The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Is Lindy West Getting Cancelled?

Posted on | March 24, 2026 | No Comments

Most people — even people who follow politics closely — never figured out that the Great Feminist Boom of 2014-2017 was not a coincidence. All the institutions of academia and media did not suddenly decide to the embrace and promote #feminist brand by accident. No, that cultural moment was organized to support the Right Side of History™ crusade to make Hillary Clinton America’s First Female President.

Having examined the reasons for the failure of her 2008 presidential bid, Team Hillary recognized that being identified as a feminist was a net negative for her and, in war-gaming her 2016 campaign — a process that began as soon was Obama got reelected in 2012 — they saw the importance of creating an “Astroturf” project to make it seem as if feminism was a mainstream grassroots movement. Young women who were targeted by this effort were generally too naïve to comprehend the cynical partisan calculatIons behind it, and sincerely believed that they were part of a spontaneous emergence of feminist consciousness, a belief that was much more flattering to their egos than to recognize they were pawns of a multimillion-dollar P.R. operation in service to the selfish political ambitions of one very wealthy and powerful woman.

All of which is to say that only a fool would have thought it was a coincidence when, in September 2015, Guardian columnist Lindy West “encouraged other women to share positive abortion experiences online using the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion in order to ‘denounce the stigma surrounding abortion.'” Nor was any intelligent person surprised when, a few months later in May 2016, Lindy West published Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, which was universally praised in the liberal media and immediately became a bestseller. The TV rights to Shrill were then bought by Hulu, which turned it into a 22-episode series.

Pro-abortion hashtag, book contract, TV deal — all these things occurred in the span of a few short months that just happened to coincide with the presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton. While I am not prepared to claim that Lindy West’s sudden ascent to fame and fortune was funded by the Clinton campaign (or perhaps that it was a clandestine CIA agitprop operation), neither do I think it was coincidental.

All of that is preamble to the latest turn of events, in which Lindy West has published a new book, and liberal women are trashing it.

Like everything Lindy West has ever written, Adult Braces is an exercise in solipsism, a song with one note — “Me! Me! Me!” — and while she was able to get a New York Times bestseller and a TV series out of this shtick 10 years ago, her target audience doesn’t seem eager to consume another installment of the “my-life-as-feminist-metaphor” saga.

West’s new book got completely dismantled in The Atlantic, with English feminist Helen Lewis calling it “the tombstone for Millennial Feminism.”

What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance. . . .
It isn’t social conservatism that has seen so many readers disbelieve West’s rapid-onset bisexuality. Millennial Feminism failed because it was suffocating, immiserating, and often at odds with observable facts about human nature.
Today, very few traces of it remain. Jezebel was sold off and closed. Tumblr has withered. The viral internet no longer reliably delivers traffic to epic takedowns of problematic figures, so hungry young freelancers have largely stopped pitching them. The publishing industry’s lust for jeremiads about “white feminism” is over. No one has used the word girlboss unironically in years. A key feminist legal precedent, Roe v. Wade, fell in part because Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire, a fact that makes me wince every time I remember that one of the most-lauded books of Millennial Feminism was Irin Carmon’s Notorious RBG.

What she is saying is that, in retrospect, maybe the kind of feminism Lindy West represented wasn’t good feminism, i.e., the kind of feminism that is consistent with Democrats winning elections. Anyone could see at the time that, for example, Lindy West’s beliefs were “often at odds with observable facts about human nature,” but feminists (including Helen Lewis) were willing to tolerate that until it resulted in Donald Trump twice being elected to the White House. Lindy West was a highly praised bestselling author, and then Trump beat Hillary. Four tumultuous years later, the elderly white man Joe Biden managed to “win” the 2020 election, but was compelled by the terms under which he obtained the Democratic nomination to make Kamala Harris his running mate. Then when Joe’s brain short-circuited in a June 2024 debate, he got kicked off the ticket and Harris was anointed as the Democratic standard-bearer — losing to Trump even worse than Hillary lost to Trump.

Liberals judge everything by whether or not it helps Democrats win elections, and the experience of the past 10 years is such that we might say feminism has been “weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

Did the decade-long failure of feminism — in terms of its utility as a partisan weapon for Democrats — result in this sudden outburst of criticism directed at Lindy West? It’s hard to say, but Helen Lewis’s takedown in The Atlantic set off a tsunami wave of Subtackers denouncing West’s brand of feminism. The bisexual “throuple” angle in West’s new book got Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s dander up:

For the last decade or so, there’s been a crossing of wires of sorts, wherein queer liberation and feminism are meant to be the same project. More specifically: the idea is that if women could simply abandon straightness, there, right there, is the feminist future. Abandon cisheteroland, and the feminism manifests.

As she explains, this is at the very least short-sighted, and results in harms that are perhaps not intended, but are entirely predictable.

In the context of analyzing Lindy West’s fat-feminist shtick, Kat Rosenfeld remarks about how “the same liberal communities which prided themselves on openness and tolerance also harbored an absolutely staggering contempt for the sensibilities and cultural practices of red America, and especially of the white working class, which they mocked mercilessly for being backwards and unenlightened . . . And one thing about the rural white working class: not always, but often, they’re fat.” Lindy West grew up as fat in deep-blue Seattle, where her size was socially coded as working-class, and the anti-fat prejudice she complains of is widespread among liberal snobs. However, as I explained in 2018, “Preferences Are Not Oppression”:

How is it that America (evidently unique among all nations) stands accused of a “monomanical fixation” with being thin, while at the same time we’re experiencing an obesity epidemic? And does Lindy West actually believe this “warps every single woman’s life”?
My daughters are not fat. My two daughters-in-law are not fat. My teenage sons’ girlfriends are not fat. If their lives are being “warped” by a “monomanical fixation,” they haven’t mentioned it. Some people are just naturally thin, more or less, and thus suffer no hardship because of the general preference for thinness. “Fat feminism” is a movement organized to convince us that our normal preferences are wrong. If you think a skinny woman is more attractive than Lindy West, your preference oppresses Lindy West, in much the same way (and for much the same reason) that she considers “stigma” against abortion oppressive.

The slow-motion approach to totalitarianism means that most people don’t realize how we have gone, in the space of about 40 or 50 years, from prohibiting certain beliefs as “racist,” to now attempting to prohibit other beliefs, attitudes and opinions for no reason except that some people’s feelings are hurt. The taboo on “racism” (which must be put in quotation marks because its definition has become increasingly vague) was based on the understanding that such attitudes motivated actual harm to black people. In the context of Jim Crow, lynching, etc., these harms were quite a bit more serious than mere hurt feelings, OK? But now the Left is trying to stifle free speech on the basis of a need to “de-stigmatize” various behaviors. What this means is that, for example, the practitioners of polyamory demand that they should be exempt from criticism, in the same way that Lindy West by denouncing “the stigma surrounding abortion” means that she should be exempt from criticism.

The Thought Police aspect of all this is what disturbs me most. I am fully capable of examining evidence and listening to arguments and making up my own mind without any external guidance, and I do not wish to prohibit people from publishing bad books full of wrong ideas, which is what Lindy West does. So long as we are free to criticize these bad ideas, without the Thought Police suppressing our criticism, other people are free to make up their own minds, just as I am. The totalitarian tendencies of those whom Helen Lewis calls the “high priestesses” of Millennial Feminism were obvious enough 10 years ago, but it wasn’t until Trump got elected and reelected that liberals began to have second thoughts about this movement. Lindy West getting cancelled is yet another reason I am proud that I voted for Donald Trump. So much winning . . .



 

Category: Feminism, Liberals

In The Mailbox: 3.23.26

Posted on | March 24, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Director Blue: The Iran Dossier – How Barack Obama Helped Build A Nuclear Terror State, The 20 Most Advanced Weapons Systems Fielded In 2026, and The Day Lewis & Clark Reached The Pacific (1805)
EBL: Baked Fish With Creamy Lemon Sauce, Getting Rid of Visceral Fat, The Politburo Five, MAGA Airport ICE, and Beef Wellington
Twitchy: Debut of The Rock’s Live-Action “Maui” Has Trailer Viewers Curling Up In Laughter, Rachel Zegler Finally Speaks Out on the Failure of Snow White (It’s Your Fault), and Ms. Rachel Fights To Close ICE Facility for Children
Louder With Crowder: “The View” Claims Putting ICE In Airports Is Good Because They Won’t Be Deporting Illegals That Way, Democrat victim-blames woman murdered by illegal in Chicago, Joe Rogan unloads on Gavin Newsom’s pathetic attack on independent journalist uncovering fraud in California, Taylor Lorenz has a new group of people she’s lecturing people to mask up, and Lesbian sociology professor rants about how many girlfriends she’s had “with male genitalia”
Vox Popoli: A Longer Reach, Iran Makes Its Demands, A Library, Unlimited, Scratch and Claw, and The Lost America
Cedar Sanderson: A Writer’s Christmas Eve, Blood Orange Meringue Pie, and  My Hands Remembered
The Bugscuffle Gazette: The Right to Be Let Alone, also, Bachelor Chow
Stoic Observations: When Everybody Knows That Everybody Knows AI, Discovery – Rene Girard & Sacrifice, also, The CTA Problem
Mazelit Airaksinen: I converted – now what? also, Hospital Worker Who Said “Israelis Have A Repulsive Culture” FIRED
Upstream Reviews: Lord of a Shattered Land
Draw & Talk Comics: The One Question that Changed my Life
Defending The Wood Perilous: Starquest Book Eight Is Live, also, Kickstarting Joy

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Baldilocks: Stripe Issues
CDR Salamander: March Midrats Podcast Free-For-All, also, Europe’s “Say vs. Do” Issue 
Don Surber: Bad war coverage > bad ratings
Elizabeth Nickson: The Fabian Sneer – How American Sexuality Was Ruined By Repellent Aristocrats & The Rockefeller Family
Glenn Reynolds: Answering The Important Questions
Racket News: The Swamp Log
STUMP: Paul Ehrlich & The Murder-Suicide of Expertise, also, This Week In Meep – After DST, The Deluge

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Automotive
New Releases – Automotive
H&R Block Deluxe & State Tax Software


 

Category: Linkagery

Rule 5 Sunday: Late Night With Daisy Dukes

Posted on | March 23, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Thanks to @kbdabear.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, “The Happening”, Let’s Make Pizza, Rickshaw Girls, Irish Women (1967), Maureen O’Hara, The Madison, and MAGA Ides of March

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Rule 5 Saturday – Claire Muzic, Fish Pic Friday- Summer Mae, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Blue Catfish Too Good For Dog Food, Did Tucker Set Up The Ayatollahs? The Monday Morning Stimulus, and Palm Sunday

BACON TIME: Rule Five Red Hot

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Deals on Premium Beauty Products
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts




 

Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: On An Even Keel

Posted on | March 23, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

If you’re the sort of person who prays for others when they’re facing the Reflector Heads, please do so for Fritz, who blogs at A View For The Beach. He has been rendered humorless. 
We started the week going 2-1 against Pete’s Brewers and ended it losing two out of three to the Royals, who have a tough rotation. So we’re still in second place in our division at 63-67, seven games behind the Twins and five ahead of the Brewers. I can’t remember offhand how Pete has the playoff brackets set up, but since there are two teams in the other division with better records, there’s a chance I’ll miss the playoffs – but I’ll have plenty of keepers for next year and some early draft picks to mend the holes in our pitching.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
FMJRA 2.0: Holding Our Own
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Rule Five Sunday: Ersatz Gingermageddon
A View From The Beach
EBL

 

In The Mailbox: 03.16.26
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.17.26
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.18.26
EBL
357 Magnum

Gavin Newsom’s ‘Cougar Crossing’ Is the Perfect Symbol of Californication
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.19.26
EBL
357 Magnum

There Is a Reason Why Taboos Exist
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.20.26
EBL
357 Magnum

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

 

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Amazon Essentials
H&R Block Deluxe & State Tax Software


 

Category: FMJRA Award

Scandal-Plagued Former FBI Chief Robert Mueller Dies in Disagrace at Age 81

Posted on | March 22, 2026 | No Comments

Robert Mueller, tainted by controversy.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum is always wise policy, which Democrats never follow whenever one of their enemies die. Democrats hate without apology, but become indignant if Republicans return the favor.

Readers might notice that the headline of this obituary is perhaps not a model of journalistic objectivity, but that’s the whole point. You see, I spent a decade at the Washington Times, which gave me a chance to study how our liberal competitor, the Washington Post, always slanted everything, including obituaries. Liberal journalists find ways to sneak in tendentious words and phrases like controversial and scandal-plagued when writing about their chosen enemies, and I think this is as good an occasion as any to repay the favor in the case of Bob Mueller.

It is worth pointing out that, prior to 2017, few liberals would have thought of Mueller as a hero. He had a long career as a federal prosecutor before becoming Assistant Attorney General in the first Bush administration, and was subsequent chosen in 2001 by Bush the Younger to be FBI Director. His reputation was as a conservative Republican, and he remained in the job until 2013, when Obama named James Comey as his successor. Four years later, after Trump had fired Comey (after learning that the FBI had illegally spied on his campaign), Attorney General Bill Barr recused himself from the case and appointed Mueller as special counsel, tasked with investigating the whole matter of “Russian collusion.” Mueller was 73 years old at the time and appears to have functioned as a figurehead for a witch-hunt conducted by his underlings.

For nearly two years, the Mueller investigation dragged on, ruining the lives of various Trump allies entangled in the case, as the witch-hunters tried to bring pressure on them to implicate Trump in something — anything — illegal. All that while, the talking heads on MSNBC were gleefully cheerleading Mueller, telling their Trump-hating audiences that “the walls are closing in” on the Bad Orange Man. Ultimately, however, these sadistic fantasies were disappointed: Mueller’s final report failed to find any evidence of “collusion” between the Russians and the Trump campaign. It was all a hoax from start to finish. And when Mueller was called to testify before Congress, it became apparent that he was well down the path to becoming completely senile.

It is an objective fact that Mueller was disgraced by his participation in the “Russian collusion” witch-hunt. However, because his phony investigation was useful to Democrats — it disrupted Trump’s first term and arguably helped Democrats win control of Congress in the 2018 midterm elections — all the usual suspects in journalism are now obligated to praise him as a hero. They get paid to lie.

As bad as the “Russian collusion” witch-hunt was, however, it perhaps wasn’t the worst stain on Mueller’s record. As FBI director, Mueller authorized the Bureau to use informants to organize neo-Nazi rallies:

In 2007, Orlando residents were furious to discover that an FBI informant had organized a neo-Nazi rally through one of the city’s mostly black neighborhoods a year earlier.
“To come into a predominantly black community, which could have resulted in great harm to the black community? I would hate to be part of a game,” Orlando City Councilwoman Daisy Lynum said at the time, calling for a “full-scale investigation” into the matter.
However, an FBI agent testified that his informant participated in the event, but didn’t organize it. The city’s uproar passed without a public investigation, full-scale or otherwise — until now.
Thanks to a trove of previously unpublicized law enforcement records and interviews with several players involved, Headline USA can reveal that the Orlando neo-Nazi rally was indeed organized by the FBI. The Orlando event also seems to have been part of a larger program to hold Nazi rallies across the country. And according to FBI records, the bureau sponsored those events despite knowing they led to an increase in the number of card-carrying Nazis in America. . . .

You can read the rest of that, and also read Part II of Ken Silva’s investigative report on this shady episode from Mueller’s career.



 

Category: Corruption, Crime, Media Bias, Scandal

D.E.I. + A.I. = O.M.G.!

Posted on | March 22, 2026 | No Comments

Clayton County prosecutor Deborah Leslie

One of my sons is a lawyer, and the youngest is currently a first-year law student, and the stories they tell me about the use of AI (artificial intelligence) by both law students and practicing lawyers are disturbing. You may think “fake news” is bad, but fake law is much worse. Last year, I wrote about Stanford Professor Jeff Hancock who calls himself a “misinformation expert,” who was enlisted as an expert witness by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in a case about so-called “deep fake” videos. Hancock was disqualified after his AI fakery was discovered:

Attorney General Ellison concedes that Professor Hancock included citations to two non-existent academic articles and incorrectly cited the authors of a third article. Professor Hancock admits that he used GPT-4o to assist him in drafting his declaration but, in reviewing the declaration, failed to discern that GPT-4o generated fake citations to academic articles.
The irony. Professor Hancock, a credentialed expert on the dangers of AI and misinformation, has fallen victim to the siren call of relying too heavily on AI — in a case that revolves around the dangers of AI, no less.

What happens, of course, is that people get lazy, relying on computer programs to do their work for them. And this is causing all kind of problems in education, as well as in the actual practice of law. If you’re a lawyer using AI to help write your briefs, it’s important to double-check the results because AI programs are known to “hallucinate” fictitious cases sometimes — and it’s a disaster if you get caught using those:

There was turmoil in a Georgia courtroom on Wednesday as AI-generated deficiencies in the state’s legal filings threatened to upend proceedings in an appeal lodged by a woman convicted of murdering an older man in a citizen’s arrest gone horribly wrong.
In December 2023, Hannah Payne, 25, was convicted on two counts of felony murder, three counts of possession of a weapon during a crime, and one count each of malice murder, aggravated assault, and false imprisonment over the May 2019 death of Kenneth Herring, 62.
The defendant was subsequently sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after serving at least 43 years behind bars. . . .

Permit me to interrupt the narrative here to explain to anyone unfamiliar with Georgia: Clayton County is a Southside suburb of Atlanta. The population is 69% black and only 9% white. Needless to say, Clayton County is heavily Democratic. In 2024, Kamala Harris got 84% of the vote in the county, which is home to the Atlanta airport. And, in regard to this case, it is important to note that Hannah Payne is white, while the man she was convicted of murdering is black. Back to the narrative:

Payne quickly appealed her sentence and conviction citing ineffective assistance of counsel. After losing her motion for a new trial in late summer 2025, the appellate effort made its way before the Georgia Supreme Court this week.
During oral arguments, one of the justices noted that certain components of legal filings from the lower court did not appear to have legal justification.
“In reviewing the trial court’s order denying the motion for new trial, there are at least five citations to cases that don’t exist, and there’s at least five more citations to cases that do not support the proposition for which they’re cited, including three quotations that don’t exist,” Chief Justice Nels S.D. Peterson said.
An attorney for the state denied knowledge of the fabricated citations.
“I did prepare an order, that order was revised,” Deborah Leslie, representing the Clayton County District Attorney’s Office, said.
This answer received a quick riposte.
“Those nonexistent cases were cited in your initial brief opposing the motion for new trial,” the justice told the prosecutor.
To which Leslie replied: “Your Honor, I’m not aware of that, but I would be glad to research and provide the court with a supplement.”

Keep in mind that this is a high-profile murder case in Georgia, a case with an obvious racial angle in a state with a long history of difficult race relations, being argued in front of the state supreme court, and the D.A.’s office has just been caught using fake citations in its motion, and the prosecutor’s response is, “Your Honor, I’m not aware of that.” Good Lord!

Everybody on X immediately started shouting “DEI!” Far be it from me to accuse others of racism — “RAAAAACISM!” — but just because the lawyer is black doesn’t mean she’s a DEI hire, and plenty of white lawyers have similarly been caught using fake citations generated by AI.

While I was not able to locate background information on Deborah Leslie, I was able to find an organizational chart for the Clayton County District Attorney’s office, which shows that Leslie’s boss is Chief Assistant District Attorney Zina Pitts. who has been a lawyer in Georgia for the past 25 years. The fact that Pitts and Leslie are both black women, as is District Attorney Tasha Mosley, is not the result of “DEI” policy, it just reflects the demographics (and political leanings) of Clayton County.

Tasha Mosley was appointed DA of Clayton County in 2019 by Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. She is an alumna of SMU, got her law degree at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, and has been practicing in Georgia for 30 years. She has been reelected to the office since her appointment seven years ago, and while I have no interest in praising her, this current brouhaha is the first time the Clayton County DA’s office has bungled anything so badly as to attract nationwide attention.

Let’s talk about the facts of the case:

On May 7, 2019, Payne and a semi-truck had a green light when Herring breezed through a red light in his Dodge Dakota pickup truck, causing a minor crash with the semi-truck. Testimony at an earlier hearing suggested that Herring stayed at the scene of the crash for roughly 15 to 20 minutes before ultimately getting back in his truck and driving away.
Payne, who was not involved in the initial crash, pulled over and called 911, she testified on Monday.
A witness — a state corrections officer with medic training — also saw the crash and came up to speak to Herring, a detective previously testified. Based on his training, the witness suggested Herring was having a medical emergency — a diabetic shock or something of that nature. For example, Herring was disoriented, displayed red-orange eyes, and had walked around his truck several times.
But Payne thought Herring was drunk — toxicology tests would later show Herring had no drugs or alcohol in his system.
“He’s OK, but he’s definitely inebriated,” the officer said at one point, according to Payne. This alleged claim prompted her and the semi-truck driver to ask at the same time: “Do you mean he’s drunk?”
After Herring left the initial crash site, however, Payne had settled on the idea that he was drunk. She got back into her Jeep and pursued Herring despite being told at least once by 911 not to do so.
“I saw him stopped in the turning lane, so I turned as well,” Payne testified. “When I stopped, I was under the impression, with having 911 on the phone, that I could be a messenger.”
Payne said she initially only intended to get the driver’s license plate information, which she said the 911 dispatcher had asked of her.
Prosecutors argued the audio from the 911 call shows the dispatcher was adamant that Payne not pursue Herring. The audio is also clear the defendant was adamant she was going to go after him.
“He is drunk. I’m not,” Payne told the dispatcher before the fatal confrontation. “I’m sorry, but I’m here to tell you I’m not not going to follow him because he is going to cause an accident.”
After the two shouted at one another for a few moments, Herring reached out of his truck and grabbed her, Payne testified on Monday. She claimed he ripped her shirt with the grab and eventually “mashed the gas,” briefly dragging her forward with his car.
Payne said she never stopped trying to pull away from Herring and eventually announced that she had a gun to try and get her alleged assailant to let her go. That’s when Payne admittedly drew the gun.
“I pulled it out and immediately started trying to just continue to push against the door with it — like push it away from him” she testified. Then, she said: “He grabbed my hand with the gun in it.”
All the while, the defendant said, she screamed for Herring to stop.
“As he’s pulling it is when it — the trigger went off,” she testified. “After it went off, my entire body kind of fell backwards.”
The state, on the other hand, proved during the trial, relying on witness testimony and recordings, that Payne actually cut Herring off with her car, then jumped out and “very aggressively” ran up to Herring’s car, cursed at him, immediately started punching the confused man through his window, took out her gun, threatened to shoot him twice, and “immediately” shot him.

The facts are disputed, but what is clear is that Payne believed that Herring, who ran a red light causing an accident and then left the scene of the accident, was a danger to other motorists. She claims she fired in self-defense during a struggle over the gun. But even if the jury didn’t buy that explanation, Georgia law still recognizes the right to use deadly violence in defense of others. Payne’s appeal argues that her defense attorney failed to get the court to instruct the jury properly on that, as well as on Georgia’s “citizen’s arrest” statute, which was still in effect in 2019, although it was repealed in 2021 after the Ahmaud Arbery case.

It’s worth noting that the NAACP called upon its supporters to “pack the courtroom” for Payne’s sentencing hearing.

Did Hannah Payne receive a fair trial? Considering the basic demographic and political facts about Clayton County, is it possible that any white defendant in such a situation — claiming self-defense in an interaction with a black person — could receive a fair trial?

Perhaps others are not concerned about this, and certainly I would not “play the race card” were it not for the fact that the NAACP already played it. Let the authorities in Clayton County reflect on what it might mean to their community if it were nationally regarded as a “no-go zone” for white people (as many locals already do). Now add to that the embarrassment of the District Attorney’s office using non-existent citations in an appeal of the case, and it’s not a good look for Clayton County. The state Supreme Court is not very happy.



 

Category: Crime, Georgia, Racism

In The Mailbox: 03.20.26

Posted on | March 21, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
Wow, an entire week without skipped/compacted posts.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Do We Need More AI in Our Life? also Self-Defense Is Catching on in Chicago
Director Blue: Did Trump Really Just Kneecap Lloyd’s of London?,  
EBL: Giant Calimari, Italian Hard Cheeses, Chuck Norris RIP, “The Happening”, and Saint Joseph Pasta
Twitchy: Variety’s Chuck Norris Headline Gets Ratioed To The Moon, “People Are Starting To Notice”, and MN DFL Ob-Gyn’s Cringe Voter ID Dunk Fails Hard 
Louder With Crowder: New report exposes insane amount of non-citizens collecting welfare, highlights the three worst offenders, Shocking report shows NYC spends more per homeless person than the average NYer MAKES PER YEAR, Hasan Piker’s Cuba Lies Debunked Feat. Real Cuban, Spanglish Generation, Democrats vote in near unison AGAINST deporting illegals who viciously attack dogs, and Lame NY governor steals lame CA governor’s social media strategy to start beef with Barstool Sports and fails
Vox Popoli: That’s How Bad, VDH Predicts a US Victory, and Can it Get Worse?
According To Hoyt: Go Pick On Someone Your Own Size, People Are Not Widgets, Use Your Power For Good, This Is Not A Post, and Telling us it’s raining
Monster Hunter Nation: Monster Hunter Files Vol 2
Upstream Reviews: Cyberpub

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Biden Era Intel Assessment Targeted White Moms and Homemakers as Potential Domestic Terrorists, Las Vegas Cops Defy Judge’s Order, Refuse to Release Violent Repeat Offender, Obama’s Presidential Center Seeking 100 Unpaid Volunteers to Staff Lavish Facility, MAGA Ramps Up Pressure on Trump to Dump Cornyn, and Surf, Turf, and Another Media Meltdown
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For March 20
Behind The Black: Space Force shifts another ULA Vulcan launch to SpaceX, The FCC’s agenda at its next meeting includes an item for “Weird Space Stuff”, Ursa Major test flies a new liquid-fueled missile engine for Air Force, Kratos wins $446 million contract to build/operate ground system for Space Force satellite constellation, and Blue Origin files FCC application for its own 51,600 data center satellite constellation
Cafe Hayek: More on How Excess Capacity = Inadequate Capacity
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Dana Loesch: Joe Kent Was Under Investigation For Leaking Months Before He Resigned 
Don Surber: Friends in need, not NATO
First Street Journal: You in a heap o’ trouble, boys!
The Geller Report: US, Japan Announce $73 Billion New Business Projects Including $40 Billion Nuclear Power Project, NYC’s First Lady Deletes Old X Account as Posts Glorifying Islamic Terrorists, Jew & America Hatred Reemerge, BOMBSHELL STUDY  – Myocarditis AND Pericarditis ONLY Occurred in Children Who Got COVID mRNA vaccination, Iranian Regime Leaders’ Kids Have Been Living in Luxury in America, and Somaliland Drops Receipts That Ilhan Omar Married Her Brother
Hollywood In Toto: Hollywood Takes Aim at ICE with HBO Max’s Huge Hit, also, White Guilt Slams BLM as Epic Grift
Legal Insurrection: Democrats Block ‘Women’s History Museum’ Bill Because It Excludes Men, Congress Proposes ‘PASTEUR Act’ as ‘Superbugs’ Spread and Antibiotic Resistance Increases, Education Secretary McMahon Threatens SJSU Federal Funding for Title IX Violations, Newly Renovated Church at Marquette University Vandalized, and Iran’s IRGC Spokesman, Who Threatened Trump, Killed in Israeli Strike
Outkick: March Madness? More Like Legal Madness, I Asked WNBA Star Kelsey Plum’s AI Twin About ‘Pay Us What You Owe Us’, Pittsburgh Is Closing Down Schools The Week Of NFL Draft, Whatever Happened To Former Basketball Star And Far-Left Nutjob Rex Chapman? and Sydney Sweeney Teases New Lingerie With A Perfectly Placed Rose, MLB Players Are Shrinking & RIP Chuck Norris!
Power Line: Blue Flight Continues Apace, Another one bites the dust, Family guy, and Spring can really hang you up the most
Racket News: March Media Madness – Determining America’s Worst Podcaster, Can Your Pension/Retirement Money Get Lost in the Bermuda Triangle?
Shark Tank: Wasserman-Schultz Decries Trump’s “Unacceptable” Actions In Iran
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday: Should Labor Power Be Reduced?
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, With friends like these, Chuck Norris, USAF vet, dies, and Bringing the BRRRRRRRT to the Persian Gulf
Transterrestrial Musings: Project Hail Mary, also, The Imperial Order Is Over
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Watts Up With That: Utilities Efforts Would Undermine President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, Russian Oil Poised To Flood World Markets As Trump Admin Lifts Sanctions, AEP Wants North Sea Oil & Gas Now, Energy Dominance 2.0: Permian Basin Edition, and The “Spiral of Silence” is Concealing Majority Support for Climate Action
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Mark Steyn: As the World Burns

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There Is a Reason Why Taboos Exist

Posted on | March 20, 2026 | No Comments

A ‘celebrity,’ by 21st-century standards

You are an intelligent, responsible adult, which is why you’ve never heard of Taylor Frankie Paul. Until Thursday, I hadn’t heard of her either because — as an intelligent, responsible adult — I pay zero attention to “reality TV.” But before getting to her recent failed attempt to break out from that entertainment ghetto, let’s start at the beginning: By 2022, when she was 28, Taylor Frankie Paul had accumulated a massive following on TikTok. She was a married mother of three, and a lot of her content featured her and her husband, Tate Paul, doing silly stunts, sometimes with their two young children. Then in mid-2022, Taylor “went viral” with a video announcing that she would be getting divorced. Her “life was falling apart,” she said and then she dropped the bomb: The breakup was because she and her husband (and many of their friends in their Utah community, allegedly) were involved in “swinging.”

Don’t know who needs to hear this, but . . . BAD IDEA!

Because I am someone who can be trusted to keep a secret, I can’t tell you the stories about people I know who tried the so-called “polyamorous” lifestyle and thereby wrecked their lives, but I assure you that I have never once heard of anything good resulting from aforesaid lifestyle.

In general, every type of kinky behavior that could be characterized as sexual fantasy is a bad idea. We see people destroy their lives this way quite frequently, as for example, the tragic saga of Fred “Bubba” Copeland a/k/a “Brittni Summerlin.” Disapproval of such behavior is sometimes referred to as a “taboo,” which has overtones of superstition, as if the forbidden nature of certain sexual practices is the result of irrational prejudice. But if you study the situation with an eye to long-term happiness, these taboos are entirely rational.

Suppose that you’re a guy bored with marital monogamy, and your particular fantasy is a ménage à trois. So there’s a reasonably attractive and friendly young woman who lives in your trailer park, and you spring the idea on your wife: Y’all get together for some fun, just to “spice thing up” a bit. Congratulations — your wife is agreeable, so you do the threesome, and it’s so awesome that you begin doing it regularly. You, your wife and the good-looking trailer park neighbor, having a great time. And then one day, you get off work early and show up at your trailer to discover that your wife and the good-looking neighbor lady have decided they like the twosome better than the threesome, and your involvement is no longer necessary to the fun. You’re going to lose everything, including your trailer, because your soon-to-be-ex-wife is now a full-blown lesbian. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a true story, which I can share without violating my code because I did not personally know the people involved and heard this tale second-hand from a trusted source.

Whenever I tell that story, the listener will invariably tell me a very similar story involving people of their acquaintance. There are enough people out there doing stuff like this that the pattern becomes familiar to anyone who pays attention. When the “fantasy” comes true in real life, it’s never going to lead to a good place, which brings us back to the story of Taylor Frankie Paul, the TikTok star whose marriage got wrecked because of the “swinger” lifestyle. Her husband moved out and moved on with his life, but Taylor’s viral fame attracted the interest of Jeff Jenkins, an experienced reality-show producer who had worked on Keeping Up With the Kardashians and its various spinoffs. The result was a Hulu series, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which made its debut in September 2024, and has been continued through a total of 40 episodes.

Knocked up: Dakota Mortensen and Taylor Frankie Paul in 2024.

Taylor and her circle of friends star in the show, with the usual “reality TV” drama, some of which is actually real. In the first season, Taylor learned that she was pregnant by her new boyfriend, a guy named Dakota Mortensen. The couple had a baby boy together, but they broke up in the second season. Season Three dropped late last year, and earlier this month the fourth season made its debut. Meanwhile, in September last year, ABC announced that Taylor Frankie Paul would star in the next season of The Bachelorette. Because you are an intelligent, responsible adult, you have never watched The Bachelorette. It’s a long-running spinoff of The Bachelor, which made a ratings splash when it debuted in 2002, with one guy choosing his prospective bride from a group of female contestants. The Bachelorette, which premiered in 2003, just reversed that format, with a group of guys vying to be chosen by a woman.

Who watches this garbage? Not me and not you, as we are intelligent, responsible adults, but many millions of viewers tune in habitually for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, which is why this garbage has been on TV for more than 20 years. This same audience of tasteless dimwits, of course, are also the target audience for “reality” shows like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, so it made perfect sense — from a marketing standpoint — for ABC to make Taylor Frankie Paul the star of the new season of The Bachelorette. From other perspectives, however, this choice made no sense at all. Like, how is this woman a “catch”?

Let’s not critique her looks, OK? But aside from her appearance — certainly no better than 6/10 — here is a 31-year-old single mother of three, and yet ABC expected their audience to buy into the idea that men were literally lining up to compete for the chance to make her their bride?

Is the dating scene for guys really that bad nowadays? Even if you presume your audience to be a bunch of dimwits (a safe assumption for “reality TV,” to be honest), this premise strains credulity. And yet ABC invested millions of dollars in this, the 22nd season of The Bachelorette, starring the rode-hard-and-put-up-wet Taylor Frankie Paul.

The red flags were ignored until disaster struck this week:

Taylor Frankie Paul repeatedly attacked Dakota Mortensen during the 2023 incident in which she pled guilty to aggravated assault, and the video shows that one of her children was struck during the fight.
TMZ has obtained the video — a copy of which was evidence in the case — and it’s hard to watch. Dakota struggles to record the altercation with his cellphone as Taylor puts him in a headlock. She backs off … but then charges and tries to kick him.
The struggle turns violent as Taylor grabs a metal barstool and hurls it at Dakota. He screams at her — “your daughter is sitting right there” — but she persists, throwing 2 more stools at him. At that moment, you hear her child, who was curled up on the couch, begin crying.
The police report says the 5-year-old girl was hit and later had a “goose egg on her head.”
Police arrived on the scene that night after a neighbor called to complain about the noise, and in the video you hear the officer trying to separate them.

So, not only is she a 31-year-old single mom, but she’s also a dangerously violent lunatic. That was enough for ABC to cancel the whole season:

ABC has canceled Season 22 of The Bachelorette after a 2023 video of Taylor Frankie Paul — who was set to lead the new season — fighting her ex-boyfriend went viral.
The entire upcoming season of The Bachelorette was canceled on Thursday, just three days before it was set to premiere. . . .
“In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season of The Bachelorette at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family,” a Disney Entertainment Television spokesperson told People. . . .
Recently, a source told People that filming has apparently been halted for Season 5 of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives due to “some pretty serious stuff happening regarding [Paul’s] past.”
A spokesperson for the Draper City Police Department, meanwhile, told the magazine that there is an open “domestic assault investigation” involving Paul and Mortensen.

Wow! In addition to cancelling an entire season of The Bachelorette, it now appears the future of Taylor’s franchise The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives may be in jeopardy. And the tea keeps spilling.

Because you are an intelligent and responsible adult, you will probably not be surprised to learn that the court has ordered Taylor Frankie Paul to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. What do you suppose this evaluation will reveal? That she is deranged and demented? Unhinged, wacko, daffy, non compos mentis and off her rocker? Nuttier than a Snickers bar, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?

Does it seem to you in hindsight that maybe there was some clue that this woman was in need of a straitjacket and a padded cell? Perhaps the fact that she wrecked her marriage because of the “swinger” lifestyle?

If only someone had warned them that Crazy People Are Dangerous.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! It never ceases to amaze me how sometimes I spend hours working on a lengthy essay, and what gets quoted is a quick jibe that only took me 15 seconds.



 

Category: Celebrities, Scandal, Sex
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