When Will America’s Ritual Child Sacrifice End?
US lawmakers shrug off yet another school shooting, a deranged Donald Trump doubles down on smearing the late Rob Reiner, and MTG is getting hitched.
🎄 On this day in 2019, Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want For Christmas Is You” reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, 25 years after its release. Carey reportedly nets some $3 million annually just in royalties from the classic, which only took her 15 minutes to write!
Good morning! Peter here, with major breaking news. Merriam-Webster has selected 2025’s word of the year: “slop.” As I detailed in Friday’s edition of First Draft, “slop” refers to the glut of generic, soulless AI-generated content flooding the internet, polluting our timelines and rotting our brains. Merriam-Webster also crowned a few runners-up: “gerrymander,” “tariffs,” and “touch grass.”
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ US lawmakers still have no plan to address the epidemic of gun violence killing our children, Donald Trump officially classifies fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, Hakeem Jeffries’s top deputy in the House faces a progressive primary challenger, the president slaps the BBC with an “YUGE” lawsuit, and Marjorie Taylor Greene finds love?
America’s Hunger Games
In 2019, 15-year-old Mia Tretta was shot in the abdomen during a mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. Her best friend, Dominic, was killed in the attack.
In 2018, 13-year-old Zoe Weissman bore witness to the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were massacred.
Over the weekend, both women were subjected to their second brush with wanton gun violence.
Tretta and Weissman were but two of the thousands of undergraduate students at Brown University on Saturday who barricaded themselves inside dorms or fled from campus after an unidentified gunman opened fire on an economics study session, killing two and injuring nine others. The shooter remains at large.
“No one in this country even assumes it’s going to happen to them,” Tretta told NBC News. “Once it happens to you, you assume or are told it will never happen again, and obviously that is not the case.”
The early 1990s gave rise to the rather foul cliché “babies having babies,” after an abnormally high number of teen pregnancies occurred over a relatively short period of time. Today, we’re witnessing “school shooting survivors surviving school shootings.”
“I am so sorry Mia,” Congressman Ro Khanna stated in response to a social media post from Tretta. “I am ashamed that my generation of politicians has let you down.”
Way back in 2008, Suzanne Collins (not to be confused with our dear Trump-enabling senator from the great state of Maine) published The Hunger Games. The book presents a dystopian future in which the state ritualizes the slaughter of children and calls it a necessary evil. The violence is not barbaric so much as bureaucratic, administered by officials who insist there is no alternative. It must simply persist – for, well, reasons. Now, where have we seen that manner of blasé shoulder-shrugging, that style of procedural thoughts, prayers, and platitudes before?
Life imitates art, amirite?
Compare and contrast the death cult that is the American political class with that of Australia’s.