Some opinion writing is built like an argument. Eric Utter’s latest column for American Thinker is built more like a crime scene board, a string of unrelated recent items pinned together with the implicit thread that they all belong to the same story.
Published September 29, 2026 under the outlet’s “Leftists” category, the piece opens with a blunt verdict — “It is too much for a decent and sane person to bear” — and spends the next several hundred words explaining why. What follows is less a single thesis than a running inventory of grievances: criminal cases, a political candidate’s social media post, a governor’s wardrobe choice, a viral video, and a story attributed vaguely to something “surface[ing]” online. Utter’s stated conclusion is that the country has been “fundamentally transformed” into something he and his readers no longer recognize.
The crimes he cites
The first item Utter raises is the case of Dimone Fleming, a 26-year-old Bronx mother who, according to his account, repeatedly stabbed her 3-year-old and 11-month-old sons and submerged their bodies in a bathtub at a taxpayer-funded family shelter. Utter says Fleming was found not criminally responsible and will not go to prison, and he frames the outcome as evidence of a system that has stopped punishing the worst acts. He writes that a woman can “murder all three of her kids … and be called ‘a darn good mother.'”
Utter does not cite a court, a prosecutor, or a news report for the Fleming case in the column itself. Readers looking to verify the details would need to go elsewhere; the piece treats the outcome as a shared premise rather than something to document.
From there he moves to Charlie Kirk, describing “many vile attacks” on the late conservative figure — and by extension his family and those who loved him — along with vandalism of statues and likenesses, tied to what Utter calls the first “anniversary” of Kirk’s murder. The scare quotes around “anniversary” do the argumentative work here, signaling that the milestone itself is being marked in a way Utter finds grotesque. As with the Fleming case, no specific incident, location, or outlet is named.
Hochul, Headen, and the optics of outrage
The column’s sharpest concrete material involves two elected officials and a candidate. Utter notes that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wore a hijab while speaking to Muslim men, an event he places two weeks before the 25th “anniversary” observation of the September 11 attacks, which he reminds readers killed nearly 3,000 people. The juxtaposition — the head covering, the timing, the death toll — is the entire argument. Utter doesn’t allege any policy consequence or say Hochul was marking the anniversary; he simply lets the proximity of the two dates sit there.
Then there’s Shelly Headen, a Democratic state legislative candidate in North Carolina. According to Utter, Headen posted a photo to Facebook from a vacation in Germany showing herself standing and smiling in front of crematorium ovens at Dachau, the former concentration camp now maintained as a memorial. The caption, as Utter quotes it: “Visiting Dauchau [sic] Concentration Camp in Germany … This is where Trump supporters belong.” The misspelling, preserved in brackets, is clearly part of what Utter wants readers to see — a person who could stand grinning at an oven and still get the place name wrong.
A separate item is sourced even more loosely. Utter writes that a story “surface[d]” claiming illegal aliens in Ceuta, Spain, are cutting cats in half and otherwise dismembering them “for fun.” No outlet, official, or date is attached. It functions in the column as another data point in the same direction, not as a verified report.
The Seattle shooting and the phones
The passage Utter lingers on longest is a Seattle shooting. A 21-year-old man was shot three times on the street, he writes, and no one helped because bystanders were filming with their phones. Utter’s rendering of the bystander mentality is sarcastic and direct: “Great footage! Real! Lotsa clicks and likes!” He adds that the wounded man walked to a convenience store begging for help and that employees allegedly locked the doors on him as he bled out. The word “allegedly” is Utter’s own hedge, and it’s the only one in the paragraph.
This is the item that most clearly carries the column’s real subject. The Fleming case is about courts, the Headen post is about a candidate, the Hochul detail is about symbolism — but the Seattle passage is about the public itself. Utter’s claim is not that a crime occurred, it’s that the people watching declined to intervene and reached for their cameras instead.
From anecdotes to a theory of decline
Having assembled the list, Utter pivots to the diagnosis. The good are mocked and punished, he argues, while the bad go unaccountable. Institutions have been “captured by evil clowns” bent on destroying what he calls the freest, most prosperous, most tolerant and benevolent nation on Earth. He says Christianity is routinely mocked and marginalized while Muslim prayer minarets ring out across American cities.
His coalition theory is stated flatly: “The DEI Nazis, the cultural and political Marxists, and the Muslim fraudsters have effectively combined forces to destroy this nation.” He concedes the claim is unpalatable to many, then insists unpopularity doesn’t make it untrue. Free and open nations, in his telling, are uniquely vulnerable to this kind of assault, and the only defense is a citizenry and leadership that are learned, moral, and courageous.
The supporting list is a familiar one for readers of this genre: a “Muslim Trojan Horse” admitted a couple of decades ago, teachers’ unions recast as Leftist indoctrinators, a mainstream media he calls a “pathetic, anti-American joke,” widely legalized mind-altering drugs, and the Ten Commandments displaced by an infinite number of “my truths.” He reaches for the 1956 film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and its 1978 remake, then updates the metaphor: too many Americans have succumbed to “The Invasion of the Mind Snatchers,” which he considers the greater tragedy.
Utter anticipates the objection — “Sorry, but that is the truth as I see it” — and argues that backpedaling from the truth is what produced the mess in the first place. Resistance, he writes, is better than consenting to live as slaves. Then the piece arrives at its honest answer to its own question.
“Am I hopeful? With all that is aligned against us, truthfully, no.”
He closes with a paraphrase of a Sinatra lyric — “Isn’t it rich? Isn’t it queer? / Losing our purpose after all of these years” — followed by the line about clowns, and a final instruction to readers: “I’ll let you determine who the clowns are.”
What the column is and isn’t
As commentary, the piece is less an argument than a mood rendered in list form. Its persuasive force depends entirely on whether a reader already accepts the framing that these items belong together. Nothing in the column attempts to establish a causal link between, say, a governor’s head covering and a candidate’s Dachau photo; the connection is tonal, an accumulation meant to feel like proof through volume.
That structure is also its vulnerability. Several of the most inflammatory items — the Fleming ruling, the attacks on Kirk’s likenesses, the Ceuta story — arrive without sourcing, dates, or named authorities, which makes them difficult for a skeptical reader to check and easy for a sympathetic one to accept. The Headen and Hochul details are specific enough to be verifiable; the Seattle account rests on Utter’s own hedge that the store employees “allegedly” locked the doors. The column’s power comes from the reader’s willingness to fill in what Utter leaves out.
What’s most striking, though, isn’t the outrage. It’s the ending. A piece built to rally resistance concludes by declining to offer any hope at all — a choice that distinguishes it from the more common genre convention of closing on a call to fight. Utter calls for resistance and then admits he doesn’t expect it to work. Whether that reads as candor or surrender likely depends on where the reader was standing before they clicked.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/darkness-at-noon-and-1-p-m-and-2-p-m-and/