I feel despair about evil tonight, but my cats offer some comfort

By David McElroy · January 25, 2026

When I feel despair about the rest of the world being insane and irrational, I take comfort in the feeling that the greatest sanity and reason around me come in the form of cats and dogs.

They never lie — to us or to themselves — and they’re completely transparent about who and what they are.

When the humans around me seem to be doing their best to make the world a horrible place, I appreciate the love and consistency I experience from those such as Alex, who you see in my arms late Saturday night. He’s a great comfort to me on a night such as this, when the humans around me feel insane and irrational.

There are times when the evil in the world is so clear that it seems as though every person of good will must see it and recoil from it, but I know that isn’t true. Not yet.

But on this night when the evil and dishonesty of the powers around me are so incredibly clear — even more than usual — I feel despair about whether most people will ever again care about truth and decency and morality.

If you see the evil going on in the world, you don’t need me to explain it. If you don’t yet see that evil, you’re in such a level of denial that I can’t make any difference for you anyway.

My sense of morality says that all exercises of violence and political coercion are evil, so I consistently make the same moral case no matter which group of thugs is running around with guns. But there are times when the naked evil and abuse become so obvious that I think, “Surely they’re going to see it now. Surely they’re going to understand that it’s immoral, no matter who’s doing it.”

But I’m almost always disappointed when I hope this.

I can’t make humans start being honest with themselves. I can’t make people become intellectually consistent when it comes to applying their stated beliefs. I can’t make people take off their blinders. I can’t make them see the monstrous evil they have been supporting and enabling.

The only thing I can do is pray — in the literal sense — that a remnant will form around morality and decency that go far deeper than the political allegiances that our society teaches people to hold as sacred.

I know I can’t change the way of this world, but I can remind myself that not everyone is part of the evil. I hope you are one of the few who isn’t part of the evil — and who isn’t trying to substitute another brand of evil for the evil in our streets right now.

I do feel despair tonight. I feel helpless that I can do nothing. And I feel pretty hopeless that things can change. But I’m thankful for the felines around me tonight — and if you’re one of the few who join me in praying for a more moral and just and free society, I’m thankful for you, too.

We are a tiny remnant — and I pray that more will join us in the days to come.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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