Commentary Culture Investigations

October is election season. Campaigning and early voting are already proceeding across the nation, absentee ballots are in the mail. And election fraud news is breaking. Peter and Eric update us on the latest election fraud news in this week’s episode of The Drill Down.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants the military to check its testosterone levels.
On Wednesday, Hegseth announced a new policy requiring annual testosterone-deficiency screenings for service members 30 and older as part of their regular health assessments. Troops under 30 may opt in voluntarily, and testosterone replacement therapy, if recommended, will also be voluntary. The apparent goal is not to turn every officer into a linebacker, but to keep troops “strong, resilient, and capable” for the demands of the battlefield.
Naturally, Democratic critics treated the announcement as if Hegseth’s policy came straight from the mouth of Andrew Tate.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D–PA), an Air Force veteran, said the policy “proves that Secretary Hegseth takes direction from the far corners of the manosphere.”
Others, such as Sen. Adam Schiff (D–CA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D–WA), thought they had a “gotcha” moment by likening the Pentagon’s testosterone screening plan to cross-sex “gender-affirming care.”
“Pete Hegseth comes out in favor of gender-affirming care,” wrote Schiff, while Jayapal said, “The Secretary of Forever Wars, Pete Hegseth, just announced they are going to provide hormone therapy to male service members who don’t have enough testosterone … Let’s be clear: This is gender-affirming care, and it completely debunks all of Republicans’ attacks on trans people.”
Because it evidently is not obvious to some, addressing a deficiency of a hormone that a man’s body naturally produces is not the equivalent of artificially suppressing one sex hormone and elevating another so far past your baseline that you grow breasts. 
When a man is low in testosterone, as becomes more prevalent past the age of 30, there are noticeable and significant effects across the board. It is not just some cosmetic metric or signal of masculinity; it is “tied to muscle mass, bone density, metabolism, energy, concentration, mood, and physical performance.” The subsequent drop-offs in performance and ability have real overlap with the demands of military life.
Hegseth even clarified that “this is not about artificial enhancement; it’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”
Under President Biden, Democrats were all too happy for the government to foot the bill for actual sex reassignment surgery for veterans and active service members through health care coverage. But to screen and provide for a biological factor tied to strength, concentration, and performance of active service members? Well, that’s a bridge too far. 
The mission of the military is to “provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.” Checking whether service members sworn to defend the nation are biologically capable of performing at their best level is not exactly a deranged idea.
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In early January 1963, Hugh Gaitskell, a fairly conservative Labourite MP, considered a likely future PM, came down with severe chest pains and shortness of breath. A few days earlier, he had complained of a sharp pain in his back while walking in a crowd in London.
Shortly thereafter, he died in a London Hospital. The diagnosis was a ruptured aorta and other symptoms of Lupus. There was major commentary that he was done in by the KGB, who were more or less running wild in London in those days.
In 1971, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, an extremely pro-defense Democrat, sometimes called “The Senator from Boeing” because he was from Washington State, where Boeing was and is based, complained of a sharp pain in his back, and soon thereafter died of (supposedly) a ruptured aorta and other lupus-like symptoms. He was also extremely pro-West and anti-Communist, and there was speculation that he had been punctured by a KGB umbrella man who did not like his politics.
Three days ago, in mid-July 2026, after one of many trips to Ukraine, which he supported strongly after its invasion by Russia, Senator Lindsey Graham, a STALWART OF THE GOP, complained of pains in the chest.
He died on the same day of a ruptured aorta and other symptoms of lupus. His health, while not perfect, had been robust until the night before. According to Mr. Trump, he was in an ebullient mood because he thought he had rescued Ukraine from unlimited Russian torture. There has been considerable speculation that he was poisoned by Thallium while on his travels for peace in Ukraine.
Poisoning by Thallium has the same symptoms and is almost impossible to detect. It has long been a favorite tool of the KGB.
Any questions, Comrades?
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Image licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Why do managers yank pitchers in the midst of no-hit and perfect-game bids?
Something that would never have happened 30 years ago happened twice in four days this month.
The Pittsburgh Pirates deservedly lost when manager Don Kelly pulled starter Jared Jones six innings into a no-hit bid, and the relievers proceeded to implode. The baseball gods visited no such karma upon the Miami Marlins when manager Clayton McCullough called the bullpen to relieve Eury Perez 92 pitches into a perfect game. But the wrath of the opposing team’s fans did come down on him in chants of “Shame!” in Sacramento.
Paul Kengor writes @ The American Spectator on this subject that I occasionally ponder: “Once upon a time in baseball, pitchers went the distance. To complete a game was the objective, if not the norm. The record for the most complete games is 749 by the immortal Cy Young (who threw a grand total of 7,356 innings in 22 seasons). We always hear that a certain record ‘will never be broken.’ In this case, that’s surely true. Cy Young’s number will never be surpassed because today’s managers would never dare let it. Last year, there were only 29 complete games in MLB by all pitchers combined, out of a total of nearly 2,500 games. That’s about 1 percent of games.” (RELATED: Baseball’s Increasingly Rare Complete Game)
Kengor has addressed this subject several times in recent weeks. The paucity of complete games interests me less than a related, though much less discussed, change to the game (more on that a few paragraphs down). (RELATED: MLB’s Pitching Craziness Continues)
From the first article, it seems very clear that Paul played baseball better than I did. My eyes mainly did me in. So did a bigger kid’s beaning of me very early in my Little League tenure. Psychologically, that ruined me for my rookie season. Years earlier, at a batting cage, I saw two older kids laughing as the pitching machine kept hitting me with the ball. The two kids, laughing harder as they noticed me noticing that home plate had been moved, then started to run away. This did me no favors. I boasted three hits, all singles and probably at least one a “Little League” single, my first season. But I later worked as an umpire ($8 a game) and a vendor at Fenway Park (anywhere from $28 to $190 a game). So, the sport interests me greatly, even if calling me a mediocre player insults mediocre players, and my “expertise,” interpreted most charitably, does not surpass even the average fan.
Yet, like the average fan, I harbor strong opinions. This remains especially true on one aspect of the game that existed at the major-league level when my unfortunate incident at the batting cages occurred but now appears as extinct as the eephus pitch.
The penchant for shifts, the inability to bunt to counteract them, the lack of complete games, and, especially, the death of the four-man rotation all fascinate me. Earl Weaver used a four-man rotation for the entire 1978 season. Did this hurt the careers of Mike Flanagan, Dennis Martinez, Jim Palmer, and Ross Grimsley? They all won more than 100 games throughout their careers and pitched for at least four seasons after 1978 (Flanagan pitched until 1992 and Martinez pitched until 1998!).
Bob Boone tried a four-man rotation in 1995 for the Kansas City Royals. “For the first half of that season,” Rob Neyer wrote, “Boone often sent Kevin Appier, Mark Gubicza, and Tom Gordon to the mound on three days rest. But Appier, their best pitcher, got hurt in July, and that was the end of that experiment.” Then, after Neyer issued his four-man-rotation observations, the Blue Jays tried it for a stretch in 2003.
Why did the four-man rotation die? Performance, surprisingly, did not dictate the change.
“There was no indication that pitchers did better or worse based on how many days of rest they got,” Russell Carleton of Baseball Prospectus wrote in 2013 after analyzing the impact of rest on pitcher performance. “What was significant was the number of pitches that the pitcher had thrown in his previous start. Longer outings made for slightly less effective pitchers (more walks, more hits, fewer outs in play). It’s something we’ve seen before. Using more modern data, I found that a pitcher who threw 140 pitches might expect to perform slightly worse than expected in his next start, and that the effect was gone by the second start.”
Possibly this explains the obsession with pitch count that Paul, and myself, lament. Carleton suspected that the popularity of the five-man rotation owed less to performance than fear of injury. Pitch counts overrule fan and maybe even managerial desires for complete games for similar reasons. But if analytics now manages the managers, why do none of them even consider a four-man rotation when statistically an extra rest day does not offer any predictability on how a pitcher performs in his next start (though pitch count can and does influence performance in the next start)?
When Earl Weaver started managing the Baltimore Orioles, 10 clubs comprised the American League. Fifteen do now. Possibly league expansion watered down starting pitching, and possibly the influx of foreign players more than offset expansion’s dilution of talent. Independent of either conclusion, one can make a strong case, especially for lower-budget clubs with a couple of very good starters, that a four-man rotation makes sense.
Weaver certainly believed in it. The seventh of his 10 baseball laws? “It’s easier to find four good starters than five.”
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It’s been a week.
Last week I was off. At least from here at The American Spectator, I was off. I took a “vacation” from the day-job activities here and at The Hayride so that I could focus on The Necessary Men, which is the new Mike Holman novel.
I was on Chapter 2 on July 3 when I started the “vacation.” By Sunday night, I’d finished Chapter 12. I’m expecting the first draft to be done by the end of next week, and then it’ll serialize here at The American Spectator next month.
The Necessary Men games out, in the Mike Holman universe, President Trump’s “friendly invasion” of Cuba. It’s probably the most satirical, and definitely the funniest, of the four. Which is not to say it isn’t serious or that it isn’t a political thriller. It still fits in that category.
I’ve been saying that Cuban communists won’t like it. American communists REALLY won’t like it. Everybody else, though, will get a kick out of it.
Anyway, this has been a tough week, because I’m slogging my way through this week’s columns here, and doing the Spectacle Podcast (we had really good segments this week, by the way; make sure you check those out), and doing Hayride stuff, and all I really want to do is get the first draft of the novel finished.
Part of that desire is my increasing distaste for politics as it’s currently practiced in this country. And there’s something in particular that I can’t stand. I’d call it out if I saw it from Republicans, but I don’t… really. I’ve seen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie do this at times, but not that often. But on the Left, it’s non-stop.
And I’ll show you five examples of it that I found on Facebook and X in about an hour on Thursday morning. That’s how absolutely everywhere it is.
Performative stupidity.
By that, I mean pretending not to know anything in an effort to push a narrative that everybody understands is false. These examples will explain it.
1. Cops and Commie Protesters Are on the Same Moral Plane, You Guys
This person isn’t important, but she’s not the only one pushing this message…

This is the Left in 2026. pic.twitter.com/OEgOBfYNFu
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) July 16, 2026

Another iteration of the same idiocy…

I mean, not if you put your car into park and turn off the engine. pic.twitter.com/rEX3ciBZQ7
— 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐠 (@CasuallyGreg) July 15, 2026

And yet another…

When Charlie Kirk was killed, people said he was a father taken who didn’t deserve to be murdered for doing what they love etc.
This week, two unarmed, undocumented fathers were killed by ICE
Where’s that same outrage? Does our humanity end at immigration status?
— Patrick Robles (@robles4theppl) July 15, 2026

The darkly funny part about this was that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the Mexican illegal killed by ICE in Houston, was a meth dealer. He was a cartel thug resisting arrest.
What’s not so funny is that the Left apparently likes Mexican illegal cartel thugs more than they like Charlie Kirk.
But it’s really amazing to have to note that no, communist protesters are not on the same moral plane as law enforcement officers trying to make an arrest during the execution of their duties, and no, an illegal alien career criminal fighting with police is not the same thing as a political activist giving a speech on a college campus.
The comeback to all of this is something which should be absurd but is instead patently obvious, which is that the Democrat Party is bought and paid for by the cartels, and that’s why they make cartel thugs into mini-George Floyds every time they suffer consequences for being cartel thugs.
2. The “Gender-Affirming Care” Faux Flex
Naturally, Adam Schiff would be out there making fun of testosterone. We mock what we don’t understand, after all.

Pete Hegseth comes out in favor of gender affirming care… https://t.co/nnNYmKGW4A
— Senator Adam Schiff (@SenAdamSchiff) July 16, 2026

And of course, Schiff was echoing the performative stupidity of this manifestly unqualified woman…

The Secretary of Forever Wars, Pete Hegseth, just announced they are going to provide hormone therapy to male service members who don’t have enough testosterone.
Let’s be clear: This is gender affirming care and it completely debunks all of Republicans’ attacks on trans people. pic.twitter.com/HBiAEYFY98
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) July 15, 2026

It should hardly be a controversial point that the Secretary of War would want to ensure the men of the U.S. military maintain healthy levels of testosterone. There are lots of basic health reasons why we’d want that, not to mention the obvious fact that your warfighters are going to need to be high-T individuals if you want to win wars.
I’m not going to belabor that. Instead, I’ll point out the argument, straight from the cutting-room floor of Idiocracy, that you get from Adam Schiff and Pramila Jayapal. Which is that an unquestionable male who is tested for testosterone levels and given the opportunity to boost them is “affirming his gender” in the same way that a confused male who thinks he’s female would be affirming his gender by taking female hormones.
They actually think this is smart rhetoric and that it’s going to persuade people that their arguments are better, rather than an open admission that they spew abject nonsense all day.
That’s where we are. And there’s so much more of it out there. To wit…
3. The Brilliance of Immigration Expert John Leguizamo
This is a branch of an especially idiotic tree, and it comes from somebody who can best be described as a Hispanic supremacist. John Leguizamo is hilarious, unintentionally, because when he talks about “white people,” he doesn’t seem to understand that his Spanish heritage actually makes him one of us.
Spain is in Europe, you know. Spanish people are Europeans. John Leguizamo comes from a Spanish bloodline. He’s white. And if his argument is that white people are “illegal immigrants” for having settled the Americas, he should probably recognize that, far and away, the most brutal of the conquerors of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere were his ancestors, the Spanish.
That would require introspection. John Leguizamo doesn’t have any of that on offer. Instead, he gives us this…

John Leguizamo stopped by The Daily Show to go after critics of birthright citizenship and say every white person is technically an illegal immigrant, “Now, the Trump administration says they’re not talking about all children of immigrants, we’re only saying birthright… pic.twitter.com/C8Ac0VkpOJ
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) July 16, 2026

This would be a forgettable nothing of a clip but for the fact that it’s a running performatively-stupid catechism of the Left. Remember “nobody’s illegal on stolen land?” That was Billie Eilish’s idiotic line at the Grammys earlier this year, and she was rightly pilloried for it, including by the Native American tribe who’d been in residence in Southern California when Leguizamo’s Spanish ancestors showed up and ran them off — the tribe asked Eilish if she’d sign over the title to her house and got the sound of crickets in response.
And rightly so, because there was assuredly a tribe that’d had that land earlier and got bounced off it.
I can’t share this movie clip enough. I’ve never seen Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee; I keep saying I’m going to get around to watching it, but I’ve seen this clip 100 times and so should every dumb leftist pushing the “stolen land” performative stupidity…

And again, it’s performative stupidity, and it exists not because these people don’t know any better (with the exception, possibly, of Billie Eilish), but because it serves an agenda.
They want to flood the country with Third World immigrants who they believe will vote for left-wing politicians who’ll promote policies they like. So shaming regular Americans with the “stolen land” trope, when in fact the continent was exceptionally lightly populated when the “white man” got here by Stone Age savages who hadn’t invented the wheel and never stopped slaughtering each other, rarely if ever congregated into permanent settlements and exercised very little dominion over the land, is their way of paving the intellectual ground to run over the opposition by ordinary folks who’d like to preserve our culture and civilization.
You don’t have to credit this. Better to call it out for the self-serving, treasonous lie that it is.
4. “Voter Suppression”
And here’s Chuck Schumer with his own take on the SAVE America Act, pushing another performatively-stupid lie…

Chuck Schumer calls the SAVE America Act – that the majority of Americans want passed – “the most devious voter suppression legislation.”
Why doesn’t Schumer want secure elections? pic.twitter.com/9qcLoIFkEA
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 16, 2026

This is of a piece with the ridiculous Elissa Slotkin’s argument that passing the bill would ensure Democrats could never win any election anywhere in America. (RELATED: Maybe Shut Up, Elissa)
Schumer knows that putting extra safeguards in place to stop foreigners from voting in American elections and to encourage clean voter rolls won’t do anything whatsoever to retard the ability of eligible voters to vote. He knows that when Georgia passed some commonsense election integrity reforms in 2021, amid a great deal of caterwauling from his party, voter turnout in 2022 was quite high for a midterm election.
He knows these things, but he doesn’t care.
This is more an example of performing for stupidity than performative stupidity, of course, because Chuck Schumer thinks Democrat voters are rubes who can be lied to without consequence.
But there is stupidity in it as well, and it’s this: by insisting that every warm body, and some cold ones, get ballots, Chuck Schumer is suppressing his own political clout — because the skew in the electorate that you get from an “expansion” in the eligible-voting population makes the Chuck Schumers of the world obsolete in favor of the AOC’s and Zohran Mamdanis of the world.
Schumer doesn’t do the feigned ignorance thing. He leaves that to others. Instead, he does the too-smart-by-half thing. And if you know what time it is, you realize too-smart-by-half is still stupid.
5. And Now for Something Completely Different
I’m sensing that you’ve probably reached your limit. I know I did while writing this. So, as is often customary at the 5QT, we’ll end with a change of pace.
This is an actual performance, rather than being performative. And instead of stupid, it’s evidence of real talent.
The artist’s name is Shakey Graves, and he’s sort of a cult classic. You may or may not have heard of him; my YouTube keeps popping this video out when I let it pick music videos for me, and I can’t get enough of it, even though it dates back to the Obama era.
Close your eyes and listen to this, and you would struggle to imagine it’s one guy creating the sound, and then open them and recognize he’s doing this with a suitcase kick-drum set and a guitar, and you can’t help but say, “pretty cool.”
Which can’t be said for much of the above.

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