension into submission for the sake of a socialist utopia that has failed every single time it has been tried in the history of the world will again take the reins. That is nothing short of the slow arson of a child’s future.

Victor Davis Hanson, Jeremy Boreing, and Dana Loesch walked through the wreckage. The diagnosis is ugly because we made it ugly.

History was already stacked against us. The party that holds the White House has lost House seats in midterms 90% of the time since 1900 and Senate seats 75% to 80% of the time. That is the reality. Pretending otherwise is how you lose. Cost of living kept punching voters in the mouth.

Too many on the right spent 2 years acting like the base’s patience was infinite while grocery bills climbed and the permanent-loss crowd whispered that the only pure option left was to stay home and watch it all burn.

Hanson laid out the cold math. He also noted the high-profile immigration raids that played well on social media and less well with suburban parents who just wanted the price of groceries to stop rising. We treated their lived reality as a messaging problem. It wasn’t. The countryside was already on fire.

Jeremy Boreing called the night a bloodbath and named the internal sabotage. The hole left by Charlie Kirk filled with the permanent-loss crowd whose entire business model is “we lost again, send more money.” They spent 2 years telling people not to vote because a cleansing fire would somehow fix everything. It worked. Young men who backed Trump in 2024 swung hard the other way. Evangelicals showed up as a smaller share of the electorate.

You cannot complain about the culture for 40 years, refuse to build anything, and then act shocked when the other side wins. The water got chummed. The sharks did exactly what sharks do. My daughter does not get to wait around while we figure that out.

Dana Loesch warned people in advance and got savaged for it. The results exceeded even her grim projections. Her research on the exit polls is clear: the Iran war did not play as big a role as the narrative insists. Corruption did.

Not a single exit poll shows Iran or Israel as a top-four concern. The top concerns are the economy, cost of living, jobs, and tariffs. Government corruption registered as a crucial or major factor for 90% of voters. Cost of living hit 89%. The Iran war was a factor for 74%. Real, but not the singular or top reason. It contributed to the scope of the losses. It was not the main driver.

Cost of living and inflation were the top reasons 2024 Trump voters defected. Anti-Israel sentiment moved some younger voters, but the majority of GOP voters said support for Israel was “not strong enough” or “just right.” Only about 19% of those who called support “too strong” actually voted Republican. A Muslim Brotherhood-adjacent candidate won a Senate seat while parts of the right were busy purity-testing every alliance that didn’t match their latest podcast.

Loesch’s take is clinical: the coalition is bankrupt, the MAGA era as we knew it is over, and if we refuse an honest conversation about messaging, affordability, and the actual top issues (corruption and the cost of living), we will not get the Senate back until the 2030s.

She quoted Tolkien on purpose. “From the ashes a fire shall be woken” is not colorful prose. It is simply what must be done. The broken sword does not reforge itself while everyone is still arguing about who is allowed to hold the hammer.

The common thread is straightforward. Historical headwinds plus an affordability crisis the administration treated as a messaging problem instead of a lived reality, plus government corruption that voters ranked at the top of their concerns, plus a right-wing podcast world that spent 2 years telling people the only rational move was to stay home or primary everyone into oblivion.

Republicans held the White House, the House, and the Senate and still managed to do nothing. John Thune stalled or blocked the president’s agenda at nearly every turn. Young people watched the party that promised results deliver gridlock and excuses instead.

Plenty of them decided it was better to burn it all down and start over. The Iran conflict was a factor that expanded losses for some, but it was not the decisive driver the post-mortems keep claiming. We did not lose because the left is competent. We lost because we made it easy for them. We handed them the ultimate weapon and then acted surprised when they used it.

Every mother I know is now staring at a future where her child is told the answer to everything is more free stuff paid for by a country that can no longer afford itself, where boys are girls if they say so, where dissent is violence, and where the people who want to chemically alter children and nationalize the rest of the economy get to set the rules. I am not willing to hand my daughter that future.

Here is the part where the autopsy ends, and reality begins.

We have been here before. Obama lost 63 House seats in 2010 and still governed. Clinton lost the House in 1994 and finished with high approval. The presidency is an imperial office now. Executive orders, vetoes, foreign policy, and the ability to paint the party in power look like the villains they are.

The left will go totally insane. They always do. AOC, the new Senate radicals, the open-borders caucus, and the people who think the answer to every problem is more government, more puberty blockers, and more forced compliance will give voters a live demonstration of what their socialist utopia actually looks like. They will overreach, investigate, destroy institutions, set fire to the Constitution, and try to throw our borders wide open again while insisting that men can get pregnant and that parents who object are the real threat.

They will remind normal voters exactly why they hated the last time Democrats controlled everything. That demonstration is a gift if we stop treating it as a reason to curl into a ball and cry about the loss. The dark side always overreaches. The question is whether the free people are still standing when it does. My daughter’s future is not a podcast topic. It is the reason any of this matters.

Marching orders, because the right loves a list almost as much as it loves circular firing squads:

1. Affordability is not a feeling. It is the issue. Every speech, every ad, every local race for the next 2 years should be about the price of groceries, rent, insurance, and energy. If you cannot explain how your policy lowers the bill, sit down. Mothers already know the bill is rising. I see it every week.

2. Stop the permanent-loss business. The people who profit from permanent loss are not your friends. Build actual institutions, businesses, schools, and a corrupt media that do not require the country to be on fire to stay relevant. Boreing is right: the future belongs to the people who build it. The country does not rebuild itself.

3. Turnout is not a suggestion. Dragging people with you is the minimum. Local elections, school boards, state legislatures. The national midterms are already lost. The next ones are not. You do not win by refusing to march.

4. Message the border and crime without the high-profile circus that scares the normies you need. Quiet competence beats viral raids that become campaign ads for the other side.

5. Drop the purity spirals on foreign policy. America First does not mean isolationism so pure that we ignore every adversary who wants us dead. It means securing the border, growing the economy, and not getting sucked into wars we cannot explain to a single mother in Texas. Loesch and the exit polls are clear: corruption and the cost of living ranked higher than the war. Voters who flipped wanted prices down and accountability more than they wanted ideological perfection on the conflict.

6. God is not a political consultant, but the people who still believe in Him are the ones who show up when it is hard. Keep that. The doomers do not. Even the smallest person can change the course of the future, but only if they actually show up. I am not willing to hand my daughter a country that ran out of money and hope while the left experiments on children and calls it progress.

Share

The left just handed themselves a Congress full of people who will overreach, investigate, destroy institutions, set fire to the Constitution, and try to force their failed socialist dream on the rest of us.

Our job is to make sure that when that happens, there is a competent, results-oriented gladiator standing there. We did not lose because the ideas are wrong. We lost because we spent 2 years acting like the ideas were optional and the base’s patience was infinite. It is not.

That cannot be the story we leave for the next generation.

The fire shall be woken. Get to work. Our kids need us.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Note: These cats really piss me off, and I aim to write about it publicly.

With the proliferation and widespread use of Artificial Intelligence, among an ever-widening spectrum of potential applications, it is harder and harder to tell what is real and what is artificial –and this observation has long been old news. I fear the question will devolve from “what is real and what is not” to “does it even matter anymore?”

The shamelessness with which AI-generated commercials and content are now published must indicate something–it doesn’t matter what is artificial or not. At some point, we will get used to it and may even look back on those ol’ days where we, in our less evolved ways, still used live humans to record on camera–in the same tone of voice that is used when mentioning the horse and buggy.

What does this have to do with copycat artists? Can’t exactly say at the moment, but my guess it is downstream from the world really not giving much of a shit about reality.

These artists that I am referring to are so shameless in their regurgitation, so obvious in their mission, so transparent in their copying ways—it is a talent of a kind.

Don’t put all your eggs in one Basquait!

The artist currently undergoing this treatment the most is none other than Jean Michele Basquait; painter, graffiti artist, token art school anti-hero and style guide for a new generation of artists.

For those who don’t know, his legend is similar to that of a Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse–contemporary legends, voices of their generation, shot out of a cannon, and also–perished too early. Jean Michele frequently competes with Warhol, Van Gogh at auction to give a sense of scale. His work has entered into the public consciousness so deeply, you may have seen references of his work, without even knowing it.

(Yes, Basquiat paints as your five-year-old kid could; that’s the point—we heard you the first time. Grab a book, move on)

I don’t mind the cosplay or the homage play going on here–dressing up as cultural icons is a national pastime. I don’t even mind the copycat nature of self-exploration through influence–mimicking.

Processing the work of others is perfectly natural and expected throughout the course of an artist’s life, necessary even. I have done so much mimicking as an artist; I couldn’t possibly toss a brick in that glass house–but what is it that irks me about these artists? The recognition? The sales?

(CLARIFICATION: Jay-Z’s fascination with Basquiat is slightly adjacent to the phonies simply copying his paintings)

Is it the idea that, possibly, so few realize what they are doing, the origins of their work, that they take it as original? What then, does that say about the so-called artists of Instagram or the public they are so eager to appeal to? Have they lost all sense of decency?

When you paint in the style of another painter, you may be paying them a debt; you may flatter them. When you make a career off the back of their work by ripping it off it, you are dancing on their grave.

To get another sense of what I mean, the artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970) has also received his fair share of flattery:

The real Mark Rothko and his extraordinary painting behind him:

In a perfect world, these scam artists would either be sat down and explained some things to, or run right out of town. But we are far from a perfect world, and I don’t know that I would be able to stand to live in a world that was. (You can polish every corner of Paris, but, for heaven’s sake, leave one dirty toilet, for posterity, for the rest of us!)

What it might say, my takeaway as an artist, it must go something like this, the best I can put it:

I should almost thank them–they confirm the limitations of art–the purchase originality has on its process. That the paint, the canvas, the style, the aesthetic–the physical manifestations of all this art we make- it’s all bologna. It is neither here nor there. The canvases, the paint, the museums and the guards are all as good as dead. What am I saying? Have you no reverence?!

What I mean is that you can take all these things and toss them where they belong–right in the bin. Because you can copy Rothko and dress up like Basquait, but you can’t take away the late nights Rothko spent in that Union Square loft, or the nights Basquait slept in the park.

The lives and the experiences of the artist are theirs and theirs alone–they cannot be channeled nor copied nor relived. They can be felt through the works, but the work, as we know, can be destroyed. It is the same as saying– we live moment to moment.

Share

The paintings and the poems are the burnoff, the exemplars of a life lived, blood that was pumped–a heart that quarreled and wrestled with lovers and demons. The artist gets the moment of expression, and that is it. The painting and the poem are just the ash, as Mr. Cohen put it. We all have the ash–artist or not–if you have lived your own life, which is always a life well-lived. The rest is window dressing. The artworks–from the Mona Lisa to the Parthenon, from the Chrysler Building to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon–it’s all, when it comes down to it, simply decoration.

Still, these little assholes rub me precisely the wrong way. However, they are, neither here nor there.

Judson Vereen
Oct 28, Portland, Oregon

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Canada, and Vancouver has a lot going for it. I just didn’t realize that we Canadians are the worst people in the world.

I must commend the President for treating Canada with a level of kindness we do not deserve. He has been almost saintly in his restraint. Despite the clear and present danger that Canada poses to the US, he has not branded us the worst country in the world, instead taking a more measured and nuanced approach, labelling us “One of the Worst Countries in the Entire World” and “one of the nastiest countries to deal with”.

Since coming to office in January of 2025, Trump has made many claims about Canada, including that:

• The US trade deficit with Canada is “$200 billion.”

• Canada is one of the world’s highest-tariff countries.

• Canada hiked its dairy tariffs during the Biden administration.

• Canada generally doesn’t “take” US agricultural exports.

• Canada prohibits US banks.

• Canada is “constantly surrounded” by Chinese and Russian ships.

Sure, these are all false, but I hardly see why that matters. Should I ignore the recent accusation that Canada interferes in US elections simply because everything the President has said about Canada to date has been a lie?

Clearly not.

And the Trump administration is right to warn Canada. If the US were to allow politicians from different countries to talk to each other, we would soon find embassies and consulates popping up all over the place.

And then what? Free trade and military alliances? God forbid!

Why do I, a Canadian, support President Trump?

It’s quite simple. As a Canadian citizen, I couldn’t vote for him, but I did argue he was a better candidate than Harris. Get it? I supported Trump in the last election, and consequently, I am a de facto member of MAGA. As such, I am required to defend him for as long as he is in office - possibly beyond that - regardless of what he says or does.

Trump has made it clear that Canada is America’s enemy, so who am I to argue?

Canada is clearly one of America’s greatest historical adversaries, and yet Trump’s actions have remained measured and diplomatic. Despite leading the country that produces the third-highest amount of illicit drugs in North America, Prime Minister Carney has not been given the Maduro treatment. Yet. Despite Carney’s position as a narco-terrorist who has the gall to label Trump’s lies as lies, the President has so far limited himself to just hurling insults at the PM.

Such benevolence from the Great Leader!

The American people are truly the most fortunate on Earth. America’s greatest president and protector has kept the ravaging hordes of Canadians at bay by cleverly introducing policies which have reduced Canadian tourism to the US by 29%. By reducing the amount of money that workers in the tourism industry make, Trump has also reduced their tax burden. That’s what I call 4-dimensional chess!

If that wasn’t enough, Trump has also stepped up to help Americans deal with high energy prices caused by the war with Iran, which we all know was caused by the Biden administration. Recently, the President was able to make a deal for diesel with that great humanitarian Vladimir Putin.

Very shortly, world diesel production will skyrocket by roughly 0.08% thanks to his tireless efforts. Art of the deal! Yes, this amount is equivalent to only two weeks of Canadian diesel imports, and shipping it to the US from Canada would have been much easier, but you can hardly expect the President to make a deal with an enemy like Canada, can you?

And yet despite Canada’s perfidy, Trump continues to offer to make us the 51^st state. Such altruism!

All this, and he educates us as well. Like many of you, I often find it difficult to keep up with world events, so when Trump makes a deal with Russia and criticizes Ukraine, it’s an important reminder of who the good guys and bad guys are. Without these statements, I’d have to try to remember who invaded whom, or worse, turn to the lamestream media for “facts.”

Yes, despite everything he has done for America and the world, there are still those who criticize him. It must be jealousy. They’ve watched him increase his net worth by between $2.7 billion and $4.1 billion since taking office for his second term in January 2025, all while having to occasionally perform the duties of president.

It’s awe-inspiring. Who wouldn’t feel a little envious?

Americans are living through a “golden age,” and I really hope that Canada’s politicians are paying attention and learning from what President Trump does. With the President’s guidance, Canada may one day find itself amongst the ranks of the countries Trump truly respects, like Russia, China, and North Korea.

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, history, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

She still needs a wheelchair to cross the parking lot to the doctor’s office. Nothing magical happened when the label was ripped off. She still has every symptom of someone with MS and zero idea what any of it means. The disease didn’t get the memo. It just kept eating her alive.

Then Megyn Kelly, in the full mean-girl mode that has become the style of podcastistan, decided the real problem was that Applegate was crying because she no longer gets to be “the face of this disease.” A wild goose chase, she called it.

She explained that celebrities lean into their health problems and turn them into a brand. The woman who spent five years treating a disease she didn’t have while her body kept collapsing was apparently the villain for not performing the correct emotion about losing the only explanation she had.

In an ecosystem already short on compassion, Kelly managed to treat a misdiagnosis that left someone still disabled as evidence of grift. The standard operating procedure of punch-down content, delivered with the serene certainty of someone who has never had to negotiate with their own legs about whether today is a walking day.

Janice Dean, who has lived with MS for more than 20 yrs, called the comments disgusting and labeled Kelly a mean girl. She noted that Kelly already knew how long it took for doctors to diagnose Dean herself, and she said she was grateful Applegate had been a voice for so many of them. Dean added that she is one of those “loser people” who talk about their diagnosis to help others, and that she has been in and out of the hospital in recent weeks.

I have enormous respect and esteem for Janice. She is a fellow MS warrior and a kind, lovely woman who has spent years doing the unglamorous work of making the disease less invisible without turning her own suffering into a performance of superiority. When someone who actually lives with this disease calls the commentary disgusting, that is not celebrity drama. That is a data point from the people who have to navigate the same broken system and the same bad days.

I got my MS diagnosis 16 years ago after a lifetime of doctors treating my symptoms as a personality defect. Fatigue that made standing up feel like a moral failing was anxiety. Numbness that came and went was stress. Vision that grayed out like a bad signal was drama.

The suggestion, delivered with the calm of people who have never had their nervous system stage a coup, was that it was all in my head—psychosomatic, imaginary, or at least mostly imaginary, and therefore mine to manage with better coping skills and fewer complaints. But it’s hard to ignore a woman whose entire right side curls in on itself while she goes temporarily blind.

Turns out it actually was in my head. And the myelin that was supposed to be insulating both. Just not in the stupid, psychological way they meant. The lesions were real. The inflammation was real. The progressive damage was real. For once, they had accidentally stumbled into a technically accurate statement while missing every relevant detail. It was like diagnosing a house fire as “the problem is heat” and recommending meditation instead of the fire department.

The relief when someone finally said the words was not cinematic. It was the quieter, meaner kind: someone had finally stopped gaslighting the evidence and started looking at the actual MRI. After years of being treated like a difficult patient who had invented an illness for attention or because she was bad at life, having a name for it felt like being allowed to exist. Not cured. Not fixed. Just no longer required to perform wellness for people who found my symptoms inconvenient.

Sixteen years later, my legs still sometimes lose the argument with gravity. The diagnosis didn’t hand me a better body. It just stopped some of the extra punishment for having the body I have, and when the flares become intolerable, home healthcare trots out with a steady drip of IV steroids to suppress the attack, so I don’t go permanently blind.

Applegate spent years as the public face of something she turned out not to have, while living with the real, ongoing consequences of whatever she does have. Now she is back in the diagnostic wilderness with 5 years of MS-specific treatments behind her, a public identity built around a disease that isn’t hers, and commentators who seem personally offended that she isn’t smiling about losing the label.

In podcastistan, the default move is to treat someone else’s medical pain as content and then score points for noticing that the chaos is messy. Compassion is already scarce. Treating a misdiagnosis that leaves someone still disabled as evidence of a cottage industry is nothing short of grotesque.

The people who treated her reaction as a gotcha are the same people who have never had to explain to a neurologist that yes, they really can’t feel their feet today, and no, they didn’t invent the numbness for engagement. There is a particular dark comedy in the fact that a wrong diagnosis can still be more useful than no diagnosis at all.

At least with the wrong name you sometimes get treatments that happen to help, or a community that understands what “I can’t walk from the parking lot” actually means.

Without a name, you get to keep explaining yourself to people who have already decided you are either exaggerating or shopping for a more interesting life. Applegate’s doctor congratulated her. Her body did not receive the memo. Megyn Kelly apparently thinks the real issue is that Applegate no longer gets to monetize the misery. Most of us who have lived through the years of “have you considered that this is psychological?” would trade all of it for a single doctor who just believed us.

Janice Dean has spent more than two decades doing the opposite of what Kelly described. She has talked about her diagnosis because the alternative is silence, and silence does not get you diagnosed faster or treated better or believed sooner. I respect that work. I respect the woman doing it.

The psychosomatic era of my medical life is over, but the memory of it is useful. It taught me that “it’s all in your head” is sometimes accidentally correct and still almost always useless. It also taught me that the people most eager to police how a sick person is supposed to feel about their illness are rarely the ones who have to live inside it. Applegate is still sick. She just lost the name she thought explained why.

Share

The rest of us who have spent years arguing with doctors about whether our nervous systems are real will recognize that particular hell. The congratulations don’t help. The mean-girl lectures don’t help. The lesions, whatever is actually causing them, do not care what anyone on the internet thinks she should be feeling about them.

Christina Applegate is still sick. Still disabled. But now, she no longer knows why, which is its personal hell.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The numbers. Essentially, the kids aren’t drinking; they aren’t screwing, and most single adults are either completely disinterested in the disaster scene that is dating or completely clueless on how to get a mate. Nobody is getting along; modern dating has the charm of a disposable cutlery set. Relationships last as long as the paper plates on which they cut! Heaven’s….

Loneliness, yes. It’s as though staring at a screen for 12 hours a day somehow makes people less likable, less approachable, and less able to withstand or initiate contact with others. But everybody knows this; everybody acknowledges this. And surely we have learned our lesson: to slow down on tech and act and think responsibly. Or, perhaps, fully indulge in automated everything, including robots, apparently, everywhere. Sometimes we just zig when we ought to zag, as a species—don’t you just hate it when that happens?

I have been lonely. Once upon a time. Even recently. It’s actually cold. I mean, it gives me the body chills at times. That loft in Los Angeles, just me and the vermin! My apartment on Page Street, after heartbreak struck me in the gullet, down and out in San Francisco! Being alone has given my body the chills, yes, but I have also been married—the day in and day out of that gives me the chills, too.

And yes, I still believe in marriage. I just equally believe in parting ways, cutting ties, and hitting the road—I believe in marriage, and by god, I also believe in D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Love has a way of expiring; some don’t notice until the mold sets in. Some dash for the door at the first sign of ecchymosis…

Well, I don’t mind saying it aloud. I like being alone. It is my favorite state of being at the moment. Me at my most happy, my most elated, is when I am putting the key to the lock, turning the knob, and entering my own abode—which will be dark and quiet. Closing the door, the world behind me is one of the greatest gifts to man—absolute fucking solitude.

It’s not a pandemic; it's euphoric…

I love returning home to myself, so much so, I am even capable of coming home, getting comfortable, and then hastily leaving for a quick stroll, just to experience walking back home, entering again, etc., and closing the door behind me…

And That’s life! That’s what all the people say…

Solitude–the only true mother of invention. Solitude is where the hard battles are always won, and why I must return to solitude, long bouts of it, to remain sane. There are many kinds of people, but one distinction worth observing is between the people who can more or less get along with themselves and the people who can’t.

The self is at war now more than ever. The self is not just part of humanity, but is humanity. And like anything that is part of the whole, the self is soluble within its surroundings. You are your surroundings. The self is—well, what I mean to say is, learn to be alone, learn to be with yourself, or get swallowed up, eaten alive, absorbed by the circus that is our glowing humanity. It may be the gifts that are given by solitude to forge the character that one day may lead us all from hell.

Solitude–the art of being alone and loving it. The art of curating your pace, your tempo, your mindset. To be alone is to learn to self-regulate, to become self-reliant. It is not out of some dislike for people that I require my solitude. Solitude is necessary, I aim to get across; necessary for all of us. If we can only be more intentional with our loneliness, more directed and productive inside our isolation, then we could possibly seize an opportunity of personal riches.

Share

The times I have spent in solitude in my life are precious. And it is a precious gift that everyone deserves. I hope everyone gets the chance to be with themselves in this lifetime. For a good long while. And when we get back among a crowd, or with family, we find how much more generous we can be. Time and money and even people–they have become fillers. But like any well-designed abode, these spaces are to be used, not filled. Strategically, not gluttonously.

The modern human requires a psychological diet. A respite from the bombardment of our times.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

After the kids slept, he scrolled, hungry for anything that answered. Lila answered. She was recently divorced and living alone in a too-clean apartment. Lonely and single. He fed her the neglected-husband story. Silent dinners. Hands that always pushed him off. She felt sorry for him. That was the trap.

She wrote longer notes after work. He told her that her mind mattered, that no one else had looked there. He told her that she was stunning and exciting while he wove his web. The words landed, and she rearranged her evenings around his replies. He described the nights he lay awake wanting someone who would not turn away.

She answered by telling him how the messages made her ache, how she read them again in bed and imagined his hands on her. He never said he had no intention of leaving. He only kept the thread open and let the hunger grow.

One night he sent the line he had turned over all day while Hannah slept upstairs. “I’m falling in love with you. You’re a pretty girl, but there are lots of pretty girls in the world, and I have no trouble getting their attention. It’s your mind I’m falling in love with.” Lila’s chest tightened. She answered after an hour. The words scared her. By morning she had written three more times. She described her scandalous dreams after his messages and imagined his hands where no one else’s went. She said she trusted him not to make her feel foolish.

She had already begun to love him because she believed the story. He slowed his replies. Then he stopped. She had rearranged her nights. She had believed the hunger was mutual. She cried herself to sleep that night. The pillow stayed wet until morning. She deleted the account. He left behind a single woman who had paid for his attention with real tears and a broken heart.

Across town, a wife named Megan lived inside a marriage of soul-destroying loneliness. The house stayed quiet after the children slept. Tom worked late or fell asleep on the couch. When she reached for him, he said he was tired and turned away. The mattress held two separate bodies. She lay awake listening to ordinary sounds that no longer reached her. She scrolled because the silence was crushing her spirit.

A message arrived from a man named Derek. “That photo you posted. You look alive in it. Like you’re waiting for someone to notice.” He asked what she was wearing. The words landed low in her body and woke a heat she had almost forgotten. She answered from the bathroom with the door locked. He called her sexy in the way a husband stops doing after years of shared laundry and school runs. He said her husband didn’t know what he had. She believed the flattery because no one else in the house seemed to care.

The exchanges lengthened. He told her he thought about her hands and the way her voice might sound when she stopped being careful. She described the ache that sat under her ribs most evenings. She sent a photo she would never have shown Tom. Shoulders bare, the strap of her dress slipped down, the bathroom mirror holding the evidence.

Her pulse climbed so hard she had to sit until it steadied. Derek answered within minutes. “I can’t stop thinking about you.” She read it twice and felt wanted in a way that changed the air in the room.

She stayed up after Tom slept. The messages grew more explicit. She wrote what she wanted. His mouth at her throat. The weight of someone who was not tired of her. He answered with the same hunger and named the places he would touch. Soon, pictures became videos. She told herself it was only talk. The line between the screen and her body thinned anyway.

One afternoon, while Tom was at the office, she drove to a hotel she had never entered. Derek met her in the lobby. In the room he kissed her as if he had been waiting. His hands were sure where Tom’s had grown absent. She came apart under him with a sharpness that made her cry out into his shoulder. For a stretch of minutes the loneliness lifted.

Afterward she drove home and sat in the driveway with the engine running. The cold returned through the vents. Derek stopped writing two days later. She checked the thread in the shower where the water could cover the sound of her crying, then deleted it. What remained was the knowledge that a stranger had named her desire and then left her carrying it alone. The same soul-destroying quiet waited the moment the car door closed.

The internet does this to both. A man anesthetized by rejection finds a woman who listens and feeds her the script until she loves him. A woman starved for touch finds a man who calls her sexy until she crosses the line she swore she wouldn’t.

Algorithms push the next face. Private threads supply the missing proof that someone still notices. What begins as late-night talk becomes a second life measured in deleted histories and rearranged evenings. Homes split. Children watch one parent grow distant while the other stares at the glowing rectangle in their pocket.

Share

Research shows the damage is measurable. Surveys of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found 81% of attorneys report a rise in cases using social-media evidence. Facebook alone is the primary source in 66% of those cases. Reports link the platform to roughly 1 in 5 divorces through discovered messages, reconnections, and secret chats.

Infidelity, including the online and emotional kind, appears as a contributing factor in 20 to 40% of divorces. Meta-analyses put online infidelity inside roughly 25% of marriages. Counselors note that 1 in 3 emotional affairs now start on social platforms. 40% of people who admit online cheating say it led straight to a physical encounter and then to divorce.

The wreckage doesn’t stop with the married couple. Single people and the ones drawn in absorb the lie. They rearrange their nights. They believe the story. Then the thread goes quiet. The online world keeps the supply endless. It seduces the anesthetized into destroying what they already have and leaves the innocent carrying the cost. The hunger doesn’t end when the account is gone. It only learns a new name for the next person willing to listen.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Listing the rise in deaths as a percentage increase rather than a number is a little trick I learned from the media. Nothing brings in the views like anger and fear. “if it bleeds, it leads” is second only to the first commandment of modern journalism: “never let facts get in the way of a good story.”

Facts Schmacts
Earlier this week, reports out of Russia stated that 28-year-old Daria Shipilova, who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died “of suspected plague in Siberia.”

Russian authorities claim she died “from pneumonia of an as-yet-unestablished origin.” What’s more, “she was vaccinated and therefore ‘immune to the dangerous infections with which she worked.’ Also, it probably came from a local wet market.

Just kidding, Russians are white, so it isn’t racist to think the disease came from the local infectious disease lab. She worked in an infectious disease lab and was vaccinated against the plague but skipped her flu shot?

All kidding aside, you’ll be forgiven if you don’t find this slightly alarming. After all, the plague killed roughly 30% to 60% of the European population between 1347 and 1353 and, in the process, earned the pleasant little moniker: The Black Death.

As we all know, no one has died from the plague in almost 700 years, so we can understand why the press is all over this story.

Except that’s not quite true.

During the broader second half of the 20th century (from the mid-1950s onward), there have been more than 85,000 cases of the plague resulting in roughly 7,000 total deaths across 38 countries. These are only the officially reported numbers; the real number is likely higher.

Here’s another interesting fact: Not one media outlet reporting on the plague story has provided this info.

Why?

If It Bleeds, It Leads
Well, truth, accuracy, facts- call it what you wish- get in the way. The goal is to sell newspapers, not reliably inform the public. Did 1 more person die of the plague this week or are deaths up 100%?

Which sounds scarier?

Is there a risk of another global pandemic, but this time the disease has a 60% mortality rate? Or do about 200 people die from the plague each year, and this is barely worthy of notice?

Trick question. The press is actually reporting that “pneumonic plague’s mortality rate is almost 100 percent if untreated.”

The media: “I have lies of omission and lies of commission. Which will get you to read the article?”

Believe Nothing You Hear And Half Of What You See
Normally I turn to Canada’s CTV when I want a really stupid take. Here’s a recent one.

However, CTV is only the industry standard for stupidity. There’s more than enough to go around. I’ve lost track of how many times the world was going to end. Or maybe it wasn’t going to end, but it was going to kill millions. Or maybe not millions, but there was definitely a good reason to feel anxious and maybe lock yourself in your house. Double masking while driving alone in your car was the least you could do.

Give Me The Good News
Ok, here it is: only 33% of Americans trust the media.

I suppose that could also be bad news since I think the number ought to be much closer to zero. Don’t ask me what happened in 2026 that caused the number to rise.

You’re Going To Die
I hope this doesn’t come as a shock. Let me add one qualifier to that statement: someday. If the press has you worried about the Plague, let me ease your fears a little. You will probably die from old age as this table shows.

Your lifetime odds of dying in a car accident are greater than those of COVID. Either way, double masking while driving alone isn’t going to prevent either.

Share

You are more likely to be murdered by your spouse than to die from the Plague or Ebola. My advice? Don’t start hoarding toilet paper just yet.

Also, maybe buy your wife some flowers from time to time and lower those murder odds a bit. Just make sure you check the bouquet closely. You don’t want to die from a bee sting, do you?

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece
The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Then reality crashes the fairy tale like a drunk fairy godmother.

Your knight in shining armor morphs into a workaholic zombie, slaying corporate dragons or wrestling tractors just to pile up those shiny monetary trophies at your feet. Exhausted? Sure, but hey, there’s always energy for a quick roll in the hay, right?

Meanwhile, you’re pulling triple duty: scrubbing the castle, wrangling the tiny tyrants (aka kids), and juggling your own job because why not add more chaos? Romance? That’s buried under a mountain of laundry and existential fatigue.

Both of you are drained dry, grinding away to make ends meet, maybe squeezing in a vacation if the budget doesn’t laugh in your face. Keeping the kids alive feels like a full-time gig. Congrats, you’re basically running a survival reality show.

Enter complacency: Once a dynamic duo, now you’re just two bedraggled roommates exchanging goodnight pecks, wondering if your last hookup was during the Obama administration.

Humans crave three basics from loved ones: Understanding, Appreciation, and Acceptance. Miss one, and your relationship crumbles faster than a vampire in sunlight. Poof, gone!

Cue my madcap experiment: I dove undercover on Ashley Madison (yep, that scandal-plagued cheater’s paradise is still kicking, data breach be damned) and chatted with 103 men from all walks of life. Their tales? Eerily similar, like they all read from the same tragic script.

Ladies, we love to paint men as sleazy dogs who’d hump a lamppost, but spoiler: That’s rarely the case. The truth? It’s messier than you think and sadder than you know.

Let’s dissect their excuses, er, reasons. (Names changed to shield the guilty; I’m here to enlighten, not torpedo lives. Think of me as a marriage whisperer with a side of espionage.)

Take Tim, 42, investment banker and father of six kids (gulp, talk about overachieving in the gene pool). His wife’s a homeschooling superhero, but after baby #6 four years ago, she hit the intimacy brakes hard. Tim adores her, knows she’s wiped, even hired a live-in nanny to lighten the load. Nada. After four years of blue-balled begging, he sought affection elsewhere. He stays for the kids and their 15-year history, but without touch, he’s basically a walking corpse: depressed, lost, and questioning if monogamy is just a fancy word for “slow death by neglect.”

Then there’s Bryan, 55, still handsome after 30 years of marriage, kids flown the coop. Empty nest? More like empty bed. He’s a community bigwig in local politics. Divorce would tank his rep faster than a viral scandal. But his wife shoves him away like he’s radioactive whenever he craves closeness. Trapped in a sexless spotlight, he’s seeking affairs to reclaim some vitality, underscoring the stark irony between his public role and private struggles.

Kevin, 50, is your classic serial cheater. Never faithful to a girlfriend, ex-wife, or apparently, his own conscience. Magnetic? Oh yeah, with a sob story about neglectful, narcissistic parents that could win an Oscar. But guys like him were rare; most weren’t born cheaters, just molded into them by marital famine. Kevin’s the exception that proves the rule: Some dudes treat fidelity like a suggestion, not a commandment, and they cause devastation wherever they go and with whoever is unlucky enough to cross their paths.

The gut-puncher? Scott, 27, married his high school sweetheart at 18. Post-baby #1, she flipped into a verbally and physically abusive nightmare, yet convinced him to pop out #2 five years later. He absorbs the hits to shield his girls, terrified of custody courts that favor moms and cast fathers aside like useless sperm donors. Ashley Madison? His desperate lifeline for a shred of kindness after years of domestic doom. Poor kid’s basically in a horror movie where the monster wears a wedding ring.

I emerged from this digital den of despair with unexpected compassion. Overwhelmingly, these guys weren’t chasing “new pussy” like thrill-seeking predators. They craved feeling desired, not discarded. Science backs it: Men need physical intimacy like plants need sunlight; withhold it, and they wilt into depressed husks. Imagine signing a lifetime contract forbidding touch from anyone else, only for your partner to ghost the bedroom. It’s like being sentenced to solitary confinement with a view of the conjugal visit room.

Where’d they screw up? Communication, or the lack thereof. Every. Single. One. Avoided the tough talk like it was the plague, opting for “go along to get along” until resentment built up like unpaid bills. I pointed out menopause, weight gain, or low self-esteem could be culprits. Doctors fix that stuff all the time. But nope, they stewed in silence.

Why do stats show men cheat more (about 20% lifetime vs. women’s 10%)? Biology’s a bitch: Their wiring screams for physical connection, and without it, they spiral into despondency. Trapped by kids, cash, careers, or custody fears (courts aren’t exactly bro-friendly), cheating becomes the grim escape hatch.

The fix? Pick wisely upfront and master the art of communication and being clear about your needs before popping out babies that will keep you trapped in perpetual celibacy. Happy marriages don’t run on autopilot or passive-aggression.

Bottom line: Denying intimacy is relationship sabotage. He’ll stop asking eventually... and start swiping.

Ladies, heed this: In the age of apps and endless options, everyone’s replaceable. Keep the spark alive, or watch your fairy tale turn into a cautionary tale, complete with alimony payments and a side of regret.

I’m not advocating for cheating or trying to justify it. What I’m pointing out is that there are common patterns behind why men cheat. If you’re interested in reducing the chances of that happening in your own life, it might be worth paying attention to what I’ve learned.

I personally know pastors, ranchers, businessmen, and professionals who are stepping out on their wives, so don’t think it can’t or won’t happen to you. Burying your heads in the sand and proclaiming that there is NEVER any good reason for cheating won’t stop your marriages from crumbling.

Share

Marriage is a covenant, and it’s just as important for women to see to the needs of their husbands as it is for husbands to see to the needs of their wives. Imagine walking down the aisle and making a deal with someone that you’ll never touch anyone else so long as you both shall live, but after a while that person refuses to let you. That’s where many of these guys exist now, In a constant state of physical famine.

May the odds be ever in your favor!

P.S. If you’re feeling attacked, ladies, I have a follow-up piece to this about why women cheat. Trust me, there is plenty of blame to go around fueling that 50% divorce rate.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

I have witnessed firsthand many changes in the industry—advances in tech, cash culture, and shifting attitudes toward alcohol have shaped the dining/drinking experience for customers and staff alike—and in the middle of it all, the very idea of gratuity is being questioned. Who in the service industry at large deserves a tip?

(I’ve got one, you say! Get another line of work!)

Inflation! Affordability! It’s the economy, stupid–and it is. Stupid economy… And it’s coming from both ends–as belts tighten for the consumer in an effort to keep every spare dollar, the tip jars, or screens make their way to unexpected places—much to the chagrin of the everyday consumer.

Well, I’ve about had it! On the way to work today, the bus driver asked for a tip. I was so insulted that I complained to the manager of the Tri-Met. He agreed it was truly unprofessional and said he would issue a stern warning and assured me it would never happen again. I was so impressed with him I tipped him twenty and walked the rest of the way to work…

Shit rolls down hill, and perhaps, we have reduced the service industry to beggars…

I understand–every dollar we tip is a dollar we just gave away. But this is America, honeychild! Money is the sweet nectar, o Óleo, that keeps this ship steering the right way. You see–you see–what we have here? A breakdown of a kind, the breakdown of communication, the silence of capitalism. It is the silence of money, and America, if not its inventor, is certainly its perfector.

The tip jar, the screen–it certainly is in your face–is it not, and if I understand it correctly, more so lately than usual? It is a nasty little thing, and nothing is more crass, more nasty than a confrontation over money. You’d rather ask your father-in-law for a kidney before a spare dollar, now admit it!

America’s relationship with money is rooted in a kind of mystique. It is everywhere, it is nowhere. It is in abundance if you know where to look; it is never anywhere that meets the eye. It sits underneath every open bar tab, every shared Uber, every dinner among friends, every gift under the tree that does not ameliorate the shortcomings of last year’s present.

At the restaurant, it is a sigh of relief when someone just offers to pay, and it is settled upon. I offer to pay, too, but probably to buy my way out of any awkward haggling later on. It is expensive to be cheap!

My attitude is this–I always tip. I just can’t help it. The encroachment of any kind of pettiness, I am allergic to. It is a cloak, an attitude I need to survive; I hate cheap people. I also detest money. It isn’t about the money! There is something about cheap people I find lacking that has nothing to do with money; it is a cheapness in spirit I find wanting to piss on…

Anyway, the restaurant industry is fictitious. The bar and hotel, too. The shit has rolled so far downhill–look at wages + cost of living; just do it, you can’t make the equation work without tips. Servers would turn in their aprons, bartenders would retire to philosophy, baristas would remain (the lot of them wouldn’t know what to do with themselves), and every restaurant with any character would turn into a Wing-Stop or gas station-adjacent Subway.

Without the generosity of strangers, without their participation in the farce, the restaurant industry, at large, fails. Co-ops, alternative business models, shared-profits systems exist, but their methods aren’t broadly, culturally time-tested. Alternate systems may flourish here and there in cities that can approach the cutting edge, but there are restaurants all over the country that will continue to rely on gratuity to cover the pay for their workers.

The point is there is no system, only culture, and there is something said about culture and politics–one of them is downstream from the other one, but when they fuse, everything is downstream from that. All the way down to the poor soul who pours your beer, or gets you the extra ranch, or creamer, and depends on your generosity for their living. It’s a Beggar’s Banquet, and I am Mick Jagger, and I can’t get no…

Customer Satisfaction.

Just yesterday a man emptied his change into the tip jar. 67 cents. He was pushing 80 years old. I said, “Please, Mr. Jagger, you’ve done enough! Another gentleman, sporting a touch of gray, ordered a cheeseburger without onions. Says he can’t stand onions. When a man does this, I see his inner child. A boy sits before me now, making an ick face at those slimy vegetable toppings–gross, mom!

The truth is, I get the sense that the rats are fleeing the ship. Money tightens, everyone at the bottom scrambles. We have normalized these positions and then have become complacent with them in the restaurant industry; complacency breeds dysfunction, deterioration.

The conversation between the worker, the tipped soul, and management has been a one-way street for at least two decades. The workers at the bottom are getting crushed, yet expectations keep rising. Years ago, you hardly had to worry about allergies. Now, they are everywhere, and the implications of a mistake feel life-threatening. For someone to order without a following list of modifications and special kitchen requests feels like a lucky break.

Too, a group of six came into the restaurant; after one order of fries for the six of them, a few coffees, an iced tea, the total bill for the table was $55.00. Separate checks, every one of them, all paying with a card, all requesting receipts.

It is the restaurant industry–dealing with people–that makes you wonder how the world functions, how do people survive with such little wherewithal.

But what I do know is the people in the industry are some of the best people I have known. If my experience is any indication of the industry at large, the service workers keep the world moving. They can’t always feel like it, but are mostly willing to perform, determined, and invested.

Share

For myself–I tip all I can. As a bartender, there is some feeling of obligation, something that compels me. The service industry is full of moving parts, and when you know enough, it is harder to hold it against anyone. The delivery was late, the ice machine broke down, the cook called in, the server’s water broke this morning; it’s all too human of an enterprise. I’m not paying for the service; I am paying for the show.

A tip is a call to action for the spirit! It says pony up to grease the wheels a bit, buy your ticket for the show. The tip is always optional, and so is the performance. Without everybody playing their role, the house lights come on, and the fiction of all this restaurant business is seen in much greater relief.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The proverb, American in reality, stems from the thawing of the relationship between America and Communist China during the early 1970s. More specifically, it refers to President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.

While the Communist Chinese had been on the allied side during World War II, their ideology had guaranteed that they would fall under the influence of the Soviet Union once the Cold War began in the late 1940s.

However, relations between the two great powers soon began to deteriorate. When Stalin died in 1953, Mao Zedong rejected Soviet dominance over world communism. As the years passed, relations continued to sour, leading to Moscow pulling all economic and technical advisors out of China in 1960 and eventually to border clashes between the two countries in 1969.

Nixon saw this as an opportunity to put pressure on Moscow, to drive a bigger wedge between the two nations. It began with China and the US table tennis teams exchanging visits, and this “Ping-pong diplomacy” led to Nixon visiting China in February 1972.

Nixon had a well-established reputation as an anti-Communist “hawk.” He served on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), sponsored legislation requiring Communist Party members to register with the federal government, and was a staunch supporter of Taiwan. In short, his anti-communist credentials were impeccable. Consequently, his conservative critics were unable to accuse him of being soft on communism.

In short: “Only Nixon could go to China.”

Today that term is thought to have a broader meaning. It is taken to mean that only a hardliner can enact a policy that goes against a party’s traditional ideology.

Personally, I think the proverb is dead, and I think Trump, or more specifically, MAGA killed it.

The Kingdom of the Blind

I spent much of 2024 arguing that Trump was the better candidate than Harris. Like many people, I had misgivings, but having seen how dishonest the Biden administration was and fearing Harris would move the Democrats further to the left, I felt Trump was the better choice. Counterfactuals are by their very nature guesses, so it is not impossible that I was right and Harris would have been worse.

That said, Trump has been a disaster. This is not to say that he hasn’t done things I agree with. Securing the border is one example. I try to, as they say, “call balls and strikes” when it comes to policies and consequently have criticized Trump when I disagreed with him. As you can imagine, this has not made me popular with the more, how shall I put it, fanatical members of MAGA.

However, as time has passed, my belief that my credentials as a Trump supporter would mean that “only Nixon could go to China” would protect me when I criticized Trump’s policies and actions.

I was wrong.

More often than not, criticism of Trump is met with accusations that I have TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. If I think treating China with kid gloves while engaging in trade wars with allies is bad diplomacy and will result in inflation, then I have TDS.

If I think the only thing a war with Iran will accomplish is higher energy prices and the depletion of vital American military supplies, I have TDS.

If I think the President of the United States should show some class and not engage in online trolling like a 12-year-old boy, I have TDS.

If I remind people that the federal government strong-arming companies into doing what it says is what the Biden administration did during COVID, I have TDS.

If I point out that Trump’s strong-arming of companies is reminiscent of what the Biden administration did during COVID, I have TDS.

If I point out that the federal government taking ownership stakes in private companies sounds a lot like communism, I have TDS.

MAGA has gone from wanting a politician to “shake things up” to being a cult which requires absolute loyalty to the leader. Any mental gymnastics necessary to justify a decision is acceptable no matter how absurd, and any criticism of the great leader is heresy.

Those of us with any knowledge of economics or history must feel a little like Cassandra; we know where these actions are leading, but no one believes us.

This leads to the second proverb that MAGA has killed: “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” This is meant to imply that a person with only a little skill or knowledge can easily lead or have an advantage over people who have none. But that does not apply when you are facing a cult. Knowledge, truth, and rational thought are irrelevant to cultists.

Share

Had Nixon lived today, 20 years of anti-communism would not have shielded him from accusations that he was a communist sympathizer if not an outright communist. In today’s world, all that matters is the eternal now, and all that criticism of ‘the great leader’ will get you is shouted down.

In America today, the embodiment of the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man isn’t a king; he’s a heretic.

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece, the single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

That is the house I came from. That is the creed that raised me. Left-wing ideology is a death cult. It ruins women, murders children, and sickens society until a mother can walk her daughter into blood and still believe she is the kind one.

I was four when I watched my father beat her. Not a story I was told later. A scene burned into me while I was still small enough to believe a house could stop a man’s hands. The terror did not pass through and leave. It stamped itself into my soul and stayed.

Two or three years later she told me she had been raped. No shield. No delay. She put the ugliest night of her life on a child and kept talking. She had been twisted early: abused as a girl, raped as her first sexual experience, then beaten by my father while I watched.

After that I stopped being a daughter. I became the adult in the room. I parented my parent. I watched her face before I watched anything else. I learned how to calm a grown woman while my own body stayed braced for impact. I never felt safe. A child who feels safe does not sleep with one eye open waiting for the next horror.

That is how the cult gets in. It finds a wrecked woman, calls her wreckage wisdom, and uses her to train the next girl.

I was the next girl.

I got pregnant young. Fear made my hands shake. I went to her because some last unkillable part of me still thought a mother might fight for me. She didn’t. She already had two or three abortions behind her. I watched the threat of meaning cross her face. If what was in me was a child, then she had ended children too. She could not survive that. So she reached for the lines that would save her and wreck me: Cluster of cells. It doesn’t matter. Don’t make this a tragedy.

I felt myself tear while she was still speaking. She had to say it didn’t matter. She had to lead me into an evil act so she would not have to repent. That is how a death cult moves from one generation to the next.

It uses a mother’s unconfessed blood as a script for her daughter. I went where she pointed. I ended what she told me was nothing. I have been walking around with that anguish ever since.

When she left, she did not drift. She tried to destroy me first. She raged. She hurled venom at the softest places in me, words built to shred my soul and keep cutting after the door slammed. Shame. Disgust. Verdicts meant to follow me into sleep. Then she left. Every ten years. Exile after execution on repeat. She could not stand that I refused her ideology, so she punished me with absence only after she had tried to leave me in pieces with her venom.

Then she would come back. Soft voice. Clean hands. A thin act of tenderness. That was never repair. That was the countdown. I learned the pattern in my bones. Play nice. Wait. The next cut is coming.

The next came the day after Trump hit Iran.

She blasted me with mentally ill poison and aimed it at the center of who I am. She let me know that I was her greatest shame. Her disappointment. A fraud who only believed what I believed for money and attention.

She said it knowing I had carried these convictions most of my life, through years when they cost me a mother and paid me nothing. She needed me agreeing. If I agreed, then she did not have to face what her politics had made of her: a mother who could flay her daughter and then disappear into faux moral superiority.

The irony would be funny if it had not been my life. She rages about Trump being a pedophile who ruins girls while playing death queen in her own house, a woman who tried to eat her daughter from the inside out and still wants credit for her conscience. She will rager about other people’s sins and never look down at the graves she walked me to.

That is the cult’s favorite costume: public fury, private rot.

I did not come out clean.

The anguish twisted me. I took that memory of my father beating her, the terror burned into a four-year-old’s soul, and I used it as fuel. I learned to hate men with a precision that felt like justice. I tore them apart from the inside. I knew how to get close enough to do real damage and leave them standing in it. Their subsequent abuse, real and imagined, all went into the same fire.

I was not always the safe, Godly woman I am today. I was what that house made me when it finished with a girl’s innocence: not just wounded. Lethal. That memory still sickens me. This ideology does not only take children from the womb. It takes the living woman and teaches her how to ruin other people so she will not have to sit alone with what was done to her.

There are nights it all hits at once. The 4-year-old watching repeat beatings she cannot stop. The child forced to hold a rape she cannot carry and should never have been asked to.

Share

The young woman talked into a killing so her mother could stay unrepentant. The adult standing in the ashes of another decade-long disappearance. The later knowledge that I had learned how to hurt the way I had been hurt. Anguish corrupts all it touches, but redemption is possible, and I am living proof.

There is blood on my hands, but I will make sure my daughter stays clean. I am raising her with love that does not require her agreement as rent, with values that do not need a dead child to protect a grown woman’s unrepentant sins, with support that lets her remain a child.

She wasn’t told at six that the world is a rape she must manage. She will not watch violence become the family language. She will not be walked into a grave and told it’s normal. She will not learn that love ends in a soul-shredding speech and a slammed door. I will stand between this death cult and the next girl.

The cycle stopped with me.

My daughter will never have to know what it cost.

The case itself is disturbing enough. Three innocent children are dead, strangled to death by their own mother in the basement of their home while their father went to run errands.

Dawson, Cora, and Callan are their names.

Three beautiful children lost to the entire world forever. Dawson wanted to grow up to be a firefighter. Cora really loved princesses. Callan didn’t have a chance to grow up and dream. May they rest in peace.

At first I thought this was strictly a tragic case of poor mental health care (I have since changed my mind based on the facts of the case), and I wrote about what I did to put an action plan in place should I slip into postpartum depression after the birth of our second child.

It included things like telling a close neighbor of mine that I had a problem with my first, and I also told another close friend. It included lining up and developing a relationship with a psychiatrist who could closely monitor me after birth. I also set up an appointment four weeks after birth, right around when my husband was going to return to work. I told my OBGYN team. I also discussed breastfeeding-safe medication with both my OBGYN team and a pediatrician.

My first issue with Lindsay Clancy was why she seemed to be bouncing around and switching providers while in the midst of a crisis. Especially an entirely predictable crisis given her history with postpartum anxiety with both Dawson and Cora.

Why did she not have a psychiatrist picked out ahead of time? After all, she was a labor and delivery nurse. And the issues that children of mothers with postpartum mental health issues are well documented. Things like speech delays and even attachment disorders are much more likely in children with mothers who have untreated postpartum mental health issues.

And while speech and language therapists are wonderful people who do great work, giving your kid attachment disorders can go on to give your children serious disruptions in their social relationships well into adulthood. The infant-mother dyad is one of the most foundational relationships a child has, and it sets the stage for the rest of their life.

In other words, if you’re not willing as a mom to care about yourself because you’re just far too depressed to do so, surely you can muster up the courage to get yourself together for your own children.

If I know this, as a lay person, surely a labor and delivery nurse would know this and know it more intimately than I do. After all, she was on the front lines of maternal healthcare.

And as more details about this case have come to light, the less sympathetic I have become.

She was offered an inpatient medication management program and a general mental health partial hospitalization program at the Women’s and Infants Hospital in December of 2022, and she was told to follow up about those treatment options with her psychiatrist, Dr. Tufts, but she failed to do so, and instead continued with just her short visits with Dr. Tufts.

Furthermore, there was zero sign of any psychosis before the incident; she only heard the voice during the murders, one time. Never once did she tell her doctors that she was having thoughts of harming the children.

She did manage to tell her husband and her mother, though. People point to this to state she was “crying out for help,” but I find it convenient that she told the very people who had no power or ability to help her.

She never told her doctors about her thoughts of harming the kids in spite of the fact that she had an appointment with Dr. Tufts the day before the murders.

You would think, given that this is your psychiatrist, that mentioning the fact that you had thoughts of harming the children would be something you would tell her. Yet neither Jollotta nor Tufts were told. Nor did she tell anyone when she voluntarily checked herself in at the McLean Center.

I guess when I look at all these facts laid out before me, I have a question: What more could’ve possibly been done to help Lindsay Clancy?

And for those who want to blame her family, how long should Patrick and her family have had to babysat Lindsay to prevent the unthinkable, especially when she lied to virtually everyone in her life about her mental state? Should Patrick have known she was lying and never left her alone with the kids despite her outward appearance of health?

He thought she was healthy. She just met with her doctor the day before. He was getting some food and MiraLAX.

When I think about what more could’ve been done to help Lindsay, the only things I can think of would be to roll back HIPAA laws so that Patrick was in full communication with her doctors, and the moment she expressed any thoughts about harming the kids, allowed her husband to involuntarily commit her for an indefinite period of time until she was no longer mentally ill.

You know, like the good old days in the 1950s.

I appreciate the conversation surrounding mental health, but I don’t appreciate the idea that Lindsay didn’t have any agency. Lindsay was in full control of her healthcare, her doctors, and what medications she took, and she had access to some of the best healthcare in the country.

Share

There is no doubt, based on her medical records, that she was having serious problems finding the right medications and was mentally ill (although I don’t believe the claim of “command hallucinations”).

But it was up to her to utilize the resources given to her. I firmly believe an inpatient stay to figure out her medications would’ve probably saved her children.

Instead, she chose to remain in the home, send Patrick on an errand, and she strangled her children to death.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.
-- Alexander Smith

It is a very Christian sentiment, and it got me thinking about how much society has changed over the years and about what it is that holds a society together. It isn’t surprising that this quote is unapologetically Christian. Smith was a Scottish poet who lived from 1829 to 1867.

He lived in a different world. A Christian world. At least with respect to the West.

The foundation of Western society, the common belief that held society together, was Christianity. Sure, there were different variants, often in conflict with each other, but our laws, morals, and social norms were based upon a common set of values which were largely taken from Christianity and the Bible. At least broadly speaking. Christianity wasn’t the entirety of Western civilization, but it supplied a shared moral framework within which those other institutions operated.

What is our common denominator today? Is it still Christianity? The table below shows that the percentage of people claiming to be Christian has declined significantly and, in some locations, it has declined to such an extent that Christianity is now a minority in some Western countries.

The decline in Western religiosity is a complicated topic with many mutually reinforcing changes. Science gradually replaced religion as the West’s primary explanatory authority for the natural world. Rising existential security reduced the need to explain things that once made life extremely precarious: infant mortality, famine, disease, premature death, war. Religion, which was once an important factor in a person’s identity, became just another choice a person could make. And the list goes on.

However, we don’t need to explain why things changed to recognize that they did—and that Christianity can no longer be considered our common belief system. As much as many of us may wish otherwise, it is not the glue that binds us together.

So, if Christianity isn’t holding Western countries together, what is? What has replaced Christianity as the bedrock of Western society?

“Liberal democracy?”

That is certainly something all Western countries have in common, but you can’t hold a society together with something so simple as “I have rights.” Rights conflict, so are as likely to cause conflict as to prevent it.

“Freedom” doesn’t work either, as it only unites us when it is threatened. And even then, it is only if we all agree what freedom means. And we don’t.

Many have suggested that “civility is the glue that holds society together.” It’s certainly a catchy quote. However, civility is less a glue than it is a means to avoid conflict. I can be polite to people in a foreign country without needing to have anything in common with them.

The longer I think about this and the deeper I dig trying to find bedrock, the more worried I become. I fear that over the last 50 years Western society has slowly replaced Christianity with “multiculturalism” and “tolerance,” and if I’m right, that’s a big problem.

“Multiculturalism,” as it is currently practiced in the West, requires adherents to believe one of two things, each wrong in its own way. The first requires supporters to believe that culture and values are somehow separate. That people from China, India, or Iran are just Westerners who dress differently, speak a different language, and eat different types of food. The second belief, which at least pays lip service to the existence of significant differences, assumes that cultures can coexist without shared values.

Both assumptions are seriously flawed. Culture and values are not distinct; they overlap. Different cultures may share some similar values, but they do not share them all. How different cultures are from each other greatly influences how likely it is that they can coexist. Believing otherwise is what has contributed to much of the strife resulting from mass immigration.

Share

“Perhaps,” you might say, “but certainly tolerance is a good thing, right?”

Sure, but “live and let live” is hardly a unifying creed. Tolerance may be a virtue, but it’s a negative virtue; it doesn’t tell us what to do, but rather what not to do. If anything, it promotes the fragmentation of society by promoting, or at least tolerating, the creation of sub-communities that have little in common other than some shared infrastructure and the right to vote.

I fear that in our efforts to “live and let live,” to believe that everyone is essentially the same and wants essentially the same things, we have planted the seeds of our own destruction.

My question to you is this: can a society survive indefinitely without a shared conception of what is good?

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

While he is gone, Lindsay Clancy takes their three children downstairs. Cora is five. Dawson is three. Callan is eight months old. She wraps exercise bands around their necks and kills them one by one. Then she cuts herself and jumps from a second-story window. She lives. They die. He comes home to a yard, a dying wife, and three small corpses. His 911 call sounded like an animal being ripped open.

The ending of that night was not a legal theory. It was three coffins smaller than coffee tables, slammed shut in a room that should have held toys. Cora. Dawson. Callan. You do not get to dress this up as “awareness.”

A jury in Massachusetts is deciding what to call her. Her lawyers want postpartum psychosis. If the jury buys it, she is a patient. If they do not, she is a murderer staring at life with no parole.

Now the part her fan club misses. Normal people call it reality.

I spoke with an Ivy League–trained psychiatrist who wants to stay nameless. Not a talk-show performer. A specialist who treats this collapse for a living. The expert was blunt. The drug mix in Clancy’s blood does not turn a nurse into a methodical child killer.

Those combined medicines make people foggy, slow, heavy. They smear a plan. They do not hone one. A person that medicated does not shove a husband out the door on a clock, march three children into a basement, and finish the job before the headlights swing back.

Fog does not keep time.

A plan does.

Postpartum psychosis almost always detonates in the first days or weeks after birth, not when the baby is already eight months old. Eight months is a long stretch to hunt for help, stockpile pills, write in journals, send a man on an errand, then swear the devil snatched the wheel at dinner. Clancy’s version does not sound like an illness. It sounds like a script written after the bodies went cold.

Then the second horror crawled in. This one wears ring lights.

After the trial clips spread, younger mothers started filming themselves scaring or hurting their own kids and calling it support for Lindsay. Shake the baby. Slap the toddler. Hover over the crib like a nightmare. Jam a phone in the face of a child who cannot leave and cannot understand.

They called it sisterhood.

They called it awareness.

It was neither.

It was a séance with an audience.

A baby does not know what a verdict is. A toddler does not know Lindsay Clancy. They know one face in the whole world is supposed to mean milk, love, and safety. Then that face transforms. The voice goes sharp. The hands get rough. A slab of black glass slides between them and the person who was supposed to keep them alive. The child pays in raw fear so the adult can play holy victim for strangers.

Clancy killed three children and a slice of the internet tried to sanctify her. The cameras did not stay in Duxbury. They slithered into other nurseries. States have sued Discord, Roblox, and Meta over platforms that treat kids like disposable currency and give a stage to these unholy performances. This won’t ever stop until social media companies decide to grow a conscience.

Here is why the abuse of men belongs in this story. The Clancy chorus did not build a new machine. It fed the old one: female pain is sacred, a child’s terror is content, and the man who objects is the monster.

If a culture can saint a mother who films a child’s panic, it can brand a father the threat the second he opens his mouth. That is the same spell, just pointed at a different body. First the child is the prop. Then the man is.

Workplaces learned the trick early. DEI rules taught offices to treat male workers like a stain, as if presence itself were the offense. MeToo started as a hunt for real predators and decayed into the same shortcut: an accusation is almost as good as proof. The gym made it content. A woman shows up in a skimpy outfit built to be stared at. A man looks. She films him. Suddenly he is the creep, and she is the victim. The phone does what it did over the crib. It picks a saint and a monster before anyone has time to think.

Female pain gets the halo. The man gets the rope. That is toxic femininity on full display.

A man ruined by a clip, a rumor, or a workplace script cannot sound the alarm about a crib. Fathers are not “in their feelings.” They are doing the math. A culture that can turn three murdered children into a trend, then film the next child’s panic for likes, is not a culture you trust with a locked door.

This environment endangers women. The men who used to come when they screamed have learned that scream can be bait. So, they hesitate. Then they stop coming. Not because the dark got smaller. Because the last decade taught them that running toward it can ruin them too, and the damsel was the monster all along.

Share

The house does not get safer when the men stop coming home. The thing in the basement does not grow a conscience. Women who clap for cruelty, fake wounds, and child-as-content will not inherit a quieter night.

Three children are already gone. Do not play shocked when men stay outside and let the dark eat whoever is left. All women are in danger because some women are insane. But that is not the scariest part. The scariest part is that the ranks of the insane keep swelling.

Which way, Western man?

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report exposed decades of industrial-scale horror. Predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs systematically groomed, raped, tortured and trafficked at least 250,000 vulnerable White British girls. What began with gifts, alcohol and drugs turned into gang rapes, beatings, waterboarding, trafficking and forced pregnancies. Entire towns became hunting grounds while authorities looked the other way.

Police, social services and politicians saw the pattern. They heard the screams. They chose silence because they feared the “racism” label more than they feared little girls being passed around like meat. Caution replaced prosecutions. Evidence vanished.

Community relations mattered more than broken children. The report demands justice through tougher sentencing, deportation of foreign offenders and proper recording of ethnicity and religion. Every leader who enabled this betrayal has blood on their hands.

Keir Starmer and the Labour Party stand exposed as cowards who let it happen on their watch.

Scotland delivered raw proof that the system has collapsed. Last August in Dundee, a 14-year-old girl grabbed a knife and axe to protect her 12-year-old sister from foreign men who were harassing and assaulting them. Video showed the terrified sisters pleading for the men to stop. One girl screamed “Don’t touch her!” while brandishing the blades in desperation. Police swooped in and charged the child defender with ‘offensive weapons’. The men walked free at first. Only this summer was the perpetrator convicted.

The case became known as Sophie of Dundee. A child forced to arm herself because the state failed to protect her family.

The pressure built until it exploded again. In June, in Edinburgh, a 36-year-old Scottish man snapped. Armed with knives, he went on a stabbing rampage against several Muslims, shouting that he was protecting the country from them. When the law fails citizens, vigilantes are inevitable.

Northern Ireland erupted into open revolt. Masked locals torched properties and clashed with police. In Newry, Mourne and Down, the New Republican Movement released a chilling video warning: “You have flooded our communities with military-age migrant men. We will not sit back and watch our culture and religion destroyed.”

They knew the addresses and vowed action to protect women and children. This followed the Ballymena riots sparked by sexual assault claims and the June attempted beheading on Belfast’s streets. Knife crime and sexual offences are surging while foreign-born numbers explode. The people have had enough of elites lecturing them about compassion from their safe ivory towers.

These flashpoints share the same rotten core. Brexit promised control but human rights laws and globalist pressure kept the floodgates open. George Soros and his Open Society Foundations bankroll a web of NGOs and campaigns that actively block migrant deportations, fight enforcement and expand inflows across Britain and Europe. They fund legal challenges that grind removals to a halt in the courts, attitude-shifting projects that rebrand open borders as moral necessity, and refugee networks that lobby relentlessly for more arrivals under the banner of compassion.

Predators keep entering while native communities are treated as expendable.

The fury finally broke the system. The grooming gangs scandal, the arrest of a child forced to defend her sister, the vigilante stabbing in Edinburgh and the open revolt in Northern Ireland created an unstoppable wave of public anger. Keir Starmer was forced out as Prime Minister in disgrace, his government collapsing under the weight of elite betrayal and failed policies that treated citizens as expendable.

And don’t be fooled by Andy Burnham stepping in. As Mayor of Greater Manchester, he commissioned reviews into the very grooming gang scandals that devastated Rochdale, yet whistleblowers like Maggie Oliver called them limited paper exercises where survivors were sidelined, professionals resigned in protest, and he protected the institutions rather than ripping out the rot. Replacing Starmer with Burnham is just swapping one face of the same failed establishment for another. It will be more of the same betrayal... or worse.

Share

Britain and Northern Ireland need real borders now. Criminal migrants and failed claimants must be removed fast. Dumping unvetted outsiders into communities without consent must end. The grooming gangs shattered thousands of little girls. A child in Scotland had to arm herself to save her sister. A man in Edinburgh took the law into his own hands. Northern Ireland watched an attempted beheading on its streets.

After years of sexual assaults, harassment and imported violence, the question burns hotter than ever. When will enough be enough? How many more must bleed before the elites are dragged from their bunkers and citizens are finally put first?

The streets have spoken.

The reckoning has begun.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

So, yes, there are people who like the WNBA, just not enough to make it profitable. Here is what NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had to say about the league’s financial situation in 2025:

Despite significant monetary support from the NBA, the WNBA is “still expected to lose $40 million this season. The tickets are very inexpensive, but even at low prices, we’re not selling enough tickets to run a viable business.”

My solution would be to give them all sticks, replace the basketball with a puck, and make them play on ice, but as a Canadian I may be biased.

It also wouldn’t fix the real problem, which is that women’s sports suck - at least compared to men’s. Don’t get me wrong, I say the same thing about semi-pro men’s leagues so I’m not being sexist. I just don’t like watching sports unless it’s being played by the best players.

This is where the WNBA’s second problem comes in. To improve the game, they kinda want to let men play.

That’s not the way the league will phrase it, of course.

Its collective bargaining agreement states that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” However, they don’t define “woman” or outline any hormone or biological criteria. They also released this statement recently:

“We embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change. Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm. We will continue to have hard conversations. But we will not be used as political pawns.”

Blah, blah, blah.

If you’re running a women’s league and you can’t come out and say, “no men allowed,” are you really a women’s league?

Wouldn’t it be more honest to rename the WNBA the WWWNBA, where the second and third Ws stand for “wink, wink.”

The desire to parrot DEI platitudes was all well and good when society was too cowed to question these conflicting statements, but then Sophie Cunningham had to open her mouth and spew this hateful and transphobic statement:

“I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Gasp!

Fortunately, the WNBA does not have any transgender women players who might take offense at the statement. Unless you count non-binary players, which I don’t for the same reason I don’t count unicorns as horses.

Still, there were plenty of “empathetic” people around to ensure that the WNBA aligned itself on the “right” side. By which I mean the side wanting biological men to play in women’s sports. This included Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, who had this to say:

“We need to protect trans kids. To me, it’s a human rights issue. Every kid has a right to sports.”

The league made its position clear(er) by calling on Big Brother to help:

“Online, report abusive posts and drown out the bots and bad actors. At home, tell your elected officials to strengthen Title IX.”

“Strengthen Title IX.”

The irony of making this statement while arguing that biological men should be allowed to play in women’s sports appears to have been lost on the league’s PR department. Well, it’s not like Media Studies is heavy on logic.

It’s obvious that the WNBA’s brain trust wants to support women and trans women (read: men). That’s their right, of course. And honestly, what could possibly go wrong by attempting to sit on a fence dividing reality from the world of make-believe?

Wait! Breaking news! It appears that ex-NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are claiming to be women and have vowed to enter next year’s WNBA Draft.

How brave! How heroic! Two marginalized transwomen striving to bust down the barriers of hate that are keeping them oppressed. “Transwomen are women!”

Inspiring.

The WNBA must be overjoyed!

Wait! I’m getting an update on this breaking news. It appears that the league does not believe the claims of these two strong and beautiful women, going so far as to denounce their efforts as “bad-faith” actions meant to “demean or marginalize others.”

Share

I’m shocked! I thought “your gender is what you say it is.” I thought “no one can tell you your gender.” How can an anti-hate task force call into question a person’s right to identify as they see fit?

I can just see the next hateful step: a biological definition of “woman.” Who will define it? What if there are multiple conflicting definitions?

Who am I to believe? Is there no slogan that will save me?

Wait...

#BelieveAllWomen.

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece
The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Here’s my review: it was pretty good. Not as bad as I feared, nor as good as I’d hoped or been led to believe. That’s the culture war/Hollywood hype for you.

Nolan has directed 13 movies.

I wouldn’t put this in his top 5, but that’s not surprising. Nolan had an epic run from 2005 to 2014, and every single movie during that period is superior to The Odyssey.

Why do I say that?

Simple, I’ve seen every one of those films numerous times - I’m thinking of rewatching The Prestige as I type this - and I doubt I’ll ever watch The Odyssey again.

The Odyssey kept my attention but lacked emotional depth, genuine excitement, and any memorable dialogue. I’d put it on par with Dunkirk. Probably a 7 out of 10, mainly because I wouldn’t give it a 6 and there’s just no way it deserves an 8.

But who am I kidding? You didn’t come for my opinion on the quality; you came to answer one question...

How woke is it?

Woke enough that it’ll likely qualify and be nominated for many Oscars.

Yes, the casting was “modern.” Or DEI influenced or engaged in “race swapping”. Pick the term you prefer. However, if you want to win an Oscar, you have to play the game.

At this point, if you go to a Hollywood movie you have to be willing to ignore this type of casting. If you can’t, you shouldn’t bother going at all. That said, I do have some thoughts on some of the roles.

Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the movie. Perhaps knowing in advance helped. It was also a fairly small role. This was the Odyssey, not the Iliad after all.

Would her beauty “launch a thousand ships?” Maybe, but I wouldn’t have been on any of them. She’s hardly hard on the eyes, but I would have went with someone else. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder though.

I didn’t have an issue with Zendaya playing Athena either. I won’t explain why, as it would be a bit of a spoiler. I feel bad just telling you that.

The most visible DEI casting was probably Himesh Patel as Eurylochus. Again, it didn’t bother me. Largely because I like the guy as an actor. You may accuse me of being inconsistent in my approach to DEI casting. Guilty. You could cast Denzel Washington as Helen of Troy and I’d be fine with it.

There were however two roles that I found… jarring. And it didn’t help that they were the first two people to speak in the movie.

The first was “Elliot” Page. Every time Page spoke it was annoying. The whole trans creepiness issue aside, I find a 5’1” 110 lb. person playing the role of a Greek warrior as ridiculous.

“The bard” spoke second and something about the accent just didn’t sit right. I had heard that some people found the American accents in the movie annoying. I’m not sure why? What did they expect ancient Greek accents? The accent of this particular character more than any other stood out so I researched it the next day and discovered:

“Travis Scott (playing the bard/Phemius) used his natural American/Houston (Southern/Texan-influenced) accent and speaking style, with rhythmic, rap-influenced delivery.”

Was it the accent? Was it the rap? Was it a combination? I don’t know but I did not like it when that character spoke. Luckily, he only spoke twice.

There were also a couple of non-DEI issues:

• Penelope (Anne Hathaway) complained at one point that only men could rule. This caused me to roll my eyes. I’m sorry, but the presence of a “girl boss” in 700 BC was a little too out of place.

• Telemachus (Tom Holland) always used “dad” instead of “father.” It sounded juvenile. You may not think it’s such a big deal, but consider this minor change:

Now that you’ve come this far...

I brought you all here because...

I want you to look at this movie in another light. Yes, it engages in race swapping, but look deeper, look at the themes:

Do these seem like beliefs that progressives would value? Unlikely. In fact, if we look at these six themes “through a progressive lens,” we can see just how negatively we would expect them to be viewed.

• The Journey Within - the individual is primarily a node in overlapping group hierarchies of power, privilege, and oppression. Advancing group equity is the goal rather than personal excellence.

• Fate vs. Free Will - Outcomes are attributed mainly to systemic forces rather than individual decisions, habits, and competence.

• Home and Longing - The private home is a patriarchal space of unpaid domestic labor, gender hierarchy, and isolation. The bourgeois nuclear-family household is a capitalist institution that privatizes care work and reinforces inequality.

• Deception and Wisdom - Concealing one’s “true self” is described as internalized oppression or a privilege that sustains the status quo. Public disclosure—coming out, centering identity narratives, or making the private public—builds solidarity and challenges norms. The private sphere itself is a historically patriarchal or hierarchical space that shields inequality.

• Human vs. Nature - Nature is not to be confronted but instead nurtured and protected because environmental harm falls disproportionately on marginalized communities, future generations, and the Global South. Climate justice, environmental racism, and sustainability for human equity are central.

• Love and Loyalty - Monogamy arose with private property to ensure male control of inheritance and undisputed heirs. It subordinated women while often allowing male infidelity. The monogamous family is a historical stage, not an eternal one.

The themes found in The Odyssey are on display in many Nolan movies. He is not a woke director, but one who is “playing the game” to ensure his film is viewed and celebrated.

Share

I want you to consider something: that The Odyssey is not a woke Hollywood movie, but something else, something that we, to the right of progressives, should support.

Who will celebrate this film most enthusiastically? Progressives.

Who will shower it with awards? Progressives.

And who will spend three hours absorbing a story whose deepest assumptions contradict many of their own? Progressives.

The Odyssey isn’t a progressive weapon.

It’s a Trojan horse.

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

That said, I prefer kids; they’re cuter, more fun to play with, and serve an important function in society. Ya, I’m taking a brave stance, right?

What’s the connection? For one, behavior. Pets require their owners to train them, while kids need attentive, responsible parents.

“Owner?” you might say, “don’t you mean ‘pet parent?’” My response? Come here so I can punch you. I don’t know which statement is more annoying, “we’re pregnant” or “I’m a pet parent.” No matter how much you love your pet, you aren’t its parent.

A little while back, I wrote an article about Zoomers, the cost of lunch, and the importance of budgets. I had no intention of returning to the subject until I listened to a podcast recently that informed me that there are more pets in Australia than people.

Insert jaw drop here

What does this have to do with budgets, you might ask? Well, during the discussion, one of the hosts mentioned that he budgets $10,000 ($6,984 USD) per year for his dog.

Insert jaw drop here

Math is hard!

There are two issues at play here; the first is money. Young people complain, with justification, that there is an affordability crisis and that housing is beyond reach. Yet many seem resistant to making the necessary sacrifices required to achieve their financial goals.

I covered why eating out regularly and carrying credit card debt is a bad idea in the last article. If you don’t understand this, you may as well stop reading and go treat yourself to a $28 lunch - after you buy your next tattoo, of course - because you are beyond saving.

However, these costs would seem to be minor when compared to pet ownership.

This is no fringe issue; ~45–60% (rising) of Zoomers have pets. Many of them have multiple pets.

Pets would appear to be like tattoos; once you get one, you can’t stop yourself from getting another. This is no small issue when talking about budgets.

I have a pet. I’ve had a few. However, I didn’t get one until other financial matters were addressed. There’s a word for this: “priorities.”

Complaining about the cost of living, housing, groceries, etc., while owning expensive pets is an example of an inability to prioritize.

How big of an issue is it?

I’d say big since “nearly 40% of pet owners recently surveyed by LendingTree said they had gone into debt because of their pet. And among households with pet debt, nearly 1 in 4 have at least $1,000 in pet debt.”

How you spend your money is your decision; just don’t bitch to me about how hard your life is.

“Pets are people!”

The second issue with “runaway pet ownership” affects more than the pet owner; it affects society at large. Let’s call it “misplaced values.” This is where “pet parent” comes into play.

If you follow the news, you likely know that there is an immigration debate going on. This debate is influenced by declining fertility rates in the West, where countries have seen rates fall below the replacement level.

Pet ownership isn’t the cause, but it certainly isn’t helping. Especially when so many people identify as “pet parents” and put pet ownership, yes, ownership, on an equal footing as parenthood.

The fact that there are more pets in Australia than people came as a surprise, so I looked into a few other countries, and while it’s not quite that bad, it’s not good. Especially when we compare it to the number of children each country has.

For three countries with insufficient fertility rates, having more pets than children is a disturbing sign. It’s also getting worse as people replace having children with having pets.

Note: If you say, “fur babies,” I will have you killed.

A “simple” plan

Would these countries be better off if more people had chosen children over pets? How many more children would need to exist for their fertility rates to be above replacement?

It’s a hard question to answer. You can’t directly convert today’s child population into a fertility rate. However, you can estimate how many additional children would have been born over the past 18 years if each country had maintained replacement-level fertility (about 2.1 children per woman) instead of its actual fertility rate.

How many kids aren’t being born because “pet parents” equate cats and dogs to people? Hard to say, but society would be better off if we had more children.

How do we change this?

I’m generally against taxes, but if I thought it would fix the problem, I’d suggest a very high tax on pet ownership. Given the numbers, it might even fix the budget issues at the same time.

It won’t work, though. With pet ownership sitting well north of 50%, it would never pass. We’ll just have to fall back on the old tried-and-true methods.

Guilt and shame.

So here is a message from us “olds” to you young’uns: we’re not getting any younger, and we want to be grandparents at some point. I get it, kids are expense and you’re “not ready.”

Who ever was?

They don’t hand out books that say, “here’s how to be a parent.” Actually, it’s worse than they do, but they all contradict each other. You make mistakes, and you learn as you go. Just like everyone has. Yes, it’s hard work. And expensive.

Share

But it’s much more rewarding than pet ownership. Something you can’t understand until you have a child. My advice to pet owners in general and “pet parents” specifically?

Grow up! Start having kids. Your dog isn’t going to visit you in your old age home. Neither will your cat. Worse, if you die alone, your cat will probably eat you. We’ll never solve the fertility crisis as long as society puts pets on equal footing with people.

So “get busy!” I’ll even, grudgingly, allow you to say “we’re pregnant” if it will seal the deal. Until then, I’m thinking of selling bumper stickers that say, “Save the West, punch a pet parent.”

Any takers?

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

In other words, nobody is going to make a movie about me.

It would be worse if I were to suddenly come down with a rare terminal disease or handicap. Angry people bemoaning their fate do not make for inspiring movie subjects.

There are many movies about inspirational people overcoming hardships, the most famous of which is probably The Miracle Worker, which tells the story of Helen Keller. There are many others, of course, including:

My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown, the story of an Irish man born with cerebral palsy, who could control only his left foot, but who grew up in a poor working-class family and became a writer and artist.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the tale of journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome. He wrote the entire book by blinking his left eyelid, which took him two months, working 3 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Me? I am sitting up here in a cottage in Ontario during the Canada Day/Independence Day week in a crappy mood because there’s no A/C. It’s too hot, there are too many people, the bugs are biting, and the internet sucks.

Nope, I’m not an inspiration. I have some consolation, though. At least I’m not European.

In Canada, if I owned this place, I could run out and get an air conditioner and eliminate one of my problems. Getting rid of the bugs and people would probably require carpet bombing the area with napalm, and I think that’s still illegal.

Europeans are not so lucky.

As I write this, the official tally in Europe has the heat-related death toll at 5,606. Statistical modeling suggests the true death toll from the late-June heatwave has already exceeded 20,000 people.

Contrast these numbers with the US. While this year’s numbers are not yet out, last year the US saw 2,394 heat-related deaths. For the entire year.

A/C is a lifesaver! So why won’t more Europeans adopt it?

Europeans restrict and resist air conditioning due to a combination of high energy costs, strict historic preservation laws, architectural challenges, and deep-rooted environmental values.

I’m not going to take issue with the architectural challenges or historic preservation laws - though you’d think a portable unit would address both concerns. I do, however, have a problem with “environmental values.”

Note: high energy costs can be grouped into “environmental values” because decisions based on climate change are what are driving those costs.

Are high energy costs and high heat-related death rates necessary? Well, it depends on where you stand regarding climate change.

I know it exists. I’m old enough to have lived through winters in the 70s and 80s and know that winters are a lot milder than they used to be. I just don’t lose much (any) sleep over it because I know that the solution is more technology, not more government. The only way out is through - unless you’re willing to depopulate the planet (i.e., kill a lot of people).

Europeans, or at least the ones making the decisions, are of a different mindset. They believe if we don’t make drastic changes, the world is doomed. The predictions are certainly scary. According to environmentalists, the Arctic summer sea ice will completely melt in 2000, 2013, 2016, 2020, and between 2027 and 2030 - stay tuned for an updated date next year.

You know who also changes dystopian predictions when the predicted date passes? Cultists.

Why are so many Europeans dying from the heat? Because the climate cultists are killing them to “save the world.” There’s another word for killing to stave off an environmental concern. The word is “sacrifice.” European climate cultists are sacrificing citizens.

They’re not the first to think human sacrifice will save them:

The Aztecs cut open the chest and extracted the still-beating heart of victims because they feared the stopping of the sun, catastrophic droughts, and famines.

The Incas practiced Capacocha—the ritual sacrifice of children—during or following major environmental disruptions. They selected physically perfect children, walked hundreds of miles to high Andean Mountain peaks, drugged them, and then left them to freeze to death in the extreme cold, suffocated, or killed by a heavy blow to the head, then buried in ritual tombs.

Did it work? About as effectively as European climate laws work at stopping climate change. But at least the Aztecs and Incas got a show.

Here’s my proposal to the Europeans: legalize A/C, select 5000 Europeans at random, and throw them into a volcano (It seems like the most poetic approach).

Share

It won’t do any good, but you could still say you’re fighting climate change (cultists will believe anything after all). As an added bonus, you could stream it pay-per-view into people’s homes (ala Eurovision ) and use the proceeds to subsidize their electricity bills.

The same number of people would die, but at least you’d all be comfortable in the summer.

About the Author

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech
😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece, the single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.