Unprecedented times - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Well, no editor ever wants to pass on this kind of news to his readers, but I have a responsibility to you all, so... The Citizen has been barred by the Trump administration from the Oval Office and its access to Air Force One is revoked. This is in direct retaliation to Walton correspondent Jo-Ann McDonald’s reference to the Gulf of Mexico in last week’s issue, not Trump’s new and preferred name: the Gulf of America.

 

For some, this catastrophic transgression and direct Trump provocation may have just slid right by you, but for others, surely, they knew the magnitude of what they read in real time.

 

Now, this case is far from closed. We’ve secured the best legal counsel we could afford, from a regular at The Boot who “does his own research on law stuff all the time.” We are confident in our position on this matter, yet this entanglement is further complicated by McDonald’s seemingly inadvertent inclusion on a high-level White House message chain. 

 

What we know is this: 

 

• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, as part of his department’s insatiable bloodlust, was in search of bomb-making material amid Trump’s trade war. Specifically, good shrapnel to pack inside of bombs to ensure maximum carnage.

 

• With the dismantling of the Department of Education in full swing, Hegseth turned to Linda McMahon (whose qualifications as Secretary of Education include being choke-slammed and tombstone pile driven by Kane in the WWE - Kane, by the way, real name Glenn Jacobs, is now the Mayor of Knox County in Tennessee - that match was close to achieving political quorum), rightly thinking she would soon have a surplus of thumbtacks, the sharp, pointy ends of compasses and scissor arms. 

 

• Hegseth mistakenly included McDonald on the messages, not McMahon. McDonald has told us that she has a history with Hegseth that she neither disclosed, nor is it any of our beeswax, while acknowledging that, despite her ownership of a Legion dress uniform, she doesn’t have the clearance for such messages.

 

• McDonald then published a full transcript, disclosing U.S. plans to target anyone who shared an “Elbows Up” post on social media in March, with their new thumbtack, compass and scissor bombs. Despite Elon Musk posting on X that the “best place to hide a dead body is the Walton page of The Citizen, because no one ever goes there,” many read it and that has left the White House fuming and litigious.

 

You’re now caught up. And while McDonald has our full support and we stand behind her fully, both as people and professionally with our aforementioned legal team (that dude from The Boot), we have to make some concessions until the gavel hits the sound block.

 

McDonald will immediately be replaced by someone without her woke, liberal agenda; her replacement will be chosen from a pool of all of the unhinged guys who have sent me crude, misogynistic, racist and/or homophobic e-mails in recent years. Their knowledge of Walton may be debatable, but their political weather vane is pointing in the right direction and I can have all the confidence in the world that this mistake will never happen again.

 

As for the rest, it’s now before the courts.

 

There is also some collateral damage that should be noted in relation to this incident. As there was an inference that it was trip-takers Brad and Christine Knight and not McDonald who first pushed this narrative, the Knights were promptly scooped up by a team of masked goons in a blacked-out van blasting “Master of Puppets” and deported. They are currently rotting away in hellish El Salvador jail cells.