Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, October 13, 1946. Death of Vinegar Joe Stillwell, Horrific crime in Casper, The Price of Meat, French Fourth Republic.
Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, October 13, 1946. Death of Vinegar Joe Sti...: I failed to note it yesterday, but October 12, 1946, was the day that controversial World War Two General "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell ...
Lex Anteinternet: The 2026 Election, 24th Edition. Voting for Gray and Hageman is morally unconscionable. So what to do?
Lex Anteinternet: The 2026 Election, 24th Edition. Voting for Gray a...: Kristallnacht in 1938. A lot of people who had voted for the Nazis had been stampeded there by the assertion that it was the Nazis or the...
Kristallnacht in 1938. A lot of people who had voted for the Nazis had been stampeded there by the assertion that it was the Nazis or the Communists, both of which were populist parties. The smiling couple probably wasn't smiling by 1945, assuming that they were both alive.
The 2026 Election, 24th Edition. Voting for Gray and Hageman is morally unconscionable. So what to do?
The first rule of logic: Chesterton's Fence:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."The second rule of logic: Hanlon's Razor
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
It's tempting to say that this will be an election like no other, and indeed, I think it is in many ways. In terms of American elections, it's the most important election, even though it's a midterm election, since the the Election of 1860. It's the election that will determine if Trump continues to rule as an insane dictator, or if the nation can begin to turn the path towards constitutional democracy.1
Things like this make this a critical election:
On the Cornell rapes:
Letitia James is a corrupt person…And I feel badly for whoever she's looking at because they won’t get a fair shake.
He later called James a "dog".
I'm an actual conservative. I am not a populist. Conservatives believe that man if flawed and that we should be careful to conserve things that have worked or are part of culture until we know what the reason for casting it aside would really be.
The sixth rule of logic: Yeoman's Gate:
Before you go through a gate to get to the other side of a fence, completely figure out, to the extent you can, where the path goes.
Conservatives believe that man is fallen and that our natures and the nature of the world, in its pure form, is dictated by an outside existential, that being God to most conservatives, and nature to some. We don't cast away easily, and we believe the Natural Law ultimately controls most things.
Conservatism has been killed by Donald Trump.
The most significant force around Trump is that of populism. Populism believes that the "will of the people" is endowed with some sort of magic virtue. The question is, who are the people? It's never all the people. Populists always regard themselves as "the people" and other people as the enemy of the people. They're easily lead by demagogues At one time they followed Bernie Sanders around like puppies, now they follow Donald Trump. The besotted populists believe that the will of the people is magically transmitted to Trump who is always right.
Trump is a dangerously sick man.
Trump has never been an admirable one. We could go into it, but people who claim he's "Godly" are rank idiots. Indeed, a significant portion of Trump supporters at this point are the absolute bottom of the bell curve. He's deeply immoral and is committing the United States to deeply immoral acts. Fortunately, the bloom is off the rose at this point, and it appears highly likely that the GOP, which has fallen down on its duties in Congress, will be tossed out. Due to weirdness of Trump's cabinet, we'll have to endure Trump for two more years, probably.
The problem for real conservatives, however, and particularly for Catholics, or indeed for Catholics whether they are conservative or not, is how to vote.
In the Catholic Tradition, responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation.
Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, No. 13.
In Wyoming, some of the choices will be easy. Eric Barlow, the Republican, is the easy choice over Democrat Ken Casner or Dixiecrat Rebecca Bextel. It's not even close. Effectively, the races for Governor, Secretary of State, and Superintendent of Public Education are over, and will all go to good Republican candidates.
But the candidates for the House and Senate are a nightmare.
Chuck Gray is a co-religious about whom the public knows nothing. A far right right winger born with a silver spoon in his mouth he washed up in Wyoming as his daddy, who doesn't live here, has a radio station here. He barely won the primary for Secretary of State, after having been an abrasive personality in the legislature, by running on lies. Since the moment of his taking office in that position, he's been running for something else, and the House of Representatives fell to him when Harriet Hageman decided to run for retiring Cynthia Lummis' position.
Gray has been a horrible Secretary of State and he'll be a horrible Congressman. His campaign was basically that he loves Trump more than Trump loves Trump. Trump is a horror. This is a good reason not to vote for Gray, as if any additional reasons were needed. If he wins, and he's likely to, he'll be worthless as a junior member a minority party who knows nothing about the state he's supposed to represent.
The Democrat is Lisa Kinney. I just heard her speak, and she speaks very well. She didn't have the chance to get into specifics, but they can be guessed at. I'd be surprised at best if she wasn't "pro Choice", which is pro infanticide.
The Libertarian is Shaun Johnson. I heard him speak too but he also didn't really have the chance to get into specifics. The one interesting thing I heard him say is that he wouldn't caucus with the Republicans or the Democrats.
I don't think that Johnson has any chance. I think Kinney has an off chance.
I suspect that if Kinney wins, Christensen will run against her in 2028 and likely take the seat. I think he's planning on running.
The choice this year, therefore, is between Kinney and Gray. Voting for Kinney is saying no to Trump insanity. Voting for Gray is saying yes to Trump insanity. That's about it.
At the Senate level the Democrats have a really good candidate, James Byrd. The Republicans have a really horrible candidate, Harriet Hageman, who stabbed Liz Cheney, a former friend of hers, in the back so that she could crawl over her dead political body to go to Washington, where reportedly she already owned a house. If she was voted out, she'd never come back. She's shown contempt for her own state on public lands while there, making her potentially an even worse candidate than Gray.
She received a lot of votes in the primary, in spite of being such a horrible candidate. It'll take a lot for Byrd to overcome it.
So here's where we are at. We cannot vote for Gray or Hageman. Voting for them is voting for the insanity of Donald Trump and the ongoing destruction of the American democracy. Can we morally vote for Kinney and Byrd, or do we not vote at all on those races. Not voting on them may very well be like voting for Gray and Hageman. It's an interesting, and paramount, moral question.
Footnotes
1. And save the "we're a republic not a democracy" crap. That's brainless twaddle. Our Constitution creates a democratic republic and people who say that should have their right to vote, drive a car, or speak a sentence revoked.
Last edition:
The 2026 Election, 23rd Edition. Stein's Law meets the GOP. The hints of a mutiny edition.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Back to the Coliseum.
Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Back to the Coliseum.: I've been expecting it all along. It just came in a surprising fashion. Deep hatred of Catholics is the last acceptable form of outri...
This caused an immediate reaction by some Evangelical Christians on the far right, and it did from a few very far right Catholics who are probably in the Rad Trad camp. Predictably, a notable number of the Evangelicals threw of pretending they approved of Catholics in any fashion. Laughable comments that the Pope doesn't know theology were out there, but more radical ones by the Invincibly Ignorant immediately arose as well.
Sunday Morning Scene. Back to the Coliseum.
I've been expecting it all along. It just came in a surprising fashion.
Deep hatred of Catholics is the last acceptable form of outright bigotry in the United States, although there's been a general rise of bigotry and racism during the illegitimate Trump interregnum. Trump's a populist, and populist tends to boost ignorance, with bigotry feeding on that. Most of the major populist movements a person can recall, the Nazis, the Communists, the Know Nothings, featured a lot of really ignorant people who were willing to be lead around by a others, sometimes a charismatic, to them, other.1 MAGA is a populist movement, masquerading as a conservative one, as Nazism was a populist movement that claimed conservatives within it. It's not too surprising, therefore, that we're seeing more of this sort of thing than we have at any point since the 1960s.
Quite a few of the more ignorant members of MAGA claim they support Trump as he's Godly, which is patently absurd, but there's no denying that far right wing Evangelicalism is a major component of MAGA. The Press, which isn't very well educated on religion anymore, just keeps calling them "Christians", which is really misleading. Some, but not all, far right Evangelicals supporting Trump hold religious beliefs that are very recent and very novel and well outside the mainstream of Apostolic Christianity and also out of the mainstream of most Protestant beliefs. Almost all MAGA Evangelicals fit into the ignorant of theology and Church history camp that's strong in the United States of being "Bible Believing Christians" who are pretty ignorant of a rule on the history of the books of the Bible.
Around the periphery of MAGA, however, there's been some Apostolic Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, who have been, if not fully in the Trump camp, at least allowed to pitch a tent on its edges. Some of this is just flat out opportunistic on their part, and it looked like it would have a major impact on the Trump administration due to Trump's flat out ignorance and laziness. Inside the administration you have the example of J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio, and outside of it you have people like Kevin Roberts. You even have Peter Thiel, who claims not to be a Catholic but who keeps popping up in certain Catholic circles, as does Jordan Peterson and the Orthodox pundit Rod Dreher.2 National Conservatism has a strong right wing Catholic element to it, which is interesting in that it's sort of the intellectual heir of Fr. Charles Coughlin whose movement was shut down and who remains not widely admired in mainstream Catholic circles.
Most CAtholics that have supported Trump, however, have done so for one of two other reasons. The thinking ones have done so as it seemed like he was probably the only candidate who would address long held Catholic concerns, like abortion. People know that Trump himself was a louse, but they were willing to "hold their nose and vote". Others were Protestantized Catholics, of which there are a lot in the United States in the Boomer and Gen. Jones generations. These people are victims of the bad Catechization of the 1970s and as the US is a Protestant country, they've picked up a lot of Protestant beliefs.
Throughout Trump's second claim to power I've worried that the "Christian", i.e., far right Evangelical support of Trump would result in two things for Catholics. The first, which we will not address here, is that the association of "Christian" with Trump would result in Christianity taking a major hit. Evangelicalism definitely will. The second is that getting on the bus with Evangelicals would result in them beating us up as soon as we weren't of use to them.
And that's starting to happen.
The reason it started is because Pete Hegseth, who is festooned with Crusader themed tattoos announced that the U.S. Army is going to livestream the execution of former US Army Major Nidal Hasan who killed thirteen unarmed U.S. soldiers in 2009. 3 4
The Catholic Church is opposed to killing people. It's opposed to killing people in pretty absolutist terms and always has been, claims of Catholic haters aside. It's always been opposed to infanticide, including abortion. Early on in Church history there were serious debates if Christians, which were all Catholic, were required to be pacifists, and there are some saints who were. St. Martin of Tours, who had been a Roman soldier, famously told his commander "I am a soldier of Christ; it is not lawful for me to fight." Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer, went to his death in Nazi Germany rather than fight for the Nazi state. Ben Salmon, an American Catholic layman who has not been beatified went to prison as a conscientious objector during World War One as he held the view that all war was immoral. 5 And starting with Pope John Paul II, the Church has opposed the death penalty.
Catholic Bishops immediately responded to Hegseth's live stream the killing announcement by condemning it. Quiet a few individual priests with a net presence did as well. And then almost immediately after that Pope Leo XIV did, stating:
This caused an immediate reaction by some Evangelical Christians on the far right, and it did from a few very far right Catholics who are probably in the Rad Trad camp. Predictably, a notable number of the Evangelicals threw of pretending they approved of Catholics in any fashion. Laughable comments that the Pope doesn't know theology were out there, but more radical ones by the Invincibly Ignorant immediately arose as well.
Los of hte comments immediately cited the Old Testament, which is a bit ironic as frankly the CAtholic Church uses the Old Testament much more than any Protestant group does. There's a number of quotes from the Old Testament that address the death penalty, for example:
Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.
Genesis 9:6
Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death.
Exodus 21:12
So there you go. . .but wait:
Anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death.
Exodus 21:15 & 21:17
Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.
Exodus 21:15 & 21:17
Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.
Exodus 21:16
If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death."
Leviticus 20:10 (Adultery)
If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
Leviticus 20:13
Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them."
Leviticus 24:16
Okay then, if we apply to the Old Testament, we need to be killing anyone cursing their parents, kidnappers, adulterers and adulteresses, homosexuals and blasphemeres.
Indeed, if this was fully applied, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Paula White, and Scott Bessant wouldn't be in Washington D.C. as they're either adulturers or, in Bessant's case, a homosexual. Shoot, probably about 1/3d of the congregation of Protestant congregation would have to be offed, based on my observation that they don't take divorce or pre marital sex as a sin.
Well, what the heck? Why aren't we imposing the death penalty with sweeping abandon?
Well, that's because the Apostolic Churches and the Mainline Protestant Churches hold the view that Christ fulfilled the law and the Mosaic law does not apply to Christians. There are a pile of laws in the Mosaic Law that nobody seeks to apply to Christians due to the Catholic Church having alway taken this view. That's why Christians can eat shellfish and pork. Protestants who are running around declaring that the death penalty is Biblically mandated are apparently ignorant of the Bible and is laws, or they'd be killing adulterers, blasphemers, parent disrespecters, homosexuals and not eating shrimp.
Indeed, this was the case from day one. One of the very first debates in the Church was whether converts had to be circumcised. Nope, no longer applied. The dietary laws no longer did either.
It's also odd to see how all of these people aren't citing the New Testament. While the law was fulfilled by Christ, Christ did set down some pretty strict behavioral requirements. We are, for example supposed to love our enemies. That's a tough one.
Some have tried to drag out Church history, of which they're largely ignorant. "Well, the Church has always killed people. . ."
Nope. Indeed, from antiquity it's tried to stop it.
As Christ led you from death to life, so you should try to save not only the innocent, but also the guilty from death.
Pope St Nicholas the Great.
Now, I suppose you could argue that Pope St. Nicholas was talking about eternal life, but you sure are't going to save a guy by killing him.
And of course, there's the customary ignorant citation to the Black Legends were demonstrably untrue, but which lots of people still believe.
The Church as been against killing of all types right from the onset. But people, deep in their hearts, like killing. Lots of people make compromises with their Faith to justify their own acts and desires. Today, for example, is the anniversary of the murder of Hymie Weiss, the gangster who sanctioned hits, but who also carried a rosary in his pocket. As noted, plenty of very conservative Catholics have tried to say "well, I know that the Popes have said no death penalty, but it's still okay . . "6
It isn't.
And the real surprise to those not paying attention will be how prolife Catholics really are. Indeed, I've seen surprising statements in support of the Pope from completely secular sources.
And there's utterly no support for making this execution a public spectacle. We really are in the last days of the Roman Empire if we've reached that state. "War, inflation, . . . don't worry, look at my shiny baubles, come watch somebody die." Panem et circenses.
A danger of politics is that, for people who have a religion, even slightly, that it becomes easy to confuse your politics or your personal beliefs with your religion. The various flavors of the American Civil Religion are packed with that. Divorce is okay, and even extramarital sex, unless it's homosexual. . . Trump must be a Godly man as he's doing what I want him to, even if he's a liar and a serial polygamist.
There was always going to be a day when the Evangelical far right discovered that the Catholic Church is the Universal Church, it's everywhere, and that local politics are secondary to it. We're not right, not left, we're Catholic, the original Christians.
Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’
But he will answer, "I don’t know you or where you come from."
Luke 13:22-30.
This warning applies to us as well. "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." Luke 12:48. We really can't ignore the barbarism of the Trump administration any more. We've invaded a foreign nation without cause, we're killing Iranians in an undeclared war, and we're murdering people on the high seas. The Nuremberg Defense or just ignoring it all doesn't work.
Well, we were always going to be hated. Frankly, as Catholics, when everything is going well for us, it's not going well.
Footnotes:
1. Hitler was reportedly very charismatic, although watching him from the outside, it's hard to see why. To his followers, Trump is charismatic, while to most other people he certainly is not.
2. I'm not claiming that Peterson is influential in the administration, but rather he's in the Catholic end of the National Conservatives even though he is not Catholic. His wife is. Dreher was Catholic at one time and converted to Orthodoxy, where he remains with one foot in the Catholic door and nearly, for that matter, in the back pews. Dreher is partially responsible for the intellectual atmosphere that made Trump possible even though he now outright holds Trump in contempt.
3. Hegseth is some sort of Evangelical on the far right. Actual Crusaders would have regarded him as a weird heretic.
4. The fact that the killings occurred in 2009 is a really good argument against the death penalty in and of itself as it takes so long and is so expensive that the punishment aspect of it is nearly lost by the time the sentence is carried out.
5. St. Augustine famously developed the Just War Theory, which people sort of naively regard as a Catholic free pass to war. It isn't. The theory has always been fairly restrictive and even though Catholics have waged and been in a lot of wars, a lot of wars don't fit the category of being "just".
Even when they are, finding a war that's justly waged is difficult. World War Two probably stands out as a war which, for the Allies, was just, but the Allies clearly took deeply immoral actions in it, the nighttime bombing raids of the RAF, and the USAF nuclear bombings, being the two primary examples for the Western Allies.
Recently Pope Leo has further clarified the doctrine and while I do not think that his statements actually develop it in any fashion, they caused shock waves and they probably should as Catholics really need to consider if they can morally serve in the U.S. military at this point.
6. No Pope has declared the death penalty invalid ex cathedra, so a slim ability to argue it's still okay exists. But it's very slim.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Lex Anteinternet: On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Cornell Rape and Other Matters.
Lex Anteinternet: On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old St...: Chi Phi (ΧΦ) house at Cornell. Every once and a while I publish something here which I know, if anyone reads it, will offer offense. This wi...
Every once and a while I publish something here which I know, if anyone reads it, will offer offense.
On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Cornell Rape and Other Matters.
Chi Phi (ΧΦ) house at Cornell.
This will offer massive offense. It can't help but do so.1
It's also one of those posts which involves a lot of synchronicity.
The details.
I felt like bait.
Cornell rape victim.
Caption to lawsuit, entire suit visible here: Suit.
Recently the news of a gang rape of a young woman at Cornell University has been much in the news. I actually didn't pay a lot of attention to it at first as, oddly enough, I'd just read an article in the New York Times magazine supplement of a young woman who was gang raped at a university and the details, to the minor extent I was aware of them, were much the same. Turns out that it was actually a different event, and frankly the one I read about first was significantly more horrific in some fashions. After that, I looked on the net a bit, and as I'll explain below, I read of a young woman who had, almost successfully, but apparently not quite, achieved the removal of her self posted nude images from the net, and then following that, due my Twitter feed, saw a Catholic young woman commenting in horror to the comments by one of a contemporary comedian regarding sexual conduct.
Eh? Are these all related?
Yes, they are.
Let's start with Cornell.
The way the story is more or less reported is that the young woman. age 20, went to the fraternity room of a male friend she was interested in, after having become heavily intoxicated earlier in the evening. At the fraternity, she drank more and consumed at least ketamine and then was gang raped by members of the Chi Phi (ΧΦ). In a 50,000 foot sort of way, all that's correct. But when you did into the details the story is quite a bit different.
Rather, what happened, is the young woman in a sorority had an interest, both romantic and sexual, in a young man in a fraternity. Now, frankly, in any romantic interest there's always a sexual element, which will explore below, so the two are not necessarily completely separated. But what picks up from there grossly departs from what standards had been only fairly recently. She spoke to him on the phone and was invited out for the evening, starting off at a bar. They adjourned to the frat house, and when she got there, he included a friend and proposed a sexual threesom, i.e., that she consent to being screwed by him and by his buddy, and she agreed. The complaint alleges she was too drunk to say no, but frankly that seems incorrect. She also agreed to take ketamine, and consumed more alcohol. This didn't render her unconscious, but it did render her sexually pliable and various frat members came in to screw her and the word got around that you could have sex just by stopping in. At least at some point in this horrific series of events, one male member of the fraternity stopped in just out of concern, and found the first two men there and the woman under the covers. Satisfied, I guess, that things were okay, he left. Ultimately, several men penetrated her, including the first two.
The next day the one guy she liked and the girl started exchanging texts and she wanted, at first, to develop a romantic relationship with him still. She confessed awkwardice at what hat happened, but admitted at least some of the actions were consensual. And as gross as it was, she was an underaged drinker, the first gross act was. As time went on she convinced herself she'd been raped, and indeed she had been, and reported it, which at the same time was coincident with news of the event getting around campus and the girl feeling her reputation was ruined.2 It was not prosecuted in part as the Cornell police did not report the full details to the prosecutor. Apparently New York retains a very antiquated view of the law in this area, although it's not historically unique, that if a person starts consenting and passes out (which she didn't) they've consented.
Again, that view of this topic is antiquated, but it's not unique. The concept that if a girl starts down the road to sex, even if she didn't get very far down the road, which this girl clearly did, and passes out due to alcohol, has still consented, used to be a cultural norm and that tended to reflect itself in the law.
The cultural view is still there to a significant degree.
Which takes us there to the next horror.
In the second instance, a young woman went away to college. She was an adoptee raised by loving parents but it's pretty clear that when she got there she used it as an opportunity to "party". Indeed, she was drinking like crazy. She had some male friends she trusted, and went to a bar with them. While there, she drank very heavily and passed out. They raped her and used their phones to video themselves raping her. They then posted it on social media, which is how she learned she'd been raped.
This story is frankly more horrific. The young woman's error here was in getting drunk. She thought the men were her friends. When she was vulnerable, they flat out raped her. But they were so debased they shared the images of the rape on social media. The event was too much for her, and she dropped out of school.
Which takes us to social media.
While looking into this I ran across a story of another young woman. Looking at it, she appears to be a fairly nice if highly naive young woman who graduated with a fairly common but somewhat difficult four year degree. While in school, she participated in activities of a collegic nature, being a cheerleader.
She is also massively endowed, which even her "clean" photos make plain. She apparently picked up on that being a real attractant and started posting images of herself on social media, showing offer her clothed assets, which then linked to an "Only Fans" account where she could be seen nude. At some point the danger or stupidity of this must have occurred to someone (she graduated and I wonder if it was employment related) and she mounted a vigorous campaign to wipe out all the nude images. Apparently she was mostly successful, which is impressive, and which also suggest that she probably had to resort to legal help. In spite of all this, she still posts TikTok streams, clothed, which are clearly designed to show off her boobs and which frequently involve heavy drinking. She's trying to be an "influencer".
Well, it's sure not a good influence.
And finally to our last item.
A comedy clip, which appears to have started off as a "reel", showed up on my Twitter feeds as a comment by a horrified Catholic young woman. In it, the comedian is doing the engagement with the audience routine.
There are piles of such reels around by female comedians right now, and quite a few (but not all) like to engage in sex as a topic. I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with sort of the Lenny Bruce Effect, which is basically that to say something shocking when its not expected draws attention. It also expand the boundaries of what's considered shocking in a culture. Bruce was crude and vulgar and used the topic of sex in his routine. His personality trod close to his topics, he married a stripper. He died at age 40 of a drug overdose.
He also opened up the door to acts like Richard Pryor's. Today vulgarity is common.
Anyhow, the comedienne called out a couple and asked them if they were married, which they were, and how old she was when they met. 16. She then asked how many men she had engaged in sex with, something that in an earlier era would have resulted in immediate rebuke. That's become a big female edgy topic recently, with women boasting of their "body counts", as if it's all that hard for any woman who wants to have sex, to have it (more on that in a moment). She'd only had sex with her husband, which was then lampooned.
That's worthy of praise, not lampooning, and that was the American, and the European, norm up until the Sexual Revolution. Multiple sex partners were not admired in anyone, and for women that resulted in their being regarded as a "slut", which we'll discuss in more depth below.
Okay, where do we go with all of this? There is a lot to consider, and a lot of it isn't being considered.
Let's take the low hanging fruit first.
Chi Phi (ΧΦ) badge.
Fraternities, and sororities, need to be abolished.
A student movement at Cornell realized this before this assault. It wasn't the first assault alleged to have occurred in this frat house, and they tried to ban fraternities, unsuccessfully.
There is really no reason for fraternities any longer. They reflect the nature of education that existed before World War Two, and really well before World War Two. In the US, at least, they have their start in the late 18th Century.
While there are exceptions, for the most part university dormitories, "the dorms", did not become common in university settings until after World War Two at which point there was a massive expansion in the student population due to the GI Bill. The first purpose built drom at the University of Wyoming, which is of course a land grant institution, was considerably older than that, however, being Merica Hall, which opened as a women's dorm in 1908. It was originally called "Women's Hall." There was early housing for male students at UW before that, but in what is now called "Old Main", which also held all of the classrooms. It was built in 1886. This shows, perhaps, some of the awkward nature of the original housing arrangements. Combined classrooms and living quarters in buildings was a common early solution to student's residential needs. Hoyt Hall, which was a drom and a education building, was started in 1915. Knight Hall and the the Student Union were built as a part of a late 1940s Depression era construction project. Wyoming Hall was completed in 1951.
The first fraternity at UW, Sigma Beta Phi, opened in 1903. The oldest sorority in 1905.
That might seem to cut against my argument here, but it really does not. Upper education was mostly for the well to do. Land grant universities were not. There were some early school housing buildings in various locations, but they tended to be in buildings that were otherwise used for classes. Early dormitories at coeducational institutions tended to be built for women first. There were no such things as "coed" dorms.
Casper College, in Casper Wyoming, opened as Casper Junior College on September 17, 1945, a date we failed to note on this site. It was originally in the upper floor of hte high school, but moved onto its own campus in 1955. It did not have a dormitory until 1965.
So, then, what did a student do if there wasn't a dormitory, or wasn't room in one?
A person might think this is an easy question to answer, "rent an apartment", but it's not as easy as it sounds. As we've already discussed, lodging was more complicated for single people before refrigerators and modern stoves came into existence. Sure, you could rent an apartment, but it wasn't until the mid 20th Century that it was really relatively easy to live on your own in one. Students tend not to have a lot of money, and therefore its not like eating out every day was an option for a lot of them. "Starving student" had a meaning then that it doesn't now.
An option therefore was living in a boarding or "rooming" house, which a lot of single people did in general. We've already discussed that. Privately owned, they provided room and board but often under fairly strict supervision. A good example of this is given in the movie Brooklyn, which depicts a boarding house in the 1950s for young single women.
Student apartments did exist in some areas where the student population was fairly high. For large private schools, like Harvard, these tended to be multiple room, say with bedrooms for about four students, and a small room for a servant. That person took care of the cooking and cleaning for the students. Clearly this is long gone.
Cornell, we'll note, is a private university.
And then there were fraternities and ultimately sororities.
Housing and food was the main advantage of fraternities. A person needed a place to live, and like student apartments, fraternities had and still have a person who cooks and cleans. Indeed, I recall some students claiming they were joining fraternities just as the food was better than at the dorms.
Early on, with upper education being very exclusive, fraternities tended to function as literary societies. In the 19th Century, however, they were part of the large Protestant fraternal organization movement, and they began to incorporate secret rituals, some of them which were outright bizarre. I don't know about Chi Phi, but it does have an initiation ritual, which interestingly enough emphasizes integrity and honesty. This is interesting in that at the same time clubs that focused on dinner with dinging halls also started to exist, giving another food option to students, but also functioning sort of like fraternal organizations do today. Having said that, dining clubs never became enormously common in the US.
The GI Bill flooded universities after World War Two and they responded by creating dorms. Fraternities and Sororities also expanded, but by the 1960s their real purpose had passed. There was no longer a real need to join one as there was no real living advantage to doing so. Given that, their main purpose became social.
Social clubs with significant numbers of people who range from 18 to 22 years of age are a bad idea in general, unless they have massive supervision. A lot of returning World War Two veterans were, of course, over that age, and the real impact of things didn't begin to settle in until the 1950s and 1960s.
In the 50s and 60s the US was hit with the combined impact of a massive demographic influx, the Baby Boomers, a huge boost in the wealth of the country, and an assault on morals and image of women in the form of the views espoused by Playboy magazine. The impact was society wide but it had a particular impact on college and university campuses. Nowhere was that more felt than in fraternities.
The classic depiction of this is, of course, National Lampoon's Animal House. That's an exaggeration, like most comedy, but National Lampoon, an expression of Harvard Lampoon, was depicting what it knew, including really vulgar and immoral treatment of women. A central depiction in the plot of the film is a fraternity member wheeling a drunk underaged girl home in a shopping cart, after she passes out while they're about to have sex, from a "toga party" . Raping her was a bridge too far for the Lampoon, but it's depicted in such a fashion that it's implied that the chivalrous character, if you will, could have legitimately done that if he wanted to.
When I was at UW in the early 1980s, fraternities actually had "toga parties", although my guess is that they were inspired in that by the film. One fraternity that was familiar with, as a friend was in it, annually had the "Baby Ball" in which the members and invited sorority girls dressed in sheets, like babies, and slid down the stairs, which were supposed to be fallopian tubes. They also drank really heavily at this event.
By the time I was in law school, which would be the late 80s, fraternities were on the decline. That probably reflected a generational change, and a technological one. You could just as easily live on your own, and if you didn't want to, you could get a really nice dorm room. They've been declining ever since.
But, as we can see, they are still around.
They ought to be extinguished, as the Cornell student movement tried to do.
Let's start off with a statement that states the obvious, but apparently it isn't.
College students in the 18th Century are not the same as college students in the 21st.
This isn't to suggest that they were perfectly behaved. The 19th Century US was awash in alcohol all the time and there were some huge alcohol fueled student riots in the 19th Century, including one at West Point (the Eggnog Riot). And all sorts of weird harassment of underclassmen was common. In some ways, the abuse of younger students which remains common in some fraternities, occured on a wide scale. That wide scale abuse of younger students has pretty much stopped in the general student body (not in all fraternities, however), but that came with a broader student body.
What was not as common was the outright abuse of women in this fashion, save for one odd but instructive instance. Prior to 1865, some university students had enslaved women as servants, and they were subject to sexual abuse, not surprisingly.3
And up until the 1970s, seemingly, society appreciated that young men without supervision and young women without the same would get into all sorts of trouble. Kipling noted that "single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints", a line he wrote about the peacetime British Army, but which applies equally to any group of warehoused young men. Along the lines of our topic, sexual abuse of female service members has become widespread and nearly incapable of being eradicated. Given the atmosphere of fraternities, which has been libertine at least in the popular imagination since the 70s, rapes are going to be a feature of them.
Whatever function fraternities, and sororities, served, is pretty much over. Any benefit they provided, can be provided in other ways. There are going to be campus rapes no matter what, but keeping fraternities around is encouraging them.4
Which takes us to the next thing.
Failing young men and women. The battlefield casualties of the sexual revolution.
When this topic broke the week before last, it ended up on the weekend news programs, not too surprisingly. One of the people who commented on it was Republican 2028 Presidential hopeful, Chris Christie, in his role as a This Week commentator. Christe noted, albeit only briefly, that young men needed to be better educated that such conduct as was exhibited here is appalling.
That's a given, but how did we even get here, and what do we need to do?
And, frankly, young women need to be better educated in these areas.
And so do adults.
One thing that society in general needs to be better educated on is that university isn't for partying. As noted above, this sort of view has been around forever, I think you can even find Medieval examples, but starting in the 70s it became pretty bad in some quarters. In my view, this was part of the post war largess of the Baby Boom era.
Students going to university in the 60s and 70s that if they got through university they were getting a white collar job. That frankly, in many disciplines, built in a real slack attitude. Set from from home with parents that held real values but who had been damaged by the horror of the Second World War and the Great Depression, college was a chance to live it up, often on somebody else's money. Much of this has passed as the economy has changed from what it formerly was to one in which its much more difficult to get by in, but some of that attitude still exists, good examples of which, or perhaps more accurately bad ones, above. All of the examples except for the last one feature examples of this sort of behavior, and the "influences" example may actually be the worst.
This needs to end.
How to end it is another matter, although as noted the economy is ending some of it. Something that impacted it a bit when I was in university was raising the drinking age from 19 to 21, but that's already been done. In the Cornell example the problem of admitting teenagers to bars legally is highlighted That should end. If it were me, I'd just make counties that feature educational institutions dry. That's a severe approach, of course, but I'd take it. Studies show, fwiw, that almost all rapes of this type and of the service member type are accompanied by overconsumption of alcohol.
Beyond that, however, putting the bullet in the Sexual Revolution needs to happen, and frankly it's starting to. This helps explain the Trad Movement, in part, in the Catholic and Lutheran laity. When I go to Mass on Sunday and find a young married woman, often not much over 20 years old, in a matilla with her husband and a baby, I'm looking at the foot soldiers of the counter revolution. Same thing when I go to work and see the young men and women of Luther Classical College walking to school.
This We'll Defend.5
This emphasizes that the reaction ot the the Sexual Revolution has to be all inclusive and organic. You can't have a "Me Too" movement that doesn't recognize that. Adopting and teaching a standard, has to adopt it and that's adopting the entire smash. As Yeoman's laws of human behavior note:
It's interesting how often people try to evade this principal. All people fail in it, as we're fallen and we don't grasp the correctness of various things, but there are those who make a dedicated effort to avoid it. In a minor way I'm reminded of a couple I know that lived without the benefit of marriage for years, even having a child, who have gone hardcore into the MAGA world, and who are sending their child to Hillsdale school. They can't quite make it sync as while their instincts are good, they really have to work around to the origin of things to make what they're doing, make sense.
Indeed, while this goes off topic, this particularly American trait is one of hte fundamental flaws of MAGA. Many of the MAGA faithful, or former faithful, are in it as they have a sense that American society has gone off the rails. But what they're doing is leaning out of the wreckage of the train car they are in looking back at other toppled cars not realizing that theirs tipped over too. I.e., they're holding the Car Transgender and Car Homosexual in contempt while wanting to get back to the party in the Car Cheating On Spouse or the Car Divorce which tipped the train over in the first place.
Drilling down on this, what this means is that American society, if it doesn't want college age boys raping college girls, needs to dump the pornographic lifestyle its living in. Put a bit more bluntly, you can't have a naked Sydney Sweeney advertising a sports website and not expect rape to result.
Also drilling down, the old standard here, which was never perfectly applied, needs to be reapplied. Young men living in groups didn't generally rape young women as it had been emphasized that it was indescribably wrong. Moreover, they were taught, and again things happened, that sex was for marriage, not just their own selfish entertainment.6 They were taught was decency was. Decent people don't post "free pussy in alum pu".
A lot of work needs to be done in this area, but it can start right now by holding those men in this in contempt. Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, Scott Kretzschmar. Yes, they're innocent until proven guilty, but unless proven to be disconnected with these events, and to have acted to prevent them. Ingalls and Newell not only deserve contempt, they deserve to be branded as perverts, which is what they are.7
And assuming, which we are taught not to do, that this meets the New York definition of rape at some point, they shoudl be convicted and sentenced.
But what about Jane Doe? Indeed, what about all the Jane Does mentioned in this thread?
One of the really disturbing aspects of this is that we now have a society where a 20 year old girl at a prestigious university not only agrees to sex on a sort of first date, she agreed to group sex. That's perverse. Granted, there are people who are perverse, but now we have been taught not to say such things.
A girl who would have engaged in this conduct when I was young would flat out have been branded a "slut". That's not to be done now, and is termed "slut shaming", and perhaps the collapse in moral standards make the shaming obsolete. And it's worth noting that Jane Doe's conviction that everything was morally tainted here grew as the news of what she'd done was spread around. She was specifically taking heat from two sorority sisters over her role in the whole matter. That doesn't mean she wasn't raped. So much was going on in terms of drugs and alcohol in this story that if she wasn't impaired at the onset, at some point she most likely was, and she took the position right from the onset that most of it wasn't consensual. But what we have here is a really gross sex act with two young men she did consent to becoming a sort of orgy in a way, which she didn't consent to. This isn't the same at all as the Red Army showing up to a village in eastern Germany in 1945.
We need to avoid making this worse that it already is, but frankly we need to get back to a point at which that sort of conduct is shameful. Which brings me to the last two young women mentioned in this post. The influencer and couple mocked by the comedienne.
Regarding the influencer, somebody in her orbit, and may she herself, woke up to the fact that posting naked photographs of yourself was shameful, and they were yanked after quite an effort. Good for whomever woke up that fact.
But bad that her "influencing" is depicing the same sort of conduct that got the second young woman in this story in trouble. Her failure, if we are to deem it that, was not being sexually immoral, but in allowing herself to get into a drunken stupor in the presence of young men.
Which leads me to a comment that was made on the Facebook feed for the author of the article mentioned above. A commenter noted as the asnwer to the article entitled; Caitlin Flanagan: What Was Jane Doe Looking For?:
So basically… it’s dangerous to be around men?
I understand the argument about risk, judgment, alcohol, and putting yourself in vulnerable situations. Those are conversations worth having.
But there’s something deeply unsettling about telling young women: You know what men are like. You know these places are dangerous. Why did you go?
Women go to fraternity parties because they want to socialize. They want to flirt. They want to meet men. They may even want to have consensual sex.
None of those things should require accepting sexual assault as a foreseeable consequence of being around men.
At some point, “women need to make better choices” becomes an extraordinarily damning statement about men.
So the feminist position is “not all men,” but the anti-feminist position is apparently, “Ladies, you knew there would be men there”?
Well, she's correct in everything she said, the commenter, but she's wrong. Large groups of young men have fallen off the rails in this way since we have been a species. So, yes, "it's dangerous to be around men".
It is.
Not all men all the time, but this gets back to standards of the past. It's not that dangerous to be around a bunch of young men. . . who are near older men. . .and better yet if some of them are relatives. I've seen young men begin to act improperly towards young women where older men were present and intervened, sometimes forcibly.8 In other words, being at the Sheepherders' Fair is one thing, being at Moonies, apparently, quite another.
And, influencer, having a wardrobe made entirely of overly tight halter tops is dangerous. That does, in the real world, one thing. It advertises your boobs, and advertises that your boobs are available for the taking, along with things located elsewhere on your female body.
We'll loop back around here to the Flanagan article, which is drawing flak. Flanagan condemns franternitis solidly in the article. She notes that fraternities were dangerous when she was in college, and that a boyfriend she was breaking up with warned her never to go upstairs in one, which she never did.
Then she asked this question:
That’s the saddest thing about these old rituals. What attracts women to those parties—late at night, like Jane Doe—to walk alone to a fraternity house and take her chances?
She answers:
What she’s really looking for is a man. And she has no idea how to find a good one.
Footnotes:
1. On offering offense, Caitlin Flanagan, a journalist, has already written two articles on this and the second one, which will be noted above, has really drawn criticism.
2. We've left out a lot of details in our first summation of this, but her concern for her reputation isn't surprising. She consented to getting screwed by one man while performing oral sex on another, and then was screwed by multiple other men. One of the two original men actually texted her not to worry as things like this were becoming more a societal norm, which is complete bullshit.
3. Having said that, the practice of "wenching" was common amongst certain men, which involved picking up young women in bars of a certain class, that being the desperate underclass. This pretty clearly crosses over towards the topic of prostitution pretty quickly. Having said that, this definitely occurred.
4. On another note, not one of the very few men I knew who were in fraternities at the University of Wyoming graduated with a degree. This caused me to be surprised when I learned that a long time partner of mine had been a member of the same fraternity that two individuals I knew, who did not graduate, hate been.
I should note that one of those two fellows, while he did not graduate, didn't live in the frat house the entire four years either, and later went on to become a millionaire.
5. Motto of the U.S. Army, first adopted in 1778.
6. The topic of birth control has not come up here.
7. Ingalls actually has claimed that Jane Does sodomized him, and he's a sexual assault survivor. Oh please. At any rate, their joint actions on the girl were perverted, but frankly, her acceptance of being engaged in sex with both at the same time is also perverted.
Kretzschmar maintains that he was not part of the rape at all, and what he did was to go into the room and check on things. This seems to be more or less correct. His sin, here, is one of omission. He knew that something was going on and did nothing.
8. Contrary to what people might expect, middle aged men are often way stronger and more adopt in a fight than young men are.
Lex Anteinternet: The 2026 Election, 23rd Edition. Stein's Law meets the GOP. The hints of a mutiny edition.
Lex Anteinternet: The 2026 Election, 23rd Edition. Stein's Law meets...: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Herbert Stein. September 23, 2026 Something is actually going on in the GOP for the first t...
Bextel claims that Harriet Hageman went after Barlow in a major way in a discussion with her personally, claiming that she said he was "pure evil". Bextel is clearly a bit baffled why Gray and Hageman don't come to her aid in her race.
The fact that Gray is a "true friend of MAGA" is the very reason that Chuck ought to be sent to be a toilet bowl scrubber in the Kremlin. The question is who to vote for.
The 2026 Election, 23rd Edition. Stein's Law meets the GOP. The hints of a mutiny edition.
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
Herbert Stein.
September 23, 2026
Something is actually going on in the GOP for the first time since the Dixiecrat MAGA insurgency took control of the party and made it a populist party.
Bit and pieces of the signs are everywhere, all of a sudden. Stein's Law has arrived.
GOP candidates are in trouble all over the country and now they're starting to dump Trump. A good example of this is Congressman Ashley Hinson, who is trying to do the same thing that Harriet Hageman is trying to do, which is to move into a retiring Senator's spot. She's in real trouble in that effort and recent polls indicate that she's behind. The Republican seat appears slated to go to a Democrat. The GOP sent out John Barrasso to stump for her, an odd choice as Barrasso isn't inspiring on his alleged home turf, but the thought must have been that the Senate Whip could show how Hinson winning would help the Dear Leader.
Well, that message didn't seem to take. So Hinson started to bolt. From her Facebook.
Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran. We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices.
That includes suspending the gas tax, pausing diesel exports, unleashing E-15 everywhere we can, reinstating the $1/gallon biodiesel tax credit, and creating a diesel relief program to help our farmers and truckers being crushed by the high costs.
While doing this, we should also ensure our highway trust fund is replenished, so that Iowans don’t suffer from crumbling roads and bridges while relief comes our way now. These actions to lower costs are needed ASAP, and the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end.
I am working every day to deliver bipartisan results for Iowans and I will work with anyone who is ready to tackle this challenge immediately.
She otherwise demanded that the war against Iran be stopped.
Hinson had voted against the War Powers Resolution every time it's been voted on in the House, and did so just a week prior, so she's voted to keep the war rolling. Now she wants it over. Fuel prices are the reason why.
Closer to home, there are all of a sudden all sorts of die-hard right wingers who are criticizing Trump. Whether that translates over to opposing Trump lover Chuck Gray and Trump supported Harriet Hageman is another thing, but there's definitely stirring in the ranks.
Indeed, Cowboy State Daily carpetbagging columnist Dave Simpson went into a "boo hoo' fit about the whole thing, wondering if the imaginary Sweet Home Alabama Wyoming he believes to have existed has gone "wobbly".
Go home Dave. You drank too much WFC Kool aide.
Elsewhere, Wyoming teachers are organizing against the attempt to bankrupt the state:
Teachers, hospital leaders launch $1M campaign to fight property tax ballot measure
And it's been noted that Wyomingites are voting their interests:
Beyond that, the revolt is getting large enough that as early as it is, we're now seeing the non Trump GOP start to reemerge from the bunkers for the 2028 races, with Chris Christie having basically indicated that he's running.
Elections are not over, until their over, but it is clear that the GOP, and for that matter Trump, have no idea on how to hold on to the Senate, let alone the House. Doubling down on all the old tired lines (the Red Chinese are coming to have babies, date your daughters, steal your lunch) isn't working. The MAGA base was always the demographic that was most vulnerable to an economic downturn and now it's suffering. Agriculture, a Republican base, can't deal with the high fuel and fertilizer prices. Trucking can't deal with the high prices either. Regular people don't like the high prices at the grocery store and nobody likes the high fuel prices in the West.
This can't and won't be fixed by the election. The war against Iran won't be over and fuel prices will be high unless a ban on exports tanks the price of diesel, which it likely won't.
It took a lot, but people seem to be waking up to being lied to. Moreover, as that happens, Trump gets weirder and weirder by the day.
One place that appears now almost inevitable to go to the Democrats is Texas, where Texas Democratic Senate James Talarico has seen a 28-point swing in vote share against Ken Paxton.
Cont:
Fresh from getting its head handed to it in the primary, where its endorsements didn't pan out for the most part, the Dixiecrat controlled central committee of the Wyoming Republican Party has endorsed the property tax cut bill that would gut local governments like fish.
Basically, the Dixiecrat Wyoming Freedom Caucus hates the Gubbement and figures that stuff like education and the like can be handled by Ella Mae back at home.
September 24, 2026
September 25, 2026
Dixiecrats are moving over to their rightful home:
Rod Miller wrote an op ed on this and I've been meaning to post on it, so I'll just comment here. Bextel moving over to the Constitution Party, delusional though she is, is a good thing if it causes other Dixiecrats of the WFC to follow her, and they should. Here, a prominent Hot Springs politician has done just that.
The Constitution Party, which believes in a double secret constitution written in crayon and visible only through secret decoder glasses may pull over 10% in the election, which would make it a good place for people from the WFC to pack up their gray kepis and go and be "real". As is actually they, not traditional Wyoming Republicans, who are the aberration, they'd be doing themselves a favor, they'd have more voice in the CP, but the Republican Party and the State one as well. It'd allow the GOP to shake off the chains of the Confederacy which the WFC is attempting to bind it with.
In this environment, it might be noted, it's amazing that the Democrats can't get more traction than they are, but they aren't. Byrd still stands a good chance, but he's about the only one outside of the very few Democrats holding seats in the legislature.
September 29, 2026
From here on out in the election we're going to see Bat Shit Crazy on full display nearly every day.
Apparently not realizing that the election is a referendum on Donald Trump, a couple weeks ago Trump urged votes to imagine he's on the ballot.
The Republican problem is that voters are doing just that.
If people think back to the 2024 Presidential Election, most voters were never very keen on Trump. The most commonly expressed opinion going into the election was that voters disliked both candidates. The Democrats screwed themselves by running Biden, which was simply insane. Republican voters in the primary were in part MAGA true believes, but that misses the point that a lot of Republicans have left the party. When Biden dropped out, way too late, the Democrats did the typical Democratic thing and killed themselves by nominating a Kamala Harris, about the most irritating candidate they could have found.
2024 is in the rear view mirror of course, but what's been missed in the Trumpian Reign of Terror is that most people went into 2025 disliking Donald Trump and it's gone downhill from there, something made worse by the fact that this administration is made up of the cynical advantageous and those with some agenda, often a deluded one.
With that mix, Trump has had a free hand in acting like a mad king, and he's made the most of it. People with an agenda, moreover, are fully exercising their one and only chance to try to pull it off.
Trump's pretty clearly aware of this, in spite of his addled state. It explains the constant effort to build monuments to himself. In spite of what some in the far right Evangelical camp believe, there's pretty good reason to doubt Trump's belief in an afterlife. He certainly hasn't lived like he believes in one. So he's trying to make sure we remember him as a great man in terms of architecture and conquest.
It's all going to fail.
Trump doesn't seem to be able to grasp that people do not love him. He's a narcissist who is profoundly in love with himself. The worst, therefore, nightmare of his life is unfolding. A lot of motivated people who range from horrified to absolute contempt are going to boot the GOP out of the House, and now it looks like the Senate, and for the very reasons that Trump has urged us to do. They're voting on him, as the GOP has become a sycophantic personality cult.
People don't love him.
From now until the election Trump will pull out all the stops to try to keep the result he fears from happening. Anything he can legally get away with he will try. It'll be a long month until the election.
On not loving Trump, it's a shame Wyomingites don't have a better option to contest Chuck Gray.
Gray has made a career out of loving Trump more than Trump loves Trump. That's about all he has going for him. We're about to send somebody completely unqualified to do anything for the State to Congress. Would that somebody other than Johnson and Kinney were running. Neither stand a chance, and they don't really deserve to.
If none of the above were an option in that race, that'd be the one that would win.
Speaking of Gray, Gray has been showing up at UW football games recently and having pictures taken with students.
It's pathetic.
September 30, 2026
Wyoming Secretary of State and GOP candidate for Congress Chuck Gray emerged from hiding from debate requests, while he's not going to UW football games to be photographed with students, to congratulate the Supreme Court for temporarily upholding
October 1, 2026
The backers of a data center in Natrona County invited Republican candidates for the County Commission to tour the site and omitted the Democratic candidates.
The GOP candidates are Lisa Jamieson (Democrat), Matt Keating (Republican), Ray Pacheco (Republican), Candace Machado (Democrat) and Dallas Laird (Republican).
We haven't addressed this race much yet, but Laird is a 1,000,000 years old and needs to go. Keating was a somewhat controversial commissioner and then a somewhat controversial assessor. He's been battling cancer. Pacheco is a City of Casper councilman. Machado was a controversial mayor of Evansville.
October 4, 2026
The Gillette News Record ran an article about a Campbell County event of the meet the candidate type in Gillette for Bextel. It was held at The Railyard, which is a restaurant in Gillette. It's a fair sized restaurant but not huge. Apparently about 20 people went, which shows how little interest Bextel's campaign is drawing.
Her campaign does receive media attention as she's able to run it and it's so unusual. I hesitate to post on her regularly as it makes her look like a bigger deal than she really is. It is interesting however.
For one thing, Bextel keeps stating the "I didn't want to do this but had to" type of line. Nobody has to run for anything. What that really means is that the Dixiecrat is suddenly awake to the fact that Wyoming isn't 1960s Alabama and is terrified of what that means.
Also, Bextel continues to use some crude language. I guess that's no shock in this day and age but at least to some it sort of edges her towards Southern White Trash, which isn't a good look for anyone.
Those in attendance asked why Hageman and Gray (Gray stayed at her house, apparently, while campaigning) haven't come to her support.
As if.
Politics is a backstabbing game and there's no way that Hageman and Gray are going to buck the GOP for anyone.
Some local politicians showed up, which risks their being associated with her. I don't blame them for showing up, but the press coverage might be a deterrent to that occurring in the future.
October 5, 2026
More on the Gillette News Record article.
Bextel claims that Harriet Hageman went after Barlow in a major way in a discussion with her personally, claiming that she said he was "pure evil". Bextel is clearly a bit baffled why Gray and Hageman don't come to her aid in her race.
She also has a theme, or maybe a sort of obsession, with "weak men", which she claims include the current Governor, Barlow, and some other male Republicans. It's odd.
Bextel has always been a curious figure, to the extent we know anything about her, but her naivete on why Hageman and Gray (she mused she wondered what they have on Hageman), is amusing. Gray and Hageman are on a glide path to higher office, in spite of not being very good choices, and they don't want to ruin it by supporting Bextel who is a crash and dive to political oblivion.
And once again we see the South sort of rearing up in the Dixiecrat Wyoming Freedom Caucus. Bextel crudely claimed she had bigger "balls" than Barlow and interprets them not being in Nathan Bedford Forrest's Partisan Rangers as their being weak males. There's a certain sort of peculiar early 20th Century literary quality to this.
Becky, the Southern Damsel, coming to rescue us all. . .
Go home Becky.
October 6, 2026
Just looking at net chatter, the boo hoo Dixiecrats who think they are conservatives are appearing to break for Bextel in surprising numbers. She won't win, but it'll be interesting to see if the Constitution Party is able to ride her back into 10% of the vote and be qualified as a "major party".
That wouldn't be a bad thing if it drug the Allemands, Bears, etc., over to that party, where they really belong.
I'm guessing they won't make the 10%.
As was seen in the last election, the Dixiecrat WFC is noisy as well as deluded, but it doesn't enjoy much support from real Wyomingites.
Another question is whether the Democrats are able to make 10% themselves.
They should, as one of the GOP candidates, Chuck Gray, is held widely in contempt. The problem is that the Democrat opposing him is Lisa Kinney.
Gail Symons wrote an op-ed on this topic for the Cowboy State Daily.
I'm seeing a lot of moderate Republicans declare support for Kinney, and some for Johnson, but both candidates are really unattractive options. Kinney is singularly uninspiring and comes from the ancient Democrat demographic that caused the Democrats to slip into oblivion here. If the candidate came from the Mike Sullivan wing of the party, Chuck would be doomed. In spite of GOP support for her, Kinney is really hard to get enthusiastic about.
So is Johnson for that matter, and the Libertarians in general.
A debate would be really helpful but Chuck is hiding and won't debate.
For people like me this is really a problem. I'd like to see Gray loose so badly that he moves to Russia and takes a job as the toilet bowl cleaner in the Kremlin, but both of the other two candidates are really lacking. The Libertarian Party in general is always subject to a caution flag, although in Wyoming Libertarians are often moderate Republicans looking for someplace else to go following the Dixiecrat seizure of the party.
This one will be interesting to see how many people just can't vote for the other two non GOP candidates and therefore simply don't vote. My guess is that there will be a lot. My guess also is that Kinney will take a larger percentage of the vote than Democrats normally do on this race, which is usually about 25%. I could see her getting at least up to 30%, maybe 35%. I don't expect Johnson to do as well, but he might be able to draw 10%.
Overall, it's not impossible to imagine Kinney and Johnson together pull down over 50% of the vote, but probably not much more than that. Still, if that happens, Gray will be a Congressman with the minority of the vote.
Of course, this year, who knows. It's not completely impossible that Wyoming might elect a Democrat, although by the slimmest of margins, to the House for the first time in years. If it did, it would have a member of what's going to be the majority party in the House, and it would really give the Freedom Caucus the middle finger salute.
It'll also be interesting to see how many votes Byrd draws. Lummis' opponent in 2026, Merav Ben-David, drew 27% of the vote in an election in which former Congressman Lummis was going to win no matter what. Hageman has a lot more fanatic supporters than Lummis ever did, but she also has a lot more people who detest her as well. Byrd is a much stronger candidate than Ben-David, and Hageman has been hiding from debating him. Hageman showed up at a town hall somewhere recently and gave her usual poor performance. She's not good at handling negative questions at all, which is surprising given that she was a practicing attorney. Byrd might outright slaughter her in a debate.
Hageman also is taking flak from the disaffected Dixiecrats of the Freedom Caucus. Bextel complained in a town hall in Gillette about Hageman not endorsing her. Hageman endorsed Degenfelder in the Governor's race which upset the Dixiecrats as they, and the GOP they control, had endorsed Bien. Of course Trump endorsed Degenfelder, it was the point of her entire campaing, and Hageman sure wasn't going to buck Donald on that. Still, some disaffected WFC types are now mad at Hageman a bit.
I suspect they'll get over it, but a tiny percentage will write in Bien or just refuse to vote. One WFC person I know fairly well has outright declared they will not support Hageman, and another gadfly local WFC member has indicated that they're writing in Bien.
Byrd is definitely going to do better than Ben-David. I'm guessing that Byrd will draw at least 35% of the vote. That's not enough, of course, to get elected, but I'd also guess that Bien will still draw about 5% of the vote. That'd still leave Hageman with 60%, and that's likely, but it's not completely impossible that she draws under 50%.
October 7, 2026
Donald Trump, who loves Donald Trump, endorsed Carpetbagger Chuck Gray, one of the founders of the Dixiecrats in Wyoming, who has campaigned on loving Trump even more than Trump loves Trump. Hid did so on his Twitter like platform, Raging Delusional Lies Social, stating:
The fact that Gray is a "true friend of MAGA" is the very reason that Chuck ought to be sent to be a toilet bowl scrubber in the Kremlin. The question is who to vote for.
Former Gov. Mike Sullivan says that person should be Lisa Kinney.
Sullivan's endorsement shows how dim people have become in Wyoming, not because of the endorsement, but because the carpetbagging migrants fail to realize that Wyoming has had Democratic Governors fairly frequently until just recently. Sullivan is a Democrat and always has been, but one of the social commentary Twitter Twits came in to accuse him of being just that, having presumed that Sullivan must be a Republican.
Sullivan was gracious to Gray, he's a gracious man, noting something that I didn't know, that he's worked for Wyoming Right To Life. And he provided more information on Kinney than I had known.
Sullivan was a great Governor, but frankly I really doubt his endorsement will make a difference in the election. I also doubt Donny's will. People who are weak or lazy enough to pay attention to his endorsement were already going to vote for Chuck.
Early voting started yesterday in Ohio with people lining up before dark vote. According to polls, Democrats turned out in larger numbers than Republicans, but Republican voters may very well not be voting for Republican candidates.
Early voting has started here in Wyoming as well. With the races set, the major endorsements made for the most part (I'm sure more are to come), we'll close out this edition.
We'll probably also go down to the Courthouse this week and vote.
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Labels: 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, Alabama, Bill Allemand, Carpetbaggers, Chuck Gray, Dixiecrats, Donald Trump, Harriet Hageman, inflation, James Byrd, Questions for politicians, Rebecca Bextel, Taxes, Tom Lubnau, Wyoming Freedom Caucus
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