A Lone Juror

 A lone juror.

I once served on a jury in Detroit.

It was a case involving a guy who ran a drug house.

The charge was "Felon in Possession of a Firearm".

There were no witnesses testifying that they had seen him with a gun.

The trial was chaotic. It seemed that there was another defendant  who had turn states evidence, but fled that morning.

We did not know that and could not be told.

The prosecutor looked lost. He didn't no what to do.

He had lost his key witness.

finally, at a critical juncture the judge (a highly respected federal judge) actually gave advice to the prosecutor from the bench.

I immediately recognized the impropriety of that, but the case went on.

Finally it came to deliberations.

Eleven of us were voting for aquittal.

One guy held his ground. 

He annoyed all of us. 

He insisted that the cops wouldn't have brought the case if there wasn't one. Cops don't lie. 

That seemed ridiculous to the rest of us.

But we were hung.

Finally, I asked the foreman to send a note to the judge asking for the definition of possession.

It came back saying that if we had reasonable belief that even if the defendant didn't know where the gun was in the house, he could send someone to get it for him.

Duh.

We then found him guilty of possession.

The judge did something remarkable.

He invited the jury into his chambers with the prosecutor, The DEA agent, and the defense counsel (a pro bono lawyer).

The judge asked if we had any questions.

I did.

I asked the prosecutor if this was his first case.

He laughed and said no.

The judge explained that the co-defendant had skipped (we didn't know) and that he was to testify that he saw the defendant with the gun. 

The DEA guy said that their undercover agent couldn't testify or his cover would be blown and he'd be useless in the future, if not dead.

I asked the judge if it was proper to coach from the bench and he laughed and said no, but the circumstances were extraordinary.

I turned to the defense lawyer (who actually looked like a well known comedian, Avery Schreiber) and asked if the judge's coaching gave him grounds for a retrial.

He said "Of course! But I'm, not gonna tell that scumbag. Let him figure it out in prison."  

So that one lone juror kept the rest of us from giving the wrong verdict.

Sort of like 12 Angry Men.

Author John Lisec and also Xi Van Fleet

I'd been looking forward to a conversation with prolific author John Lisec for a month.

A small sample of his titles 

I sent a checkup email to him in the morning with no response.
Then I began to think it had dropped off his calendar and started preparing another hour to replace him.

At 12:55, I got with Derek the producer and said that we should give him a chance and we opened the Zoom link from 1:00:00 to 1:01:30. No show. So we committed to the other show. A pre-record with Cal Thomas. 

At 1:05 I got a text from Josh that he was at the zoom link. He had had some technical difficulties.
During this time I had  bumped the USB cable on my mic and it went dead.

Derek interrupted the pre-record, started the show with Josh, and I joined in and I'm glad it worked out because the interview was worth it. I hope you think so.

If you are interested in how books are made, or how political crises are made, like Dearborn Michigan and Springfield Ohio, you should listen.

Then I played a conversation my friend Mark Tapson had with Xi Van Fleet as she describes the Communist China she grew up in and how she sees it starting here.

Economics And Feminism

 First was a conversation with Todd Sheets, author of 2008: What Really Happened and of the substack On Wealth and Progress.

I was joined by my friend (and former co-host of The Drift Radio Show) Gary Wellings and we talked with Todd about the current economy, what got us here and what can get us better.

8 22 2026 Todd Sheets

Next we talked with retired Canadian Professor of English, Janice Fiamengo of Youtube's The Fiamengo Files and and author of her substack, along with her books, Sons of Feminism: Men Have Their Say and The Goddess That Failed: Feminism's Unending War against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself, among others.
A brilliant woman.   

8 22 2026 Janice Fiamengo

AmeriCANs

 Richard Battle, author of 
AmeriCANS Who Made America! 20th Century – The American Century
discusses the stories of those Americans who overcame and prevailed in the 20th Century.

A celebration of the CAN do spirit that grew this nation.
It's the third in a series that in the earlier volumes, celebrates those in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Odyssey

 I spoke with Hillsdale professor Ben Whalen about his online Hillsdale course on The Odyssey.
My wife and I took the course and found it very fascinating.
We also discussed the Christopher Nolan movie.
I found it good, but I think only because I was familiar with the story.
I suggest the Hillsdale course before watching.

Compulsory Feminism

 When you get to the point when you say there are no differences between men and women: such as emotion, gender specific behavior, traditional (historic) roles, etc., you ignore biological imperatives normally driven by testosterone levels, etc.

You get a Supreme Court Justice who doesn't know what a woman is. You start pushing women into Special Forces, and other non-traditional roles.
Like the Soviets did. It's a Marxist position.
The ultimate slide is to transgenderism, which although an extreme, is a logical progression.

This guy says stop it. 

Stop encouraging women (XX) into roles they may not fit. The Soviets did it for years and we mocked them.

Now the soviets are taking over our culture and we don't recognize it. 

We're electing marxists to office and their philosophy is preceding them.

And some portray this guy as a misogynist because he's pushing back against that. 

Our church (generally politically conservative) just elected a woman pastor and her husband as "co-pastor". She had told me that the district had wanted her as Senior Pastor but she insisted her husband to be equal to her. I gave her credit until the first Sunday after church when she posted an attack on this guy as if he was a freak. In business, she's a girl-boss.
That's fine, I've worked for women with varying results (just as with some guy-bosses), but keep it out of my church.
My wife said we're finding another church. I'm glad we're on the same page.

Pushing women into roles that are traditionally male is like pushing low academic achievers into college to achieve racial equity. 

Hiroshima and Dinner with a Nazi

Today is the anniversary of Hiroshima. 

A conversation I had with Thayrone X today on his way too cool for school radio show, On The Edge:

First, let's bring up Ed. Apparently, Ed had dinner with a Nazi. Ed, welcome to On The Edge. You had dinner with a Nazi.

Ed

Yeah, so anyways, coincidentally, for the last couple of nights, my wife and I have been watching a movie. We finished it up. Real good movie. World War II submarine movie called The Enemy Below with Robert Mitchum and Kurt Jurgens. And it's about... Robert Mitchum hunting a Nazi, or I should say a German submarine commander, and then the battle back and forth between. Real good movie. But I totally forgot about something while watching it. I once had dinner with a Nazi U-boat commander. And of all things, the discussion during dinner was the anniversary of Hiroshima, which is today.

Thayrone

Can you tell us, can you go back in the story to where and how you met this guy? What made you sure he was a Nazi U-boat commander?

Ed

I was working with him. And he... You know, we didn't talk about his being a Nazi, but he was a German U-boat commander during World War II, and he was assigned to Japan, actually Tokyo, to teach the Japanese German submarine tactics.

Thayrone

Was this here in America you were working with them?

Ed

No, I happened to be in Italy working there.

Thayrone

Okay.

Ed

Okay and so I was working with an Italian-American and I was on a team that was working there and this guy was part of the business we were in and so we had dinner with him and actually I was told he wasn't a great guy don't trust him blah blah blah but you know we're sitting there having dinner with him and the subject of Hiroshima came up because it was the anniversary Hiroshima. So we're talking about Hiroshima and when this guy had been in Japan he married a Japanese woman and during the conversation they both said the United States did the right thing when they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did the exact right thing and this Japanese woman said the same thing besides the German U-boat commander so I just thought I was interested to share with you since you said you would have liked having dinner with a Nazi and actually I did.

Thayrone

Well did he expound at all on what it was like being a Nazi back in the day back then?

Ed

You know what? I was very young, obviously very young, and I didn't think about it and I to some degree I think it might have not been the thing to bring up at dinner, We were talking more about the submarine experiences and then the conversation turned to Hiroshima and then some other stuff.

Thayrone

I would have had to have probed. I'm really always curious as to how somebody reconciles wanting to waste an entire race of people or section of humanity and say we're going to kill all these people and then life will be good. How do you get your head wrapped around that?

Ed

Well, you know, for instance, if you watch this movie, The Enemy Below, you see the character that Kurt Jurgens plays, the U-boat commander, and there is a die-hard Nazi that works for him on the boat. And the regular Navy guys, they just have no use for him. They kind of scorn him. And to my understanding, that was true of a lot of the German Navy. They were in there in the Navy when the war started. They were, you know, the Reichsmarine, and they just served because they were Germans and they were fighting for Germany, not for the Nazis. Not, you know, the good Nazi thing, whatever. I doubt that. But I do believe that there were German veterans who were just fighting for their country, not for a political regime.

Thayrone

Civilians as well didn't go along with it, but kept their mouths shut and didn't say anything. They didn't want to wind up in the camp.

Ed

Well, you got to remember that von Trapp of The Sound of Music, he refused to serve in the German Navy. Period. I mean, he was Austrian, but he was called in the German Navy, and he said, No, not gonna happen, and they ran off to the States.

Thayrone

I was at a thing out in Chelsea way back when I've talked about this before. It was not really a dinner, but the guy would throw what's called a salon, where he'd get everybody together at his house. He'd sit there with a white dinner coat on, he had a bell, he'd go around the table with subject matter. It was very interesting. He did it once a year. And I got invited because I'm Theron X, so they love me coming there. But at the end of the table, there was an old woman, I mean really old. She didn't say a word. And all of a sudden she chimed in, she was the mother of the couple sitting next to her, and she was full on German with a thick accent. She talked about how she was in the Sudetenland when she was taken from her parents by the Nazi party and put it to a Nazi school. And she started talking about what that was like. And she said, we have no idea here how close we are to the socialism that her parents witnessed back in the day. And I had a Romanian woman tell me that in Costco, of all places, about we have no idea how close we are to that. I mean, all the little things chime in that happened back then, too, before it caught fire and took over the entire country.

Ed

I've heard, yes, you're absolutely right. I've, there's a woman, Xi Van Ping or something like that. I can't remember her name exactly but I'm trying to get her on my show, frankly, but I've heard her speak and she talks about having been raised under Mao and says, this is, this is what we're looking at here now.

Thayrone

Right.

Ed

Of course, you see Vietnamese expatriates, people who fled, you know, the communists in Vietnam for freedom here and then all of a sudden, they're seeing, they're.

Thayrone

Yeah, and I've had that experience several times. I spoke once out to a bunch of women in Bloomfield Hills, Bloomfield Hills Women's Club or something like that, and a woman there, Polish, same thing, was freaked out at how Americans are so casually accepting communism a little at a time.

Ed

Well, the educational system's working. Hey, look, I'll talk to you later. I hear the music.

Thayrone

And have a great day. All right, thanks, Ed. Thanks a lot. Mr. Your American Heritage right there. A great show that you hear on WAAM Radio. Yeah, and they take it for granted. The kids today have been so dumbed down, so completely groomed by kids today. I mean, all the way up, I'd say, through the age 40. You can't let it happen. You got to rebel against it every chance you get. You got to take it down. You're on the edge.