Serious Thoughts From A Satirist

I’m beginning to use the Chat function on Substack much more, so feel free to contribute along on the conversation there. I like to send occasional news stories or screenshots of good tweets throughout the day while I’m doomscrolling, and I also sometimes use it to rough draft ideas or premises of jokes. If you’re a paid subscriber you can start new threads on there too, so one more reason to consider subscribing for $2.50 a month 🤩
It’s hilarious that Mike Lindell is running for Minnesota governor in 2026. It’ll be an interesting case study of whether or not Republican primary voters can take back control of the party from the MAGA crowd and nominate a normy conservative, or if they’ll do the classic GOP self-own of nominating a total weirdo lunatic who gets destroyed in the general election of a potentially competitive race. It’s been a blessing over the last 20 years that Republicans have lost so many winnable elections because of a plurality of their primary voters having unelectably radical taste in candidates — Roy Moore, Todd Akin, Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Mark Robinson all immediately come to mind.
Just imagine a Mike Lindell campaign for a moment. How’s he going to answer the obvious questions that will come up about how he claimed for years that he had evidence the 2020 election was rigged, and five years later he still hasn’t released any of it? And remember his countless media appearances? He’s going to embarrass himself because he is an unserious person, and I’m not sure he has the political talent or leadership magnetism to mount a real campaign.
Indiana Republicans just voted down Trump’s demand that they gerrymander the state’s Congressional districting and steal two House seats currently held by Democrats, despite Trump threatening to withhold all federal funding for the state’s roads and infrastructure projects if they did… lol. What a lame duck loser. It’s a funny threat for which Trump will obviously pull one of his trademark “TACO” chickenings out because it’s blatantly unConstitutional for the president to withhold funds Congress has legally allocated, and federal judges both liberal and conservative have been routinely voting all year against such efforts.
At long last, it’s maybe the first time Republicans statewide have collectively told Trump to fuck off with his mob boss, democracy-dismantling tactics. Kudos to Indiana Republicans, and Mike Pence, who was reportedly a big part of the whipping among IN legislators. Indiana Republicans have more courage and dignity than the national Republicans in Congress.
Kristi Noem had a disastrous Congressional hearing yesterday. She’s gotta be on borrowed time in her job as Secretary of Homeland Security. She’s too incompetent and unprofessional even for Trump. Her being fired would be a two-for-one deal because her walking red flag boyfriend Corey Lewandowski would also likely be pushed out of the government. Unfortunately, however, they will both have immediate entry into a lucrative Culture War themed podcast or Newsmax hosting gig in furtherance of their cringey narcissism.
There was a lovely protest at the University of Oklahoma supporting the instructor who gave the Christian student a zero for citing God in her essay. The student was honored by OK lawmakers in the state legislature, which is absurd because of what dummy behavior from random conservative morons gets lionized in Republican circles. She didn’t have the critical thinking skills to think she should keep her personal religious beliefs out of an academic essay, so she deserved to fail and learn a scholastic lesson… not be rewarded as some kind of Culture War freedom fighter. Seriously, the biggest believers in participation trophies are conservatives.
It’s kind of indicative of the growing consensus that college as an industry has maybe lost the thread. I’ve heard much contemporary discussion about how colleges give out too many A’s, and almost all students pass every class no matter how little work or reading they do, and frankly I think colleges should be much more rigorous and difficult to graduate from. We arguably have too many kids in colleges that don’t really belong, especially because colleges have too many degrees that cost too much, and sack students with too much debt in fields that have too few jobs. The college in question wimping out and backing down to a slight bit of pressure and punishing the instructor is a betrayal of its academic responsibility and likely its self-professed ideals too.
I’d like to point out that I’m intentionally not using the student’s name. I think one lesson from the excessive passions of the 2010s and early 2020s Internet culture is that more people should chill out and not follow a mob-like tendency to collectively pile-drive people who do dumb things and attack them personally. A random girl somewhere failed an essay because she is young and has bad critical thinking, and I think society deserves to not know her name or ever think of her again. She deserves to not be attacked for the rest of her life from what I hope is a “teachable moment” for the culture we can learn from and then move on.
I heard a rumor her mom helped her write the essay. It’s funny to think that both her and her mom are dummies. Maybe their whole family is dumb. Which reminds me that it’s politically unfortunate that liberals have less kids on average than conservatives, and Republicans are really having a Quiverful trad life renaissance at the moment.
Which is why I’m supportive of colleges brainwashing everyone with liberalism… jk, the “brainwashing” is merely a social and cultural deconditioning where conservative kids from small homogenous towns finally get a little freedom from their parents’ hierarchical ideological beliefs, and finally meet peers of other ethnicities and religions and sexualities for the first time.
And considering that degrees are becoming like participation trophies for anyone willing to take on a lot of debt for four years, it’s ludicrous to believe professors are even capable of pulling off some nefarious ideological scheme to turn students into communist zombies of the Woke Hive Mind when it’s a growing, ubiquitous problem that students don’t do any of the assigned reading, and do all their work with AI that professors themselves grade with AI.
It’s interesting how no one is really making a big deal about Steve Bannon being so big in the Epstein Files. He’s just so odious, no one is surprised.
Republicans really have worked themselves into a convenient niche of political evil where the media just brushes it off everytime they lie or do something awful because it’s expected, whereas the media goes into overdrive criticism when Democrats do anything imperfectly or slightly immoral.
The perfect example of this double standard is how Biden was relentlessly attacked for being old, while obviously demented and insane Trump gets a pass for regularly falling asleep on live television during his cabinet circlejerks and press conferences while the media ignores his giant hand makeup patches and bandages, and his mysterious recurring MRI scans.

☕️ If you think Donald Trump is a joke, I published two books for you: Satire In The Trump Years, and Satire In The Biden Years. Or, better yet, request your local library order a copy on their website.

I’ve also published three existentialist poetry books, Cabaret No Stare, Moon Goon, and Hotel Golden Hours available in print and on Kindle.

Because our social media platforms are being scrambled up by oligarchs, if you like my humor, diversify where you follow me so you never miss my jokes to interrupt your doomscrolling: Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, Spoutible, Medium, and Substack.