Sorry folks, Al Perrotta is still on vacation.

Perhaps through gritted teeth, Trump-scorning Fox News had to admit the former president’s ongoing clout with Republican voters:

It has been a year and a half since former President Trump left the White House, but the results from the latest round of primaries proves that his immense grip over the Republican Party remains firm. … [C]andidates backed by Trump came out on top in high-profile contests that grabbed plenty of national attention.

“Fantastic night in Michigan! Tudor Dixon will be a great Governor,” the former president exclaimed on Truth Social, the social media platform founded by one of his companies.

Dixon, a conservative commentator and former online news host, won Michigan’s GOP gubernatorial primary by double digits over her rivals and will face off in November against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the key Midwestern battleground state.

…

The former president also scored another big win in Michigan, with the primary defeat of Rep. Peter Meijer, one of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach the then-president for inciting the [sic] deadly Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. … The former president endorsed John Gibbs, a former software developer who served in the Trump administration as an acting assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

…

The former president also celebrated in Arizona, where a handful of candidates he endorsed – and who heavily supported Trump’s continued re-litigation of the 2020 election in a state that Biden narrowly won in the 2020 presidential election – came out on top.

Trump-endorsed venture capitalist Blake Masters won the GOP Senate primary. … Trump-backed Mark Finchem – who claims that the 2020 election in Arizona’s Pima County was stolen – won the Republican nomination for Secretary of State.

Trump’s influence continues despite the open hostility of GOP elites, once-dominant conservative media outlets such as National Review and Fox News, and the efforts of the Deep State and its political front, the January 6 committee, to criminalize him and his supporters.

I’ve noted Trump’s flaws here — such as his susceptibility to flattery, and past gullibility in hiring his enemies. But he still shows flashes of real political genius, and will remain the rallying point for Americans who don’t wish to be ruled by an arrogant Hacienda Oligarchy that relegates the rest of us to a chaotic Favela. And political geniuses don’t come along every day. It’s a real shame to waste them. The Democrats never do, which is why they overlooked the manifest squalor of William Jefferson Clinton.

Okay Groomers

In case our elites are wondering why angry populist candidates are doing so well, one answer might be: the people are angry. They have every reason to be, as their children are targeted by teachers promoting radical, crackpot, sexually degenerate ideologies in school. Courageous whistleblower Christopher Rufo writes at City Journal:

San Diego Unified is the latest school district to adopt the principles of academic queer theory and translate them into K-12 pedagogy, with the ultimate goal of dismantling “heteronormativity” and promoting a constellation of new sexual identities, such as “genderqueer,” “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “two-spirit.”

I have obtained a range of publicly accessible documents from San Diego Unified that reveal the district’s new ideology. The materials follow the basic premise of queer theory: white Europeans created a false “gender binary” and used the categories of “male” and “female” to dominate racial and sexual minorities. A San Diego Unified training for facilitators of LGBTQ student groups argues that this system of “heteronormativity” forces students to conform to these norms: they are “assigned” a sex at birth, pressed into the identities of “man” and “woman,” and expected to have heterosexual relationships culminating in “marriage (and kids).” This “gender binary,” however, is arbitrary, socially constructed, and harmful. It is, in the words of the presentation, a “limited system [that] excludes and oppresses trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people.”

…

A series of curriculum documents encourage students to study the basic tenets of queer theory and then examine photographs of gender-nonconforming role models, including a woman with a beard, a boy in a dress, a teenage girl with a “genderqueer” identity, a boy wearing a tiara, and an infant with a “gender neutral baby name.” In another document published by San Diego Unified, administrators celebrate “nonbinary identities,” arguing that there must be a “linguistic revolution to move beyond gender binaries,” including the adoption of the term “Latinx,” which “makes room for people who are trans, queer, agender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming or gender fluid.”

Go read the rest. Then maybe look up your local chapter of Mass Resistance, the most effective national group defending children’s innocence and parental rights in the face of this conspiracy to (sorry, Twitter) GROOM little kids into being perverts. How solid is Mass Resistance? The RINOs in charge of C-PAC won’t even let it buy a table. Yeah, that solid.

Prayers Please

Pro-lifers and conservatives suffered a tragic loss when Rep. Jackie Walorski died in a recent crash, along with another motorist and two of her aides. Walorski was a former Christian missionary in Romania, who served in Congress with distinction and championed worthy causes. She was among Republicans who contested the 2020 election, defended President Trump and the January 6 dissidents, and spoke out against the political trial of Steve Bannon.

Let’s pray for her and her family, and hope that she’s in a much, much better place now than the U.S. Congress.

Along The Stream

Don’t miss Michael Brown’s latest column on the deadly spiritual danger of trying to water down Christianity and its demands, to make it more “palatable” to potential converts. You might just be winning them over to some shallow, empty faith that isn’t Christianity.

Read John Stonestreet and Maria Baer on the sobering truth about legalized, “medical” marijuana use: It doesn’t align with science. The marijuana sold today is many times stronger than what used to be sold by dealers, and it seems to be associated with a spike in mental illness and self-destructive behavior. No, the extra taxes states collect won’t pay for that human destruction.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”