Good morning, and welcome! Today is Monday, Nov. 24, 2025.
Today in History:
1971: Hijacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 by D.B. Cooper, who was never caught.
1963: Lee Harvey Oswald is shot.
1877: Black Beauty is published.
1859: Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, giving rise to the idea that Darwin was adopted. (OK, I made that last part up)
Birthdays today include: Serial Killer Ted Bundy, Composer Scott Joplin, and President Zachary Taylor.
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I’m going to be a bit reflective today. I had this about half written, and at about 2:30 a.m., I was ready to scrap it. But in the end, I decided to burden you with it, because I think you will understand. (One of the worst things you can do is under-estimate your readers.) I’ve always been of the notion to write what I feel, and to do less is less than honesty. (I must say, PJ Media is generous in the extreme for allowing me to do exactly that). So here goes.
I was struck by Jamie Wilson’s piece from yesterday, which puts into a wonderful framework my own thinking on who I should be writing for. I want to share some thoughts on that subject, because I think it may be useful for my regular readers to understand where I’m coming from. Jamie writes:
The People You Cannot Reach
Accept this early to avoid wasting energy. You cannot reason with:
* people whose politics function as religion
*purity activists
*Antifa-style street ideologues*online radicals addicted to emotional escalation
* anyone who treats emotions as truth and words as ritualThese people aren’t debating. They’re policing. And they are not your audience.
Your audience is everyone watching, the people who still believe language has meaning, that disagreement isn’t violence, and that labels should not replace arguments. Be true to them, not your “debate” opponent.
In truth, she’s got me reflecting here. I find myself astonished that she has captured the ideas that have been the basis of my political writings for the last couple of decades, concepts I have understood on a subconscious level but never really cast into words. Frankly, that takes some serious talent.
The best explanation for how I saw my writings from when I started writing until today has always been the understanding that, regardless of how good or bad my arguments on a given political or social topic were, I wasn’t going to sway the true believers, or, if you like, the useful idiots. Rather, I saw my purpose in my writing to be allowing the conservative voice to feel that they are not alone in their thinking. Jamie’s framework brings a degree of clarity to those ideas.
It has always seemed to me that the biggest concern of most leftists you find online and in the legacy media is not allowing conservatives to believe that their thoughts are anything more than a one-off, and that nobody, or at least very few people, actually shares their values. That they are alone. Isolated, people are less sure of themselves, after all, and more easily swayed from their own thinking.
That has never been the case, of course, that they’re alone, but it is to the advantage of what I will call the “Loud Left” to spread the unfounded idea that the conservative is more alone in his thinking than he actually is. The more alone someone believes they are in that context, the easier they will be to defeat in the public square.
Years ago, the great Paul Harvey gave a speech at a “Radio and Records” awards ceremony. In which he was the headliner. Paul suggested his career was guided and inspired by someone he never met: William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia Gazette. It was he, said Harvey, that more than anyone else of the time, brought the news to the people in what Harvey called “Shirt Sleeve English.”
He went on to describe a picture that a listener had painted and sent him, and that at the time hung in the reception area of his Chicago offices. The image is of a boy, wearing rather beat-up clothing, listening in rapture to a 1930s-style cathedral radio. The painter enclosed a note, saying how much enjoyment he got out of the old radio programs. He went on to say that all of the heroes “looked a bit like me.”
I was recently reminded of that speech and his point, in the comments are of a piece I did on Rush Limbaugh, because the focus on the thoughts of Joe and Jane Everyman is a quality that Paul shared with Rush. That focus, in my view, is directly responsible for the success and longevity of both men. It’s a factor that the left has NEVER understood, which in turn explains the abject failure of such projects as Air America. They are not interested in giving YOUR thoughts validity; they are always more interested in having you parrot what THEY think.
I cannot even come close to claiming that huge ability which both those men had (who could?), but I do say that my target constituency is the same as theirs was, and that, such as it is, the degree of success I have enjoyed over the years is inexorably tied to that philosophy. Like the two of them, I might be successful at bringing clarity to the thoughts of some readers in that effort, but (and this is the key) only if those thoughts already existed in their own minds.
Put another way, when I write here, I’m not trying to sway anybody. I’m trying to put into words the ideas and the values you already hold.
I openly admit that sometimes I’m better at it than others. However, I wanted you to be aware of that struggle.
Hold fast, my friends, now more than ever. Be YOU today, and don’t let them put you off of it. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
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