It’s very heartening to see principled unity on the Right regarding AG Pam Bondi’s statements that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech.”

There is no such distinction in our constitution and there shouldn’t be. The concept of “hate speech” does not exist legally and should not exist morally or intellectually.

Moreover, we should retire words hate and phobia (outside of clinical settings) for a decade or so because they’ve been overused and no longer mean anything.

It’s great that there’s such a concerted pushback on the Right to Bondi’s statements. Her words should be a fireable offence. This should be the end of her legal career.

I watched “The Charlie Kirk Show” for the first time today. It was a beautiful idea to organize a tribute to Charlie led by JD Vance as a host. But the execution was embarrassingly bad. Terrible sound, pathetic editing. The plan was to show clips of Charlie debating on college campuses in the breaks between guests. That was messed up beyond belief with clips poorly cut, one segment repeating several times from different points. There are hundreds of excellent clips where Charlie does all the work. A ten-year-old should be able to get a good, representative collection and put it in the show seamlessly.

JD Vance should not be hosting any shows because he was gauche, fake, wooden, and kept interrupting the guests to tell them that their time was up. He recited the Nicene Creed, and that’s great, but he somehow managed to do it very clumsily and unconvincingly.

This is very symbolic of the entire administration. The plans are great but the execution is weak and embarrassing.

In absolutely any endeavor, the idea is about 15% of the success. The other 85% are all execution. If you can’t execute, it doesn’t matter that you have the most brilliant idea ever. You still fail.

We came to the stand with rotisserie chickens. Only 3 chickens were left, two natural and one smokehouse.

“I don’t want the African American chicken, mommy,” Clara said. “I want the other one.”

💬 “8,000 soldiers have died this week, from both countries. Some more from Russia, but when you’re the aggressor, you lose more.” https://t.co/rxW07tbSsP

— UNITED24 Media (@United24media) September 15, 2025

He’s slowly figuring it out.

Veeeery slooooowly.

Might actually get it in the next decade or two.

Reader Ed asks an excellent question in the post about ideology and morality:

Does modern Russia have any sort of ideology? Do Russians in Russia have any of these problems?

My mother-in-law is 76. She used to love traveling. Her younger daughter is rich, a hockey wife, and she used to sponsor her mother’s trips. She also loved gardening at her dacha.

All that has been abandoned. She now dons a military uniform and marches to the sound of military songs with other grandmas. She’s selling off her property to pay for membership in this club. She never served, never was in any wars, so it’s not a throwback to her youth. Neither is she senile. This is a woman who has options. She could be living it up in America, surrounded by her children and grandchild. She could go to any resort on the planet with the daughter who is devoted to her. Instead, she’s putting herself in the poorhouse in exchange for the privilege of singing bloodthirsty songs in uniform.

This is the Russian ideology. War is their ideology. It’s people of all ages, happy, excited, not interested in anything beyond their ideology. That Russian girl who came to teach at my department 3 years ago. She was only 24. I thought it would be possible to interest her in something. I tried very hard, took her everywhere, talked about everything. But she was glassy-eyed, happy in her ideological bliss. There was not the smallest chink in her armor. I tried to do the Christian thing, treated her with endless kindness. And I failed worse than I ever failed at anything. Her religion was stronger than mine. She had that luminous look of cult members that can’t be reached by any outside engagement.

War, war, war. Teenagers at a rave, jumping up happily to war songs, screaming slogans. And against that background, replacement migration with all its terrible stories. A migrant nanny who cut off the head of the child she was minding and walked around with that head in her hand, blood dripping on the sidewalk. Endless stories of migrant rape. Empty churches, full mosques. Political assassinations. The utter evisceration of the middle class that had barely had time to form since 1991. Nobody cares because they’ve got their war and it’s making everything else seem unimportant. Talented artists, movie stars, writers, all suddenly bloodthirsty, all wishing more war.

People who said the nation-state should go away because that will end wars were badly wrong. Neoliberal war is war without purpose because it is its own purpose. War without end because it makes every other neoliberal surprise acceptable. Fluid war in a fluid world with no morality other than raw pleasure.

A man who was arrested on suspicion of capital murder is alleged to have beheaded the manager of a Dallas motel and left the victim’s head in a trash bin, court records obtained Thursday show.

When authorities took Yordanis Cobos-Martinez into custody Wednesday, he was covered in blood and armed with the machete he is accused of using to kill Chandra Nagamallaiah, 50, according to an affidavit in support of an arrest warrant.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-accused-beheading-dallas-motel-manager-told-not-use-broken-washing-rcna230705

There had been many efforts to remove Cobos-Martínez from the country because he was here illegally. He had a final order of removal but ICE released him back into society because Cobos-Martínez’s native country of Cuba refused to take him back.

In front of the victim’s wife and son

Cobos-Martinez kicked Nagamallaiah’s head into the parking lot, then picked it up and put it in a dumpster.

I would now like to hear from our liberal readers. What, in your opinion, should have been done when, following every due process guarantee, Cobos-Martínez refused to leave the country and Cubs refused to take him? What should have been done?

How does your worldview suggest authorities should proceed in these cases?

This is the great triumph of any ideology and for this ideology it is total: to pass for morality itself. Or even better: to be, in the eyes of a given society, the whole of morality and indistinguishable from it.

– Renaud Camus, Enemy of the Disaster

When ideology substitutes morality, it becomes possible for people to celebrate a political assassination and wish death on those who express opinions they don’t share.

I was asked yesterday what unity looks like in a nation-state. It’s strange that one has to explain since we all lived in nation-states until very recently. But I can repeat that national unity is formed by fostering emotional attachment to the symbols of the nation, the shared narrative of its history, and the shared veneration for a list of cultural, political, artistic, and military figures associated with the nation state. The flag, the anthem, the national sports team, the museum, the archive. The language, the literature, the music, the shared narrative of history.

Few things are as algorithmic and have been described as exhaustively as nation-building.

Here’s a popular meme in Ukraine. Stare at the black dot in the picture for 20 seconds and then stare at the ceiling. You’ll see the flag of Ukraine.

That’s national unity. People want to see the flag of their nation on the ceiling. They are flooded with warm, fuzzy feelings in response to seeing the flag.

The way this whole way of life gets dismantled is with the idea that since you haven’t chosen this flag, this story, this anthem, and this place, it’s a limitation on the most important thing which is your freedom. You start going down the road of choosey, consumerist, ego-flattering freedom, and it’s mega enjoyable. There’s no responsibility for anything and to anyone. No ties, no unchosen emotions. You move through, extracting value, gorging yourself on it, and moving on from the consequences.

It’s all great fun. Until you are the roadkill from which value was extracted before leaving you by the side of the road. Most people imagine they’ll be the wrecking crew. Instead, they’ll be roadkill.

I suggest starting in the place where the word “unchosen” feels like something negative when the things we love most in life are usually exactly that.

Have you tried explaining furries and GAMPs to normies? It feels like a cruelty because they look very scared.

I wish I watched mainstream TV news. I wonder how they are explaining this to viewers.

I’m reading the novel Contra natura by the Spanish writer Álvaro Pombo. It’s his magnum opus about homosexuality. The novel is good (although not an easy read for a hetero woman) and it made me think of current events.

All of this transgender furries stuff is supposed to be the purview of men who are too old to get aroused without increasingly exotic forms of stimulation. For 22-year-old men, it really shouldn’t be that hard to get aroused. It should be the most natural thing in the world. It’s later on, with age, when people can no longer get there without additional effort that some (obviously, not everybody) start exploring fetishes and all that stuff.

In any documentary about the kink circles filmed 20 years ago or earlier, you’d see that everybody is well-worn. These are people who wore out their bodies and can’t get them to function without additional effort. The only fresh-faced 20-year-olds there would be prostitutes.

Something went really wrong on a purely physical level for such very young men to need so much additional stimulation to get going. Without years of hard drugs, even 50 is way too young. In Pombo’s gay novel, it’s the 65-year-old character who has this problem while 25-year-old guys can’t even comprehend what he’s doing and why.

I’m not saying that every 65-year-old will have a severe problem like this. A certain kind of lifestyle tends to lead in this direction. But there’s definitely no reason for 20-year-old guys to be furries. Impotence did not used to be a young man’s problem.