Donald Trump and the Declaration of Independence.

One of the many “Great MAGA King” T-shirts out there.

Yesterday was one of the national No Kings protests, in which people took to the streets and publicly objected to the way Donald Trump has been running the country, with minimal pushback from the MAGA Republican-led Congress and MAGA Republican-dominated Supreme Court. I live in Vacaville, which had a sizeable No Kings protest in front of City Hall. Vacaville is pretty evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, so it was interesting to look at the Facebook comments: Moderates and liberals all talking about how nice it was for the people to peaceably assemble and express their grievances, and conservatives either angry or mocking, because they just love the tangerine fascist.

Most conservatives are asking, “What do you mean, ‘No Kings’? Trump’s not a king.” Although I doubt they’re that ignorant of all the “Great MAGA King” memes and merchandise out there. It’s been around since his first term. First time I saw it I thought, “No; people are just messing with conservatives’ heads,” but nope, people willingly purchase and wear crap with Trump as a king on it. Maybe they’re doing it to troll liberals; back in my conservative days that would’ve been my thinking. But there are an awful lot of irony-deprived people out there, who’d wear it because they really would like Trump to be king. A right-wing dictatorship, in which they’d get everything their depraved little hearts have ever wanted, really appeals to them.

Trump’s not a king, but he certainly does love to act like a king. Not just because he decorates everything in tacky gold, and wants people to fawn over him him like courtiers before a shah. For comparison I got out the text of the Declaration of Independence. Does any of George Hanover III’s behavior sound familiar? (For convenience I put numbers and letters before Thomas Jefferson’s bullet points.)

On Charlie Kirk.

14 Oct. 1993 – 10 Sep. 2025.

On Wednesday, 10 September, political activist Charlie James Kirk was holding an event at Utah Valley University. It was his usual schtick of debating liberal college students; not a proper debate, with moderators and rules and time limits and everything, but one in which the kids took the microphone, challenged Kirk on something, he pushed back, they kept going until Kirk felt he won, then on to the next student. I’ve seen Kirk in proper debates, and he never fared well. Kirk did his debates to encourage young Republicans, and maybe recruit new ones.

Back when I was a young, argumentative Republican, I would’ve loved it. Nowadays I just shrug. I had plenty of impromptu, unformatted debates with fellow college students in my day; either trying to convert ’em to conservatism or Jesus. Wasn’t till I wrote political columns for a few years that I finally realized debate doesn’t convert anyone. If you’re losing, it just makes you angry you’re losing; you never concede unless you never really cared. It doesn’t win anyone for Jesus either; St. Justin Martyr’s dialogue with Trypho the Jew demonstrated this in the second century, but Christians don’t know their own history, so our apologists keep right on debating.

Anyway, as UVU student Hunter Kozak was debating Kirk about the topic of transgender mass shooters, at 12:23PM MDT, somebody shot Kirk in the neck. He was taken to Timpanogos Regional Hospital, and pronounced dead.

The FBI nabbed a suspect and questioned him, but let him go. This didn’t stop FBI director Kash Patel from tweeting they got someone—then having to walk it back. But ultimately the FBI caught no one. The alleged shooter’s dad recognized his son on the surveillance footage. He and a fellow member of their Mormon church, a retired detective, confronted him and convinced him to turn himself in. The suspect, Tyler James Robinson, 22, has some leftward leanings, and politicians have been using that as an excuse to denounce—and maybe persecute—leftist groups. We’ll see where that goes.

Of course rightists, leftists, centrists—everybody sane, anyway—have been denouncing the assassination. Kirk lived in a country with free speech laws. We have these laws to prevent this sort of violence. In countries without free speech, shootings happen. Bombings happen. Terrorism happens. People have to be free, and remain free, to say what they please—unless of course they’re inciting violence, and then we prosecute ’em for the violence, not the speech.

Plenty of people don’t get this, and think we should stop people from speaking lest it lead to violence. Fr’instance Kirk liked to denounce and belittle transgender people. As a conservative and sexist, their existence, and any public acceptance of them, personally offended him. Robinson apparently had a romantic relationship with a transgender individual, so Kirk’s statements offended him—and he felt Kirk’s stance exacerbates transgender abuse. Now, I don’t know that Kirk ever advocated violence against transgender folks—not that violent bigots ever needed Kirk’s endorsement anyway. But it appears Robinson felt shooting Kirk would help solve the problem. And of course it wouldn’t. Violence only begets more violence.

Others think we should stop people from speaking for various other reasons. Parents don’t want their kids to encounter sex, violence, and anything they feel the kids are too immature to handle… and some of ’em would rather we ban uncomfortable subjects altogether. Religious bigots don’t want other religions to spread. Donald Trump doesn’t want to be mocked, opposed, or even critiqued. I feel there are appropriate and inappropriate times for all those things, but I don’t want any government or dictator deciding when those times are. And certainly don’t want any murderer doing it either.

Okay, enough about the shooting. Lemme talk about Charlie Kirk.

His merch.

One of the many reasons partisanship is a work of the flesh, is it destroys the partisan’s discernment. They’re no longer able to identify good fruit. They still know right from wrong, good from evil… but everything their guy does, no matter how wrong and evil, gets justified. No grace for those same wrongs and evils in the other parties—and even the good deeds they do, get labeled as ulterior motives and evil.

So it’s no wonder Evangelical partisans can’t see Donald Trump’s thorns and brambles.

On cancelling 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸.

You might’ve been in denial it was coming, but here it is.

On 17 July, Stephen Colbert personally announced on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, his CBS talk show, that the show will end in May 2026. He’s not being replaced; CBS is getting out of the late-night talk show business. “This is all just going away,” Colbert said. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, claims it’s an economic decision: The Late Show has been losing them between $40 and $50 million a year.

It’s caused backlash from Colbert fans, particularly from those fans who suspect Paramount isn’t really cancelling the show for economic reasons—citing the movie studio’s purchase by Skydance Media, which the Federal Communications Commission, staffed with Donald Trump cronies, has to sign off on. Plus the recent $16 million payoff CBS made to Trump to get him to drop his frivolous lawsuit against 60 Minutes (and the fact 60 Minutes’s showrunner Bill Owens quit on 22 April, citing editorial interference from CBS management). Plus of course Trump crowing on his social media platform Truth Social how he got Colbert cancelled. Trump lies all the time, but here’s a statement which liberals want to believe.

The idea’s still stunned a lot of people. I remember when CBS desperately wanted to get into the late-night game; Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was getting crazy ratings, and CBS tried out The Pat Sajak Show against him in 1989, and it just bombed hard. Sajak was fine as the game-show host of Wheel of Fortune, but nobody wanted to watch him tell lame jokes and interview C-list celebrities. Nope, he couldn’t get A-list celebrities, ’cause Carson’s producer, Fred de Cordova, rigged the game: If you did any other late-night show, you were banned from The Tonight Show for 10 weeks. The Pat Sajak Show just couldn’t get the guests.

Funny thing… at the very same time The Pat Sajak Show began, Paramount launched The Arsenio Hall Show, and CBS distributed it in syndication. And it did get the ratings. In fact it started to chip away at Carson’s ratings. That’s because Hall had all the guests Carson wouldn’t even think of having on his show, i.e. black people. Plus people whom youngsters like me wanted to see: Rock stars, hip-hop artists, wrestlers, MTV personalities. If CBS had aired Hall’s show instead of Sajak’s, they’d’ve had a late-night franchise in the 1980s, and not had to wait till the ’90s.

But what happened, as most of you know already, is Carson retired, NBC gave The Tonight Show to Jay Leno instead of Carson’s designated successor David Letterman, Letterman quit NBC and moved to CBS, and The Late Show with David Letterman began in 1993. Aired 22 years. Colbert succeeded Letterman in 2015.

Now. As to why the show’s getting cancelled… well honestly, I believe Paramount. It’s a financial decision. It’s not the right financial decision; it’s just the quickest and dirtiest one, and one they’re gonna regret and try to undo later. And the reason they had to make this decision… actually also comes down to politics. Yeah, I’ll explain.

Bouncing around the social media platforms.

Last year I quit X and joined Mastodon; this year I’m quitting Instagram and joined Pixelfed. The times, they are a-changing.

Last year, on 1 January, I quit Twitter. It’s only been a year since I’ve been off the platform, but it feels like longer. Not sure why. It’s not because I miss it; I’m far happier with Mastodon.

I left because of its new owner, Elon Musk. I didn’t have any problems with Musk before he bought Twitter and renamed it X; he simply struck me as just another tech billionaire who bought companies, then claimed he was the brains behind them. Bought PayPal, then claimed he started PayPal; bought Tesla, then claimed he started Tesla. Okay he did start SpaceX, and a few other companies. But once he bought Twitter, he quickly became its chief troll.

Which is the one thing I don’t abide in social media: Trolls. I block ’em.

I didn’t always. Back in the ’90s, when instead of social media we had bulletin boards, and I was interacting with people on America Online and Bethany Online, I naïvely tried to debate the trolls, of all things. Somehow it didn’t occur to me they were being dicks for the evil fun of it all. So I tried reason. Got me nowhere. Eventually I gave up, told the moderators on them, and got them banned. Whereupon they created new accounts and harrassed me again… till I got ’em banned again. And again.

When I got into social media, the one thing I appreciated most was moderators. I wanted somebody to police the trolls. And they did! They were great. They also had a huge job on their hands; there are an awful lot of awful people out there. It’s no surprise that bots wind up doing most of the moderating. But of course bots aren’t intelligent, and can’t tell the difference between “I was killing it in the stock market today!” and “I’m going to kill you and your family; I know where you live.” (Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if this very blog post gets automatically blocked, just for me writing that.) Bots have one job, and they suck at it. That’s why I appreciate human moderators so very much—and not just because they’re helpful at correcting bot overkill.

Musk not only canned a bunch of moderators; he’s a troll. And you’re not allowed to block him. That’s when I knew it was time to leave.

“Oh, you’re just brainwashed by the woke media.”

Critical thinking skills on both sides are at a low.

“Well, we reelected the rapist.”

It was about midnight. I checked the news on Election Day, and found Donald Trump had been reelected president. That was my first reaction, so that was the first thing I posted on Facebook and Mastodon.

I am, as regular readers of my blogs and social media have kinda figured out, a never-Trumper. I have never voted for him, and never will. Even if his allies overthrow the Constitution, make him president-for-life, have him run unopposed, and threaten to shoot anyone who won’t vote. I wouldn’t vote for the Beast either. (No, Trump’s not the Beast. He’s just beastly.)

Unfortunately many of my fellow Christians refuse to understand my never-Trumper thinking, and assume it’s just because I’m liberal. That any abysmal defects of character Trump demonstrates are simply partisan attempts to make him sound as evil as possible; but in real life, he’s the nicest guy. The smartest guy. The greatest president since Ronald Reagan. Why, better than Reagan. Up there with Washington and Lincoln.

Y’know, eight years ago when Trump first ran for office, a lot of these same people acknowledged that Trump was a slimy huckster, but at least he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Since that time he’s somehow gone from “Could be worse” to “Put him on Mt. Rushmore.” How’d that happen?

Duh; brainwashing. Turn on conservative media and that’s all you’ll hear.

Paganism in old pop songs.

Couplea days ago, work radio started playing “Jacob’s Ladder” by Huey Lewis and the News. The DJ really likes that band. Me… meh, they’re okay. Definitely better than Imagine Dragons. For fun, I like to imagine dragons breathing fire all over Imagine Dragons. The only band I wanna hear screaming, “Thunder!” is AC/DC. But I digress.

If you don’t know “Jacob’s Ladder,” it was written by Bruce Hornsby and his brother. At the time, he didn’t care for his version, so he shelved it for a few years, and let Huey Lewis record it; may as well get some residuals. It’s about how he twice encounters certain off-putting Christian evangelists, and rejects their offers of salvation because he’d rather do it himself—“step by step, one by one, higher and higher… we’re climbing Jacob’s ladder.”

As I recall, Jacob’s ladder (or as Led Zeppelin calls it, the stairway to heaven), was a vision Jacob had of a route from heaven to earth, on which angels ascended and descended. [Ge 28.10-17] Not humans. I suppose if God permitted us to climb it, we could; but if we could, it’d only be possible through God’s grace. Our own efforts wouldn’t get us anywhere.

But that’s what Hornsby (and Huey Lewis and the News, I guess) preferred to the gospel: His own efforts. Good karma. F--- grace.

Although a lot of it, I expect, is the messengers. Verse 1 is about a fat man bugging a fan dancer; verse 2 is about a televangelist begging for money, “and I don’t wanna be like you.” I get that. I regularly see lousy examples of evangelism, and churches full of really creepy people instead of healthy Christians. Still, it takes a lot of chutzpah to think you can save yourself.