One of the bartenders at my favorite neighborhood pub is a 20-something-year-old knucklehead with a deviously sly sense of humor. He’s a kind, big-hearted kid; I genuinely like him a lot. But he’s also a committed socialist/communist who hates Trump, hates capitalism, and thinks Zohran Mandani is “pretty much a moderate.”
We’ve had some… interesting political conversations. (Mostly with him keeping his laptop open: From his perspective, everything I say is so wacky and bizarre, he uses Google to make sure I’m not lying.)
Last week, we didn’t talk about politics. A family member of mine is going through a mental health crisis that I couldn’t figure out how to deal with, so the bartender revealed something about his past that I didn’t know:
When he was still in high school, his dad committed suicide. His family tried their best to navigate the fallout, but somewhere along the way, he had a break with reality. He began obsessing over the details of his father’s passing, and in his grieving, broken mind, he reached the conclusion that his dad’s birthday — and his dad’s death day — were all linked to Bible verses.
And those Bible verses were what compelled his father to take his own life.
Then, when the bartender began applying his own birthday — and his mom’s birthday — to this nonsensical “Bible math,” he realized that he needed to kill himself on a specific date to rejoin his dad; his mom had to do it a few weeks later.
He even wrote a note for his mom, for her to find the day after he died, in which he explained what (and when) dad “needed” her to do next.
Thank God his mom found the note before anything happened. She dragged him out of school, immediately placing him in an in-house medical facility. He told me the first few days there were deeply frustrating:
“Scott, I kept trying to show them how the math worked, and they kept looking at me like I’m crazy. But in my head, this all made perfect sense!”
He said there wasn’t a singular “aha!” moment where the dam cracked and he suddenly realized he was delusional. Instead, it was a gradual process of tearing down the Walls of Despair… one stubborn brick at a time.
And eventually, over time, enough bricks were removed that the sunlight pored through again, illuminating his darkness.
The human mind is extraordinary: Given enough time, it can calculate anything.
And everything.
That’s because humans are the most preposterous anomaly anywhere in the universe. We’re the mating of God’s divine spark — a limitless, immortal soul — with mud, muck, and waste. Simultaneously, we reflect both the grandeur of God and the filth of mud.
We’re a walking contradiction.
A mind that’s capable of praising the heavens, writing poetry, and dividing the atom is also capable of torturing its host to the point of death. For whatever reason, we’re uniquely susceptible to illusions; each night, our subconscious casts one illusion after another — and most of the time, we don’t recognize it for what it is until we wake up.
Sadly, some never do.
“If my mom didn’t find that note,” he told me, “I absolutely wouldn’t be here right now. I know it doesn’t make sense, Scott… but I was so convinced I was right!”
Our brains don’t like to admit when they’re wrong. All illusions, big and small, are deadly real to the host.
And if you challenge them too aggressively, you’ll lose ‘em forever.
That’s a yuuuge challenge in political PR, because our objective is winning hearts and minds. We’re in the business of persuasion. Some voters are very open to new ideas; others have built large, thick walls around themselves, preventing anything “scary” from ever reaching their ears.
To win the next election, we’ve gotta focus on the persuadable audience. They’re our target; the folks who’ll listen and give our message a chance.
But that doesn’t mean the unpersuadable audience should be ignored. No one should be ignored — not when you really, truly believe you’re right! But it does mean you’ve gotta be realistic.
And sometimes, the best you can hope for is loosening a brick or two. The rest of the wall will take time.
And maybe prayer.
PRediction: Yesterday, on Lee Harvey Oswald’s birthday(!), the anti-Trumpers took to the streets for their “No Kings” protests. It was a highwire act for the radical left. Had it spiraled into BLM-styled rioting, looting, arson, and murder, the Dems would’ve been tarred-and-feathered as violent, anti-American anarchists.
We’re in a post-Charlie Kirk world: Political violence isn’t theoretical anymore; it’s becoming increasingly commonplace — and increasingly excused by angry, bitter leftists.
So, the Grand Poobahs in the Democratic Party must be breathing a sigh of relief. For the most part, the “No Kings” rallies were peaceful. Most of the people waved American flags; only a minority were running around with Mexican, Palestinian, and LGBTQ apparel.
Mother Jones actually had an amusing anecdote about protesters and the U.S. flag:
A woman chimed in; she wanted to share what another member of the group had said to her earlier: “I’ve never bought an American flag before, and this is what it’s come to.” We all laughed, and one of them added that “it was important to show that we love America, too.” [emphasis added]
(Sure, it was all performative. But performative still counts: It’s showbiz, babe.)
All in all, it went about as well as they could’ve hoped for… except one little detail:
What’s the deal with all those old people?!
The “No King” rallies weren’t like the recent pro-Hamas parades of 2023 and 2024, or the 2020 BLM riots, where millions of young kids took to the streets (and harassed Jews, burnt property, attacked cops, murdered civilians, blah-blah-blah).
Instead, this was an event led, populated, and orchestrated by overaged Boomers and aging Hippies.
In political theater, throngs of enthusiastic, passionate young people are worth their weight in gold. They convey a level of excitement — and confidence in their future. It’s why politicians love to surround themselves with boisterous, cheering youngsters!
Old people protesting, however, communicates something different: fear of change, a lack of faith in the future, and a tired, hackneyed attempt to relive (once again) the clichés of the 1960s.
Pinsker’s Law of PR #2: Most people don’t know what they think about something until you tell ‘em.
The Trump PR team must define the post-“No Kings” narrative as a laughable, pathetic attempt of old, geriatric farts who won’t take a hint and leave the stage. Just as MSNBC has the oldest audience in cable news, the “No Kings” rallies were basically a live version of The Golden Girls… only far less funny.
(And everyone there looked like Sophia Petrillo.)
Defining events before they happen helps set expectations, but defining ‘em afterwards is usually far more meaningful. President Trump excels at this; I suspect we’ll be reading quite a bit about it on Truth Social this week.
PRojection: When I get it wrong, I gotta fess up: I originally thought the government shutdown would last about 10 days, reasoning that Check Schumer would side with his corporate donors and/or moneymen, opting for something more performative and less draconian than permanently freezing the federal government. (Which, to be fair, is where Schumer typically lands.)
I should’ve known that the one thing Schumer values even more than money is his own political future — which means, as long as AOC is breathing down his neck and threatening to primary his seat, Schumer will gladly let the nation fall off the cliff. He’s just too gosh-durn important, you know.
This shutdown is probably gonna get worse before it gets better.
PRaise: To the essay, “The Great Feminization” by Helen Andrews. It’s a phenomenal read and offers a compelling theory: Wokeness is code for feminization, and as institutions become majority female, they inevitably reach a tipping point that codifies, expects, and mandates “woke” behavior.
Here’s an excerpt:
Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.
[…]
The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday. Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males. That is because women’s conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict but by covert competition with rivals, with no clear terminus.
[…]
The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?
I don’t buy all of her argument, but she got a lot more right than she got wrong. It’s a helluva essay.
PRedators: The “No Kings” rallies were explicitly political events: The entire point was to attack, belittle, and galvanize support against Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
So what’s the deal with all these “nonpolitical” and “not-for-profit charities” getting involved in bareknuckle partisan politics?
Credit Fox News for their investigation:
Billionaire donor George Soros is reportedly funding many of the organizations leading the "No Kings" protests, like Indivisible, whose co-founders, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, received a $3 million two-year grant last year from Soros’s Open Society Foundations for "social welfare activities." Details about the "Palestine Contingent" weaving into the "No Kings" protests raises new questions about the way big Democratic donors like Soros are funneling nonprofit dollars into a professional protest industry that is fractious, divisive and partisan, potentially in violation of tax and nonprofit laws.
Behind the emotion and patriotic imagery of the protests, a Fox News Digital investigation revealed that the movement’s polished "pro-democracy" branding masks a coordinated network of Democratic tax-exempt nonprofits and labor unions, political action committees, coalitions and for-profit protest consultants that include some of the most virulent activists against Israel, including self-declared socialist groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Democratic Socialists of America and Students for a Democratic Society.
[…]
"They call it ‘No Kings,’ but what they’ve built is an empire of tax-exempt organizations doing the Democratic Party’s work on the taxpayer’s dime," said Jennica Pounds, a computer scientist who runs a platform, DataRepublican.com, following the money on these organizations. "They are using every excuse in the book, from immigration to Israel, to rage-bait America. There is nothing ‘charitable’ about their professional protest enterprise, and they should be investigated for fomenting so much hate in America behind the shield of ‘charity work.’" [emphasis added]
They called it the “No Kings” rally, but someone paid a king’s ransom to underwrite ’em all. It certainly wasn’t cheap.
Paging Pam Bondi…
