It has to be the warmest weekend on record for the Big Sweaty Apple. All day and night, sirens wail, mostly ambulances picking up passed-out bodies on the walkways and, I assume, tossing them into the East River for a shock-revival. The ring brings back stark memories of the Covid-era, when tocsins sounded clockround, announcing another pair of lungs was in retreat.

All those medics racing plaid routes through the city, A/C cranked down, so many compressors pumping the gift of chilled draughts, bringing an Arctic curative to the torrid masses.

And here I sit, sweating in my own bedsit, facing my own climate-control unit, which has, by legal writ, been permanently set to tea-warm 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Technically, the display reads 25.556°C, since our Mayor, after imposing his earth-saving measure to arrest apartment temperature control, spent an undisclosed sum replacing every single air-condition box across the five boroughs. The units were specially shipped from Europe, so read a foreign measure, because, our conscientious Mayor assured us, the “Celsius scale, like the metric system, just makes more logical sense.”

And I agree, to a point. Look, I voted for Mayor Mamdani. I considered him a refreshing splash of Hudson drift after the tepid, rancid mayoralty of Eric Adams. My apartment isn’t rent-controlled, but I held out a slither of hope he’d interdict my annual rent hike anyway. Boundless hope—the socialist’s currency even after hyperinflation!

Well, no new rent freezes have been announced. Instead, we get a halt on lowering indoor ambience. At first, I didn’t think it would be a sweat-induced swamp. Isn’t 78° lower than 80°? It couldn’t be that bad, right? And doesn’t the rest of the industrialized world adhere to the same thermo-standard? Why not us extravagant Americans?

I switched on CNN to see if there was an update, or maybe a budge in official government policy. The anchors appear cool, unbothered. Men in three-piece suits; women in dark dresses. Not one dot of perspiration running their foundation. How are they not soaking through their tailored wear? There. That chubby guy mouthing platitudes about “working people”. His shirt should be translucent by now. What is happening? How do they all appear so put together and not ruffled in smearing heat shimmers?

My TV starts to blink, like its heated innards are whirring in a steaming pace. I click it off. Seconds later my mom calls. To check in and gloat about her Freon-sprinkling A/C, no doubt. She never puts down anyone in a consciously malevolent way, but in the manner of carefree retired conservatives: that any practice lacking ostentatious consumption is strange, stupid, vaguely criminal. I pick up to: “Hot enough there for yaaa?!” Her dry laugh muffles through the audio-out earpiece. I can’t tell if it’s her cracked voice or my phone malfunctioning due to contact with the rills of sweat running down my temple.

“Yeah, Mom, it’s hot here. I told you that yesterday.”

“Well, Fox says you’re all sitting in self-imposed saunas thanks to your ridiculous Mayor. It’s like I said since you were in diapers. Liberals just want us to be miserable. It’s the truth!”

“Yeah, Mom, I hear you.”

I can also hear her nippy Bichon Frisé yapping in the background; it’s a squeak of a bark that, I imagine, projects a fluffy vapor cloud. My mother never notches the thermostat above 62° in the summer. Al Gore can suck rocks on his private jet, she insists. But she makes an occasional $1,000 deposit into the bank account she started for me when I was 16, so I tolerate these humble-mock conversations.

“Well, I just wanted to call and make sure you haven’t melted. Try to stay cool! And hydrate! Although I wouldn’t drink any of that filthy tap water. Buy a bottle from those little shops you like!”

“Mom, New York City’s drinking water is supposed to be the cleanest in the world.”

A pause.

She sighs. “With all the trash piling up on the streets? And the sun baking it all, making it stink to high heaven? That can’t be good for the water. You need to make sure you stay cool!”

“OK, Mom. I will.”

“Good. I hear your father calling. He’s tryin’ to install a sill bird feeder so we can keep the window open and see chickadees come grub.”

“Isn’t it 110 in Sarasota right now? How can you have a window open?”

A scratchy guffaw. “Your father turned the ‘stat down to sixty on the dot. It’s Nova Scotia in this Sunshine State! Love you much, keep cool.”

If my mother bid adieu with any other mindless borax, it was hushed by the film of hidrosis on my phone screen. The stuffy, molten atmosphere wasn’t relenting, only roasting hotter. Out of desperation, I jammed my thumb at the downarrow on my A/C. No change. I pushed a few more times to no effect. The number couldn’t crack the floor. Its artificial output kept a warm breath on my pinking face.

“Forget this,” I grumbled. Sitting stagnant in a stale hothouse was maddening. Every residence and business in the city was mandated to this mire. Even the subway was a veritable seventh circle of Hell. The only wisp of refreshment to be found was in a taxi. I didn’t think; I slipped on a pair of thinning sandals, snatched my keys and stole out the door. An arduous four flights descending into flaming perdition later, I emerged onto a soupy 83rd Street. Seconds within entering the sultry slough, I second-guessed. Calling the ovened outside an inferno insults the divinely inspired idea of “hot.” This was walking barefoot on Pompeii’s caldera just after its magma upchuck. In my haste, I didn’t think to grab my Camelbak. Before I could turn heel, a familiar yellow ride pulled around 2nd Avenue. Unthinking, my hand darted. The sun was too searing to see if its light flashed. But chances were it’d be empty. The sidewalk was blessedly vacant; no competition.

The cab pulled up. Its windows were curiously open. As soon as my fingers grasped the door latch, I could tell something was wrong. Bright red. My entire body felt it. “Sorry, no A/C,” the swarthy driver barked. “In or out?”

“Out!” I retreated. Stumbling back to the sidewalk felt like I was treading sand. The taxi zoomed off in hazy whoooooosh, sending a scalding Sirocco in its wake. My throat quinched. I desperately craned my neck to find another golden chariot. Huzzah! Sweet deliverance! Another taxi whipped around the same corner. I could just make out beyond the salty beading in my eyes that its windows were closed. As it motored closer, its light was visible. My arm once more shot out.

The next minute was a desperate blur. When my senses straightened, I was inside, cool, life-giving, machine-manufactured air blasted my face, filled my pores, lanced my body. I had no recollection of what address I gave the driver. It was irrelevant. The meter climbed furiously. No matter. My father’s credit card would catch it.

The first jut went unnoticed in my wintery spa. When we hung a left on East End Avenue, the bucking became unignorable. A string of expletives roused me. “FUGGIN THING AGAIN!!!

The stalking heat slowly blanketed my being again. “Can you turn up the A/C,” I meekly petitioned, dreading the response.

“NOOOOOOO BUST DAMN FUGGIN TING BUST!!!”

Hotter. My skin flushed. The familiar blaze reignited. “Pull over!” I shouted. The taxi came to a shunting halt. I hopped out, hellward, stammering to the sidewalk, not even bothering to pay. The driver was too distracted to ask, raging as he popped the simmering hood.

Once again, I was a lone traveler in the Hall of Dis. The street was empty but for my stark mad cabbie, who was now screaming into his phone while removing his stained shirt. No taxis were milling. I set off, feeling parched, down the Saharan street in search of an oasis, otherwise known as a bodega. Water. Needed water. My steps trudged heavier as I went. The heat numbed all feeling. I kept on, peering down byways, finding blank storefronts. Was the city abandoned? Everyone flying north, away from Manhattan’s sky’s relentless death rays? My body sagged. I could barely arch my neck, when I managed one last look ‘round. Gracie Mansion! I was next to Gracie Mansion! That’s when the blurriness took me.

The first thing I noticed before my eyes lifted was coolness. A restorative cold. My eyes shaded up to a familiar face. Mayor Mamdani! That toothsome grin, behind which lurk a thousand redistribution plans.

“Hey…hey…you all right?” the Mayor asks in soft, smooth tones.

“Yes, I…” as I start to rise, I see them. Two aides, young, female, in flowly shifts, holding iPhones so steady they look like manikins.

“Scarlet, Sheila. Make sure you’re set at 60 fps,” he demands. Back graciously to me: “Let’s get you to your feet.” The Mayor hoists me up with a rough lift before steadying me. “You see, New Yorkers,” he turns to face both phones. “This is why we urge you to stay inside and keep cool as much as possible. We found this gentleman struggling outside, downed by the heat.” His white-picket smile beamed. “Times are tough. But together, we’ll get through this.”

I stood there like a prop, grinning bewilderingly, confused as to why the Mayor’s residence felt so much cooler than my own arid apartment. That’s when I saw it, just off the cameras’ scope. A thermostat. Set to 62°.

“And remember, don’t try to tool with your city-provided A/Cs. The Department of Climate Integrity can detect if any units are tampered with. Twenty-five is the legally mandated degree floor. Like I always say: Collective action is necessary for collective benefit. We’re all in this together.”

A welcoming chill down my back, I smiled vacantly for the cameras.

The post Collective Action Is Necessary for Collective Benefit appeared first on Free the People.

No, I’m not railing about a lack of whoopee, although a U.S. of Eh! that isn’t tumbling in the hay is a problem. (Maybe all that adolescent anxiety so fretted about would lighten if hormonally angsty sophomores would let nature take its libidinal course in the rear of a relative’s rusted hatchback.)

In a country founded by uptight Puritans, bouts of vice-shame periodically arise. Abolition; prohibition; blue laws; curtailing public smoking; affirmative action—all have been the result of American repentance. These interdictions were enforced by democratically enacted legislation. But what of this new forswearing, that has nothing to do with bills or regulations?

The nominative-dystopian firm Monitoring the Future reports that youthful drinking has hit an unprecedented bottom. The abstentia-dive is a shock to anyone over the age of 30 who watered down their stepmom’s tequila bottle. Back in the hairy 70s, over 90 percent of high school seniors admitted to taking a swallow or two of fun suds. Last year? Less than half of matriculating students copped to the occasional imbibing. Should this trend continue apace, Carrie Nation will break from Hell to take the nation’s reins, unresisted.

Sunny-side columnist Arthur Brooks is glum about the lack of teenage tippling. But his concern is more abstract. He writes, “the new finding also indicates a trend that is distinctly less cheery: an unwillingness to take risks associated with adult behaviors.”

Risk-taking, Brooks avers, doesn’t just lead to maturity—steel only forged by fire and the like—but is essential to America’s dynamic success. A generation unwilling to beat its own path won’t vote to maintain chancer capitalism. Softened, weakened, enervated, the plaintive young will settle for easy redistributionism, convinced cushy life is the product of a lone vote.

Brooks may have a point—a finger or two of incisive observation. But there is more fundamentally wrong with a drying cohort.

Economist Christopher Snowden sees the lack of regular soaking as an existential threat. He decries all manner of “sober influencers,” which may sound like it applies to wrinkled Sunday School teachers, but refers to “gym bros and longevity-obsessed billionaires” who shout through jump-cut vertical videos that you’ll never rise above a lumpy-couch existence if you don’t drop booze. Temperance isn’t a plight exclusive to the underage. Gallup reports that only half of Americans routinely get a bun on, the lowest rate in the poll’s recorded history. Kentucky, that great bourbon-pumping well, houses 16 million untapped barrels of devil’s buttermilk. It’s a dark day when Jack Daniels struggles to ply his wares.

The mass unlushing, Snowden suggests, is no less than a foul omen for Western civilization. Citing philosopher Edward Slingerland, he avows modern liberal society was built on a foundation of empties. Liquor “loosens the tongue, emboldens the heart and lightens the soul.” It even inspires normal, workaday men to, after a few draughts with the boys, drop bourgeois inhibition and rise up violently against their tax-happy oppressors. “Rum and whiskey. Cider and beer and porter. Wine and brandy. Punch and syllabub…these drinks helped disparate colonists become Americans,” scholar Brooke Barbier argued in Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution.

Noble and inspiring it may be to watch a ragged working stiff down copious fathoms of brave juice, pull out his phone, dial up his boss, and let loose a string of expletives so severe that John Winthrop’s grave would crack and crumble, that’s not reason enough to fear America shrugging off the sauce. The dram-drop-off is a deficiency of a first-order good.

Roger Sterling, as always, can’t be topped: “My generation, we drink because it’s good, because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar, because we deserve it. We drink because it’s what men do.” His generation was one and the same of those who bashed the blamed Nazis and showed up the French in dipsomania while doing so. After liberating the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, the ruddy Yanks frigated home to build the modern economy, with the hard-driving nine-to-five, followed by bibulous evening, served chilled in a long-stemmed V glass by your gravid wife.

These men, while no fewer than one enjoyed a nooner, treated potent potables as they should be treated: a reward for a hard day’s toil. Alcohol encouraged the famous Protestant work ethic, promising a pleasant lift after hours of busting pick. When famous fuddler Norman Mailer begged off the highballs, he lamented “[i]t just means there’s nothing to look forward to at the end of the day.”

Non-drinkers are unbearable bores, parched of humor and joviality. Consider the sozzle-scoffers in your workplace. They’re almost certainly shirty tattles who run to H.R. seconds after hearing an off-color joke about F.B.I. crime statistics. Or listen to the Twitter drips warning that bracers have “no single benefit.” Not one? The endorphin rush from the first sip of an ice-cold ale has been one of the biggest benefits to all of mankind throughout history. It sure beats downing a G.N.C. industrial-size canister of S.S.R.I.s.

Steven Bartlett, who, as far as I can tell, is one of those celebrity C.E.O.s who doesn’t produce anything other than make viral speeches about waking up at 4:30 AM to check futures prices in Tokyo, made headlines for decrying a three-day hangover he suffered after downing three glasses of wine. Of course, his sluggardness wasn’t the grape’s error; it was a personal skills issue.

Spirits, like anything quaffed, can have a varying effect on the lapper. But there’s a word reserved for those who, by biological build or temperament, can’t hold their grog. They’re weenies. Whether sipping a sole glass of Pouilly-Fuissé, or downing an Igloo decanter of neon-red rotgut, drinking alcohol is a good and fun thing. End of argument. Cin cin!

The post Falling Cheers in America appeared first on Free the People.

I was in media res of shoveling a handful of America 250 Doritos in my maw, washing down the vestigial flakes with a can of America 250 Mountain Dew, while occasionally popping a couple America 250 Skittles or M&Ms (both exclusively tricolored) in between gulps of my fatty, nutritionless, MSG-laden snack. Just as the notification dinged, I hoisted by sluggard limbs off my hard-creased couch to the bathroom, where I, upon emptying my bowels of heaven knows how many pounds of ultra-processed starch, wiped with quad-ply America 250 Charmin Ultra. Then I washed my hands using America 250 Dial hand soap. Finally, I dried my mitts with a single sheet of America 250 Bounty.

Before heading back to the sofa to resume the Netflix “Stranger Things” marathon, sponsored by America 250, I swung by the fridge to snag a couple of slices of America 250 Oscar Mayer bologna, which I housed feral-style like Tony Soprano.

My gaze wandered to the box of America 250 Star-Spangled Blueberry Pop-Tarts, the next quarry in my hanker-hunt. That’s when my slimy, pulsing fingers fished my phone out of my America 250 Wrangler pocket and brought it before my hazed eyes. The alert overshadowed the update on my America 250 FanDuel parlay and the reminder to check out my favorite OnlyFans model’s new America Nude-Titty gallery.

“Breaking news: U.S. inflation jumps for third-straight month.”

Knowing my cardboard-pastry supply was running low, I made a prudent move in such a cashcrunched fiscal environment. I quickly nuke an America 250 limited-edition Nathan’s hot dog-stuffed Hot Pocket, bolting the entire scalding loaf right out of the microwave. The boys of Pointe du Hoc couldn’t be prouder of my farsighted patriotism!

In the past month, the Musk messageboard X has been a-chatter over the lack of enthusiasm for the 250th anniversary of our country’s break with Great Britain. Blue ticks repeat variations of “nobody cares about America anymore.” Writing in Commentary, Robert Pondiscio recalls the pride he felt on the bicentennial, when parades and TV specials and periodical covers were one long tapestry of red, white, and whoohooo! Now? We’ve gone from Castle Bravo to a sparkler. “Affection for the country must be hedged, explained, contextualized,” Pondiscio drearily explains. Rod Dreher echoes the mope in his Substack newsletter. In 1976, he recalls, “people were proud to be American. It doesn’t feel that way now.” Axios parrots the dolorousness with its feature, “America approaches 250 with its best days in doubt.”

(I could pull the garden-variety columnist hack of citing the oft-placed opinion poll, “Is the country heading in the right direction,” which probably hasn’t registered positive since the Truman Administration.)

These dirges, which all chime like ad-libbed laments that frequently fill out op-ed sections in major dailies, are workaday prosiness. We Yanks aren’t excited to ring in 250 years of constitutionally delimited self-governance? The entire bag of America 250 Hershey Kisses I just inhaled begs to differ. Every single Walmart aisle is stuffed with patriotic plasticine trinkets and gadgets that are wholly unnecessary but impossible to resist. America 250 ironing board; America 250 lemon peeler; America 250 disc golf set; America 250 cornholl boards; America 250 toasters; America 250 coasters; America 250 vuvuluzas; America 250 ratchet set; American 250 John Deere ride-on mower; America 250 F-150; America 250 Cool Whip with added sugar, transfat, and a variety of indescribable industrial chemicals typically used to process petroleum into unleaded gas.

Our commercial republic is honoring its own longevity with its best feature: endless enterprise!

But all is not well in the American body politic, and it’s not just the flood of microplastics replacing our blood cells. This historic birthday isn’t all fireworks, 12-gauge-shootoffs, and Beach Boys tunes on repeat. Ominous storm clouds gather behind our Grand Old Flag. They portend a scourge that’s toppled presidents, economies, societies, self-confidences. Abraham Lincoln famously described Americans as the “almost chosen people.” But instead of siccing locusts on a MidEast pharaoh (we prefer Tomahawk missiles), it is the United States that suffers under the plague of price-jumps.

Donald Trump was elected, in part, due to his predecessor’s inflation vault. Now he’s mired in the same soup: an incorrigible need to spend and borrow, which requires artificially low interest rates that, invecim, fuel monetary pumping. So the cost of all those America 250 novelties keeps its stubborn ascension. The escalating price tag of America 250 bibelots is the real damper on national sentiment, worse than sheets of rain on a truckfull of peony shells.

An uncomfortable question must be posed: Was it worth overtossing the British yoke if, two and a half centuries later, we have to pay $7-per-pound of ground beef?

“[A] country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations,” is how Emerson once praised America. Now it’s too high an expectation to not feel burgled at the grocery store.

Maybe it’s best to enjoy a houseful of America 250 merch, even if your wallet thins to nothing.

The post An Expensive America 250 appeared first on Free the People.

Are you tired of the same old politicians, standing on stage, giving rehearsed stump speeches? Are you sick of hearing the same platitudes recited over quiet applause? Have you had it up to here waiting countless hours in line at some grimy hall only to listen to somnolescent talking points recited by cookiecut puppet in a two-dollar suit who probably moved to your state last week?

Well, forget all those wasted hours and bored tears. You deserve a politician who matches all your hopes and dreams to a tee. Ignore the fuddy-duddy admonishing about pols being poor role models, who can never mirror your aspirations. That’s outmoded, outdated, dusty, and dead thinking.

*Cue to color.* Look all around you at the wonders of artificial intelligence! With just a few keystrokes, those wonderful cyber syntha-brains can create anything you imagine, from clips of cats singing Christmas carols, to minivideos of your best friend soiling himself in front of the Dalai Lama, to putting your favorite childhood cartoon characters in tumblesheet situations. (If you, uh, enjoy such licentious things.)

Hell, you can even reimagine yourself cured of la petite mort via reconstructive JPEG.

So why not harness the limitless labor of fabrica-bots to burnish your preferred barnstormer?

Introducing the new hustings hunk: former representative of Michigan’s 8th congressional district, the esteemed Mike Rogers!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Mike who? Or: Isn’t Mr. Rogers pushing daisies? Or even: You mean that softball dad who stains his Nike Monarchs verdant while cutting the grass on Sundays?

Of, for our aspie libertarian readers: You mean that neocon warmonger who shills for Raytheon and gnaws on the bones of incinerated Muslim children???

To which I laconoically reply: Yes. That Mike Rogers.

Forget everything you knew about this milquetoast GOP toady, and whichever post offices he’s named. The erstwhile congressman is a pioneer. His campaign for U.S. Senate is utilizing advanced technology in a way that will absolutely humiliate his opponent and win him resounding victory. Rogers is riding the wave of the political future… today!

His secret sauce, his dash of glitter, his egg in his Midwestern hopslop, is that effortless tool already making life’s mundane tasks obsolete. Yes, AI is helping you write emails, find how-tos, vibe code, chat with a customer representative, file your taxes, book a flight, and calculate how long it would take an Adélie penguin to waddle across Antarctica.

But did you know it can mold any candidate into a muscly Mr. Clean? That’s right! With a few prompts and a click, you can turn a dad paunch into rippling abs, man boobs into a barrel-chest, and even a sallow, paper-thin nape into a bullneck.

Thanks to the forward-thinking of an aide, Mike Rogers went from heavyset papa to bulging bruiser, all in one tweet. The campaign hand was immediately flagged, but, in politics, you know that all publicity is good publicity. So Mr. Rogers was transmorgified even more into all sorts of eye-catching creatures, including the Hulk and a buxom vamp.

The campaign wisely jumped into the japing, posting a cartoonified video of Rogers going full WWE. It’s only a matter of time before a Reel of him suplexing Haley Steven goes viral.

There you have it: the easy-as-kittens technique to turn your staid chub of a votemonger into an ironman A-lister whose biceps shapeshift into rocket launchers that fire red-white-blue roman candles. Just a couple-a clicks and voilà! Brawny Man for the Waukesha Selectmen’s Board!

All those hack schemers, cash-burning consultants, astroturf planters, authenticity choreographers, martini-slicked operatives, feature writers, and Dick Tuck epigones are about to go the way of brougham manufacturers. Look at the shoddy material they’ve produced lately. A Nazi-inked woman-clouter in Maine? Ha! Grok would have never produced such a combustible offering. The human gladhander is out; AI is turning the personal into professional, entertaining voters’ delusions, not dispelling them.

The great political monkeyshiner Roger Stone famously observed that “unless you can fake sincerity, you’ll get nowhere in this business.” AI is such a blessing that no emotion has to be faked. Sincerity, anger, joy, indignation, aspiration, hope, unbidden enthusiasm—such quaint expressions are as moss-covered as Millard Fillmore’s gravestone. The republic is no longer in need of warm-blooded custodians. Leave the civic squabbling to the pixelsphere. The horse race is now little different than gas-station fruit machines, all flash and loss.

The post Hey Grok, Turn My Senator Into Superman appeared first on Free the People.

See of recent days: Joe Biden. Or should I say his better, more functional half, the esteemed doctor of readin’ good, Jill Biden.

The former First Lady is doing what all washed-out political figures sink to once the wishing well dries: the dreaded memoir tour.

Except, Mme. Biden isn’t flogging feel-good liberal platitudes to wine grandmas. Nor is she peddling Claudedrivel about “female leadership in an increasingly unstable world.” What Dame Biden is pushing is the prime commodity of her sex: behind-the-curtain gossip. Not just any hotsy totsy, but the genus of Washington goss that whole newsrooms make payroll with.

What’s more, her professed crack is bald can-covering. In other words, We Bidens are innocents! is the Simon & Schuster yarn she’s spinning. And it’s yielding returns, if a few dishy morning-show segments count as coin.

Matron Biden, more than anything else, wants to put the record straight, clearing her family of the perception of malfeasance while holding the highest office in the land. Her husband’s humiliating withdrawal from the presidential race remains an underdiscussed event in the era of oversharing. So why not tickle that insatiable Washington itch and give an insidery scoop as to what really went down in July 2024, when an incumbent head of state was sidelined? And pocket some cash from curious readers in the process?

Profiteers have to hand it to Biden Inc. Its principals never stop noodling on how to wring out every last penny from the most tenuous connection to government power. Every play is a shade of the Burisma buckrake.

Unfortunately for Baroness Biden, she lacks the dime-flipping chops of her spouse. And stepson. And brother-in-law. And probably that little Arkansas bastard whom the family ignores like a relative locked up for double homicide.

Sales of View from the East Wing: A Memoir have been, to use an oft-repeated crit word, “modest,” which is a gentle way of saying it’ll be remaindered by August. Mrs. Biden isn’t a Trump Administration insider talking out of school. This isn’t a Javelin tell-all. The magic beans she hoped to plant into gold have been spoiled by her own mendacity.

Washington is already a town of shameless excuse-mongers, who cast blame outward so often their fingers are rigor-mortised. Rare is a politician who accepts, without qualification, responsibility for anything, from nuking a third-world country to primordial sludge to ignoring blatant graft to boinking the comms director. But even in the pompish District, with all its wastrels, gutternsnipes, skivers, debauchees, poltroons, and “psychopathic authoritarians,” there exists, even in the sloppiest, braggiest, lecherous K Street crook, a healthy self-awareness. To crib Janet Malcolm: Every Beltway Booster who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

Jill Biden either overestimated her prevaricatory skills or simply assumed she’d be handed a hall pass to gloss over her husband’s ignominious downfall. Every interview she’s done, from legacy media to friendly chickies at “The View,” has featured one central question: Did you honestly think you’d get away with it?

The “it” being the notion that Joe Biden, after a term of stumbling around the Oval Office, dropping more malapropisms than an off-the-boat Chinese migrant with a broken mandible, was hale and hearty enough for four more years. The imperious mulier was reportedly the Edith Wilson behind the Biden Administration, coaxing her enfeebled breadwinner to gut it out. Then the infamous June debate put on broadcast what the White House desperately tried to veil: a Grandpa Simpson-in-Chief. A month and a Trump-bullet-piercing later, it was bye-bye Biden, who was put out to pasture by his party’s purseminders.

A majestrix like Jill Biden is certainly foresighted enough to anticipate questions on that extraordinary 24-day-drag. Politics, as it’s said, ain’t beanbag. The business craves headlines and viral video snatches. A seasoned pol-spouse should know.

Except Boss Bitch Biden tripped out the gate. During a CBS interview, she claimed during the disastrous forum when her husband was stringing illegible utterances on stage, that, “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

Scared? Death? Stroke? All three of those fatal thoughts ran through your mind, so you congratulated him for a “great job” then rushed your suffering hubby off to… Waffle House? And we’re to accept this belittling revision with a “ho-hum” shrug, then ask about her summer reading list?

The recounting is an inartful excuse pulled from her bookful of ducks. The First Lady actually has the gall to claim: “Certainly, if [President Biden] exhibited cognitive impairment, I would not hesitate to say so. His staff would not hesitate to say so. But he was nowhere near that point in the summer of 2024.”

Nowhere near? This isn’t a plea to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears; it’s an order to gouge your irises and lance your lobules.

Gibbering Jilly can’t bring herself to admit she and her prezman did anything but act like selfless citizens until some mysterious, shadowy forces convinced the impeccable family to return to their beach homestead, like Cincinnatus exiting to honorable retirement. Is she dense? Is she lying? Is she genuinely off her onion? Is she going through manic psychosis, utterly convinced her angelic, well-meaning servant-spouse could have hobbled along to save the country?

A deep Freudian diagnosis isn’t necessary. The Bidens really are that full of themselves. By picking open the festering wound that was the 2024 election, the Delawarean Dukes do their party no favors. “Why are we rehashing years-old scores and clinging to relevancy to sell books about palace intrigue within a wing that doesn’t even exist anymore?” is how one former Biden apparatchik described the book-hawking roadshow.

Turns out, Joe Biden didn’t enter the arena to fight for the soul of the nation. He only sliced and stabbed to soothe his ego. And maybe earn a bonus fiduciary return.

The post Jill Biden Bends the Record appeared first on Free the People.

Upon his long, drawn-out firing by CBS, the former late-night entertainer ascended skyward, but a few days prior to Pentecost, to receive his heavenly reward. And what a prize it was! ‘Twas gold in the progressive hall of heroes! Colbert was immortalized in script most fitting for the age: tweets, Instagram posts, and AI-composed captions.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris led the pity party, tweeting: “Stephen Colbert has a talent for making people laugh and encouraging them to stay curious, stay engaged, and stay hopeful about the world around them.” Had Harris only demonstrated one of those qualities, she might not have lost every swing state to the current braggart-in-chief.

The official Democratic X account, due to being run by a coven of female zoomers, joined with a four-in-one photo grid of Colbert cheesing with former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, along with a bored-looking Michelle Obama and Harris holding a light beer like it was a Fabergé egg.

The pallbearing train continued with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, and senators Amy Klobuchar, Ed Markey, and Chuck Schumer, all keying out obligatory lamentations. Meaning: their respective comms directors cribbed each other’s posts, swapping synonyms, and attaching screenshots of the boss chinwagging with shitcanned Colbert.

State-aligned media cabanaboys shed put-on tears to the pool as well. Brian Stelter, CNN’s aspic media correspondent, dashposted a series of “Late Show” signoff summations like he was documenting the 9/11 attacks in real time. Leftie rags like The Guardian and The Washington Post published maudlin remembrances, each suggestive that poor Stephy is an innocent funny man ground under a MAGA jackboot for the crime of crack.

Edward Abbey famously pithed that “distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.” And Colbert has spent years slandering President Trump with every demeaning label the Left knows, which are, to use Ed West’s bracket, forever linked to a “quirky, little-known period of European history: 1930s Germany.”

To hear the libs tell it, Colbert added to the gaiety of the nation by mindlessly mouthing every Nazified insult invented of Donald Trump. Then, the poor, unsuspecting wisecracker had his lips forcibly sewn shut by corporate bigwigs fearful of government reprisal. Some variation of the sentiment “Cobert’s cancellation should send a chill down the spine of every free-speech-loving American” was reprinted, replete with dark forebodings on why totalitarianism’s first victim is laughter.

Of course, humor does hold the line against dictators. Every joke, per Orwell, is a tiny revolution. And as Douglas Murray observed, people laugh at things they know are true. The snotty, scar-pocked king declares he’s the smartest, savviest, suaveist man alive? Call him a corpulent gasbag with shriveled nethers who takes out his unhappy marriage on his subjects. Or craft a clever poem like Horace Walpole. Or shout, “You damned rascal, where’s your wife?” Let ridicule and irreverence melt away his authority.

Colbert was no courtman, jesting the mad monarch, poking the bejeweled crown with his tassled scepter. He was the comedy equivalent of industrially processed offal. He repackaged the negs and deprecations of his fellow blues, reciting them in the same sniffy manner as an Upper Eastsider bumping into a touristing family from Toledo. Unironically blathering canned lines isn’t comedy, nor entertainment, nor is it speaking truth to power. It’s, at bottom, boring. Colbert had plenty of opportunity to flame sitting pols. He hosted a conga line of Dems during his evening hour. Instead, Stephen, as he was warmly called, shined their shoes.

Even Jon Stewart, the man who offered Colbert a couple rungs to climb into show business, occasionally pressed Democratic lawmakers, including famously jabbing Nancy Pelosi on the ramshackle launch of ObamaCare.

The real reason Stephen Colbert can no longer be watched in the witching hour has to do with America’s center of gravity: coin. CBS claims the lib-led “Late Show” was a money-loser to the colossal tune of $40 million per annum. It turns out nobody wants to watch an alleged comedian unctuously discuss baking sourdough with Kirsten Gillibrand, or some other wooden senator.

The “radlib wokery is the new Christianity” is a trite talking point. But clichés are lazily quotable for a reason: they contain a crumb of wahrheit.

The bastardized canonization of Colbert is an exemplar of leftism charading as a spiritual practice. On a weekend traditionally reserved for toasting the fallen American soldier with pissbeer, Democratic officials and their press amanuenses toasted the furloughed host like he was a pitiable Republican soldier shot dead while bravely fighting General Franco’s forces.

Colbert’s fate is worse than that of those butchered in the Auts: public-access television. But at least nobody’s income statement runs red.

The post Colbert the Martyr appeared first on Free the People.

The prodigious scribe and econ prof is out with a doozy of a column, which is more compositional victory lap than polemic. “Woke is dead!” Cowen declares in The Free Press. He then proceeds into a jig on its sustainably-resourced grave plot, heartily patting his own back.

The confident boffin is convinced the radlib excesses of campus leftism have been flushed from ho-hum American life. “Wokeism is hardly gone,” he concedes, “but it does seem to have peaked in 2022 or so.”

Hear that, disgruntled laptop-jobber? Pronoun ninnies have lost their dainty grips. You can start using “faggot” and “retard” in work emails again! Hell, send a slur-filled missive to your HR director. Remind her (a bureacratess, natch) that lefty p.c. sensitivity is stiff and done. Sign off with a “So relax, Toots,” to reinforce the new, freer dispensation.

Actually, refrain from signing your own walking papers, as Free the People shouldn’t be held liable for your UI.

Cowen seems to earnestly believe the country’s moseyed past woke trappings, like inclusion riders, land acknowledgements, DEI promotion standards, campus struggle sessions, mandated email signifiers, capitalizing the “b” in blacks, indebted undergrads shrieking about privilege, third-worldism masquerading as a choate ideology, the jaw-crimping acronym “BIPOC” and the soulless pablum of strung clichés like “indigenous,” “marginalize,” “social justice,” and “IT’S MA’AM!”

Good riddance were it so! But the possibility that wokesters have only fallen back, hiding away the rhetorical ploys and intimidation schemes, is off Cowen’s radar. He remains deadset that wokeshivtiz ways are set dead, citing, among other curious happenings, the Ukraine War. (Putin couldn’t capture Kiev, but he apparently butchered Ibram Kendi’s profit quota.)

Woke is withered, Cowen contends, but something more wicked grows in its stead. “I fear we are now moving to a new culture of anger and resentment,” he augurs. Because slicing the world into good/dark and bad/white was an exercise in peace and civility?

Poor Tyler is having visions of the bomb-happy ‘70s: “[l]eft-adjacent movements have arisen with a contrasting emphasis on action, and often action of a terrible sort.” The troubling praxis his refers to are… garden-variety progressive policies like a California wealth tax and Bernie Sanders’s airbrained data-center moratorium? Well, I suppose such reams of legalese sound like the Killing Fields to George Masontarians.

Cowen does have a real, substantive chill, and isn’t just chasing hobgoblins that keep Washington wonks awake at night. “What’s more, it is possible we are entering an era with a new culture of assassinations,” he shudders, listing off recent downed targets like Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He also references the climbing attempts on President Trump’s life. Then comes the prevarication so prominent with Beltway columnists: “It can be debated how many of these killers had direct connections to the political left, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that left-wing rhetoric about democracy destruction helped make such actions conceivable.”

“It can be debated” is a particularly grating string of words that unshackles the writer from having to make definitive statements. So in the Péguyian spirit, I’ll dispense with equivocation: the men who killed Kirk and Thompson were down-the-line lefties. That they may have offered a stray opinion or two that flirted red doesn’t suddenly redefine them as deranged moderates. Nor is Cowen’s conclusion “hard to avoid.” I’ll put it in positivistic terms modern economists love: Prog disagrees with con; prog kills con; therefore murderer = prog. Proof that one in your model!

Maybe it’s aging brain cells; perhaps it’s an endearing innocence; or, possibly, it’s proximity to the blinding Imperial City. Whatever’s to blame, Cowen plots a false divide between woke wordgames and Defargian bloodlust. “[M]uch of society, including the more radical political left, is shifting toward more fascistic approaches and away from touchy-feely universalism,” he projects.

Not since Nikolai Petrovic has a well-meaning duffer been so purblind to the wild whims of youth, or the cold-eyed determination of communistic ideology. So, again, back to economic jargon to make it decipherable. Consider this, Mr. Holbert L. Harris Chair: the transitive nature of wokery. Expressing emotive affinity for the colored downtrodden was the A in the equation that eventually equals C, the riotous overthrow of private-property capitalism. Therapeutic empathy was a veiled opening salvo in a larger charge to de-embourgeoise society. The former necessarily leads to the latter.

Woke isn’t on life support; its mandate is being fulfilled by armed and angry foot soldiers versed in acrid shibboleths. Like Candy Lane, we’ve only advanced to a new square in the leftist agitation game.

The post The Woke Train Rolls On appeared first on Free the People.

In usual aristocratic fashion, the Commonwealth’s nobility of the robe has delivered us from the tyranny of short-sighted rabble.

The Virginia Supreme Court’s strike down of last month’s redistricting referendum was a quaking decision that muddied partisanship, ideology, and the normally fine-grooved channels of X discourse. The ruling was, as in all good politics, abound with ironies.

The forthright result of the overrule gives Republicans—America’s closest approximation of the status-preserving Tory Party—what it treasures most besides cutting capital taxes: an excuse. Just as conservatives secretly long for elite admiration, these drippy defenders of tradition also harbor a primal need to burn and bury procedural norms.

Within weeks after Virginia’s demo-pproving the constitutional amendment permitting mid-decade redistricting, red states like Florida and Tennessee responded in kind, delicately carving congressional fractals to maximize GOP vote share. The High Court’s spike isn’t going to deter this push. The daisy chain of grievance must keep generating new links. The Old Dominion district-recut campaign was itself a parry to Texas’s redraw, which was a reciprocation to the Census Bureau’s (alleged) miscalculation that left Democratic states overcounted. Which itself was an error caused by the difficulty of summing heads during a pandemic, but also partially due to the Trump Administration’s interference, so the off-count was just fair play in response to… and on and on and on and on it goes, back centuries to the imposition of the Stamp Act.

Forget all the high-flown middle school rhetoric of liberal democracy, the dignity of man, the folkish wisdom of the upright voter: politics is petty reprisals all the way down.

Republicans may have uncorked the Kirkland champagne après the Friday morning invalidation. But the victory—or more accurately, bail out—may prove short-lived. The Grand Old Dominion Party is about as organized and effective as a peewee soccer team; its candidates frequently perform worse than an abbot running for Président de la République française. In the end, the Party’s scorched behind was hoisted out of the disenfranchising flames by a technocratic bureaucracy at a remove from public passion. Who’d have imagined: Republicans toasting judicial activism! This newfound respect for democratically immune commissars may even continue if the EPA finds “Gavin Newsom 2028” billboards threaten whooping crane habitats.

Democrats, meanwhile, were waylaid by an institution that, in normal circumstances, unquestioningly affords legal patina to its policies. An unchallengeable body of cordoned decide-ocrats, whose views were molded in the most liberal pedagogical establishments, unilaterally annul a blue measure? Like Hercules with Hydra’s blood, liberal technocracy wrenches its own works. Che sorpresa!

The petard-hoisting wasn’t over. “Corrupting money in politics” remains a Democratic bugabear, despite its candidates consistently outspending the opposition. Yet, the ostensible cashphobic party poured drams of dough—over $50 million by most measures—promoting the measure. The month leading up to ballot day was little distinguishable from October in a presidential-elec year. Every single YouTube video opened with a 15-second ad of Barack Obama exhorting you to stick it to MAGA neanderthals. Stacks of mailers packed my mailbox every day. And the texts—Dear Lord Almighty, the texts! Every minute of every hour of every day, an all-caps imploration to save Virginia by letting prog-pols re-arrange the congressional map like a dyslexic child struggling with a jigsaw puzzle.

Not since Vietnam has the Democratic Party overwhelmingly firebombed a place to influence hearts and minds. As with intimidating Ho Chi Minh, it was all for naught.

The dryest just desert came at the expense of the Democrats’ new favorite thingamajig: early voting. Adopted to make it easier for wage-slaves to vote for more EBT credits, the gimmick has, like all welfare connivances, expanded well beyond the scope. Election Day no longer exists; it’s Election Season, with up to a month and a half to hit the polls.

The Virginia Constitution stipulates that amendments must be considered in two General Assembly sessions, the first wrapping before an election. Since the redistrict amendment was pitched while early voting was underway last fall, the Court nixed the entire process, finding it illegal from stem to stern.

Now the scramble is on for the party of rigid institutionalism to pink-slip the entire Court, subsuming the judiciary into an appendage of the legislature. Somewhere along Masons Neck, a guttural cry rings out.

“Haste makes waste” is a good summation of why the Democrats’ partisan play came a cropper. But the depressed Dems shouldn’t stay begloomed for long. Republicans, as the panting Stupid Party, will sit on their laurels, content with eeking out a win via lawsuit, rather than having to convince voters of anything.

The post Ironies in Old Dominion appeared first on Free the People.

Hussah! We’ve got Republicans on the damn run. Can you believe our sea-shaded luck? Our opponent in a quaint, verdant New England state is at last the caricature sketch we’ve always drawn of Republicans. Wealthy failson; misogynist; actual Führer fanboy. And best of all, this little Reichian goosestepper is a Senate nominee. Which means free seat in the one congressional body that occasionally exercises sway over the President.

Forgot Michelle Obama—this albino Anschluss adorer is the DNC’s silver bullet. Or should I say ace in the hole? These Dems bristle their short hair at the mention of firearms.

Now it’s time to do as any good D.C. consultant does. Swoop in after months of husting sweat’s been spilt, just to overcharge on media-placement fees in the home stretch. We’ll make Mike Murphy look like some “West Wing” binge dweeb.

I’ll make a clean breast and admit my six-figure-billing firm hasn’t paid a soupçon of attention to the shady glade of a state. Aren’t all these top-corner states bluer than the water at Turks and Caicos? This isn’t a race; it’s an AMG versus a pedi-cab. Plus, far as we D.C. advisors are concerned, Maine might as well be Wyoming. Does the Acela even go past Connecticut?

Seriously, I’m going to buy Graham Platner’s poppa a Boca Grande condo for gifting us such an exquisite specimen of a scion. Except there’s no need to splash out. Platner père already sits in tall cotton. In fact, the Platner clan is greener than the Pine Street state itself. Granddaddy Platy was a renowned architect who scoped and scaled parts of the Ford Foundation’s HQ. Ya know, the same Foundation that played Maecenas with the CIA’s coup-dough? Graham also plays in stolen roughneckism: his oyster-farming is just a hobby. Privileged, pampered upbringing with murky ties to a commie-crushing bureaucracy. $trike one.

Platner the Hopeful is young enough for a record of unbidden blue talk—and I ain’t talkin’ prog stump speech. He’s a #metoo nightmare manifest. Blind belief in brutalized women is a Democrat article of faith. Here’s Platner’s gentlemanly advice to any gal worried about a roofy in her vodka-cranberry: “[H]ow about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f*** up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?” Hooooooo boy! Not only does Graham blame the victim, he implies reciprocal consent. Prince Charming in tartan continued: “So if you don’t want to be in a [compromising] situation, act like an adult for f*** sake.” An ode to taking responsibility? That’s the last thing voters want to hear. $$trike Two.

Platner’s next piske is at the Democrats’ second biggest constituency: blacks. Platner can’t avoid his native white puritanism, asking why Afro-Americans are a bunch of cheapskates. “Every now and again a black patron will leave a 15-20% tip, but usually it [is] between 0-5%. There’s got to be a reason behind it, what is it?” he wondered aloud on a Reddit forum. For America’s most mythic and fragile race, such questions are strictly verboten. Inquiries about social deviancy are met with that stern occupation-erasing accusation: RACIST. Such thoughtcrime should not only bar Graham from Congress, but also his quaint rustic village until his dying breath. $$$trike Three.

An easy political out already. But then comes the chef d’oeuvre of candidate cancellations. Graham Platner is a real-life Derek Vinyard. The man actually inked a Nazi death-camp symbol on his pec. Allow me to repeat, because, somewhere, James Carville is doing backflips. This white-trash hooligan bigot has a literal Holocaust tribute on his chest. Forgive any typos because my eyes are blinded by visions of past presidents perfectly printed on reams of greenbacks.

I’m no believer, but being gifted a Republican opponent with a Dachau homage must be divine intervention, a blessed lagniappe, manna from heaven. Platner is the new Alf Landon; his routing will be so complete that Nagasakians will consider their fiery annihilation a tepid mercy. His totenkopf is a keen stand-in for his campaign—absolute walking death. And I just read on CBS’s Portland affiliate the dumb bastard actually covered it up with some teenage Hibernian sketch and a cartoony dog. Easy. Money.

Oh, felix culpa for your trusted consultant coming in to piggyback whomever our candidate is over the finish line. Imagine! Our guy could be a nonentiy. Or a Boy Scout with a bowl cut and rectangle-frame specs. No matter! A silver-spooned Adolf-stan with a penchant for badmouthing rape victims? Not even Aaron Sorkin’s pinkish noodle could sprout such a character. Yessir, this gravy train is full and running!

…whatsthat?

Graham Platner is the Democrat?!

Look, I know my eyes have been drawn to other contests in states where the population doesn’t half in the winter. But really? A Schutzstaffel prog with golden Huggies and a mouth like Harvey Weinstein? This might be a tougher nut to crack than I thought—and I was a gopher on the John Edwards campaign.

*Pulls out shotted spiral notebook.* Guess it’s back to the classics. Hey! Get the video team in here. And grab someone non-filthy commuters off the sidewalk, preferably black women with footwear fancier than tennis shoes. These New England blue bloods love their minorities, since they have more moose than moors in their state.

We need to get the narrative pat and put out immediately. Repeat after me, then make whatever warm bodies you lug in parrot likewise. “Vote blue no matter who.” “Vote blue no matter who.” “Vote blue no matter who.”

Regurgitate those five words like a mantra. Then… let’s see. What are our other clients saying. Ah. Senator Van Hollen is blaming the Hitlerian misogyny on PTSD. Good start! Lefties love their mental-anguish excuses as much as they love popping SSRIs. Anyone else? Our amoral hatchetfriends at The Bulwark say voters crave “authenticity”—and they have focus group findings to prove it! Nothing says cha-ching like loaded questions to feed prefabricated answers. And—LOOK!—Obama campaign alum Jon Favreau called Platner “a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown.” He actually used Kampf as a compliment… that clever clogs!

Well, there are the marching orders. Graham Platner is a real, hardworking shucker who will liberate Maine from this corrupt Administration’s Gestapo takeover. Repeat ad nauseam. Time to become Baudrillard and reify this précis. Place the ads; fire up the Reels; print the palm cards; drill the doorknockers; beam the tag into every YouTube video playing from *checks Wikipedia* Kittery to Caribou.

Graham Platner has always been a kind, if misunderstood, progressive champion. He ain’t no Nazi and never was!

The post How to Win with a Nazi Candidate appeared first on Free the People.

Dear Mr. Piker,

Let me start by saying I’m a MASSIVE fan. Like, top of the tumbril chop fan. HasanAbi is my most-viewed Twitch channel by far. No other BreadTuber comes close. Hours I’ve dedicated to your discourse. My screentime is at least 75% of just you. Before a rando redditor pointed me in your direction, I was ignorant, a sap, a cog, a working dog, a lumpenprole. But now I’m awake. No sheep am I. You’ve jolted my class consciousness. Once I was lost in the consoomerist void, but now I’ve found common cause. I’m no longer a slave to the zionist cattleherders. I am your comrade-in-arms, great HasanAbi! My undying loyalty to you and the Proletarian Revolution is absolute!

My allegiance should be above suspicion, HasanAbi. Because, as a champion of the downtrodden, a lifter of the weak, an empowerer of the small, I pledge my troth to you in the fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie, not just in word, but deed.

Hence my dashing this desperate missive to you at a time of great need. Your steadfast soldier is in peril. I’m sitting inside a rotting cell in an oppressive prison, no doubt constructed on the backs of the working class and financed by swinish billionaires. And the guards, I suspect, are former IDF, given their inhumane disregard for us captives. HasanAbi, cherished ally in the crusade against moneyed fascists, I beg you: HELP!

I ask not out of prolelish want, but in sincere militant conviction. I am a political prisoner. The only reason I’m shackled here is because I put righteous class warfare into praxis. No armchair activism here! You see, I’m a barista—a working dreg dumping dregs for predatory suites, carving an almost-life off their spare coin and whatever my porker of a boss decides is “fair” pay. I should say I “was” a barista. I’m no longer “employed” by the bondsman. In fact, my so-called “boss” is dead. That’s right, HasanAbi! I finally realized that all the manifestos and comments and flyers and marches mean not a thing. All airy proclamations! To quote the Chairman, power comes from the smoking gun. And as you’ve wisely observed, CEOs commit “social murder” by underpaying we unappreciated toilers. Every meager check I was handed after slaving before a hot milk steamer was a stab to my dignity. I could take no more. My worth, and the worth of all wagies worldwide, was on the line. So I expropriated my father’s 357 and struck a blow for all workers.

In solidarity, I’ve snuffed that wage-garnishing Goliath. It happened just as you said. The streets ran with his blood and brain matter! Or at least, the spackled walls of his tiny office did. No matter! One mortal shot to a machine man gives hope to all men!

Unfortunately, the zionist-controlled press has silenced my story. The local ABC outlet called it an act of “workplace grievance.” But it was so much more! I have yet to see any other headlines, not even in the Jacobin, of my liberatory bloodletting. Marx knew, as you know, the power of publicization.

That’s why I require a rigorous defense based in the ethic you espouse every day, dear HasanAbi. I’m not personally pleading for your money, as I know, as a fellow sharpened sword in our liberatory war, you are no profitmonger, and thus have little in funds. But if you could use your popular stream, your portal into the zeitgeist, to potentially solicit financial support for my defense, I’d be even more in your service.

Please, HasanAbi! The law of Wall Street weighs heavy on my neck. The silver-toed boot of the overclass presses hard. I’m no genuine third-worlder like you, but a miserable white middle-classian fighting the good and necessary fight. I know you’d never let a fellow red down. You aren’t just my new Lenin, but the new Vozhd.

Make me the new Luigi Mangione.

Yours in the struggle,

Jim @killallcaps Bivens

To: Hasan Doğan Piker
Date: May 6, 2026
From: Pelican Bay State Prison

Dear HasanAbi,

I fear my time grows short. This oppressive caging wears on my body. I haven’t had a full meal in days—the commissary offers no vegan options. The meat-gnashing capital class again! Everything on offer is fatty processed sludge, pumped full of disgusting zionist chemicals to render the radical spirit soft and pliable.

But, HasanAbi, rest assured, I’m not deterred. Your soldier stands at the ready to march. I’m ready to see this out until the capitalist porkers are stuck by their own money clips. But what I need in our greedy, grubby, gorging world is what the real Marxian men lack: funds. The court system is corrupt, as you well know. Tainted with the poison of profit. I require an attorney to make a real case for me. The so-called “public” defendant is actually suggesting I plea. Cop to a crime which isn’t even a crime, but a righteous reaction to our unjust shekel-spinning world. Can you believe it? That’s why I need a real defense—one versed in the exploitation of struggling workers like us.

This is an opportunity to stir thousands—maybe millions—of dormant consciousnesses, awaken them all the swelling revolution against the oligarchs keeping us bogged down in plastic, planet-polluting misery. We can’t miss it, HasanAbi. Consider the first bullet fired, the first nail struck. My fellow wage slaves saw the aftermath, the final terminus of our being held down. But they also saw vengeance. Redemption. LIBERATION! They saw the blood in the office! Now they must see it in the streets if we’re to have any hope!

So, please, my Vozhd, I implore you. Publicize my plight. Turn my fight… NO… our fight, into a viral case. You helped create Luigi Mangione the Martyr. He wasn’t even a fan of yours. And he didn’t even have UnitedHealthcare insurance. I’m a true believer, a BreadTube native, versed in the dialectic of those historic forces that are slowly rusting our fetters. The spark is yours to light. The powderkeg is right here, in cell D-4-205. Together, I know we can blow up the corrupt, irredeemable order and build the world anew.

By the way, my celly is a fan of yours, too. Or, more like knows of you. But he’s also a nut. In here for tweaking and slitting his dealer’s throat. Says you grew up rich and live in a $3 million LA mansion. I don’t believe it. Not for a second. You’re prole to the marrow, HasanAbi. Hence your pull with the angry masses. Please. Broadcast my fight so we can finally dig the blade into those luxurious fatcats just begging for the final stab.

Yours forever in the struggle,

Jim @killallcaps Bivens

To: Hasan Piker
Date: May 11, 2026
From: Pelican Bay State Prison

Dear HasanAbi,

This is my last, last, final, urgent request. Please, HasanAbi. I don’t care that you come from money—though I was shocked to learn that you are indeed the son of an actual pocketwadded businessman. A real-life cutthroat executive. My dad was a pathetic middle manager at a restaurant supply company. He never forgave my renouncing the rapacious system that took his hair and grayed his skin. Called me an ungrateful snot. I countered, “Better to be a snot than slave!” I hope you concur, despite your comfortable and coddled upbringing.

Regardless, it’s a cruelty of this world we can’t choose our parents. But now I ask you again, Comrade HasanAbi, spread my case. Make it bigger than my one small act of brain-splattering defiance. Turn it into the first shot in our final charge to disembowel the asset class. Only you have the reach and following to turn one man’s justifiable sacrifice into a real, bona fide movement. I offer myself as a Martyr in the killing fields of this late-stage capitalist hellscape. Use me, HasanAbi.

My time has almost ticked off. Sentencing is tomorrow morning. My so-called “public defendant” is forgoing a jury trial. I suspect he may be right. No doubt the jurors’ consciousness are still mired in materialistic want. This is why I need you, HasanAbi. We can still create a public awakening. Together we can scream YA BASTA! to all who extract our labor for their own gluttonous profit!

Oh, HasanAbi! Why won’t you answer your fellow revolutionary??? I forgive your bougie birth. I truly do. This is your last chance to have an even bigger Martyr at your disposal. I am ready to sacrifice myself for the great communist cause. I’m yours at the ready.

Should I be sentenced to a lifetime stint in the clink, or worse, the zionist-crafted death injection, my actions, noble and messy as they were, will be for nothing.

HasanAbi, please. Together, we can hasten the twilight of capitalism. The new equal world awaits. Why won’t you help your fellow red ally????

Yours in the struggle to the end,

Jim @killallcaps Bivens

The post Three Letters to Hasan Piker appeared first on Free the People.