Roger Marcum

[Come Home to Rome @ComeHometoRome]

Guys and gals. This is the way. Get married and have kids young. Men, work hard and provide. Ladies make a home and raise kids right. Most human thing you can do.

[Bill Maher @billmaher]

The prevailing view of so much of the young left in America is that we’re the worst country ever, so if someone attacks us, they can’t be all bad.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

I initially held Jason Arday entirely responsible for his plagiarism, lies and exaggerations, and I still do, but he was just another fabulist, faker, and fibber, and in my profession of studying these con artists he doesn't stand out from others.
It is white progressives with no moral compass and no sense of agency or personal responsibility who have made him into a martyr.
Shame on all of you.

[Bo Winegard @EPoe187]

At some point, we either decide that we are mature enough as a civilization to be honest about racial differences, or we continue to live a costly lie, enabled by the silence of cowardly professors who know better.

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

George Floyd inspired riots.

Charlie Kirk inspired vigils.

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

To be a socialist or a communist is every bit as totalitarian, anti freedom and anti American as fascism.

It should be viewed, not only with moral outrage and revulsion given its history but with the understanding that it is fundamentally subversive to America.

[House Republicans @HouseGOP]

REPOST if you're PROUD to be an American! 🇺🇸

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

You've probably heard this before, but it's always worth repeating. Something extremely cool about the "Star-spangled Banner," the American national anthem, is that it asks a question, and it's the question at the heart of everything in the American worldview.

"Oh, say, can you see
By the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed
At the twilight's last gleaming..."

So the anthem begins with a question and a scene. One man, a patriot, is asking another man, another patriot, "can you see it?" at sunrise after a long, dangerous night.

The "it" in question is going to be revealed to be the flag, our "star-spangled banner," which they had last fully recognized and honored as the sun set, daylight failed, and night crept over them the evening before.

Can you see it? Say! Can you see it?!

IS IT STILL THERE?!

"Whose broad stripes and bright stars
Through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched
Were so gallantly streaming..."

Here we find that the "it" is in fact the flag, our star-spangled banner, and we learn why the question is being asked.

The flag is described as having flown and streamed gallantly over ramparts of war through a perilous fight. All could have been lost. The flag, and even the fledgling country for which it stands, one nation under God and indivisible.

Say! Can you see it? Now that the light is back?

IS IT STILL THERE?!

"--And the rockets' red glare,
The bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there!--"

They could see it through the battle in the light of the rockets and bombs that threatened them, here and there in quick glimpses. But it was still there throughout! But now? At dawn?

Say! Can you see?

IS IT STILL THERE?!

"Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free
And the home of the brave?"

The urgency is palpable with every refrain. They have to know. It's the first thing they must know as the sun begins to light the sky, even before it rises.

IS IT STILL THERE?!

Say! Say!! Can you see? Can you see it?!

At the heart of every American beats the fundamental truth and reality that what we have here is precious, that it's worth fighting for, to the death if necessary, and that it's fragile. That at any moment it can be lost. That we have to remember to look for it because last night might have been the night in which it failed.

Every day, every year, every generation.

The American fight for freedom, to live in self-governance within ordered liberty, is ongoing and never-ending. The price of the land of the free is that it must be the home of the brave. We have to defend it, defend it, and defend it again, against all enemies foreign and domestic, because what we have is amazing, rare, fragile, and worth every cent of treasure, every drop of blood, and every risk to our sacred honor to protect it.

Our anthem is not a declaration. It is not a proclamation. It is not a statement.

It is a question.

Every time we sing our wholly unique national anthem, we as American ask the question again. IS IT STILL THERE?! Are we still America? Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

Because it's a question, the answer is not known. It is not a guarantee. It cannot be taken for granted and isn't. And what an honor to ask and take up our part in the story, in the American Experiment, in the greatest country the world has ever known.

For tonight, the last night of our first 250 years, as the sun gave way to twilight's last gleaming and darkness overtook our land once again, the answer was still yes. We can see it even tonight in the red glare of rockets, with small bombs bursting in air, fill the sky with the noble tribute of fireworks once again.

And we all ask ourselves, will it still be flying at dawn?

This is what it means to be an American.

Happy 250th, America! Now for many happy returns!
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Adam Carolla @adamcarolla]

Is there a greater example of Hollywood douchebagary. Than this

[Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630]

Almost literally every important left wing take - "Gaza genocide," "the war crime of killing enemies," "trans women," "systemic white supremacy," "heterosexual sex is rape," "asylum seekers," "undocumented migrants," "the modern Patriarchy," "my breeding kink as a female bottom" - is just based on twisting words into meaninglessness.

This^ is a common right wing point, but it is 120% accurate and always worth remembering. The great weakness of the post-modernist is that wordplay does NOT actually change reality. You can call a wolf or a pitbull ex- fighting dog a "lab mix" all you want; it will still eat your kid.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

As I’ve been saying, in a decade people will look back at this time as a moment when society (at least some) lost its mind, like witch hunts, lobotomies, Satanic Panic, and Recovered Memory Movement. It will be studied by historians, sociologists and social psychologists…

[Homeland Security @DHSgov]

While Hollywood celebrities embarrassed themselves trying to drum up hatred of @ICEgov officers from the Grammys, DHS law enforcement was hard at work arresting sex offenders, child abusers, and criminals convicted of assault in Minnesota.

Some of the criminals arrested during Operation Metro Surge on Friday and Saturday include:

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

The right doesn't set up "autonomous zones" because, unlike the far-left, we actually value civilization over anarchy. We want rule of law over chaos. We want to build, not destroy. The difference could not be more fundamental.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

I am actually a huge fan of the BBC or at least what it used to be. This recent scandal and the new information that is being revealed about BBC bias on other matters such as immigration, gender ideology etc explain very clearly why our country is where it is.

The simple fact is that journalists, civil servants, politicians, activists, comedians and other cultural and political commentators live in a bubble in which they are not only naturally insulated from the views of the man or woman in the street, they are also deliberately insulating themselves from the views of the plebs whom they despise and look down on.

On every common sense issue (illegal immigration is wrong, men can't become women, lying about Trump & Farage is wrong, no matter how much you hate them, Net Zero is economic suicide etc) they have taken the wrong side every single time. But not only were they wrong, they gaslit everyone else into believing we were the immoral ones for being right.

This isn't about the BBC, it's about the entire social milieu in which smugness and certainty have triumphed over curiosity and humility.

This is the truth about why Britain is where it is: the people who are meant to lead us do not serve the people, they serve themselves.

This is a rotten way to do politics, to debate ideas, to run a country. Is it any surprise that the wealthy (who can leave) and the young (who are flexible enough to leave) are fleeing in their droves?

People don't like to hear it but it is true: Britain has slipped into an economic, cultural and demographic crisis from which it will be nigh on impossible to recover. Our GDP per person is lower today than it was in 2008. Our cultural and political debates are phony. We argue about what a woman is while our country is going bankrupt. The best and brightest leave while the government stuffs hotel after hotel with illegal immigrants at our expense.

Britain has one electoral cycle left to change course. We won't survive 5 more years of elite failure after this useless Government limps out of office. We're running out of road.

[Stephen Knight 🎙️ @GSpellchecker]

There’s a stunning naïveté running through liberal democracies about other cultures. The assumption seems to be that, deep down, everywhere is basically the same except for the language and cuisine.

The fantasy goes that if every culture were simply left alone, freed from "Western interference", it would naturally choose women’s rights, gay clubs, individual liberty, and maybe the odd Starbucks. But that’s completely delusional.

Some cultures do get to do exactly what they want though. And what they want is religious fundamentalism and public executions in the Street. Oh, and plenty of iPhones so they can film themselves cheering it on.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

My hottest take is that the best food is actually American.

Genuinely, the best range and quality of food is to be found in the US.

This doesn't negate the fact that a lot of American food is awful and bad for you.

But if you want the best of the best, US it's where it's at.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

Don't blame @serenawilliams alone for this farcical response to a cotton plant in her luxury hotel room.
It is, in large part, what happens when POC are told for years that racism is systemic in society and unconscious in everyone, that the police are targeting POC (even black cops, who have supposedly inculcated hatred of blacks from living in a racist white culture), that ICE agents are like slave traders, that 2025 America is really no different than 1925 or 1925, and that even luxury hotel designers are surreptitiously planting reminders of the African slave trade so guests get the message.
If people really believe these falsehoods, it's not surprising they respond accordingly.
https://t.co/E28WTr6oTy

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

(Warning: long rant)

My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.

I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.

Millions of them. Tens of millions. They��re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.

And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.

Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.

I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.

Here are the facts:

Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.

Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.

Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.

These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.

Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:

These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.

These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.

When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.

They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.

And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.

When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”

They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.

And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.

When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.

And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.

For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.

In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.

In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.

> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)

> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)

> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)

> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)

In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.

> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)

> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)

All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.

You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.

Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.

If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

Power of belief part 4:

If you tell people they can change sex—that men can become women & vice versa—when people express their doubts (based on science & common sense) the people who believe it can either change their minds or provide evidence.

Cognitive dissonance prevents most of us from changing our minds.
There is no evidence people can change sex because they can’t.

Most people in this space then play word games with definitions (gender, not sex) or abandon semantic precision altogether (a woman is whatever someone who feels like one says it is, binary means you can be both or neither but can’t define either one, etc.)

If trans identity is important but the person doesn’t feel validated by others, that’s when emotions, especially anger and revenge, can escalate into violence.

Few express such emotions violently, but law of large numbers means even million to one odds will happen often in a population of 300 million adults.

This is why the truth matters, why free speech matters, and why the norms of peaceful protest and debate are vital.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

If we want to know how to deradicalize, we have to know how people radicalize. A good metaphor for it is seeds and soil.

A lot of people blame the demagogues, which is reasonable. Radical people are saying things that change people's minds and radicalize them. Think of them as throwing seeds.

Seeds only grow if they land on fertile soil. So how is the soil prepared?

There are many ways, but one of the strongest ways is for things not to be working as they should. When our schools aren't teaching (nevermind the fact that they're brainwashing), our police and courts aren't keeping our streets and campuses safe, our government isn't doing what it needs to do (and is doing things it shouldn't), etc., or in other words when there are problems in how things run, people notice and want them fixed. This is normal and not radicalizing.

What is radicalizing is when you show up, get involved, point it out, make a campaign, etc., (or just see someone else doing it) and it makes no impact. When you show up to complain about inappropriate curriculum at your kids' schools, and school boards shut you down and the FBI investigates your grassroots group, for example. Nothing changes except, perhaps surprising hostility. Things keep getting worse, and no one in the institutions we depend on is responsive, or worse, they're hostile.

That's when people radicalize.

That is, instability plus corrupt institutions equals radicalization potential. The rest is actually very easy.

The solution is to make sure our institutions are held accountable and start the process of reform (or, better, succeed at it. Where serious danger lies, accountability and reform measures must be implemented quickly and firmly, though civilly and responsibly. Other institutions have to engage this process according to their own timelines and our own reach on them.

Institutions are, in effect, little more than networks of human beings bringing their resources together for common cause. That's why we say marriage and family are institutions. Your circles in life are institutions. So are Congress and the local school board.

I bring that up because even where there are so many institutions we cannot reach, there are so many we can. Now. Today. Immediately. And we have to decide if they're going to be part of the solution or part of the problem. We cannot do anything if we believe it doesn't matter, so we have to put our faith in doing the right thing because it's the right thing.

As for the big institutions, they are hard. We have to accept that. It's baked into the cake, and we have to temper our expectations around that fact. But we have a golden opportunity right now, with Trump in the White House and the Democrats at their lowest approval ever and people just positively sick of all the hate and malice flowing from radicalism already, to demand real changes and make real changes. We cannot lose sight of that opportunity or faith in its capacity, with our pressure, to do at least some things right, or we're just tilling the soil for radicalism.