Those of a certain age will remember the era of infomercials and QVC.

For the younger set, “infomercials” were long-form commercials on cable TV, usually late at night. They ran for five, 10, even 30 minutes, incorporating elements of narrative — usually with laughable skill — to give the feeling that you were watching an actual show rather than a paid advertisement. They hawked products for the home and kitchen with a number to call to place your order.

Most of us are just going to click onto the next thing, unaware that the News-ique (TM) item left a Truth-ette (TM) trace in our minds.

QVC — “Quality, Value, Convenience” — was/is a TV channel that was nothing but one big infomercial, with on-camera hosts showing off products and bantering with each other and customers who called in. It was online shopping before there was an online.

Both marketplaces were famous for offering products that simulated much more valuable items. One such product was the pinnacle: a cubic zirconia stone that was (supposedly) visually indistinguishable from a diamond. It’s got everything: sparkle, allure, and the look of a real diamond at a fraction of the price!

Diamonique is forever

The best part is the name: Diamonique. Those branding this luxury obviously followed the old drag queen convention for choosing a stage moniker: Take a name denoting quality, seriousness, or at the very least referring to an actual person, then give it a little comic twist that lets you know immediately you're dealing with an imitation. Classic drag queen names of this type include:

Hedda Lettuce

Virginia Hamm

Anita Mann

... to name just a few.

As you can see, Diamonique fits right in.

So glittering was Diamonique that this imitation spawned imitators of its own, the best of which is Diamelle. When you can’t afford Diamonique, turn to Diamelle!

Authentic imitation news

What’s amusing in jewelry marketing doesn’t carry over in news and journalism — or what is alleged to be news and journalism. There’s a “news” marketing practice all over social media that gives you what appears to be a news story but is not.

I call this News-ique (TM). It has the look and feel of real news but at less than .01% of the value. It’s all over Twitter/X and other social media platforms.

The News-ique (TM) formula:

Choose a topic guaranteed to rile people whether they’re left, right, or center. The closer the topic is to today’s “discourse” on social media, the better.
Write a lede sentence or short paragraph making a claim that flatters the interests, views, but especially the biases of the reader. The text should confirm the reader’s prior assumptions.
Include an image that looks very much like it is advertising a published news story, but do NOT include a link to that apparent story. It might or might not be published somewhere, but you can’t know from the original post — that’s the News-ique Difference (TM)!

Post nothing else. Do not follow up with a link. Watch outrage flow, and collect clicks and cash.

Know your News-ique

Here is an example of News-ique (TM), a post on X from an alleged news account, Europa.com. The post includes a picture of the subject against a background that looks “newsy” and “official.”

It says this:

Poland's Spokeswoman for Children, Monika Horna-Cieślak, used her official powers to take the children of a woman who was rude to her and place them in an orphanage.

Horna-Cieślak, 36, who is herself childless, had intervened in a public park in Warsaw before being told by the mother of an unruly child to mind her own business. She then leveraged her authority to have the children seized and placed into care.

Why is it News-ique (TM) and not news? Because there’s no link to a fuller source or documentation. There is no follow-up in the thread, only responses from X users.

I do not know if this item is real. I have not checked by doing my own search. It does not matter if this particular item is real or not; it is representative of countless posts every day that use the News-ique (TM) formula. My concern is not the content of the story, but the packaging, intent, and effect.

News-ique (TM) works because it presents plausible outrages. It’s believable that a head of a government ministry for children’s concerns would abuse her position and target a mother who criticized her. This type of thing happens. We know government officials sometimes abuse their authority and get away with it.

Filling in the gaps

But what if there is more to this story about a Polish official?

What I’m about to write is pure speculation used to demonstrate possibilities. I’m not giving you facts; I don’t even know if the original claim is true.

Let’s assume the core of the claim is true. What if the mother did not merely tell the minister to mind her own business? What if she smacked her with her purse? What if she made false and defamatory claims about her online? What if the minister observed that mother abusing her child?

The whole story changes if any of those factors are true. If the mother were abusing her child and the minister intervened, then the minister would have been doing the job she is in office for. She looks like a heroine instead of a villain.

Again, everything I just wrote was speculation. That’s the point: Without context, detail, and at least some provenance for the original claim, all we are doing is writing fiction while treating that fiction as fact.

The political and cultural content cuts in both directions. This example plays to the fears — often real and legitimate — of people with a right-wing bent and to libertarians and other freedom-minded people. But News-ique (TM) items just as often flatter the assumptions of left-leaning people.

H. Armstrong Roberts/Classicstock/Getty Images

New pollution

The News-ique (TM) approach contributes to political, cultural, and emotional pollution. It leaves an impression of truth in the minds of readers and “consumers.” And no, it doesn’t just work on “stupid people.” It works on most people, smart and stupid, left and right, hysterical or stoic. Items that flatter and confirm our prior assumptions are mentally sticky; they leave a trace you might call Truth-ette (TM). Few are immune.

At best, News-ique (TM) is irresponsible and lazy when the content is real and tells a true story. At worst, and I suspect in the majority of cases, it’s a deliberate choice to shade the truth and deprive readers of full context. Outrage gets clicks and cash; sober consideration does not.

Some might push back: “You can use Google/Siri/Whatever to check for yourself.” True. But most people won’t. Not even smart people will usually take the time unless they’re going to comment or use it in an essay or podcast. Most of us are just going to click onto the next thing. We won’t necessarily be aware that the News-ique (TM) item left a Truth-ette (TM) trace in our minds.

Sometimes, we’ll subconsciously incorporate that item into our view of what’s true about the world. This has happened to me and has probably happened in cases I’m unaware of. When I become aware that I’ve been foolish and failed to check veracity, I admit it in the same thread where I made the claim. Better not to react without having the facts first.

Unstoppable

There is nothing you or I can do to stop News-ique (TM). There is no way to change the social media incentive structure so this is not a profitable game. The only thing we can do is increase our skepticism and discernment.

“Then just stay off social media” is not a workable answer either. Social media is toxic and full of mind games. But it is also the medium through which we can learn many actually true things happening in the world that mainstream news simply will not tell us.

Social media is where we can find “citizen journalists” like Nick Shirley who document problems like fraudulent Somali day cares paid for by American taxpayer dollars. When mainstream media gets wind of stories like Shirley’s, it works hard to discredit them, as you see in this CBS News piece. It is also where we can hear directly from politicians and government officials without ABC/NBC/CBS/NPR/NYT leaving out important words to slant the story.

We are never going to have a world “back” where “official news” can be relied on. That world never existed anyway; we just didn’t have any way to fact-check the fact-checkers before.

If you see a “news story” on Twitter/Instagram/TikTok, make sure you know whether it’s news or News-ique (TM). Check whether context or links are given. If they are, cross-reference the claim against other sources. If they are not, you are reading News-ique (TM).

Diamonique can give you sparkle for the soirée at an affordable price. News-ique (TM) is a bad bargain at any price.

EXCLUSIVE: A year after Charlie Kirk’s death, Sabo’s 'controversial' tribute finally goes on display

One year after the murder of Charlie Kirk, the VFW in Denver has allowed me to hang the art that I created in tribute to him.

I’d presented it four months ago, but it was suggested that the story was too hot, that not enough time has passed for people to be comfortable with the content. I could have pulled the old line, “I thought that was the whole point of art, to challenge people,” but even I could appreciate their trepidation, especially in a city as captured by liberal dogma as Denver.

I learned a while back that when a liberal says that art should never be censored, what they really mean is art that they agree with should never be censored.

A year has passed since the murder, and we've heard just about every conspiracy theory you could imagine: exploding mics, palm guns, a bullet fired from a drone, it was Israelis, it was the FBI, it was his wife.

Nonetheless, it was determined last month that the case against the official suspect will be going to trial. Without a doubt, it will be the most watched legal proceeding since OJ’s. This art will be on display in October on First Friday in Denver. I hope that you’re able to see it.

Over the target

As with the COVID art I revisited this summer, I dedicated a good amount of time to getting the pieces together, all the while with an increasing sense of dread that my time — the last thing I have to waste — would be in vain: There was no way in hell the VFW was going to allow me to hang the work.

Ever since I’ve been showing art in Denver, my website has been getting hacked, making it difficult for me to be able to support my family. As much as it sucks, these attacks remind me of the saying, “You take flak when you’re over the target.” In other words, I must be doing something right.

In light of what happened to Charlie for standing up for his beliefs, getting a site hacked and losing a couple of bucks pales in comparison. Don’t get me wrong — it's not that these people don't want the worst for me. If my wife and I ended up living under a bridge, they would laugh and throw things at us as they drove past. It’s sobering to realize how joyfully some people embrace hate. I may not be Charlie Kirk, but I am certainly closer to him than our self-proclaimed enemies.

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Violent reactions

I put these Charlie Kirk pieces on the streets not long after Charlie’s murder. The tattered, textured look is meant to represent the violent reactions that he inspired from those who disagreed with his views, as well as how often my street art is ripped down just as quickly as it’s put up. I put my posters up at night and never wait for better light to document them, aware that they may be torn down before the sun comes up.

I learned a while back that when a liberal says that art should never be censored, what they really mean is art that they agree with should never be censored. Everything else is fair game, and as Charlie learned, no tactic to silence someone is off limits.

I also decided to include my Iryna Zarutska pieces; perhaps these would make the cut even if the Charlie pieces proved too much. Who was I kidding? I thought, as my anxiety increased. This series is even more brutal.

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Screaming 'stop!'

Taking over a stop sign is not as simple as it looks. I’ve seen many half-hearted attempts at repurposing one. My approach is to not add a single word to the piece. I want the art that I add to scream, “STOP!!!” The art should belong on that sign. I think I pulled it off with her murderer half a second from plunging that knife into her neck. I want everyone who views this piece to scream that one word in their head. Included are photos taken from the street hit in Hollywood. One piece boldly and purposefully includes the name IRYNA ZARUTSKA so there is no question as to who this person is. Everyone who views these pieces will say her name, even if just in their thoughts.

I CAN’T BREATHE! I’ll admit to the art being cluttered. The pieces should have more room to breathe. I was so surprised and blown away at being allowed to show these pieces, from both series, that I took the opportunity to throw as much of it up as I could, fearing I'd never get such an opportunity again. But if all goes well, next month I’ll curate the display to include only the Charlie Kirk pieces, some of which are absent. The month after that, I intend to reshow the Iryna pieces, also including those photos I didn’t have room for this time around.

Unsavoryagents.com

The small “ALL LIVES MATTER” piece is a deliberate reminder of this truth. I mean to provoke those who cheered the murder of Charlie because he did not agree with them and dismissed the murder of Iryna simply because she was white and her murderer was black. This is what I mean when I include the word “DOGMA” in the Charlie Kirk piece. What good is art if it only confirms what you already believe?

Dear Women: Your Bad Life Choices At Cornell Frat Parties Shouldn’t Be National News

Women have a choice to make. They can no longer evade the responsibility for it.

Want to avoid fixing Canada's problems? Just blame Trump.

President Donald Trump has once again found the quickest way to send Canada's political establishment into a fit of national indignation: point out the obvious.

This time, Trump went after the country's immigration policies.

It is an extraordinary thing to hear a Canadian prime minister publicly discuss planning for an invasion by the US.

“Canada is destroying itself by allowing millions and millions of people into the Country, essentially unchecked and unvetted, and who are causing problems that will soon be too big to handle,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. “It is a Liberal takeover that will end very badly. Already showing up in their numbers. Big unemployment.”

Fatuous fact-check

Canadian officials and media outlets were quick to push back. CBC pointed out that immigrants and temporary residents are screened and that Canada's unemployment rate, while still 6.4% in August, has fallen half a percentage point since May.

Fair enough. Like many of Trump's pronouncements, “unchecked and unvetted” is an obvious exaggeration. But concentrating on that phrase conveniently allows Canada to avoid the substance of what he said: The country allowed immigration and temporary migration to rise so rapidly that the Liberal government is now scrambling to bring the numbers back down.

As recently as 2021, more than 8.3 million Canadians — 23% of the population — were or had once been landed immigrants or permanent residents, the highest proportion among G7 countries.

And that was before the subsequent explosion in temporary residents. By October 2024, Canada's non-permanent resident population had climbed to nearly 3 million, or 7.2% of the population.

Ottawa is now reversing course. The government has cut its target for new temporary-resident arrivals from 673,650 in 2025 to 385,000 this year — a reduction of about 43% — and says it intends to reduce the temporary-resident population to less than 5% of Canada's population by the end of 2027. The government itself acknowledges that immigration levels must be brought into line with Canada's housing supply, health care system, and labor market.

Justin time

That is quite a retreat from the immigration consensus that prevailed under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

In January 2017, days after Trump's first inauguration, Trudeau responded to Trump's immigration restrictions with a social media invitation heard around the world.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” Trudeau wrote. “Diversity is our strength. #WelcomeToCanada.”

Nine years later, Ottawa is trying to get the numbers back down.

Statistics Canada reported last week that the number of non-permanent residents fell by nearly 155,000 over the previous year. Yet 2.78 million non-permanent residents still remained in Canada on July 1 — about 6.7% of the population.

You don't have to accept every word of Trump's Truth Social post to notice what happened. Canada dramatically increased immigration and temporary migration. The government that presided over the increase is now cutting it.

Yet Canada's political establishment remains far more comfortable talking about Donald Trump than examining how the country arrived here.

Carney's cosplay

Within days of Trump's latest broadside, Prime Minister Mark Carney was discussing something considerably more dramatic than immigration: the possibility of war with the United States.

Asked by the New York Times whether he had seriously considered the possibility of American military action against Canada, Carney said he had examined the “extreme tail risk.”

“I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” Carney said. He stressed that an American invasion was “not a base case,” describing the exercise as simple “risk management.”

It is an extraordinary thing to hear a Canadian prime minister publicly discuss planning for an invasion by the U.S. Despite Carney's fond reveries about the War of 1812, when American forces repeatedly invaded British North America, Canada and the United States have spent the past century preparing to fight alongside each other, not against each other.

The two countries were founding members of NATO. They jointly operate NORAD, the world's only binational military command, and maintain a web of bilateral defense agreements and joint military plans for the defense of North America. The U.S. State Department has described America's defense arrangements with Canada as more extensive than those it maintains with any other country.

That cooperation dates back at least to 1940, when Prime Minister Mackenzie King and President Franklin Roosevelt established formal cooperation on continental defense.

Eighty-six years later, Canada's prime minister is publicly acknowledging that his government has considered what happens if the country on the other side of that defense partnership becomes the threat.

The military imbalance makes the hypothetical stranger still. Canada's armed forces are a shadow of the military that fought through two world wars and landed at Juno Beach on D-Day. During World War II, the Royal Canadian Air Force grew into the fourth-largest Allied air force. Today's Canadian military has struggled with recruiting, aging equipment, and years of procurement delays.

George Rose/Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Made in Canada

Carney's comments might have remained an odd diplomatic footnote if Donald Trump were not simultaneously becoming the organizing principle of Canadian domestic politics.

In British Columbia, Premier David Eby has just called a provincial election two years ahead of schedule. The timing could hardly be better for Eby. B.C. Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay had resigned only days earlier after months of turmoil within the opposition party.

But Eby says the election is necessary because British Columbia faces an “existential moment.” The threat comes courtesy of — you guessed it — Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump is attacking our jobs, driving up costs, and threatening our ability to make decisions for ourselves," said Eby in announcing the election.

Obviously, no alliance means that two countries' interests will always align. Canada has benefited enormously from its relationship with the United States, but there have always been disputes over trade, defense, energy, and any number of other issues. Trump's tariffs have hurt Canadian industries, while his repeated talk about Canada becoming the 51st state has understandably irritated Canadians. That is what happens when two sovereign countries pursue their own interests.

But Canadian politicians seem increasingly preoccupied with the points of friction. And Trump has become awfully useful to them.

Meanwhile, many of the problems Trump is talking about were made in Canada.

Trump did not create Canada's housing shortage. He did not create its enormous temporary-resident population or set the immigration targets the Liberal government is now cutting. Those were Canadian decisions, made by Canadian governments.

The immigration reversal should make that particularly difficult to ignore. Ottawa spent years pushing the numbers higher and is now scrambling to bring them down. Correcting Trump's exaggerations does not make that record disappear.

Canadian politicians can continue blaming Trump for what he says about their country. They might spend a little more time explaining what they've done to it.

Defending the last place where men can be men

Sometimes I wonder what younger men talk about in 2026.

Then I think about my own youth in my 20s and 30s. What did my friends and I talk about? Music, mostly. At least with my crowd. What bands you liked. What new groups you were listening to.

Why is a female broadcaster telling me about returning punts? I returned punts on my JV football team in high school, and it was terrifying. She has never returned a punt.

Films were another topic. The latest movies by Scorsese or Tarantino. There were video games, of course. And books occasionally. And more esoteric pursuits: Computer stuff. Martial arts. Learning to surf.

And then the perennial topics: sports, politics, jobs, women.

The day the music died

Nowadays, music has faded in importance to most men. Movies also seem less popular and not as important.

Politics has become a dangerous subject. Nobody is talking about that in a casual way — not with people they don’t know.

Dating is also a difficult topic of conversation. Women seem to be outdoing men in education, employment, and almost everything else. They really don’t need us any more. And they know it.

A respite in sportsball

But then there’s sports. That’s one topic getting more popular with men.

Sports is safe to talk about. It’s an easy subject to introduce. It’s something men of all ages seem to have an instinctual interest in.

Most importantly, it’s an area where masculinity is not criticized. In sports, men can do “men” things. They can be violent (football). Or graceful (basketball). Or analytical and strategic (baseball).

A safe harbor

Sports remain a place of sanctuary for guys. To become deeply involved in a "Monday Night Football" game is like a separate state of consciousness where you are momentarily shielded from the anxieties of the day.

A good football game has a satisfying narrative. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. The competition is real. The result is conclusive. What happened happened. When it’s done, it’s done.

There’s no changing the outcome afterward. No manipulating the statistics or who gets the credit.

A family affair

A love of sports is something you can pass on to your children. You can create family traditions around it.

Unlike most things in modern life, sports institutions remain connected to their histories. Consistency is valued. Conservation is a virtue.

If your grandfather took you to Fenway Park to see the Boston Red Sox, you might do the same with your grandchildren. Which is a great point of pride in Boston.

Chip Somodevilla/Archive Photos/Getty Images

The bookie is on your phone

Unfortunately, anything with this much cultural significance and historic value will inevitably be subverted by the powers that be.

One obvious example: online gambling, which has been permanently attached to every kind of sporting event. Point spreads are now the first talking point when discussing an upcoming game. Even if you don’t gamble yourself, the constant presence of sports betting brings an aura of darkness and exploitation to what should be wholesome entertainment.

It’s nice that they have a “Gambling-is-ruining-my-life” hotline. But what would be even better is for sports gambling to be illegal, as it was for almost my entire lifetime.

Sideline reporters

Another vector of attack: the presence of women in areas of sports that should rightly be the domain of men.

Throughout the sporting world, we see women inserted into male competitions as referees, commentators, coaches, and trainers.

Why is a female broadcaster telling me about returning punts? I returned punts on my JV football team in high school, and it was terrifying. She has never returned a punt. I want to hear from someone who’s done it and knows what it feels like.

Hurting the children

Another alarming development: the transformation of sports into a potential career path for children, who find themselves involved in grueling training routines before they have reached their teens. And this despite coaches, pro athletes, and ex-players urging kids not to begin life-altering training too early.

An entire industry has emerged to develop “future sports stars” from an early age. Never mind the damage to their bodies and the delusional parents who fall for these scams. These kids will be so burned out that they’ll never want to play sports again.

Don’t get too comfortable

All of which is to say: Sports is a precious resource for men. It keeps us sane. It makes us happy. Think about the joy we have experienced in recent weeks from the beginning of the new NFL season.

But we can never get too comfortable. We must remain diligent and protect sports culture from subversion and profiteering. If sports is what we love, sports is what we should fight for.

What Chris Hansen knows about sin that modern culture forgets

“You see how this looks, right?”

That question captures Chris Hansen’s method. He takes a man who believed he was meeting a child for sex and forces him to look at his own conduct from the outside.

We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves. That is how ‘I knew it was wrong’ can coexist with ‘I did it anyway.’

For more than two decades, Hansen’s predator stings — from NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” to later investigations — have offered a grim case study in self-deception. The men know the conduct is wrong. They choose it anyway. Then, when Hansen arrives with the transcripts, they scramble to preserve the belief that they are good men.

In other words, Chris Hansen has given us a case study in sin.

The basic scenario is familiar. An adult begins communicating online with someone he believes is underage. The age is made explicit. The conversation becomes sexual. A meeting is arranged. The man drives to the house.

Then Hansen walks into the room.

“Have a seat. What are you doing here?”

Almost nobody simply says, “I came here because I wanted to have sex with a child.”

Instead, the explanations begin.

“I just came to talk.” “I was lonely.” “I wanted to make sure she was OK.” “I knew this was probably a setup.” Sometimes the man insists he intended to warn the supposed child about the dangers of talking to strangers online.

Then Hansen produces the chat logs.

He reads an explicit message in that grave, almost bureaucratic voice and asks, “What did you mean by that?” Everyone knows what it means. The point is that the words are no longer private. Hansen has dragged the man’s rationalizations into the open and placed them next to the evidence.

Now the story changes. Simple denial will not work, so the explanation becomes biography. He was lonely. He was depressed. He had a hard day. The goal is no longer to deny the conduct but to move the audience’s sympathy toward the man who chose it.

Hansen keeps returning to the same question: Does any of that make it acceptable to send sexual messages to someone who told you she was 13?

The excuses collapse one by one.

Banderlog/Getty Images

Perhaps he missed the message stating the child’s age. Hansen points to the exchange in which the decoy asked whether the age was a problem and the man said it was not.

Perhaps he never intended to do anything sexual. Hansen reads the acts the man described in his own messages.

Perhaps he changed his mind on the drive over. Then why did he keep driving? Why did he knock on the door? Why did he bring condoms?

If he knew it was wrong, why did he still show up?

At some point, the rational answers run out. What remains is the answer many of the men cannot bear to say plainly: I wanted to do this.

Instead, they reach for the self-image they are desperate to protect. “I’m not a predator.” “I’m a good person.” “I just made one stupid mistake.”

The deception is not merely directed at Hansen. Much of it appears to be directed inward.

They are trying to preserve a portrait of themselves that the evidence no longer supports. Dorian Gray had the decency to keep his portrait hidden in the attic. Hansen puts the chat log on the kitchen table.

This is where Hansen becomes an accidental moral philosopher. He keeps asking a question human beings are remarkably good at avoiding: Why did you do what you did if you knew it was wrong?

The answer is frequently, “I don’t know.”

Philosophers have a name for part of this problem: weakness of the will, or akrasia. A person judges one course of action to be better and chooses another anyway.

Christianity goes farther. Sin is not merely rule-breaking. It disorders desire and corrupts our understanding of ourselves. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful. Paul describes people as suppressing truths they do not want to face.

We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves.

That is how “I knew it was wrong” can coexist with “I did it anyway.” Fallen human beings do not merely fail to do the good they claim to know. They can learn to love what is evil while renaming it good. Milton gives Satan the line: “Evil, be thou my good.”

Some of the strangest Hansen encounters make the point even more sharply: The men recognize him.

They have watched the show. They know what happens. They have seen other men caught in precisely the same way. Yet they somehow never placed themselves in the same category.

Those guys were predators. I’m different.

Hansen sometimes asks whether they have children the same age as the decoy. Many do. What would they think if a grown man sent their child these messages? The moral judgment suddenly becomes easy — until Hansen turns it back on them.

That brings us to the problem with toxic empathy.

Compassion is a virtue. But compassion becomes morally destructive when it rearranges the categories of victim and perpetrator.

A man who drives to a house believing he is about to sexually exploit a child may indeed be lonely. He may have suffered. He may have psychological problems. Those facts can help explain him. They do not make him the victim of the encounter.

Gisela Schober/Getty Images

The child he intended to exploit is the victim.

Our culture increasingly prefers therapeutic questions: What happened to him? Why is he hurting? How did society fail him? Those can be legitimate questions. They become toxic when they displace the more basic moral question: What did he choose to do to someone else?

Hansen’s great contribution is remarkably simple. He puts the evidence on the table and asks the person to account for it.

In an interview with me, Hansen said he learned something from Mike Wallace: Sometimes the most powerful question is simply, “Explain.”

That is why the format has a moral force larger than the television sting itself. Explanation is where excuses either become clearer or finally run out.

For more than 20 years, Hansen’s subjects have demonstrated something Christianity has taught for 2,000 years. “The heart is deceitful above all things,” Jeremiah admonishes, “and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

Hansen’s kitchen table is not a confessional. But it is a place where self-deception has a hard time surviving the evidence.

Man of the Century: Kate Upton's Husband Bids Farewell to MLB

Kate Upton's husband enjoyed a storybook ending to his Hall of Fame baseball career on Saturday. Justin Verlander, 43, sobbed like a champion as his seven-year-old daughter rushed to greet him on the mound at Comerica Park in Detroit. Upton beamed with pride by the dugout, holding their one-year-old son. The family embraced. The crowd went wild.

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The last ethnic Halloween costume nobody apologizes for

Even in these days of hotter summers and disappearing traditions, a few fall rituals remain reassuringly predictable: back-to-school sales, postseason baseball, and the annual uproar over an offensive Halloween costume.

This year, it was Target's turn.

For generations, poverty among rural Southern whites had been treated not simply as an economic condition but as evidence of something wrong with the people themselves.

A screenshot circulating on social media showed a child model wearing a “circus clown” getup from the retailer's Hyde and EEK house brand. Critics said the face mask, miniature top hat, and gloves — not to mention the child's pose — evoked blackface and 19th-century minstrelsy. Target quickly pulled it.

The Rev. Jamal Bryant, the Georgia pastor who spent the previous year leading a boycott of Target over its retreat from DEI initiatives, called it “a profoundly harmful symbol of racism.” Target followed with a corporate apology: “As a company, we know we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. The costume is offensive and should never have been part of our assortment.”

The resemblance to Jim Crow-era imagery was vague enough to give Target the benefit of the doubt. The individual elements of the costume have lost enough of their original meaning that a designer could plausibly assemble them without recognizing that they once belonged to a caricature of a particular people.

But the cultural memory of minstrelsy remains strong enough that once the connection was pointed out, the resemblance was clear enough to make pulling it the right call.

We retain a similar sensitivity to the old caricatures of most ethnic groups, even when the stereotypes themselves have receded from everyday life. But there is one old American caricature that has become so detached from the people it once mocked that most of us no longer recognize it as an ethnic caricature at all.

Hillbilly Highway

Walk into almost any big-box store or scroll online retailers this month, and you will find it: the frayed overalls, the missing front tooth, the corncob pipe, and a jug of moonshine. A quick Google search shows that “trailer park,” “redneck,” and “hillbilly” costumes abound. You can even dress as Joe Dirt, Ricky from "Trailer Park Boys," or Joe Exotic from "Tiger King."

No corporate statement has ever called such costumes “especially hurtful.” No brand has ever pulled any one of them and promised to look closely at how it happened. It's simply a costume built on the presumed backwardness, dirtiness, and moral degeneracy of the people once called “hillbillies,” sold with little awareness of the history behind the stereotype.

That history includes a largely forgotten mass migration — and the prejudice and discrimination that followed it. At roughly the same time that millions of black Southerners were heading north and west in the Great Migration, another vast movement was under way. Historian Max Fraser estimates that as many as 8 million whites left the Southern countryside for the factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest, along what became known as the “Hillbilly Highway.”

And that was only part of a much larger exodus. Historian James Gregory estimates that nearly 20 million white Southerners left the South over the course of the 20th century, compared with close to 8 million black Southerners. Yet while the Great Migration became a familiar part of the American historical narrative, the parallel movement of white Southerners largely faded from national memory.

Southern man

My own family were part of that migration, moving from Western Kentucky to Gary, Indiana, in the 1950s. They weren’t hillbillies, technically — Western Kentucky sits roughly 300 miles from Appalachia — but that distinction meant little once they got north. To the people already there, a Southern accent did all the sorting a map wouldn’t.

That the migration was remarkably successful seems hardly to have mattered. Chad Berry’s oral histories of the Southern whites who migrated to Midwestern mill and factory towns found that most achieved the economic stability they had sought, even as their new neighbors continued to stereotype them as violent, drunken, lazy, unclean, and sexually dissolute.

Richard Dorson captured the prejudice in "Land of the Millrats," his study of the industrial communities around Gary. Driving through nearby Whiting with a local man named Ed, Dorson was told why trailers carried a particular stigma: “This is a Southern white area. Hillbillies live in the trailers. So there's prejudice attached to trailers, 'cause that was the first housing available to Southern whites in the community. So trailer equals hillbilly.”

The prejudice could have more tangible consequences. Historian Anthony Harkins found that job listings announcing “No Southerners need apply” and restaurants refusing to serve “hillbillies” were not uncommon in Northern cities receiving Appalachian migrants.

Gabriel Gigliotti

White trash

But the contempt those migrants encountered in the North had much older roots. For generations, poverty among rural Southern whites had been treated not simply as an economic condition but as evidence of something wrong with the people themselves.

In her book "White Trash," historian Nancy Isenberg traces that tradition from colonial descriptions of the poor as “waste people” through the antebellum contempt for the supposed moral failings of “poor white trash” and into eugenic theories that treated poverty and “feeble-mindedness” as hereditary defects.

Appalachian journalist James Branscome made this case explicitly more than 50 years ago, in a 1971 manifesto called "Annihilating the Hillbillly." By portraying Appalachians as backward, ignorant, and responsible for their own poverty, he argued, coal operators, government agencies, and the national media diverted attention from the economic arrangements that had enriched outsiders while leaving much of the region poor.

The hillbilly, in other words, provided a convenient explanation for poverty: The problem was the people. And when millions of those people left the rural South, found industrial work, and built more prosperous lives elsewhere, the stereotype followed them anyway.

Yokels only

Today the hillbilly survives mostly as a seemingly harmless comic trope. The caricature migrated from comic strips like "Snuffy Smith" and "Li'l Abner" to television's "Hee Haw" and "The Beverly Hillbillies." More recently it was "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" and "Duck Dynasty." Cletus and Brandine Spuckler are still turning up on new episodes of "The Simpsons," more than 30 years after Springfield introduced its "slack-jawed yokel."

It might be harder to laugh if we still connected those characters to the people the caricature once described.

The history isn't particularly ancient. In 1958, Time quoted sociologists describing poor Southern whites as “vicious” and more difficult to assimilate than other minority groups. A Wayne University survey of Detroit residents published in 1952 found “poor Southern whites; hill-billies” the second-most frequently named group when residents were asked which people were “not good to have in the city.” Twenty-one percent named them, compared with 13% who named black residents; only “criminals and gangsters,” at 26%, ranked higher.

These were the people who left Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for the mills of Gary and East Chicago and the auto plants of Detroit. They didn't bring backwardness north with them. They brought labor. Many found the economic security they had gone looking for and became part of the working class that built the industrial Midwest.

Eventually, they also became less visible. Their children and grandchildren lost the accents, left the trailer parks, moved into the middle class, and blended into the rest of America. The people disappeared into the country while the character remained behind.

That is the history the Halloween costume no longer evokes.

None of this requires another corporate apology. But corporate sensitivity reveals something in what it notices — and what it doesn't. Some old caricatures still carry a social cost. Others remain fair game.

I don't know what my own family heard when they migrated more than 300 miles north to Gary. They're gone now, and they didn't leave that part written down. That's part of the point. The costume survived. Their story didn't.

REVIEW: 'The Color of Money'

The Color of Money is not the best film in its three leads' bodies of work (meaning costars Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, alongside director Martin Scorsese). That would be—reader objections expected—The Sting for Newman, Collateral for Cruise, and Goodfellas for Scorsese. Nor is it the most impressive entry in each man's catalogue: Newman's alcoholic ambulance chaser in The Verdict and Cruise's pickup artist-slash-motivational speaker in Magnolia represent two actors at the peak of their powers, while Raging Bull is Scorsese's true technical masterpiece. But The Color of Money occupies a genuinely important place in each of their careers.

The post REVIEW: 'The Color of Money' appeared first on .

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