In a column published October 9, 2026, American Thinker’s Eric Utter argues that the United States has lost its capacity to hold anyone accountable — and that the cost of that loss is now showing up everywhere from Moscow laboratories to Minneapolis suburbs.
The piece opens with a Russian researcher reportedly dropping a vial containing pneumonic plague, which Utter notes put the world on alert. Rather than treat this as an isolated lab accident, he uses it as Exhibit A for a broader thesis: mistakes and misdeeds no longer carry consequences. He wonders aloud whether the vial was glass when it should have been unbreakable, whether the researcher was distracted, and why no apology has surfaced. His answer, delivered bluntly and in caps: “NYET, in any case.”
The accountability question
From there, Utter pivots to a question he treats as the organizing principle of the entire column: why is almost nobody held accountable anymore? He entertains a sardonic explanation — that accountability is now considered white supremacy — before landing on a more serious complaint. Conservatives, he writes, are held responsible for things they didn’t do, and even for demonstrably good things they did. That two-tier arrangement, in his telling, leads quickly to disaster.
Fraud becomes his next target, and he doesn’t limit himself to one variety. He lists Somali fraud, Medicare fraud, NGO fraud, and voting fraud alongside fraud in media and politics, concluding that it can sometimes seem as though everything is fraud. The phrase “rampant” doesn’t satisfy him; “ubiquitous” is closer.
He then runs through a rapid-fire list of political grievances, each phrased as a question rather than an argument: What happened to DOGE? Why is Tim Walz still in office? Why is Ilhan Omar still in the country? Why is Keith Ellison not in jail? Why does Gavin Newsom still get called “Slick”? How might El-Sayed win his race in Michigan? How did Mamdani win the mayoral contest in New York City? Beneath the barrage sits a single incredulous claim — that numerous politicians who, in his words, quite literally hate this country keep getting elected, if indeed they are being elected at all.
The column doesn’t stay on politics. Utter moves to crime, writing that Somali gangs have been shooting up high school football games and gas stations in the wealthy western suburbs of Minneapolis. He then jumps overseas: Paris is on fire, he writes, with mass protests and riots in France and Spain. On Canada, he is withering. The vast majority of Canadians, he argues, appear to have Stockholm syndrome, convinced that Prime Minister Carney is tough, smart, and doing his best for the country. He stretches the diagnosis into a pun, suggesting Canadians may actually have “Stockyard syndrome,” because they are behaving like cattle or sheep.
Gad Saad and the ‘suicidal empathy’ diagnosis
Utter’s explanation for how all of this came to pass is not structural or economic. It is psychological and cultural. There is no logical reason for any of it, he writes, other than that a terrible and misplaced empathy — what he calls “suicidal empathy,” borrowing the phrase from Gad Saad — has allowed it to happen.
That leads to the natural follow-up, which Utter puts in his own voice as a mock dialogue with himself: Okay, great, Eric, but how do we stop letting it happen? His answer is a list of personal directives rather than policy proposals. Don’t back down in anything great or small. Don’t kneel before any special interest group, race, or religion. Refuse to go along to get along. Refuse to lie, or to let a lie go unchallenged. Attend caucuses. Infiltrate school boards. Form neighborhood watch groups. Make your voice heard on social media or by any other means. He reminds readers that they, too, can protest or counterprotest, and closes the list with a proverb: people who won’t stand strong for something will fall for anything.
He finds encouragement across South America, writing that monstrous tyrannies are being thrown off, Marxism is being left on the trash heap of history, and freedom is reigning again in places like Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, and possibly Brazil.
His central maxim is blunt: we get what we tolerate. He points to Britain and Canada, where he says people are being fined and arrested for truthful social media posts and comical memes. Then he turns to the ballot box, warning that Americans cannot keep electing what he calls Marxist and Muslim clowns. Republicans, he concedes, often fail to carry out the will of their voters — but today’s Democrats, he insists, will not fail to carry out theirs. If the blue wave isn’t stopped, he predicts, impeachment, open borders, weakness, DEI, and still more fraud and corruption will follow.
The forecast darkens from there. The economy will tank, he writes, and there will be even more chaos and violence in the streets. Worse will follow, he adds. Much worse. His prescription is simple and explicit: get out and vote straight Republican, because otherwise your freedom might be taken away along with your money and your country.
The column signs off in the style of a political advertisement — I am Eric Utter, and I approved this message — before the standard American Thinker appeal for donations, framed around the importance of speaking freely.
Whether readers share Utter’s diagnosis or reject it outright, the column is a useful snapshot of a particular strain of conservative argument in late 2026: that the problem is not any single policy failure but a widespread refusal to impose consequences, and that the remedy lies less in legislation than in personal refusal — refusing to kneel, refusing to lie, refusing to tolerate. It is an argument delivered with more heat than structure, and it lands, as intended, as a call to action rather than a policy paper.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/a-plague-a-lack-of-accountability-and-the-nations-we-deserve/