Curmudgeon opens with a measured critique of MoveOn.org’s No Kings Day campaign, arguing the organization’s selective outrage — absent during its own side’s executive overreach — keeps Americans in a manufactured state of perpetual crisis. His bottom line: “I don’t hate the people I disagree with. I disagree with the people I disagree with.”
His second piece threads John Lennon’s “Revolution” through today’s protest culture. Lennon’s warning against carrying pictures of Chairman Mao — a man who killed 35 to 50 million people — maps neatly, Curmudgeon argues, onto activists who embrace authoritarian symbols while preaching liberation. Real revolution, Lennon insisted, starts with freeing your own mind.
High Plains Grifter takes a sharper, more combative tone. His Liberty Loaders Lodge piece is a straightforward invitation to Salida-area patriots: gather at Eagle’s Roost Barn on April 18th, load AR-15 magazines by propane lantern, and reject what he calls the nanny-state dependency that the left’s knitting circles represent.
His second piece lands the punch directly: a Salida brewery hosted an “Angry Knit-In” comparing border agents to Nazi stormtroopers. High Plains Grifter’s verdict is blunt — trivializing actual wartime courage isn’t resistance. It’s cosplay.
That charge carries more weight alongside a piece submitted separately about the real thing. On a quiet Bavarian road in May 1945, a German Major surrendered his unit to Major Dick Winters of Easy Company, 101st Airborne, presenting his Walther P-38 as a sign of respect between soldiers. Winters later discovered the pistol had never been fired — not once in six years of war. He kept it the rest of his life. “It reminds me,” he said, “how wars should end.”
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