A Poignant Thought

     Happy New Year!

     For some the prospects the New Year offers are offset by the frustrations of the year before. That’s particularly so for the indie writer:

I sold 22 books in 2025 😭🙌🏻✨

— Tai Harrow - Indie Author (@taiharrow) January 2, 2026

     I don’t know that lady, but her bittersweet announcement strikes a chord with me. 22 books! God alone knows how long and hard she labored over her offerings. And while 22 is better than zero, I’m sure her aspirations ran to higher numbers.

     There are a lot of us. We probably outnumber writers published by conventional publishing houses by a couple of orders of magnitude. And it’s a given that not all of us are really good writers or storytellers. But the doggedness of the indie writer carries a meaning independent of whether he’s got all the assets of a Steinbeck, a Hemingway, or a Faulkner.

     There are stories in him. Regardless of his abilities, he wants to tell them. And they might just need to be told. If you’re my age or older, you might remember this tag line from an old television show:

     There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.

     That show focused on a single police precinct in New York City. It was widely acclaimed. Yet it told stories embedded in relatively ordinary lives.

     A human life is composed of stories. Some are complete; others are “works in progress.” Some shriek with immediacy. And very few are ever told.

* * *

     Long ago, I wrote:

     The distribution of writers attempting the e-publication channel goes something like this:

• 90% or more: Persons who cannot write and should not try.
• ~7%: Persons with a fair command of English, but who have no stories to tell that anyone else would want to read.
• ~2%: Persons with a fair command of English who have stories to tell, but whose styles and preconceptions are unsuited to telling them in a winning fashion.
• ~1%: Capable storytellers, including a significant number who could crack the “traditional” publishing channels (or who already have).

     I rather regret that partition. I’ve come to believe that everyone has one or more stories in him. He may not have the ability to tell them in a winning way, but they’re there nonetheless. If they press him fiercely enough, they’ll come out: perhaps just in conversation over a beer, but they will be told. And those to whom they are told will feel their impact.

     I’ve encountered quite a number of other indie writers these past fifteen years. (We tend to cluster. After all, no one else will have us.) They share the need to tell stories. Even the least capable of us is responding to pressures he cannot withstand.

     Yet answering “What do you do?” with “I’m a writer” is the most reliable way I know of making the asker excuse himself and head for refuge. Sometimes it works even if the asker is an aspiring writer himself. Try it at your next social gathering.

     Even once set down in print or pixels, some stories remain “untold” de facto. No one listens. Perhaps that’s what keeps America’s legion of therapists in business.

* * *

     Don’t mind me. After all, I’m just a talkative old man. As I’ve said before, I write these pieces mainly for myself. That includes the stories I tell. No one is obliged to listen, and few do. But I do have a point.

     You have stories in you. So do the people around you. They want to tell theirs at least as urgently as you want to tell yours. They might not be articulate. They might not have patience enough to do all that typing and formatting. But their need is no less than yours.

     Among the simplest and greatest of charities is the gift one gives by listening.

     Just an early-morning thought.

Smith, Jones, And Coming To America 2026

     There’s quite a bit of contention over why immigrants to our shores seek to come here. Yet the answer generalizes neatly:

• Immigrant Smith comes for an improved chance to get something: e.g., freedom from persecution or a materially better life;
• Immigrant Jones comes to serve a superior mandate.

     Those motivations sometimes blend.

     We saw Smiths from Europe almost exclusively during the “open immigration” period from the end of the Civil War up to the 1965 Hart/Celler Act. Since then, there’s been a mixture of Smiths and Joneses. The Smiths of recent years have included a significant number of predators and gang affiliates from Mexico and Central America. The Joneses have largely been Muslims.

     President Trump has put great emphasis on stanching the flow of illegal migrants and migrants from hostile cultures. In doing so, he’s nudged the balance back toward the European Smiths: persons from largely Christian cultures who could be expected to assimilate. This is a good thing. The “unmeltables” have greatly exacerbated our racial and ethnic tensions. Several ethnic exclaves, particularly in the Southwest, are populated largely by “unmeltables” and illegals.

     But of course, there are persons on the Left who condemn Trump’s changes as “inhumane.” By their standards, it’s a violation of our ethics to insist that newcomers actually become law-abiding Americans… first and foremost, by complying with our immigration laws. The Dishonorable Charles Schumer (D, NY) has openly defended the illegals and vowed to seek a “pathway to citizenship” for them:

Chuck Schumer: “Our ultimate goal is to get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here."

I'ts right out in the open. https://t.co/KmvyjIN5xb pic.twitter.com/XFlStXb1BF

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 1, 2026

     Leftists who favor making no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants usually claim that the illegals are all Smiths. “They came here for a better life!” Even if we omit consideration of the immigration laws, this is a deliberate effacement of an important distinction. Some of those Smiths seek “a better life” by preying on others. Indeed, some were sent here by even bigger predators, to serve those bigger ones’ aims.

     As for the Joneses, we must deem them invaders ab initio, regardless of whether they wear uniforms or tote weapons. This is particularly the case for Muslims. Islam forbids the Muslim to acknowledge any allegiance other than Islam. Thus, the Muslim is required to remain conscious at all times that his creed commands him to subjugate all persons everywhere to the dictates of Islam.

     The nations of Europe have been battered nearly to destruction for failing to accept this fact. Islam has penetrated Europe so deeply that its clerics now openly proclaim their intention that Islam and sharia law shall rule throughout the Old World. Europe’s governments, with a handful of exceptions, have postured as either indifferent to those threats or powerless to oppose them.

     That’s a summary of large-scale human mobility at the beginning of the Year of Our Lord 2026. Individuals’ motives for migration are all subsumed by the Smith / Jones dichotomy. Are there a few Smiths scattered among the Joneses, or vice versa? No doubt. Might some Joneses prove tractable in the long run, capable of renouncing their original aims and becoming loyal Americans? The odds are against it, but I hesitate to say it can’t happen.

     I will say only this: Beware. That is, be aware. If there are migrants in your community, do your best to know which ones are Smiths and which are Joneses. Treat carefully with the Smiths, but be even more wary of the Joneses. And under no circumstances let the Joneses build fortresses among you, no matter how they represent themselves or their institutions! Not opposing them from the outset could ultimately cost your life, or the lives of your descendants.

Some End-Of-Year Thoughts

     Janus has been prodding at my backbrain, prompting me to think those classical end-of-year thoughts. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how I’d like 2026 to differ from 2025, both for me personally and in larger ways.

     Janus, for those not familiar with the mythology of ancient Rome, was the god of doorways. He was usually depicted as two-faced, one face looking backward and the other looking forward. The passage from one year to the next was especially deemed his kind of transition. I made use of him in Doors:

     “Every decision changes us. Even the little ones. And we can’t know beforehand how much.”
     “I wouldn’t have expected you to cite chaos theory on Christmas Eve,” she said.
     “It’s not that so much as the nature of time. Do you know the myth of Janus?”
     She shook her head.
     “The Roman god of doorways. He had two faces, one facing forward and one facing back. He symbolized choices and transitions. We seldom face a choice knowing everything that will come of making it either way. We can’t avert the consequences of our choices, and we can’t undo them afterward. Once we step through that door, it locks itself against us.”

     For someone like your humble Curmudgeon, sunk deep in years and choices made along the way, it can seem unlikely that any decision I could make now would have a great effect on the years to come, whether mine or others’. (To the advanced grammarians among my Gentle Readers, if any: Is there a rule against ending a sentence with a possessive? If so, please let me know. Thanks.) But there’s chaos theory to keep in mind, isn’t there? So perhaps I should respect the unboundedness of the possibilities.

* * *

     Among my enduring resolutions is one I adopted long ago: always to speak the truth as I see it. That’s not an unmixed virtue. Truth often hurts. Many an unpleasant truth has come my way these past seven decades. On those occasions when I’ve expressed them publicly, the reaction has nearly always been fury, sometimes bordered on violence.

     In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, he includes a quasi-religion that advocates “living by the foma:” i.e., falsehoods that give comfort rather than the abrasion of unlimited truth. It’s uncertain whether Vonnegut meant that prescriptively. Yet a lot of people do live by such falsehoods. It may be that that’s their cushion against reality’s abrasions, and that they couldn’t bear to live without it.

     I can’t go that way. I have to see what is. Having seen it, I have to live with the knowledge. I’ve often felt an obligation to pass such knowledge along, even if it will hurt the recipients.

     The awareness of the hurt I’ve caused by doing that has made me think some very dark thoughts. Paramount among them is one I’ve dwelt on to my chagrin.

     Very few of us are poised at the levers of history. Very few of us can effectuate even small changes to what is. If in expressing a painful perception or insight to someone else who has no such power, I cause him unhappiness, I’ve darkened his personal reality to no good consequence. Why do such a thing? Why not keep my dark awarenesses to myself and let him rest in his greater comfort?

     Try that one on for yourself. Warning: it will pinch.

* * *

     I have a compulsion to think about what I see, and to express my inferences here and elsewhere. I don’t know why. It probably indicates that I’m not getting enough sex. But whatever the reason, when I start thinking along the lines above, it makes me wonder whether the pain I cause is justified by the improvements I stimulate… if any. It may be that my only possibility of bringing a net benefit to others is by shutting up. It’s not possible to be certain. I can only wonder about it, and I do.

     I’d prefer – oh, greatly! – to see positive things, benign developments and possibilities, new and promising vistas. But I haven’t seen many such these past few decades. What I have seen suggests that what Robert A. Heinlein once called “the Renaissance Civilization” – i.e., the United States of America – is in terminal decline, the sociopolitical equivalent of Cheyne-Stokes respiration.

     That has colored my writing in two ways. The first affects these opinion pieces, which have grown gloomier with time. The second affects my fiction, which focuses on the decisions and actions of heroes, some of them unsung, sincerely determined to make things better for themselves and others. Which of those is the more “realistic” vision? Must one of them give way to the other?

     That’s a particularly gloomy thought.

* * *

     The Year of Our Lord 2026 is almost upon us. I don’t have any special wisdom about the year about to end, nor any insight into what will come. One of the realizations that comes with advanced age is that there’s little point in trying to foretell the future. For my part, I just hope to live through the coming year and get a few things done that I didn’t manage to finish in 2025.

     Wherever you are and whatever your station in life, I wish you, Gentle Readers, a Happy New Year. May 2026 bring you all the best that life has to offer… and may God bless and keep you all.

Dangerfield’s Syndrome

     Forgive me, Gentle Reader. It’s very early, I’ve been reading some disturbing stuff, and it has me in a foul mood. Two tweets in particular ignited the urge to blather about something that will offend at least half the human race.

     For those who may not have noticed – the Web does conceal a lot about those who rant here – I’m a man. Male, that is. A Y-chromosome bearer. Therefore, I share in the common burdens of the male half of my species. I try not to dwell on them; it’s not good for any of us. But the consciousness of some of those burdens can be difficult to suppress.

     Have a second look at the title of this piece. (For the moment, just the menfolk. The ladies will get their turn.) Know what I’m talking about now?

     The old saying that familiarity breeds contempt has a special application to male-female relations. Familiarity is rooted in the word family. Families of the traditional sort – one man, one woman, and some number of minor children, dogs, cats, and their appurtenances – don’t stay together for as long as they once did. If you’ve noticed that and wondered how to redress it, you’re not alone.

     Part of the reason is burgeoning contempt, especially hers toward him.

     Even at its most obvious, that can be puzzling. Why should she feel contempt for him? She married him, didn’t she? She claimed to love him, back then; has her love lapsed? If so, why?

     Remember the old slogan that love is the answer? We heard it a lot more often a few decades back. It was wrong then. It’s still wrong today. It’s especially wrong when applied to male-female relations, especially those of the (previously) intimate sort. The error inheres in a single word.

     Bide a moment while I fetch more coffee.

* * *

     Have a look at a particularly striking tweet:

"Only women, children and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is only loved under the condition that he provides something." - Chris Rock

Changing this dynamic should be at the top of the priority list.

— Lisa Britton (@LisaBritton) December 30, 2025

     That was a stunner. It points to a truth that virtually no one is willing to face squarely. In part, that’s because there’s a misdirector in it. Once again, the misdirector consists of a single word.

     Have you found that word yet? No? Well, as it’s my job to illuminate things that elude other people, I shall tell you forthwith.

     The word is love.

     Miss Britton’s statement is both admirable and factually impeccable. However, the underlying disease isn’t a failure of love. For all the air time it gets, love isn’t a primary emotion. It’s a resultant that's made possible by other factors.

     Primary among those factors is respect.

     Many a relationship between a man and a woman is actually devoid of love. Her love of him, that is. She needn’t feel love to bind herself to him. She does need to acknowledge and respect his ability to protect her and provide for her. Say what you will about “modern women” and the contemporary independence thereof; she would never tie herself to him if he didn’t seem equal to the protect/provide role.

     There’s a lot of talk about how today’s women are all determined to hold out for a modern prince: tall, handsome, self-assured, chivalrous, and with at least a six-figure income. There’s a lot of truth in that. The expectation may be unreasonable, but a lot of women hold it even so. They’ve been told that he’s what they deserve.

     Young women, that is. After about age 30, their standards start to slip. In part that’s because of the “biological clock;” in other part, it’s because they own mirrors. Reality has banged on their doors for long enough to get their attention. Men they’d have dismissed a decade earlier start to look good; good enough for a trial run, at least.

     The complementarity of the sexes is hardwired into us. Women yearn for protectors and providers. Men are designed for the role, and seek to fulfill it. Eventually those urges overcome the propaganda. The desire to see oneself as deserving of a prince or a princess gives way before their power.

     If you’ve been wondering why we bear so many fewer children per couple than previous generations, that’s a part of the reason that’s much harder to face plainly than the various nostrums about “consumerism” and changes in the “economic value of progeny.”

* * *

     As time passes, the respect she feels for him can wane, and often does. This is especially prevalent if occupational and economic advancement eludes him. Those things are not automatic; indeed, many men never consciously seek them. Over time, it can seem to her that he’s just there. Marking time. Doing what he’s always done, with the rewards he’s always received. Her labors loom large in her consciousness, especially if she’s the mother of minor children. His do not.

     The diminution of respect that often proceeds from those perceptions is poison to a marriage. Yet it happens, especially between couples surrounded by other families that seem to be doing better. Her protestations of love start to ring hollow. He senses it through her behavior, which will always outweigh her words. The marriage begins to lose its cohesion.

     Five years, ten years, fifteen years… the interval will vary according to the characters of the participants. But the behavioral changes are consistent. She complains more and more, to him and to others. He develops a “wandering eye,” with adultery a frequent result.

     This isn’t about love. If there was love in any degree at the outset, it will begin to crumble as the respect that made love possible crumbles beneath it. But the respect is primary; the failure of love is a consequence.

* * *

     The above is a general, surface-level diagnosis of a common phenomenon. It’s unclear to me that there’s an antidote to it. Yet I’m confident that a lot of the midlife failure of sexual intimacy is explained by it. It’s less about loss of love than about his failure in her eyes to bring her what she married him for.

     But has he failed, truly? I don’t think so.

I care about men because im a human being being with empathy for Christ sake it’s not that hard is it? I feel protective toward those carrying silent weight and I always have. That’s called being in tune with this thing that we were given as human beings called the ability to…

— Chloe Roma (@The_RomaArmy) December 29, 2025

The Deepest Divide

     I’d intended to apologize for a sudden attack of intellectual sloth and declare a day off, but I have something on my mind that demands a piece, if only a brief one.

     You’re a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch. That marks you as intelligent, erudite, on top of current events, and unusually handsome and charming. And that means you’re already aware of the enormous “daycare fraud” being perpetrated by Somalis in Minnesota. It’s a good thing you’re already aware, for the national media have done their best not to mention them.

     Citizen-journalist Nick Shirley has done excellent work at exposing these frauds. Not one of them has any children in its care. All are consuming federal and state funds with a voracity that would impress Ungoliant.

     The scandals that surround the scandal pertain to the Minnesota state government’s tolerance – nay, its protection – of these fraudulent institutions, and the complete failure of any national news organ to report on them. Governor Tim Walz, already a figure of considerable ignominy, has openly said that he will support the Somalians against ICE and the justice system. All in all, it forms a pile of ordure that would sicken Satan.

     If Satan were an American, that is. If he’s a Third Worlder or a Muslim, it’s business as usual, except for the embarrassment of getting caught with your hand in the till.

     If you were raised in the U.S. or in Europe, you were raised to Judeo-Christian moral-ethical standards: broadly speaking, the Noahide Commandments, of which the Ten Commandments of the Book of Exodus are a superset. Those standards are not common to persons reared outside the nations of Christendom. Third Worlders generally live by another rule:

Getting Away With It
Is All That Matters.

     Military science-fiction writer Tom Kratman has called this amoral familism. Of course, the term amoral implies a moral standard that an amoralist would deny. The standard of the First World, as previously mentioned, is the one delineated by the Ten Commandments.

     It doesn’t matter that we of the First World are shocked by the Somalian fraud system. That is: it doesn’t matter to the Somalians. All that matters to them is getting away with it. They feel no guilt. They’re merely embarrassed about being exposed. They have powerful protectors, so there’s a good chance they’ll continue to get away with it. Should that protection fail, such that they’re indicted, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for their crimes, well, “them’s the breaks,” right? Imagine a big Third World shrug.

     Prison, by the way, would not change them. They’d come out as amoral as they went in.

     In this cleavage between the moral standard shared by the U.S. and Europe and the non-standard of the Third World lies the clinching argument against permitting Third Worlders to immigrate to the First World. To the Somalians, the U.S. is a goodie bowl from which to grab all they can get away with. Their attitude is shared by virtually all other Third Worlders. They start stealing as soon as they’re here. They don’t stop of their own accord; they must be stopped. To avert that calamity, they make use of every bleeding-heart slogan and epithet you’ve ever heard, with copious assistance from the American Left.

     (Why the American Left is so willing to defend these migratory vampires is a subject for another tirade. For now, just take it as written.)

     The 1965 Hart-Celler Act made it possible for Third Worlders to apply for entry to the United States, with the possibility of naturalization after five years’ residence. Beyond that, the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Refugee Act allow such persons to petition for asylum here, on the representation that they’re fleeing persecution. These were regarded as humanitarian reforms. However, as we have seen from the Somalians and other Third World arrivals to our shores, the humanitarianism is one-way only. Third Worlders don’t assimilate. They certainly don’t adopt the Judeo-Christian ethics that makes our open, generous, excessively trusting society possible.

     President Trump has said that he will deport them. I hope he’ll keep his word. For longer-range relief, the Hart-Celler Act and all legislation that draws from that foundation must be repealed in favor of an immigration policy that admits only those who can be expected to conform to Judeo-Christian moral-ethical standards, no matter what religion they profess. I imagine Buddhists would be fairly safe.

I Should Have Mentioned…

     What I write will henceforth appear here as well as at my Substack site. I’ve also decided to reproduce my essays from the now defunct “Version 2.0” site at a Blogger site. Further news will be forthcoming.

Attractively Packaged Lies

     Have a brilliantly compact observation from a brilliant source:

Any memetic structure that inhibits biological reproduction must necessarily transfer to the minds of those who do reproduce or it will die out.

They target the youth especially, because their mental firewalls are not yet strong. https://t.co/ICxY3e1Xq2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 28, 2025

     Bravo! I hope a great many people see the above and reflect on how nicely it characterizes the incentives faced by young Whites today. It also raises a parallel question: were the memetic firewalls of which Elon Musk speaks stronger in previous generations, or have those dedicated to the destruction of the White race and the civilizations it’s built become that much cleverer and more insidious?

     I’m suddenly in mind of an old Heinlein story:

     “Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth.”

     [From “Gulf,” in this collection.]

     To be sure, we’re all “men of imperfect brain.” Yet I have a sense that the generations before the great wars of the Twentieth Century were less easily swayed than those that followed. That may be because the examples of family structure were more attractive, more enduring, and less often challenged than are those of today. Today, “alternative” family “structures” abound. Long-term endurance isn’t common. And the promises they make, while seldom spoken aloud, are seductive.

     Young Whites of the prewar years grew up among intact nuclear families that tended to be larger than those of today. They were exclusively heterosexual. They were racially unblended. Childbearing was applauded. Infidelity was condemned. Divorce, while it did occur, imposed a stigma upon those divorcing, especially if minor children were involved.

     The rise of aggressive, subtly anti-family feminist ideology was a large factor as well. World War II forced many women into the workplace, which supplemented the feminist proposition that women could and should have “lives of their own,” apart from child-rearing and homemaking. A young woman’s prime childbearing years, if expended on wage-work, are forever lost. Meanwhile the Betty Friedans and Germaine Greers were exhorting young women to “make something of themselves” – to go to college or enter the workforce – rather than to leave themselves “dependent on a man.” Women’s magazines were increasingly used to reinforce that message.

     I hardly need to expound on the social and economic changes that followed the wars. Compared to the incentives presented to Whites of the prewar years, the differences could not be more striking. (They stand out even more starkly when compared to the incentives faced by young blacks.) The mental defenses of postwar generations were far more easily undermined than those of their predecessors. Many forces converged to do the undermining: schooling at all levels, the news media, the entertainment industries, and the activists perpetually deriding tradition in favor of “change.”

     Just this morning, a young friend – a young woman who recently opted to enlist in the Army – reminded me that inferences are always subject to dispute, and that opinions will vary. No question about that! Were the postwar changes to social structures, customs, and attitudes uniformly bad? Perhaps not; traditional ways aren’t always indisputable or unchallengeable. But they explain much about today’s reproductive malaise.

     Elon Musk spoke of “memetic firewalls” that are too weak to repel the ideological bombardment today’s young Whites endure. Add the great intensification of that bombardment, and it begins to seem that things could hardly have developed otherwise. But human happiness, which Aristotle called the consequence of right doing and right living, appears seriously endangered by the changes the youth of the preponderantly White First World nations have faced. Many who eschewed the old ways of faith, family, and community look back on their decisions with regret. Perhaps lessons are accumulating for those that follow them… however many or few they may be.

New Content At Fran’s Substack Site (Updated Regularly)

December 27, 2025:
Pogrom 2026