Cagle World

As I watched the bloodbath in New York on Tuesday evening, all I could think of was the last episode in Game of Thrones, when Daenarys sicced her dragons on Kings Landing.

Of course, there were some significant differences. In the first place, Dany was one person seething with anger and grief, whereas the voters of Manhattan could be counted in the millions.

Second, Kings Landing was destroyed immediately, burnt to a crisp by the loyal lizards, while New York will suffer a slow deathover the next four years.

But the end result is the same: people destroying the thing they loved, in a momentary flash of madness.

That is how I see the election of Zohran Mamdani. The citizens of the greatest city in the country just anointed a 34-year-old neophyte who has had a very difficult time condemning Hamas, to lead them into 2030, and possibly beyond.

His words, far from repelling them, attracted them to his campaign like suicidal flies to a Raid Air Strip.

They embraced his promises of free buses, free food, free lodging, free health care, free falafel, and everything else that they could desire.

Cognizant of the fact that he’d alienated many Jews in a city that has an extremely high concentration of the chosen people, he spouted some platitudes about fighting antisemitism.

Aware that he’d been caught in a number of lies during his campaign, including inventing imaginary family members, he cracked a self-deprecating reference to hijab-wearing “aunties,” with a wink to his true believers.

And then, he used his words like the dragons’ hellfire to incinerate his enemies, including those who didn’t vote for him, those who don’t believe in socialism, those who see his bigotry, and those who understand that you cannot govern from a place of vengeance.

He was the voters’ dragon, and they unleashed him on their beloved city.

I watched this in real time, listening to his words, which were tinged with hatred and which danced very close to the level of incitement.

Many of my readers will react with “but Donald Trump does the same thing,” and they are actually correct.

But Trump is a happy warrior in his own way, smiling and smirking through his jabs at political enemies. If he didn’t have overwhelming power to actually hurt them, it would be an entertaining set for standup.

The guy is funny. You also get the sense that in his own flawed, twisted and toxic way, Trump loves this country and wants to maintain its foundations. He’s a builder, after all.

Mamdani, on the other hand, wants to tear it all down, and rebuild a Workers Utopia, where immigrants are not the victims of ICE but are, at the other extreme, the rulers of the Earth.

He prattled off a list of them, making sure to hit his favored immigrant groups like “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.”

It’s nice that he mentioned them. But what about the Korean convenience store owners and the Irish policemen, the Polish Uber drivers and the Filipina nurses, the German line cooks and Italian pizzeria owners.

These are the sorts of immigrants that fly a bit under the radar screen in Mamdani’s New York, which is par for the course for a man who somehow believes that the United States and Israel are complicit in “genocide” in Gaza.

As I wrote on social media in a post that triggered a lot of blowback, “New York elected a Jew Hater to govern a city with millions of Jews. What prayer do I even have for that?”

Some of my friends suggested “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

But I think they know exactly what they are doing.

Like Dany in Game of Thrones, they are angry people, saddled with grievance and perceived insults. They feel like Atlas, unfairly carrying the weight of the world on their fragile shoulders.

Those bodega owners and abuelas and taxi drivers just aren’t getting a fair shot, and the rich billionaires are exploiting them.

So, make them suffer. Try socialism, where everyone is equally aggrieved, equally poor. Or to put it another way, the enemy of my enemy should be broke.

It did not end well for Kings Landing. It also did not end well for Dany, who ended up shish kebabbed on the sword of her beloved.

The only ones that made out fairly well in the deal were the dragons, because they always have a slight advantage.

I think the same thing will happen to New York. The millions of Danys who voted for Dragon Mamdani will suffer mightily for their anger and their hubris.

As far as this mayoral lizard, he should end up with a national profile, and future political gigs.

That’s because he, like the winged pets of Westenra, has a slight advantage.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

There are a few people in the world who are instantly recognizable with just one name: Madonna, Beyonce and Rihanna come to mind, as do fellow performers Cher, Elvis, Prince, Bono, and Sting.

The same is true for Malala.

I have known about this brave young woman from the moment she was catapulted, against her will, into the limelight. In 2011, while traveling on a school bus in the KPK region of Northwestern Pakistan, Malala was shot through the head by the Taliban.

Her crime? Advocating for girls’ education.

I followed her trajectory, from an emergency flight to England and lifesaving brain surgery, to her continued advocacy on behalf of young girls and women, to her emergence as an important figure on the world stage, and finally, when she won the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 15, the youngest person to have received the award.

Malala has always been on my radar screen because of the work that I do, which involves representing immigrants, refugees and asylum applicants.

Since I have a fairly large number of Pakistani clients who come from the same region of the world as Malala, their own stories reminded me of what she had to go through to survive, and then ultimately triumph.

The interesting thing about my clients, though, is that each of them was a man.

There were teachers who had defied the Taliban by insisting on admitting girls into their schools.

There were businessmen who insisted on teaching young women skills that would allow them to earn a living, and not simply be slaves to the home.

There were vaccine advocates, who worked alongside of women to ensure that children received the necessary protections against polio and other communicable diseases.

There were social workers, and political activists, and men of the same ethnicity as Malala who fought for the dignity of their people in a country that often discriminates against the “Pashtun.”

For that reason, one night last week was personal for me. It was the Philadelphia stop on Malala’s book tour, connected to the publication of her second memoir entitled “Finding My Way.”

I’m used to being in the presence of heroic people. They come into my office on a daily basis, with their folders and their papers and their hopes.

Many of the men that I mentioned earlier are matched by women who have fled untold horrors, carrying their children on their backs to escape abusive partners and the threats of gang members.

I do not know if I would have their strength. You don’t, either.

And seeing Malala on the stage, a woman who had found that strength as a girl, was a revelation. She was not the iconic figure stepping off of her pedestal to engage with the “little people.”

She was, like my clients, a human being with a story to tell. It’s just that she had already told it to millions while my clients are fortunate if they get the opportunity to tell it to one lawyer, one officer, one judge, one person who has the power to change their lives by allowing them to live it.

Today, under the Trump administration with its severe restrictions on asylum, that is becoming less and less possible.

Which is why Malala’s words touched me so deeply. At one point in the program, she was asked about the Taliban takeover in neighboring Afghanistan.

She paused, and then explained that when the country fell to the Taliban, she was undergoing the final surgery to address theinjuries she’d suffered when shot in the head.

She mentioned that she knew how hard it was for her to survive one attack and then be able to escape. She said that she could not imagine how hard it must be for the women and girls who were sentenced to living, without the possibility of relief, under the Taliban.

This is the comment that stayed with me: “One of the girls (in Afghanistan) told me that she stays hopeful in this difficult time because even though she is alone at home and knows that she cannot go to a school, but when she can pick up a book and read, she feels that that is an act of resistance.”

When I heard those words, and I looked around the room at young girls who will never have to worry that reading a book can get you killed, I realized that this is a message for everyone who thinks that asylum seekers should be stopped at the border, and silenced.

I hope Malala’s message reaches the White House.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

“He did WHAT to the East Wing?”

If someone called me up at work and said “I knocked down half of your house, and will be installing a pool in your backyard as well as a gazebo at no charge to you,” I would be apoplectic. The idea a stranger would simply decide to “improve” my property without asking for permission is a violation of my privacy, not to mention trespass.

When President Trump announced this summer he was going to build a ballroom, very few people took notice. That’s probably because he was doing so many other things, like meeting with Putin and sending immigrants to pleasant places like El Salvador and the Sudan, that a bit of interior/exterior decorating fell under the radar. Besides that, he promised it wouldn’t encroach on the existing structure because, as he then stated, he loves the White House.

Then he just started demolishing a huge chunk of it. I know people will have different opinions about what happened when they started excavating Jacqueline Kennedy’s Rose Garden and dismantling Eisenhower’s portico. Supporters said he wasn’t “demolishing” the East Wing, just a small section of it. Then, when aerial footage showed that in fact, the East Wing was now a parking lot, defenders of the president pivoted to teach us history lessons about Harry Truman and Barack Obama.

In the case of Truman, they mentioned the fact that he completely renovated the building right after World War II, which makes sense because it hadn’t been renovated in decades. We couldn’t do it sooner because we’d just spent a lot of money saving the free world. Upholstering chairs in the Oval Office were farther down on the list of essentials. They neglected to mention he asked Congress for permission and funding.

As far as Obama was concerned, he repainted the lines on the tennis court so he and some friends could play basketball, and I think he may have also installed a bowling alley. None of these things involved men in construction helmets demolishing an entire wing of the building.

The thing that angered me most about the MAGA response to the renovation was not the fact they were making excuses. It was that they were trying to gaslight us into believing that only Democrats and liberals were angered by the presumptuous acts of Donald Trump.

I am a Reagan conservative. I fought against same sex marriage. I pray the rosary in front of abortion clinics and have given the keynote speech at several pro life events. I have never voted for a Democrat for president, and I believe that the way we deal with Hamas is to hunt down every one and murder them in their beds. I heckle the protestors at the Pro Palestine marches.

My point is it’s not only liberals who are angry at what Trump has done. It is not only Democrats trying to use this as a political card against the president they cannot stand. There are a lot of us who are offended this chief executive assumes the White House is “his” house, just as he assumes the DOJ is “his” DOJ, and that he can sick ICE on whomsoever he pleases, regardless of due process.

So trying to diminish and discount the anger that many Americans felt when they saw their house, our house, redesigned without our permission and without even an attempt to ask for Congressional oversight is annoying.

The usual suspects will always define every critique of the president as whining from the far left. I know that it’s uncomfortable when someone from the right pushes back, but that’s tough.

I also find the argument we “need” a ballroom to be a bit ridiculous. When Nancy Reagan was in the White House, she was widely viewed as an ostentatious Marie Antoinette, even though I loved her style. I’m trying to figure out how she managed to function in that hovel on the Potomac for eight years.

What’s done is done. What’s lost is lost. And we will all get over it, since there are more important things to discuss. But let’s not pretend that Trump did what Harry and Barry did. They asked if we wanted the pool. He just went in and started digging.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

My first job after graduating from law school was clerking for an appellate court judge.

From 1987 to 1988, I worked, and learned, under the Honorable James R. Cavanaugh on the Superior Court of Pennsylvania. That year taught me more about the law than the prior three spent taking exams and reviewing cases.

Having worked intimately with a man like Judge Cavanaugh, who looked at his office as both a profound privilege and a great obligation to the people of Pennsylvania, it became clear to me that only a certain sort of person is worthy of the job.

That sort of person applies the law without fear or favor, and does not place his or her thumb on the scale of justice for partisans or dissidents.

That is why I oppose the retention of Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht, the three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices running to keep their seats for another 10-year term.

Retention elections are rather obscure things, and often fall under the radar. The juicy battles are in the contested elections, where candidates have to appeal to a wide voter base.

They cannot appear to be biased in favor of one side or the other, even though our elections are by their very nature partisan.

As a general rule, I’m against electing judges, but that’s a controversy for another column. We are stuck with the system that we have, and I make the best of it.

The “best of it” essentially means that we assess each candidate on his or her judicial demeanor, and their ability to be fair and neutral arbiters of the law.

They cannot seem to have a particular affection for one side in a case or controversy, and they cannot show their hand on howthey personally feel about a subject.

That is why I have criticized President Donald Trump when he attacks judges who he doesn’t think are doing his bidding.

He seems to have this idea that the judges he appoints work for him, just as he thinks the same thing about the Justice Department.

No matter how many times people try and explain that they work for us, “we the people,” he turns a deaf ear. But that’s okay.

The best judges just put their heads down, read the law, interpret it according to their best judgment, and ignore the outside noise.

That’s what James Cavanaugh always did, and that is why he was one of the most respected jurists of his generation.

Sadly, that is not what Donohue, Dougherty and Wecht have done.

There are a lot of reasons to reject their retention efforts, including the improper redistricting votes and their activities in approving what many of us believed to be unconstitutional shutdowns during COVID.

But the thing that has angered me is their very obvious, very active and extremely inappropriate lobbying for the abortion industry.

It’s no secret that I am one hundred percent pro life.I have prayed in front of abortion clinics, given money to pro-lifeorganizations, and spoken on the Capitol steps in our state capital.

But even if I were proudly pro-choice, I would be repelled by the overt bias demonstrated by these three justices.

They continue to run ads in the Philadelphia media market, and I am quite sure in other Pennsylvania outlets, touting their intention to keep abortion legal and widely available.

You might say, well that’s OK because they are simply announcing their support for laws that protect abortion rights. They are essentially saying that they will follow the laws, even though they might personally disagree with abortion.

But that is not what they are doing.

Donohue, Dougherty and Wecht are announcing quite brazenly that they will make sure to protect abortion rights in this state, even if the Legislature passes laws that restrict those rights consistent with the Pennsylvania Constitution.

Like Josh Shapiro, the most pro-abortion governor in the history of the commonwealth, they are telling us that they will not allow abortion to be eliminated or restricted even if the Legislature passes laws that would authorize it.

That is what they are saying, with the imprimatur of Planned Parenthood in several of the ads.

And as Maya Anjelou said, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.

I believe that these three justices will not act like justices, but rather like Planned Parenthood escorts in those orange vests.

And I will vote accordingly.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

The two great debates of my lifetime have been the following: “Is it gravy or sauce” and “Can a pro-lifer support the death penalty.”

The first conundrum is more controversial in my family. The second doesn’t have the philosophical gravitas of the first, but it has always troubled me from the age of 11.

That was in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided and abortion became legal in all 50 states.

When the decision came down, I was sitting in a classroom in my small Catholic Girl’s school in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The nuns, who belonged to the Sisters of Mercy, asked us to pause and say a moment of prayer for the babies.

From that moment on, I knew which side I was on. I was on Team Baby, all the way. That hasn’t changed in over a half century, and I have called myself pro-life in every biography that someone has asked me to provide for a public appearance, in every social media profile, and pretty much everywhere I’ve had an opportunity to express that view.

It is also the thing that oriented me towards immigration law. To me, helping the most vulnerable, whether they are children in utero or persecuted refugees is the exact same thing.

I’m pretty much on the same page as the new pope, the American, the White Sox fan and, this is the best part of all, a Villanova grad. Except I learned the other day he thinks I can no longer call myself pro-life if I’m in favor of the death penalty.

I suppose it was always that way, even though I had the good fortune to grow up around Catholic priests who gave you a bit of leeway on capital punishment.

I remember once asking a priest of my acquaintance if he thought that the electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment, and he said that he did.

But then he added, to my surprise, not all forms of capital punishment were morally wrong. He said that while we should never willingly make a human being suffer, there was some grounding in Scripture for what essentially was the “eye for an eye” theory.

He was reading from the Old Testament, or as I call it, the original, not the sequel.

I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not, but that conversation led me to wonder whether the whole idea of the death penalty was skewed.

There is no question that an unborn child has done nothing wrong, and is innocent of any sin or crime.

Similarly, people who are fleeing persecution need protection, compassion and care.

But murderers? Cold-blooded sociopaths? Child rapists? Serial killers? People who ambush cops? People who set bombs at abortion clinics? People who target health care CEOS and conservative activists? People who mow down kindergarten students in their classrooms before Christmas? People who kill their spouses so they can avoid alimony? Those people?

When the pope came out and essentially said that I am not pro-life if I look at the life of one of these miscreants as being of lesser value than that of a Christian being persecuted in the Middle East or a child with Down syndrome who would inconvenience his pregnant mother, I have to think he was watching a bit too much MSNBC, or the Vatican equivalent.

All of this kumbaya about how even the worst sinner has value is nice enough when it’s not your family that has been victimized. It’s very politically correct and makes you look like a wonderful person, but it ignores human reality.

There is no through line between abortion and the death penalty. One kills innocent life. The other balances the eternal scales of justice.

I am quite sure this column will not sit well with the sort of Catholic who thinks that vengeance has no place in our hearts. Those readers, and those Catholics, are missing the point.

Capital punishment is not vengeance. It is not even unconstitutional. It is the recognition that there are certain crimes that require the forfeiture of your life, in order to provide some balance to society.

A civilization that looks at murderers in the same way that it looks at refugees and innocent children is not … civilized.

So while I am a fan of the pope, and while he is making me proud to be a Wildcat, I’m going to have to have a conversation with him the next time he shows up at an alumni function.

One where they will hopefully be serving gravy.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I grew up calling myself “Italian.”

I never used “Italian-American,” partly because it’s fairly obvious that I am American and also because I didn’t want any grief from the tedious people who say things like “Why do you hyphenate yourself, we are all just Americans!”

Unfortunately, my relatives never bothered to teach me Italian, so I paid good money to learn it in college. And my grandmother refused to show me how to make pasta by hand, correctly assuming I would slice my fingers on the “chitarra,” I figured it out by myself.

That being said, I wasn’t a big booster of Columbus Day, or marches, or the other forced manifestations of my identity.

I live it in my faith, my food, my ferocity and my use of words that often begin with “F,” in both languages.

It’s also that I never understood why we had Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian Pacific Heritage Month, not to mention Pride Month, Trans Awareness Day — I’m sure if they try hard enough they will get a month — and all the other months that were somehow, without me noticing it, grafted onto the calendar.

Why, I thought, can’t we just thread appreciation for these rich and varied cultures throughout the entire year, and stop this seasonal patronizing.

But over the past few years, that has all changed.

Now, I not only make a big deal about Columbus Day, I am also celebrating for the entire month of October.

Recent events showed me, in the most brutal of ways, why those other months exist. Now, I get it.

Around the time of Black Lives Matter, people started looking around for things to start tearing down. No statue was safe from being a target of the Orwellian vandals who were not interested in educating about their own history, but simply wanted to erase the history of others.

Christopher Columbus was one of the fellows who began to represent all that the woke folk hated.

Instead of being the man who admittedly didn’t actually discover America but came pretty close because the Norwegian who got there first didn’t even know what he floated by, the wayfarer from Genoa became a genocidal maniac.

Not only that, they tried to argue that he wasn’t even Italian.

There is little to no evidence that Columbus engaged in a bloodthirsty campaign to eliminate the Taino Indians who were indigenous to the New World.

There is some evidence that he might have had Jewish blood in him, which is fine because there is a rich Italian Jewish tradition.

Most of all, there is more recent history that the reason Columbus was given a holiday was not to commemorate him per se, but rather to honor the Italian immigrants who had helped build this country.

More importantly, it was to recognize the greatest single lynching in the sordid history of this country, when 12 Italian immigrants were murdered in New Orleans for a crime they had not committed.

When I saw people, including some Italians I know and at least one Italian to whom I am related, start calling for the abolition of the holiday because they did not want to honor a “genocidal monster,” I began to realize that there were two possible problems here: either a lot of folks were misinformed, or a lot of folks were fully aware of the history and were simply bigots.

The first alternative is easily addressed by education. The second one can never be eradicated.

And since there will always be bigots, the only way to minimize what happened after BLM is to provide knowledge, facts, and do it with joy.

There really aren’t enough days in the year to paint a comprehensive picture of what Italians have given to this country. But we will take the 31 that everyone else is getting.

We will do it with the typical sense of dolce vita, mixed with the skepticism of those who were told that bread became flesh and wine became blood and believed it.

We will kick up our heels to the Tarantella, the poisonous spider, which has inexplicably become grandmom’s favorite wedding dance.

We will stuff ourselves with layers of carbohydrates marinating in additional carbohydrates and tell you that the Mediterranean diet is best.

And you will believe it.

We will not be offended if you point out that we romanticized gangsters, because at least our criminals had the most exceptional style.

You cannot imagine “Leave the gun, take the pierogis” becoming a classic line.

And we will be generous in sharing our magnificence with anyone who wants to celebrate life the way it was meant to be lived.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

The other night on CNN, there was a discussion about the troubling commonality between the people who are committing so many of the tragic shooting incidents over the last months.

The first person who tried to murder Trump was a young white man. The person who murdered the health care CEO was a young white man. The person who entered a Catholic church and murdered Catholic children was a young white man. The person who murdered Charlie Kirk was a young white man. And the person who killed a detainee at an ICE facility was a young white man.

Going a bit further back, the people who committed the Columbine massacre were young white men. The person who rushed into a kindergarten class in Newtown at Christmastime was a young white man. The person who murdered Black worshipers at Mother Emmanuel was a young white man.

Some of the killers embraced a trans ideology. Some were openly and politically leftist. Some were all over the place in their politics.

Some were loners. Some had loving families. Some had been religious growing up, and some were agnostic, to the point of being atheists.

But the one through line is that they are all growing up in a society that devalues young white men.

I know that sounds counterintuitive, since we have been told that it is young African American men who are an endangered species.

There is truth in that, given the statistics. But we cannot ignore the fact the type of violence normally committed in the Black community is fueled by drugs, anger, poverty and fatherless households.

That’s generally not the case with mass shooters.

They’ve been uniformly white, usually millennials or Gen X and middle class. Poverty is rarely an issue.

Drugs are sometimes involved. And almost all of them had fathers actively involved in their lives.

What has caused these young men to reach the point where violence is the only solution to an unnamed problem?

For many years, society has tried to correct what was seen as a generational bias against women.

There is no question women suffered discrimination for generations in all areas of life, including employment, marital relationships, health care and education. The criminalization of marital rape is relatively recent, since women were considered at law to be the property of their husbands.

Women who found themselves at the wrong end of a divorce later in life were financially destroyed.

It was, in fact, a man’s world.

But as usually happens in a society that seeks to right wrongs regardless of the human cost, we overcorrected.

Instead of bringing women to the same level as their male counterparts and aiming for true equality, we started using that term “equity.”

We created a reverse form of discrimination, where you give special consideration to those who have been discriminated against while deliberately taking rights away from those who benefited from the status quo.

Some women thought that this was fine. Girl power, and all that stuff.

But then they started having sons. And those sons started going to school.

And in those schools, teachers started punishing boys for being energetic and rambunctious, while favoring the more studious girls.

There were diagnoses of new disorders like ADHD and hyperactivity and learning disabilities that might simply have been the result of different learning styles.

And then there was the MeToo movement, which essentially made every male into a budding rapist, forcing young men to wonder if they should dare open doors for their dates at the risk of being called abusive.

And then COVID.

And the horror of the internet, which took already alienated boys and protected them from having to actually speak to real human beings.

That was all the “boy” part. The “white” part came into play well before the Black Lives Matter movement, where being a white male was already an albatross because you were identified as being one of the “haves” in a society with too many “have nots.”

It didn’t matter that many of these “haves” didn’t have all that much. The fact they might simply be blue collar, middle class kids like my own father was irrelevant.

Imagine the impact this has on a young brain.

Imagine the toll, especially when you ask that question and people who are invested in the victimization industrial complex mock you for even asking it.

There is a huge mental health crisis in the United States, and it is impacting young men, and in particular young white men, more than any other demographic.

The statistics bear this out.

So perhaps we will stop talking only about guns, only about discrimination, only about hatred, and take a long hard look at what we have been doing to young white men.

We should be having that conversation. It could save someone’s life.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Jimmy Kimmel is not a very funny man.

He reminds me of the prep school boys I used to teach back in the 1990s. They had a snotty kind of humor, an ironic “I’m so smart, ha ha” type of affect that stops being cute when you are an adult making millions of dollars mocking people you don’t like.

It is certainly not satire of the classic model, the kind that such disparate but brilliant practitioners like Jack Parr, Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Tom Snyder, Charlie Rose, Joan Rivers, Larry King, or even the more caustic David Letterman practiced like Michelangelo behind a mic. The closest we have today to anything approaching that, and he is more Lenny Bruce than Carson, is Bill Maher, who has become my favorite host ever since he realized that he, like so many of us, is a man without a country.

I don’t watch many of the late-night shows now, and in fact, I spend most of my time watching old YouTube videos of Johnny and Dick, and sometimes even Merv Griffin. The past was better.

Unfortunately, we have to deal with the present, and the present is all about Jimmy and the fact ABC is bringing him back after being “suspended” indefinitely.

I have seen the tearing of clothes and the pulling out of hair on the left, and even among some on the right who have a more libertarian bent and think that people should be able to act as obnoxiously as possible and not suffer the consequences of their actions. I am actually surprised at the number of friends on the right who have a rather absolutist idea of free speech. It’s as if they are saying, “I have to be able to say whatever I want, and not only that, you have to listen to me.” No, my friends, I do not have to listen to people I do not like, and neither do the rest of us who think that joking about the assassination of a young father and husband is disgusting.

We can turn off the TV, true. We can change the channel. We can write letters of protest. But we can also do something else, and that is create a society where people become accountable for their words and their actions.

This week, I attended an asylum interview for a client at the Newark Asylum Office. Without divulging too many details, suffice it to say that my client had almost been killed because he spoke out against a totalitarian regime. Not fired. Not mocked on social media.

Almost killed.

We do not live in a society, or at least we did not used to until Charlie Kirk fell, where our words are used as bullets against us. We are not in danger of being killed or jailed. At most, we lose jobs.

I myself have been fired from a job I loved as a columnist with a newspaper that concluded that my conservative, pro-life views, mixed with my rather feisty way of responding to readers, were not good for their business. And they let me go. I was not happy, and as I mentioned on a radio program about free speech this week, I wish they had given me a little more rope with which to hang myself.

But I understand that they had the right to do what they wanted, because they were a private company. Had they been a public or governmental entity, that’s a different story. The First Amendment protects employees at public institutions.

On the other hand, the government cannot force a private institution to do anything against its will, because that amounts to unconstitutional encroachment on the right to free speech. Some of the people who were apoplectic about Kimmel’s suspension are convinced that this is what is happening, but they haven’t come up with any direct proof.

The argument ABC caved because of licensing issues is a nice plot twist, but there hasn’t been any confirmation from the network or the FCC. Chairman Brendan Carr has referenced the fact that Kimmel lied about the Kirk assassin’s ties to MAGA, but ABC acted on its own, just as they have in their decision to bring him back.

While Kimmel is coming back, ponder this: If ABC decided to part ways, Kimmel could always find another job. Charlie Kirk’s daughter and son will never be able to find another father.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home was firebombed this summer, at no point did I say or write, “I hate Josh Shapiro’s politics, but … .” And I certainly didn’t say “Well that’s karma.”

Sadly, some people expressed exactly those two emotions.

I know they did because I read them on my page, right after I posted this comment upon watching Shapiro reach the point of tears when reflecting on the threat to his family: “Watching Josh Shapiro. Bad ass. Proud he is my Governor. No political issue is more important than basic humanity.”

That is who I am. I’m not saying this to show off my halo, tilted as it clearly is. I’m pointing this out to show that there are some basic standards of humanity that we all have to embrace, and if we don’t, we aresimply not human to begin with.

Now, a few months later, I find that the same nihilism some of my conservative friends displayed with their “but-but-but” comments is manifested in people whom I mistakenly considered friends.

Looking over the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination on social media, I found far too many examples of schadenfreude, that horrible form of virtue signaling where the speaker pretends to be upset about a tragedy, but is really thrilled to see him or her suffering.

The people who are the most despicable are the ones who begin their comments with “I don’t wish harm on anyone … BUT …” and then prattle on about how the victim of gunfire was a known Second Amendment absolutist, or someone who died from COVID was anti-vax, or someone who voted for Trump watched as his wife was deported.

These are terrible people, and they hide in plain sight on normal Facebook and Instagram feeds, mixing their pictures of last Saturday’s pasta dinner and their new haircuts and their grandkids’ first days of school with comments that celebrate the death of a conservative commentator.

I am seeing people on friend’s timelines virtue gloating about how Charlie Kirk was pro-Second Amendment. Their words amount to “how did that work out for you, Charlie.” I am disgusted and repelled by these people, and I will tell them to their faces that they are not worthy of sharing the human race with the rest of us.

Blank them, and blank anyone who has the sickness of soul to say such things, and formulate such thoughts, moments after a father, husband, son, and citizen was murdered.

There are people who are so damaged and angry that they will rejoice in the death of a man that they hated, because he said things that contradicted their worldview.

I use the word “hated” on purpose, because you must abhor someone to celebrate the fact that his wifeis now a widow, and his toddlers are now orphans.

These are the people who paste the flags of Ukraine all over their feeds, and display rainbow flags in their windows, the ones with the special trans addition, and who figured out how to correctly spell fascist by asking Siri, “What is a synonym for Donald Trump?”

These are not serious creatures, and contribute much less to society in their entire lives than Charlie Kirk did in 13 years, from the moment he created Turning Point.

I did not agree with Kirk on everything, including his embrace of Donald Trump, his evangelical fervor, and his refusal to criticize the horrific excesses of this administration with respect to its immigration policies.

But he was a good man, a deeply good man, and a brave one who was able to speak truth to the cacophony of confused college students, convinced that they could locate Palestine on a map. They can’t, because it doesn’t exist geographically.

I sit here, the day after his murder, which was the most significant political assassination since Bobby Kennedy, and I mourn two things: The loss of a man who was willing to engage with the devil, and the evaporation of the last drop of tolerance I had for people who say, “I don’t wish harm on anyone, but …”

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Every Italian mother thinks her son is special. I am sure non-Italians feel the same way, but I can really only opine on personal experience.

My grandmother had one son, and he was her prince. Louie was a great guy, and in Philly’s 49th Street neighborhood, where bad boys weren’t really all that bad and good boys were simply aspiring bad boys, Louie Fusco was pretty typical. Handsome, a bit rough around the edges, not particularly ambitious, and an eye for the pretty girls. He ended up with a very pretty one, my Aunt Connie, a woman who was not Italian and therefore did not quite understand the connection between her husband and his mother.

Before settling down, he did a tour with the Marines and was stationed in Beirut, and for the rest of his life sported the most magnificent rope-and-anchor tattoo on his forearm. That made him pretty legendary for me, his favorite niece. When she died, she took a piece of his heart with her. But it’s better that she went first, because losing him would have taken all of hers.

My mother, Lucy, had three sons, and they were also her pride and joy. My sister and I knew she adored us, except when she was annoyed with me over my room or my hair or my….hair.

But her boys were special. Teddy, Jon and Michael. It’s hard to explain the bond she shared with each of them separately, but suffice it to say when she told me I had to make their beds (even though they were entirely capable of doing it themselves) this was in no way a punishment for me. It was her tribute to them, her precious little princes.

Italian mothers are that way. At least Italian mothers of a certain vintage. It is possible the younger women who have vowels at the ends of their names will be raising their sons to embrace feminist principles, but not the ladies who graduated from West Catholic in 1956, or before. That was love, mixed with an almost possessory intent. This is what I meant when I said that my non-Italian Aunt Connie never quite got the zeitgeist.

When my brother Jon died before my mother, her entire heart was lost with him. That’s not to say that she didn’t live for the survivors, and that she wasn’t here for us. She was, because like all Italian mothers, she had the strength and endurance of the Spartans. But for Lucy, losing one child was like losing them all, and her grief lasted until she herself was reunited with him and my father, in heaven.

I was thinking of my grandmother and my mother, and all of the other “madri italiane” this weekend, when Carlo Acutis was canonized. Acutis, now a saint, died at the age of 15 almost twenty years ago from a fast moving Leukemia. During his short lifetime, he became a passionate evangelizer for the Catholic faith, and embraced a love for God and a devotion for Mary that are uncommon among the young, although not quite as uncommon as you might think. It seems that even though he was a saintly child on earth, he was also very much a normal child, someone who loved video games and hiking and being with his parents.

His mother was at his canonization, which has happened only one other time in the history of the church. I saw a closeup of her at St. Peter’s, watching as her baby boy was inducted into the pantheon of saints. She was, of course, incredibly moved. But there was something that I noted that reminded me that she was, in fact, like all of the other Italian mothers that I have known in my lifetime. At one point, she tilted her head, nodded in a knowing way. It was almost a cross between a smirk and a beatific smile. I have seen that look millions of times in my own life, and it usually means “well of course, you thought my child wasn’t perfect? Of course he is.” It was a non-verbal “I told you so.” And it was probably the most moving part of the ceremony, for me.

Here is a mama whose child is now part of the angelic chorus, this fruit of her own womb, and the pain that she suffered in losing him at such a tender age is still embedded in her mother’s heart. But for a moment on a brilliant September morning, in the presence of the world, she was able to brag about her special boy.

And all the Italian mothers understood.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].