To get the formalities out of the way, yes, I was perma-banned from Twitter by the “free speech” Musk regime.

And I gotta say, I’d come to really like many of my followers, so please remain in touch on Substack (it’s free, you cheapskates).

Why’d I get banned? A tale old as the hills: A neo-Nazi Holocaust denier attacked me as I was drunk at 7 a.m., and I wasn’t in the mood for the sieg heiler’s shit, so I told him that he’s very brave hiding behind an anonymous account, but if he wants to come to Beverly Hills in person, I’ll put him six feet under.

The Nazi went crying to Musk, and because I’d made a Nazi weep I was banned.

Every day on social media I’m condemned by anti-denier morons who haven’t read a word I’ve written since 1992 and attack me for being a denier, and pro-denier morons who haven’t read a word I’ve written since 1992 and celebrate me for being a denier. And when I try to explain that I’m not a denier, the anti-deniers, who claim to be rationalists who’ve totally not turned “6 million” into a religion, tell me that my views today are irrelevant—in 1992 I blasphemed the Holocaust and that’s an unpardonable sin, but hey it’s not like they’ve turned historiography into a religion or anything. And the deniers, who claim to be rationalists who’ve totally not turned “280,000 cookies” into a religion, tell me that my views today are irrelevant—in 1992 I brought wisdom from on high, holy tablets that can never be amended because that would be blasphemy, but hey it’s not like they’ve turned historiography into a religion or anything.

It’s a unique hell, and the reason I drink.

And on April 4 I snapped at a Nazi and got banned by the billionaire who called a British cave diver a “pedo,” only to claim, during the defamation trial, that it was just “bro talk.” Bros talk tough online and say things that aren’t meant to be taken literally.

But my “bro talk” was a perma-ban offense.

So let’s talk about why.

Musk’s moved beyond “allowing” Holocaust denial to protecting it, and I’m not the only one noticing. The day after I was banned from Twitter, Kim Iversen, bimbo member of the Tucker Carlson/Max Blumenthal/Aaron Maté left/right anti-Jew horseshoe axis (which I covered last month) who became a Holocaust denier because of course she did (it’s a rite of passage—“Goebbel Goebbel Goebbel Goebbel, one of us, one of us!”), posted a YouTube video about how great it is that Musk is making Holocaust denial mainstream, because the lying Jews have it coming.

YouTube allows Iversen’s videos after nuking my entire anti-denial channel last year because Media Matters Mongoloid Eric Hananoki told them I’m a denier.

Iversen is correct; Musk is indeed promoting Holocaust denial, in part by giving the worst deniers wrist slaps for infractions that get anti-deniers banned. Take the case of one of the highest-profile deniers on the site, a retard named Angelo “Lucas” Gage, a military veteran (who single-handedly cured me of ever again saying “thank you for your service”) whose manner of speech comes off as so brain-damaged, he constantly has to remind his followers that he never took head shrapnel.

“JEWS…make…Gage…ANGRY…me…want…WORDS…so…me…can…say…why…Gage…ANGRY…mouth…make…words…COME…SPEAK…mouth…SPEAK!”

In February this vegetable (with 247,000 followers) went beyond denying the Holocaust and outright advocated assaulting Jews. And he got a two-week ban from Musk. “Oh, you naughty Nazi! Go to your room for two weeks, then come back and have some pie.”

“Me…like…PIE! PIE……GOOD.”

Gage is back, denying away. Whereas I got a lifetime ban.

But here’s where we come to the interesting part. While Iversen was boasting about “Yay! Holocaust denial’s mainstreamed by Musk,” deniers on Twitter like Gage and 660,000-follower Jake Shields, an MMA champion (another meathead), were bitching that they were being persecuted on the site. It’s a fascinating dynamic: thousands of people posting Holocaust denial while saying, “I’m not allowed to post this.”

Dude, you’re posting it. It’s hilarious. Every day, Shields posts something along the lines of “Why can’t we question the Holohoax?” and his fellow tards reply, “Yes, why can’t we question the Holohoax?” and a few guys will be like, “Dude, you are. You’re questioning it, and getting huge engagement.”

Each day on Twitter numerous idiots (including Gage, Shields, and Stew Peters) post a video I did in 1992—a video-for-hire that I’ve long denounced—and say, “Watch this banned video that I’m not allowed to post on Twitter”…as they’re posting it. With no ban or takedown.

Deniers are the far-right’s Daquans. The eternal victims. You can give them the keys to the kingdom and they’ll still claim to be locked out. The Holocaust revisionists I worked with 34 years ago, yeah, we got a lot wrong. And we got a few things right. But we at least pretended to be interested in “finding out what really happened” (for my part, that genuinely was my desire. Whatever mistakes I made, they were one-half good faith and one-half youthful arrogance). But now Holocaust denial has become the white man’s victimization bitchfest. Deniers like Musk’s favorite Ron Unz Naziboi Keith Woods claim that “Holocaust lies” are what destroyed the West. Woods, Gage, Shields, and their millions of followers all toe the same line: “The Jews lied about being made into soap and lampshades! And because of those lies, whites are forever oppressed. A-bew-hew-hew!”

These “macho” meatheads like Gage and Shields, all they do is whimper that dey’ze been victimized cuz some meanies told a lie eighty years ago.

If I may channel Pacino from Glengarry Glen Ross, what fruits, what faggots, what children. The veteran, the MMA thug, these phony tough guys spend all day on Twitter whining that in a war eighty years ago, someone said something factually questionable and it’s lit-uh-ruh-lly murdered them.

The weakest-minded among us act like lying in warfare is the greatest sin, while they have no problem with killing in warfare. “Oh, he shot some kids? Ho-hum, that’s war for ya. But he lied? Verily, I am slain by the mendacity.”

We 1980s/1990s revisionists, for all our faults…and lordy we had many…at least understood that untruths during wartime are to be expected. You don’t act shocked by it, you don’t use it as an excuse to forever play victim. You say, “Yes, there were untruths, and in some cases misunderstandings,” and you revise the history to expunge the untruths and correct the misunderstandings.

But that’s not what today’s deniers want to do. They have zero interest in understanding history (that’s why they never read books. It’s a thing with them—memes only. Books are forbidden!). They use Holocaust denial the same way the worst of the Daquans use slavery: “Dey dun wronged me in da past and dat dun screwed up mah people.”

Just as blacks are given every advantage, every get-out-of-jail-free card, yet still claim to be victimized, same thing for Holocaust deniers. Musk gives them immunity, and they still have to scream, “I’ze bein’ oppressed.” Because these are people looking for a reason to excuse their own shortcomings. Daquans and deniers are peas in a pod.

But it goes beyond that. Why does a guy like Musk, who is certainly not a brain-damaged meathead, champion denial?

Because he can’t say what he likely wants to say.

“The kaffir savages fucked up my birth nation. And here in my adopted nation, you can’t even launch a rocket without being grilled about how many kaffirs you employ.”

Whites are unhappy with the current state of the West, but also, most of them don’t want to attack individuals based on their race. Let’s be honest—many of us, on any given day, may think, “I wish there were fewer blacks around here.” But we don’t say it because we also know a lot of decent blacks, and it’s human nature to not want to come off as vicious toward decent humans based on nothing but their skin color.

And I think Musk’s a decent guy, which is why he’s gravitating toward denial, because it gives him a scapegoat for the West’s decline that doesn’t involve being mean to individuals. By blaming “Holocaust lies,” “soap and lampshades” for the West’s woes, you’re not blaming living humans, you’re blaming long-dead ones; you’re blaming a concept. “I ain’t sayin’ I hate all Jews. Just them liars who said ‘soap and lampshades’ eighty years ago.”

Holocaust denial will continue to rise because saying “Holocaust lies sunk our civilization” allows a wide spectrum of people, including Musk and that hellish right/left Carlson/Iversen/Blumenthal/Maté clusterfuck, to blame the West’s decline on something abstract, instead of “kikes,” “niggers,” or “beaners,” while looking oh so intellectual while doing it.

So, reality check: No, WWII untruths are not the cause of your woes. “Soap and lampshades” was never part of the established postwar history of the Holocaust, and sure, dime-store novels promoted such lurid tales, just as they promoted lurid tales of the Old West (“Jesse James shot my grandma in the cunny!”). Nobody has ever gone to jail for denying “soap and lampshades.” Nobody has ever gone to jail for saying, “The number isn’t 6 million.” Reitlinger’s 1953 masterwork The Final Solution gives a lowball figure of 4.19 million, and that book is legal all over Europe (Reitlinger never mentions “soap and lampshades;” conversely, he debunks—back in 1953—some the “wildest legends” of the Holocaust).

The West is fucked up because a bunch of whites in America really loved slavery, and another bunch of whites in America decided to use slavery as a reason to fight the other bunch of whites, and both bunches of whites were too stupid to understand that eventually mass African importation would become a bill come due, while meanwhile in Europe another bunch of whites decided to raid the darkie continents while giving the wogs and nogs citizenship, education, and medicine, keeping them alive and reproducing because bleedin’ hell we’s Christians we is we is, we’ze not monsters wot wot.

The Holocaust is not your misfortune. Had Hitler, a bloodthirsty butcher, not invaded Russia, the European war wouldn’t have become the society-altering apocalypse it did. Churchill was a snake, to be sure, but his deceitful orchestration of a war over Poland was a containable fire. The cataclysm came with Barbarossa. And the millions of murdered Jews are real, so take some responsibility, white Daquans; the West’s decline is not the fault of the Holocaust.

Just as I must take responsibility for the alcoholism that prompted me to tell a Nazi I’d kill him.

End of the day, this shit falls on us. The denier whiners who say otherwise are pathetic weakling losers.

Which, of course, means they’ll prosper. That’s our world today.

I think I’m gonna make this my standard sign-off this year: “What a mess…what a fucking mess.”

Growing up, I was genuinely obsessed by Adolf Hitler and his Nazis. If I ever found myself daydreaming in class, I would doodle swastikas and cartoon drawings of Hitler’s head all over my pencil case and schoolbooks. To look at them, you would have been forgiven for thinking I was a neo-Nazi myself. Every April 20, as Hitler’s birthday came around the situation only got worse.

In woodwork class, we once had to design novelty pencil-holders. Mine was a large wooden block cut and painted in the shape of Hitler’s head, with holes drilled through the sides so that, when you stuck your pencils into them, they appeared to pass right through, as if he had been speared by an angry mob.

In Religious Education lessons, we were told to make a board game that exemplified the eternal struggle between good and evil. My own effort was “Hitler vs. Jesus,” in which the two title characters engaged in a fevered race to see who would get to the final square on the board first, where a vanload of Jews were waiting, to either be saved or exterminated, depending upon which character won (actually, it was rigged so Jesus would—He had access to several Christ-only shortcuts in which He walked on water to get there first).

During IT lessons, when saving my work to the computer network’s collective hard disk, I always named each of my files after prominent Nazis. One day, following a systems failure, we all had to go one by one into the IT technician’s cupboard and tell her which files were ours so we could be reunited with our own work. I still remember standing there, identifying Excel and Word files with names like “Heinrich Himmler,” “Herman Goering,” and “Rudolf Hess” to an increasingly bemused and distressed female member of staff.

Once, we were told to make some posters to make our math classroom look bright and cheery. Studying percentages, the task was to draw adverts demonstrating certain goods and services were now on offer to the general public at a discounted price. Knowing the Nazis had attempted to exterminate the disabled, I revealed a sale at somewhere called “The Happy Orphanage.” As my detailed illustrations showed, this was a 1930s German establishment, run by several gentlemen in SS uniform, who were offering disabled children for sale to childless foreigners in order to ease the financial burden these “useless mouths” were placing upon the Reich. In the middle of the picture was a “bargain bucket” filled with 5-year-old amputees, offered up for sale to the desperately infertile at an amazing 25 percent discount per missing limb.

Back then, most of my teachers were still sensible enough just to laugh. These days, I think I would have been placed on some kind of terror watch list.

Lessons From History
Later on in life, by which time I had begun to realize my (thankfully abortive) adolescent attempts to grow a toothbrush mustache and comb my hair down over one half of my forehead could very easily have been misconstrued, I too became a teacher. A Nazi-friendly one.

One Holocaust Memorial Day, around 2006 or so, when I was still training to become a professionally qualified corruptor of youth, all of the student-teachers at my college were shipped off to one particular high school to teach its students about extermination camps through the awesome power of immersive, live-action drama. My group’s unfortunate idea was to sit the children down at a table in small groups and re-create the rough proceedings of the 1942 Wannsee Conference—the infamous meeting of top Nazis at which the practicalities of arranging the Final Solution were arrived at.

As the conference’s convener, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, I greeted the incoming pupils fully in character with a Nazi salute and cry of “Sieg Heil!” which they were exhorted to return. Wearing an improvised SS uniform (i.e., a black suit with a colored armband), I then handed out laminated pieces of card decorated with Nazi insignia and containing several different options for the forthcoming extermination of the Jews; should they be shot, gassed, hanged, or worked to death? Should they be transported to special death camps, or simply killed in situ, in the ghettos? If they were to be transported to death camps, should this be done by road, rail, or canal? Several pros and cons for each option were detailed in neat little bullet points, and the children, playing the roles of other top-ranking Black Knights of the SS, had to debate which idea was best and why.

Predictably (albeit not to us at the time…) the whole exercise was a disaster.

Several students—all of them male—thought the whole thing was a big joke, goose-stepping to their seats, shouting “Heil Hitler!” whilst sticking their right arm into the air at each available opportunity, and barking their every word in a ridiculous ’Allo ’Allo–style German accent.

Other, more sensitive souls—all of them female—simply found the whole exercise morally repugnant and refused to pretend to be Nazis or return my Hitler salutes at all. When asked questions like “So, how do you think we should dispose of the subhuman Jewish scum, SS Obersturmbannführer Frau Eichmann?” they narrowed their eyes and said things like “We don’t want to exterminate the Jews at all, you racist!”—a response that, if I was truly committed toward remaining in character, should have resulted in me immediately shooting them.

The professional Holocaust educator called in to deliver lectures on the whole matter, a young lady from an organization that arranged educative trips to Auschwitz for British schoolchildren, was little better. At the time, there had been a recent news story about the England soccer team being given a tour of Auschwitz, during which some became bored and made jokes. The lady was adamant this was a most disgusting thing, and that Auschwitz, of all subjects, was no laughing matter. Then she showed us all a slapstick slide of her falling over in the death camp during one of her previous trips there when it was icy underfoot, and laughed about it whilst pulling a silly face. I couldn’t help but feel she was giving out some rather mixed messages to her audience here.

Armchair Generals
How could each and every one of the alleged adults involved in this debacle not have realized how misguided the whole thing was at the time? Well, we were all then aged in our early 20s, and the answer, I think, is that—a bit like Jean Baudrillard with his famous book about the First Gulf War being primarily a media event, not a physical real-world military one for 99 percent of the globe’s slack-jawed population, sitting safely at home and watching it all unfold excitingly on TV—none of us really believed WWII had ever actually ever taken place at all.

As time passed, post-1945, so did the visible effects of the war on the world around us. A European child born in 1945 would still have been able to play in bomb sites; a child born in 1985 would not. Gradually, WWII has become something we have only ever seen on TV or at the cinema, read about in books, or experienced vicariously during a videogame.

In the modern age, there are now two Nazis, and two Hitlers. There is the real Third Reich, which actually existed, but which very few of us ever directly knew. Secondly, there is a kind of Virtual Reich, presented to us through the mass media. The Nazis in this Virtual Reich fulfill two key recurring pantomime villain roles: crude and Manichean embodiments of evil, or else figures of risible comic fun. Through exciting movies such as the Indiana Jones series, the kind of sources from which I first really “learned” [sic] about Nazism as a child, I was given the rather strange message that both such presentations were not in any sense contradictory; that it was normal to laugh at that which you were also simultaneously being exhorted to consider wholly evil.

A Pole’s Position
If my own adolescent acts of Nazi-related classroom juvenilia were tasteless enough, then a more recent gone-viral piece of schoolwork from a Japanese high school student known only as “Takumi” makes me look positively PC. Asked to write a letter in English to a famous person from history, this is what Takumi wrote:

Dear Hitler,

My name is Takumi. I’ve been a big fan of yours since I learned about you in the History class. I love your war. You know how to fight! Your wars were beautiful. I want to know you more.

Takumi

That sounds like a teenage girl writing a fan letter to her favorite pop star, not one to history’s most famous genocidal dictator. The further you travel away from actual 1930s–40s Nazi Germany—both temporally and geographically—the worse the whole problem becomes, it would seem.

I cannot claim to be a big fan of Poland’s current pro-E.U. gauleiter Donald Tusk, but I did rather agree with him when, back in March, he warned that Europe and the U.S. might well be in some kind of “prewar” scenario with Russia without really even truly believing it.

Raised as we spoiled post-1940s Westerners have been in a postwar world in which, or so Francis Fukuyama once lied to us, history had ended once and for all, and where threats like the Nazis gradually came to seem every bit as remote and cartoonish as the Vikings or the Huns, younger generations seem constitutionally incapable of recognizing that military conflict is once more a real-world possibility after all, and not something that only still happens in films or far away, as in Iraq. Probably we will go on believing this, until the first enemy missiles land down upon us.

Tusk recalled a photograph that hung in his family’s house as a child; it showed crowds of happy people laughing on a Polish beach, taken on 31 August 1939. A few hours later, Hitler—the real Hitler, not the comical cartoon one people like myself and Takumi grew up knowing—invaded, and WWII broke out. Tusk then spoke of a recent encounter with a Spanish official who demanded that the European Council henceforth drop all usage of the word “war” when discussing the present conflict in Ukraine; the term sounded far too “abstract” to voters, he said. It is just such a blind failure to prepare for war, to believe that it is even possible, that is the most common prerequisite for creating the conditions in which it actually will happen.

Putin may attack the West, if pushed too far; it is not impossible. The problem is that most people just do not believe they live inside history anymore—because, for so long, they have not truly had to. Most comfortable sleepwalkers in the Western world today do not really believe in the past existence of Adolf Hitler. Do they really believe in the present existence of Vladimir Putin, either? One day, like the dead atheist faced with an angry God, I fear they may be forced to do so.

The Week’s Most Gayish, Grayish, and Patriots’ Dayish Headlines

TAKING IT UP THE BUTT(ERFLY)
There was a time when leftists demanded that the entire world stand still for a bug. In 1995, when Steven Spielberg of Schindler’s List fame, Jeffrey Katzenberg of Disney fame, and David Geffen of anal sex fame tried to build a film studio in West L.A.’s coastal Ballona Wetlands, their plans were halted by local environmentalists who got an injunction because the project would’ve interfered with the mating grounds of the monarch butterfly.

The three most powerful men in Hollywood, torpedoed by a butterfly.

Butterfly is schmetterling in German, and as history buffs know, the Schmetterling was a Nazi missile project abandoned by Hitler at war’s end in 1945.

It took fifty years, but a schmetterling finally blew up some Jews.

The days of leftists using butterfly sex dens to force David Geffen to pull out of a real estate project (when the man won’t even pull out of Keanu Reeves) are long gone. The anti-growth leftists of the ’90s have been replaced by the “invite the world” immigration fanatics of today, who say to hell with butterflies and wetlands—we need tenements and Section 8 housing, and lots of concrete; nothing but concrete (a position held by Matt Yglesias, the only man on earth who masturbates to Brutalism).

So, with butterflies no longer a bulwark against progress, what can leftists use?

Trannies, of course! Last week the United Nations passed a resolution protecting the habitats of the “intersex.” Yes, the “intersex” are now a globally protected species! And The Independent, producing the most “wait, is this satire?” headline ever, declared “Climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers.”

And no, it’s not satire. “Indonesian trans sex workers” claim that heavy rains caused by climate change are ruining their business. Because it’s hard to yell “it’s ma’am; call me ma’am” when you’re drowned out by the din of a thunderstorm. So now all environmental concerns must be seen through the lens of “how does this affect trannies?”

All hail the ma’amarch butterfly.

SOUL-AR ECLIPSE
Of course, if world events are not being seen through the lens of “but how do trannies feel,” they’re seen from the perspective of “how can we make this about black people?”

Capital B is a “Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization reporting for Black communities across the country.” One imagines the newsroom as a kind of Daily Planet, but with Perry Black barking orders at reporters:

“La’mpray, gimme 800 words on why cold onion rings are even worse than cold fries.”

“DeZeeza, gimme a column on why shooting someone who cuts you off in traffic is the only rational option.”

“Tykwando, I need a front-page feature: ‘Asians: the most punchable faces on earth.’”

Last week Capital B ran a story titled “Eclipse Fever Is Gripping Black Texans.”

“While the event will cast a brief shadow on life in Texas, it sheds a light on scientific fields that have been mainly out of reach for Black folks.”

“Journalist” Adam Mahoney doesn’t go into detail about the “out of reach of black folks” thing. Instead, his piece explains why blacks are skeered o’ the eclipse. Blacks have been advised to “stock up on several days’ worth of food, fuel, and water and be wary of traveling away from their homes,” just in case the eclipse brings the wrath of da Sun Duppy of da Goofa Man.

Of course, most American blacks aren’t as ignorant as Mahoney assumes. They know that the eclipse happened because your mamma so fat she went skydiving and blocked the sun.

Meanwhile, last week in Southfield, Michigan—71 percent black—a hoodie foodie shot up a Chipotle because the workers didn’t give him enough guacamole. Is there a connection between black people murdering strangers over food and “scientific fields being out of their reach”?

Tune in next week to Capital B, and read all about how the racist guacamole embargo has destroyed a generation of prospective black Einsteins.

GOOGLY-EYES WIDE SHUT
AOC has a problem with AI fakes. Which is ironic because AOC herself was once accused of being an AI fake. In 2021, Daily Beast editor Justin Baragona accused Tucker Carlson of faking an image of AOC: “So it appears Tucker’s producers added googly eyes to AOC in this image.”

Turned out the image was unaltered; the crazy eyes were totally real.

Baragona is Italian for “insane idiot” (back in the Old Country, the Baragonas were most notable for being the first family to stick a fork in an electrical socket).

But now AOC has seen actual fakes of herself—AI-generated porn featuring her likeness—and she’s not happy. Last week she told The Telegraph that she intends to propose a law prohibiting AI “deepfake porn.”

“It has real effects on the people victimized by it. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it,” she said. Ironically, that’s the same problem with the new Road House.

AOC added, “It parallels the intention of physical rape and sexual assault, which is about power, domination, and humiliation.” This would be a stunning and brave statement against rape if it didn’t come from someone who’s totally cool with Hamas’ rape of Israeli hostages.

Indeed, last week Hamas told the media that it’s “misplaced” the forty hostages Israel wants returned in exchange for a ceasefire.

Have you looked under the couch cushions, Mukbar?

AOC’s now realized that maybe AI deepfakes have their uses. “Maybe make AI replicas of the hostages, and the Jews won’t know the difference,” she told Al Jizz-ear-a, a deepfake AI porn site for Muslims who enjoy ejaculating in the Eustachian tube.

And even that site rejects AOC’s googly eyes as too creepy.

FEELING PAIN? GHETTO-VER IT
Share the pain! That’s the message from Advil’s “Pain Equity Project,” announced last week via a video of black people discussing “pain bias.” The panelists claimed that blacks don’t get enough pain meds from doctors because doctors “never believe black people experience pain.”

Such “doctors” must never watch CNN, because if they did, they’d hear that everything puts black people in pain, from the glances of whites to standardized tests to incorrect fast-food orders to seeing an Asian strolling down the street.

Maybe it’s the constant crying wolf (“I bashed that white girl’s head in because her words gave me pain”) that creates the skepticism.

“I’m in pain, doctor!”

“Lemme guess—you saw a movie and the lead actor wasn’t black.”

“Yeah, it’s killin’ me!”

Two odd things about the “pain project.” One, you don’t need a doctor’s permission to take Advil. You in pain? Buy some Advil, brutha. Hell, you won’t even get busted for shoplifting some. Ain’t that good enough?

Maybe blacks just need to be told what “OTC” means.

Also, whites (white children especially) are overprescribed opioids more often than blacks, and it’s literally killing them. That blacks wanna get “equalized” on this is insane. The desire to have everything the white man has apparently extends even to premature death.

“Doc, I’ze in pain! Gimme dat fendinol.”

“Sir, federal regulations require that I can’t…”

“You racist, Doc! I’ze suin’ you for pain bias!”

“Okay, okay, here’s a mason jar of it.”

“I don’t need da mace; I just need da pills.”

A week later at the funeral:

“Lazondo Giggins was a fine man! A gentle student and an honors giant. Wait, maybe I got dat backwards. I been eaten dem pills he left behind. Anybody want some of what’s in dis mason jar? Don’t worry—there ain’t no mace.”

CHING CHONG DIE-NAMAN
On the topic of “ethnic pain,” one of the enduring racial myths about “Orientals” is that they’re not just inscrutable, but unfeeling. Pain doesn’t register as it does with whites.

Chalk it up to the transcontinental railroad. If an Irish worker died, the Micks would spend a week in mourning—drinking, singing, weeping, brawling, hugging, and reciting bad poetry. If a Chin worker died, his compatriots would feed the body to dogs, eat the dogs, then go about their business.

That the Cultural Revolution would eventually reach a death toll of somewhere around 10 million only happened because the standard Chinese reaction to death is “meh.” Hence their beloved dictator’s nickname, “Meh Zedong.”

Nobody knows why Orientals keep voting Democrat, keep voting Soros, even as they remain the prime targets for abuse at the hands of black thugs in cities like New York and San Francisco. Even Jews tend to only vote that way when they themselves can live in safe neighborhoods.

But not America’s slippery slopes. They take the punches like it’s nothing.

Case in point: Asian-American Iain Forrest, a medical student and cellist. Forrest loved nothing more than playing classical music for commuters in NYC’s subway stations. Until he was brutally beaten by female black thug Amira Hunter, who was then released without bail by female black judge Marva Brown.

Why’d Ludweave van Beethoven attack Forrest? Who knows; Judge Brown was like “dem Chinks don’t feel pain no-how. Now gimme some Advil; dat racist eclipse dun put me in pain.”

Last week, a new judge finally agreed to hold Hunter behind bars, after she returned the favor of Judge Brown’s release by shoplifting $325 in merchandise from a Midtown Nordstrom.

For his part, Forrest, the assaulted musician, reacted to the beating with the expected nonchalance.

As a singer, he’s no mezzo. But as an Asian? He’s as “meh…so?” as they come.

I have never really understood why people like pug dogs. They seem to me ugly, they run to fat, and because of their pushed-in snouts and widely spaced eyes, they are inexpressive. They have difficulty breathing, like a fat man trying to sleep on his back. Between breathing and choking, there is for them but a narrow difference.

It is surely a sign of the perversity of man that he should have selectively bred such creatures precisely for their unattractive features. It is because they (the dogs) inevitably suffer that some countries are considering the prohibition of their breeding, though whether pug dogs would themselves agree that it was better that they had never existed than that they were born with all their disabilities cannot be known.

I write this because our femme de ménage, cleaning lady, in France brings her pug dog with her. Both she and the dog have had a hard life. It cannot really be any 60-year-old woman’s dream to clean for us, however well we try to treat her; but, widowed, she is obliged to work to help her daughter, who herself was widowed by the early death of her husband, leaving her with a child to raise.

She rescued the dog, a female, from being put down after she, the dog, had served her turn for a breeder of pugs and was therefore no use to him. This purely instrumental attitude to dogs, especially those raised to be pets, horrifies me. I first encountered it on my return from a dog show, the largest in the world. I didn’t much like the show, for at best it seemed that the dogs on show were an instrument to inflate the egos of those who showed them, albeit that they were for the most part extremely handsome creatures. (There was a vet present who specialized in toxicology, for these “dog-lovers” did not hesitate to poison their rivals’ dogs if they could, thereby, ruin their performance in the show ring, thus increasing the chance of their own dogs winning a prize.)

In the train, I sat opposite a man who was reading a dog magazine. We fell to talking, and I discovered that he was a dog-breeder. “You must love dogs,” I said. “For me it’s just a business,” he replied. Whether he said this just to bring the conversation to a close, I do not know; he resumed reading his magazine. But I felt a chill in my heart.

Out cleaning lady’s dog, now quite old for the breed, snuffles a lot and seems easily to choke. She cannot run, she merely waddles from time to time a little faster than she walks. She cannot really wag her coiled tail, at most she waggles her hindquarters a little when pleased. But her face expresses nothing. Nor can she bark, at most making a noise like someone with severe laryngitis.

Nevertheless, she is clearly affectionate to her new mistress and even quite friendly toward us. She will, with difficulty, rise up and put her front paws on our laps. Perhaps I imagine it, but there seems to be an appeal in her eyes, and she likes to be stroked. I have even come to like her in return. There is something in her ugliness that melts the heart.

It is not, of course, her fault that she is ugly. Perhaps it is this that melts the heart: One pities her. And whenever I see her, I reflect on the part that chance plays in our lives—but also the part that our efforts play. In fact, this is the central mystery of human existence: how we become what we are, for no inventory of our genetic inheritance and environmental circumstances quite accounts for it. Where human beings are concerned, there is always an unbridgeable gap between what is to be explained and the explanation offered, and I hope that there always will be: For total knowledge would lead to total power, and total power to total oppression.

Whenever I look at our cleaning lady’s pug, I think of a man in the small town in England in which I live half the time. He is of an age difficult to estimate, so peculiar is his appearance. No doubt a clinical geneticist could identify the syndrome with which he was born, but I cannot. He is sexually undeveloped and has a face that might lead one to suppose that he is mentally retarded, though he is nothing of the kind. His hypogonadism inclines him to fat, and he waddles rather than walks.

He induces in me a feeling of guilt for more than one reason. The first is at my own luck by comparison with his, which I did nothing to deserve. I am not exceptionally good-looking, but I don’t think anyone would remark on my odd appearance as I walked down the street. His appearance is so odd that I don’t think anyone could look at him without constantly remarking on it. But he is both pleasant and harmless.

This gives rise to the second cause of my guilt: I am not able myself to put his appearance out of my mind whenever I see him. Occasionally, I have had occasion to speak to him, for sometimes he serves in a charity shop where I buy secondhand books. I feel bad whether I look him in the face or avert my eyes. If the latter, I am obviously avoiding him; if the former, I may appear to be staring at him. In fact, I can find no natural way of facing him or interacting with him; I feel guilty that I am unable to make contact, so to speak, with the man within.

This is my failing, of course. It is precisely the failing that probably makes of him a very lonely man, one who can never be quite at ease or have a normal social life, for I doubt that I am alone in my failing. I feel great pity for him, but I cannot express it because this would only humiliate him further and make any interaction with him even more artificial than it already is.

I realize how fortunate I have been in life, though I make my living by complaint. My misfortunes have always been of my own making—one definition, perhaps, of a free man.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

President Joe Biden keeps lecturing corporate America to “pay your fair share” of taxes. It turns out he’s right that some companies really are getting away scot-free from paying taxes.

But it isn’t Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley or the Wall Street financial company “fat cats” or big banks or Walmart. They pay billions in taxes.

The culprits here are the very companies that Biden is in bed with: green energy firms.

It turns out that despite all the promises over the past decade about how renewable energy is the future of power production in America, by far the biggest tax dodgers in the country are the wind and solar power industries. Over the past several decades, the green energy lobby — what I call the climate-change-industrial complex — isn’t paying its fair share. That’s because the vast majority of these companies pay nearly ZERO income taxes.

But they wade in rivers of federal direct and indirect subsidies that keep these zombie companies alive. Over the past two decades, the renewable energy lobby has collected more than one-quarter trillion dollars in subsidies — payments that we’ve been assured over and over would be temporary. The argument for these grants, loans, tax abatements and other sweetheart kisses is that these were “infant industries” in need of a Head Start program for CEOs. Except these companies have never even reached puberty after all these years.

What’s worse is that Biden keeps spoiling the children with lavish gifts for bad performance. A new report by tax expert Adam Michel at the Cato Institute finds the green energy subsidies — mostly created by Biden policies like the so-called Inflation Reduction Act — will drain the Treasury of as much as $1.8 trillion over 10 years.

The Cato report finds that since its passage, “the estimated cost of the IRA’s new and expanded energy tax credits increased dramatically.”

These tax shelters are just a form of Aid to Dependent Corporations. They never seem to want to cut the umbilical cord.

What have we gotten for this mountain of taxpayer-funded green energy largesse? Nothing, really. Today, we still get 80% of our energy in America from fossil fuels and nuclear power. Wind and solar are stuck at less than 10%. This is some investment we’re making.

Meanwhile, Biden keeps railing against companies that pay no income tax. He’s advocated a mandatory 15% minimum corporate tax. But guess what industry is explicitly exempt from the minimum? The green energy lobby.

It’s just a reminder that a lot of people are getting really, really rich off climate change hysteria.

The “green” in green energy doesn’t stand for a cleaner environment. It stands for the color of money. Yours and mine.

Back in the good old days when the Brits ruled the roost in the American colonies, the sneaky Brits used a system of their own to lord it over those who looked like them, spoke like them, and worshipped the same God as them, but called themselves American rather than British. It was very simple, really. The bad old Brits recalled an old British law passed by those whose knowledge of democracy was equal to mine of homosexuality, called the Bills of Attainder. If someone had displeased you, and if you belonged to the right party, he or she would be attainted, and they’d never bother you for the duration. Bills of Attainder did wonders for those who were on the side of the state, such as landowners, the rich, members of parliament, aristocrats, females with connections to the landowning aristocracy, and prostitutes whose clients belonged to the Church of England, parliament, and the landowning aristocracy.

This kangaroo court system has now been revived right here in the good old US of A, and my good friend and editor of The New Criterion, Roger Kimball, was the first to write about it. As Roger pointed out, the Founders of this country, having managed to kick out the Brits, made sure Bills of Attainder became a no-no in the Land of the Free. Along with the hated “bills” came the ex post facto law, which was pretty much the same thing. The Founders said no bills, no post facto, and added a statute of limitations to ensure that if you stole an apple when young, you would not be prosecuted after you were a success fifty years later. (I am simplifying all this for any of you who only read from your telephones.)

Needless to say, all the above are back with a vengeance, and the target is The Donald—who else?—with a ludicrous statute of limitations trampled by a woman who claims she was raped by The Donald at Bergdorf’s, an impossibility to those of us who know the dressing rooms, unless the rapist and the victim are tiny midgets no circus would employ because they’re simply too small.

Let’s face it: Trump might not be a gentleman of the old school, but that he’s a victim of the establishment and target of the judiciary under orders from the top is as true as the fact he dyes his hair. Just reading the headlines reminds me of the ones that appeared back in the ’30s in Moscow. That’s when Uncle Joe Stalin purged his rivals by having them admit under torture that they had plotted against the state and had them shot. This the Democrats have not done, and they don’t need to because they’ve got the useful idiots, the media, on their side.

What Uncle Joe did not do was advertise the fact he was going to get his rivals. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, did. She campaigned on the promise “to get Trump.” It is unheard of. Even banana republics do not advertise they’re “gonna get their enemies,” but Noo Yawk does.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton went on cable news and said pretty much the same thing. But none of this compares with that guy Engoron, a New York state Supreme Court judge who would easily fit in with those German judges who oversaw the trial of those who tried to kill Hitler. Engoron used the charge that Trump overestimated his wealth to stick a fine on him that would bankrupt Elon Musk, ignoring the fact that all real estate is overvalued at all times by everyone selling. If this is justice, I am a banana.

Mind you, The Donald can be his own worst enemy. In a way, it illustrates he’s normal. He screams and insults and acts the way we would act if we had an old hag like Maureen Dowd calling him worse than a murderer in her pathetically hateful column in the Times, while she shows off her limited knowledge of Macbeth by name-dropping the latter ad nauseam.

Basically, the state of New York has issued a Bill of Attainder on The Donald, and the governor has admitted as much. When other investors threatened to stop doing business in the state because of the extraordinary fine imposed on Trump, she admitted it was a one-off; in other words, we’re only after Trump, not you, so back to business as usual.

So, in summing up: The Biden regime is hell-bent on indicting, arresting, bankrupting, and imprisoning Trump. It is a strange universe for American politics. Not exactly Eisenhower versus Stevenson, or Kennedy versus Nixon. A debarred lawyer and a former porn star as star witnesses against the 45th president, the legal system misused as never before in America, grotesque judgments issued by judges like Engoron that would lead to suicide by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and bloated penalties imposed that would make a South American banana republic judge blush in shame. Biden himself is no innocent bystander. He made it clear he wanted Trump prosecuted, and Attorney General Merrick Garland shamefully obeyed. When Trump first won in 2016, the powers that be were unprepared. They soon after invented the Russian connection that took three years to prove totally false. This time they’re not taking any chances.

The New York Times is weeping over the death penalty again, publishing a glowing review of Nashville reporter Steven Hale’s book Death Row Welcomes You. Obviously, it’s an important book, since only 1 million journalists have already written about their touching and personal relationships with men sentenced to death.

Although I am generally a hate-reader — having, for example, at least skimmed nearly every book about Trump (he’s a Russian asset, a threat to democracy, a conman and sociopath) — I can’t in good conscience contribute to an author who waxes on about his “friends” on death row, their “beautiful paintings,” and how supporters want to “celebrate” the life of men who just happened to mercilessly torture and kill helpless human beings.

So this will be a review of the Times‘ review, with supplementary information from Amazon’s book sample, plus news reports and court records about the crimes that put Hale’s friends on death row.

Hale, the Times writes, gives an insider’s account of death row — a place “shrouded by myths of monsters and abominations.”

Myths?

Yes. For example, the Times starts with three paragraphs on Billy Ray Irick, such as the “abuse” he suffered as a child. (If you’ve ever been spanked, the media will turn you into the star of “Mommy Dearest.”) We also get Hale’s description of Irick’s response to lethal injection: “He jolted … His face turned almost purple.”

Hey, does anybody know what landed Irick on death row? The Times says, “Irick raped and murdered a girl.”

A girl.

Her name was Paula Dyer, and she was 7 years old.

While babysitting Dyer, Irick raped her — anally and vaginally — then suffocated her, busting blood vessels in her face and eyes. When the police arrived, she was lying on the living room floor with blood pooling between her legs. She was still alive, so we know she suffered.

Lead investigator Don Wiser told The Knoxville News Sentinel: “I saw her body at the hospital that night — just a beautiful little girl. You had to wonder who could do something like that to a 7-year-old child.”

Irick’s only explanation: “I lost it.”

I stand corrected. It’s totally a myth that death row is full of monsters.

Suggestion for the one-millionth and one reporter to write about his pals on death row: If you’re going to vomit out prose like this, please don’t:

“I heard far more about the grace of Jesus Christ growing up than I did the state’s duty to repay killing with killing. I suppose this is why, at some point in my teenage years, I came to the belief that an earth as it was in heaven would not include the execution of prisoners if it had any prisoners at all.”

But as long as Hale has graced us with that paragraph, we absolutely do not “repay killing with killing.” We repay unimaginably hideous murders with 30 years of free room and board, including time for exercising, reading, socializing, making friends, dating, getting married, having children and telling your life story to gullible reporters — all while your victims are in the ground being eaten by worms — and then, being delivered a quick and merciful death.

Hale says his book will reveal “the true horror of executions and the full beautiful and painful humanity of the condemned.”

How about the painful humanity of Lee Standifer and the horror of her execution? In 1981 — yes, that’s how swift and certain the death penalty is — this 23-year-old mentally disabled girl was on a date with David Earl Miller, whom she’d met at the library. He got her drunk, took her home and smashed her head with a fireplace poker so hard it fractured her skull and burst one of her eye sockets. He then dragged her outside, undressed her, tied her up and stabbed her over and over again in the neck, chest, stomach and mouth.

A brisk 37 years later, the “beautiful … humanity” who did that to Standifer finally got the electric chair.

Another piece of beautiful humanity, Donnie Johnson, refused his last meal, asking that instead his supporters “feed the homeless.” Gosh, what a great guy.

He’d killed his wife, Connie, by stuffing a 30-gallon garbage bag so far down her throat that only two inches protruded from her mouth. One of the officers who found her body told the Commercial Appeal that if the governor had “made the scene with us that night, he wouldn’t grant any clemency.”

But Hale is more interested in the last moments of the beautiful humanity. He bemoans Stephen West’s “violent death” in the electric chair. Violent death? A quick jolt of electricity is a full body massage compared to what West did to Wanda Romines and her 15-year-old daughter, Sheila.

After telling his pregnant wife he was going fishing, West and a teenage accomplice entered the Romines’ home, tied up mother and daughter and, for hours, forced them to watch each other being tortured and, in Sheila’s case, raped by both men. Wanda was stabbed more than 40 times. Worse, she had to watch helplessly as her daughter was raped and slowly stabbed to death.

What kind of moral ghoul could read about Wanda and Sheila’s murder and decide to write a book honoring West’s life?

Hale claims “support for executions, or indifference to them, could not survive a … night with the men facing them.” Tell us the facts of the case first, and most people would pay to watch the executions on Netflix.

McKinsey & Company, the famous management consulting firm, has published a number of wildly popular reports during the Great Awokening—such as 2015’s “Diversity Matters,” 2018’s “Delivering Through Diversity,” 2020’s “Diversity Wins,” and 2023’s “Diversity Matters Even More”—asserting that gender and ethnic diversity in corporate management is a magic bullet for making money.

McKinsey is a (highly) for-profit entity not otherwise known for doing disinterested scientific research just to advance the frontiers of knowledge. Then again, neither is McKinsey an investor trying to pick undervalued stocks. Instead, it makes its money telling the C-suite what the bosses want to hear.

But all that didn’t induce much news media skepticism about McKinsey’s reports…until recently as DEI has slightly receded in fashion.

Now, however, the conservative press is finally starting to publicize the old doubts of the business school researchers who live to find ways to outsmart the stock market.

For a summary of why the greatest concentration of outspoken skeptics about McKinsey’s epochal discoveries have been concentrated in B-School faculties, see London Business School professor of finance Alex Edmans’ blog May Contain Lies. Here are some highlights of his critique of McKinsey’s latest:

The paper is remarkably non-transparent about its methodology. The body of the paper never describes the sample of firms included in the study, what their dependent and independent variables are, and so on. This may be to stop people replicating their study as their prior research was found to be irreplicable. It is as if they hope that people will accept the results because they want them to be true, and not ask any questions (again, the opposite of diversity of thought).

The single most fundamental rule of thumb for thinking about causality is that X couldn’t likely have caused Y if Y happened before X. But not in McKinsey’s world:

But the McKinsey study makes an even more basic error absent from the other studies: they measure diversity after they measure financial performance! In their own words, “The analysis of this report is based on 2022 data on diversity in leadership teams and 2017-2021 data on financial performance.”

To draw a baseball analogy, were the Los Angeles Dodgers the highest-revenue franchise from 2017 to 2021 because in the 2023–2024 offseason they invested over $1 billion dollars in two Japanese stars, Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto? Or is Los Angeles already being the richest franchise why Dodgers were, as expected, able to afford the top two Japanese players? (Japanese players are more expensive for American teams than, say, comparable Dominican players: The Dodgers had to pay a $50 million fee to Yamamoto’s Japanese club for the right to pay him $325 million over 12 years.)

The answer to the baseball question is obvious, but then we tend to think more clearly about sport than about society. Edmans observes:

This makes it very likely that any relationship is due to reverse causality: it is financial performance that allows companies to invest in diversity, rather than diversity causing financial performance. (Indeed, my own work finds that financial strength is associated with superior future diversity, equity, and inclusion).

Competent executives and board members who check the currently preferred sex and race boxes are much in demand these days. High-quality People of Diversity are a luxury item more affordable by profitable corporations (and low-quality PoDs are less of a risk to strong firms to drive them into bankruptcy).

Also, McKinsey reports only one measure of profitability, Earnings Before Income and Taxes:

McKinsey’s earlier results were earlier shown to be untrue for all of these alternative profitability measures, leading to concerns about cherry picking the one measure that worked.

And why not report what really matters?

Moreover, it is not clear whether you should be measuring profitability at all. The most relevant performance is (long-term) Total Shareholder Return. TSR is what investors actually receive. TSR is far more comprehensive than EBIT (or any profitability measure). If a company announces a new patent or wins a big customer contract, it will boost the stock price but not immediately lift EBIT. More importantly, TSR is forward looking. Many tech companies have enjoyed soaring TSR despite modest profits due to their long-term potential.

Tech companies have of course driven much of the growth of stock indices over recent generations. (Six of the top seven firms on earth in market capitalization at the beginning of this month are American tech companies.)

If Asians like Jensen Huang of Nvidia, the graphics processing unit chipmaker that is the third most valuable publicly traded firm in the world, are redefined as white-adjacent, then the founders of tech companies are notoriously nondiverse. A legendary Silicon Valley investor once told me he’d analyzed the founding teams of over 150 “unicorn” start-ups with valuations of at least one billion dollars. Only three had female founders, and they were part of husband-wife pairs.

So, McKinsey’s choice to report profitability rather than stock performance biases their results.

You might have wondered why, if McKinsey had actually discovered a major, enduring, and well-publicized violation of the notorious Efficient-Market Hypothesis (that it’s tough to consistently beat the stock market using public information), why day traders weren’t sitting at home counting pictures of corporate officers and board members by demographic categories, and getting rich by betting on the more diverse firms.

Note that you don’t have to believe in the Efficient-Market Hypothesis, which has been around more or less since finance economist Eugene Fama’s 1970 paper, but you very much ought to consider it when thinking about how to invest.

Consider that back in the 1970s, mutual funds typically charged an 8 percent “load” so you could compensate E.F. Hutton for talking when others listened or, more justifiably, subsidize Smith Barney’s wonderful John Houseman Paper Chase character commercials.

Of course, practically no stock picker ever beat the stock market by enough to make these funds worth the 8 percent load. If they were that good, why would they even cut you in on their lucre? (Indeed, one hedge fund that does have a track record of drubbing the market over three decades, James Simon’s Renaissance Technologies, is largely run for the benefit of the math geniuses who work for it.)

Hence, today, the most popular investment funds tend to resemble those offered by Vanguard, which has $7.7 trillion under management because it focuses on minimizing the fees it charges its clients by simply reproducing the S&P or the like. Why spend money on putative financial seers when you can exploit the wisdom of the crowd for very little? (Of course, if everyone followed Vanguard’s strategy of freeloading on those trying to beat the market, asset prices would become badly wrong because nobody would still be doing the hard work.)

Obviously, lots of rich guys have outperformed the market. But the lengths they need to go to try to outgun the efficient-market hypothesis are pretty impressive. For example, in the 1983 Eddie Murphy nature vs. nurture comedy Trading Places, Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche try to beat the orange juice futures market by stealing a Department of Agriculture forecast of the orange harvest. But already by that point, the most successful commodity traders in cocoa futures were employing a network of bush pilots to aerial photograph the immense African hinterland to see how this year’s cocoa harvest was coming.

Or high-speed traders will engage in prodigies of investment to shave milliseconds off the time it takes to arbitrage markets in Chicago and New York.

In contrast, anybody could have sat in his pajamas and counted the diversity of publicly traded firms’ leadership and invested in the most diverse ones. Yet, I’ve seldom heard of anybody trying to beat the market by doing it.

It’s almost as if people tend to believe our orthodox cant about diversity with the part of their brain devoted to being socially acceptable, yet simultaneously disbelieve it with another part dedicated to making money.

Similarly, I’ve seldom if ever heard anybody argue that diversity is more valuable in one type of industry than another, even though that’s more reasonable-sounding than that diversity is a panacea.

For example, it’s not implausible that women executives and board members would tend to be beneficial at Lululemon (although the yoga pants retailer was founded by billionaire Chip Wilson, an Ayn Rand-worshipping, DEI-despising straight dude with studied opinions on women’s butts).

But that logic would conversely suggest that male leadership would be better at Nvidia, whose chips power such male-dominated activities as gaming, cryptocurrency mining, and artificial intelligence. Of course, diversity-mongers are desperate to sink their claws deeper into Nvidia, so you aren’t going to hear that. Instead, diversity will continue to be hawked, no matter how implausibly, as a universal cure-all.

There are well-known stories of firms getting a leg up on rivals by discriminating less. The most famous might be the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1946, the most distinguished baseball executive, Branch Rickey, broke the long ban on black ballplayers by signing Jackie Robinson. Brooklyn then stayed out ahead of most other clubs by playing ever more blacks. In return, during Robinson’s ten-year career (1947–1956), black Dodgers were five times the National League’s most valuable player and four times the rookie of the year. The Dodgers won six league championships and lost two others in the last inning of the season.

What about firms that started hiring more women around 1970? Surely, some firms quickly got a leg up because there were plenty of competent women who were underemployed before social norms changed abruptly about a half decade after the end of the baby boom. But, to my frustration (I like being aware of historical examples), I can’t name any companies that flourished by hiring and promoting more women.

I suspect this is partly because customs changed faster and more universally regarding women than blacks. In contrast, the St. Louis Cardinals and Boston Red Sox met in the 1946 World Series but never made it back during the subsequent prodigious careers of Stan Musial and Ted Williams, respectively, due in part to their managements not integrating for a decade or more after Brooklyn had.

But it’s also because our dominant mindset is averse to recollecting that corporations have obvious financial incentives to not discriminate irrationally. Recounting how quickly American culture switched to encouraging women and blacks a half century ago would undermine the conventional wisdom that they are still pervasively undermined by systemic racism and sexism.

Yes, for those who are asking, Elon nuked me from Twitter. Perma-ban—irreversible.

Yes, it involved the Holocaust. But let’s talk about that next week, okay?

Because a great man died last week, and I’d like to honor him.

And recall the time I stalked him.

Joe Flaherty was improv comedy. As Dan Aykroyd stated in a tribute following Flaherty’s death last week at age 82, Flaherty was the instructor for Aykroyd, Belushi, Radner, Candy, Murray—the greats. Ironically, one of the reasons Flaherty didn’t get recruited by Lorne Michaels for SNL’s first season is that he was traversing North America starting new Second City franchises because nobody knew how to do the work better.

When the SCTV TV show started, Flaherty was its heart and soul. The cast changed—Candy came and went, Catherine O’Hara came and went, Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis came, went, and came, Martin Short came once (an unfortunate medical problem), but Flaherty remained.

He was my childhood icon. More than anyone at SNL, more than anyone at Monty Python.

As a teen actor touring with an Anglo-American theater company in 1985, I aped Flaherty mercilessly. Every comedic take I did was swiped from him. That’s why I never went into acting as a profession—I’ve nothing original to offer. But damn I got loads of laughs copying Flaherty. Nobody could do a better double take. It was vastly different from Jack Benny’s “gentle” double take. A Flaherty double take was harsh, swift, and impossibly funny.

Long before it became fashionable to speak of entertainment “universes”—the “MCU,” the “DCU”—SCTV established a “universe,” a show-within-a-show: the fictional SCTV network, owned and operated by Guy Caballero, portrayed by Flaherty. Although each episode consisted of sketches, as an anchor there was always a story arc about Caballero. One man trying to keep a terrible TV network running, surrounded by terrible people.

But the thing is, Caballero was terrible himself. And this is what I hope to convey about a character that’s meant so much to me in my life. Indeed, a character that, to an extent, has defined me.

Guy Caballero was a flawed man, and that’s putting it mildly. He pretended to be crippled just to get “respect.” I’ll never see anything funnier than the moment, early in the show’s history, when we first witness Caballero wheel up to some stairs, get out of his wheelchair, carry the chair up the stairs, and get back in. Time and again, he’d do the same thing, always explaining to onlookers that the wheelchair was a necessary ruse to force his staff to respect him, because you have to respect a cripple.

And that wasn’t even Caballero’s worst quality (believe it or not). He was an embezzler, a cheat, a slippery, cruel employer. But also, he was endearingly childlike. It was such a great, multilayered character. And by God it stuck with me, and struck a chord with me. And just as Flaherty’s double take came to define me as a young comedic actor, the Guy Caballero character came to define me as an adult.

And then one day in 2002 I had the opportunity to speak to Flaherty one-on-one.

My girlfriend from 2001 to 2003—I won’t say her name because she’s a “civilian” but also because she stabbed me once and I’m still really fucking afraid of her (you never forget your first kiss or your first slashed artery), so I’ll call her Bewbs McManus—was a stunning tall busty blonde from Michigan, in L.A. to be an actress (what, you expected her to be here to attend electrician school?). Bewbs’ first L.A. acting gig was a role opposite Gary Busey that included a Jacuzzi scene. And on the day he first laid eyes on her Marilyn-in-her-prime body, Busey screamed “yeeeee-haw” and galloped around the room joyfully slapping his ass with an imaginary riding crop.

But of course he’s always been a class act that way.

Bewbs was manager of the Hollywood Video store in Westwood Village, an upscale area adjacent to UCLA on L.A.’s Westside.

For those of you who can’t remember (i.e., Zoomers), Hollywood Video was Blockbuster’s main competitor. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, it was dominant, owing in part to the fact that corporate hired managers like Bewbs McManus. Everyone wanted to be on the corner of Gayley and Wilshire Boulevard Friday night as Bewbs manned the counter wearing the cheap (and thus very revealing) Forever 21 tops I’d buy her, giving out candy and “winks” to male customers to make them think that if they just keep coming back, they might score more than a copy of the Bobcat Goldthwait direct-to-video talking-horse film.

Celebrity customers would always announce themselves to Bewbs (yes, back then even celebrities had to rent videos. Rather reminiscent of when Pee-wee Hermans had to physically visit porn theaters. The internet spoiled so much of our world’s natural order…). Bewbs would excitedly tell me about her celebrity customers. It would’ve made a good high-concept TV show: a sexy covert agent working as a video store manager. Because think about it—you had everybody’s ID (ID wasn’t racist yet; it was okay to demand a driver’s license to rent Bobcat Goldthwait’s talking-horse film), and you knew when the celeb would have to be back at the store to return the video.

Video store managers were like private eyes. They knew when and where the big names would be. “Paul Schrader has to return his copy of Barney’s Great Adventure by 9 p.m. tonight or he’ll face a $3 late fee.”

Too bad there wasn’t a TMZ back then; Bewbs could’ve made a bundle on celebrity spotting tips.

True story: One time Bewbs told me that some pervy old customer had been chatting her up, and he’d given her his card: Glenn Stevens.

Holy shit, the former deputy district attorney who blew the whistle on the McMartin School satanic panic abuse scandal, got prosecutorial immunity, and made a movie with James Woods? THAT Glenn Stevens?

Please don’t stab him, Bewbs. I really want to interview this guy! Keep him alive just long enough for that.

Bewbs and I plotted that I could stake out the store the night Stevens was supposed to return his latest video (yes, the Bobcat Goldthwait talking-horse film). As it was, she always wanted me to hang out at the store with her anyway, because it kept me at knife’s distance. But I treasured those peaceful hours at home when she’d be at work. Yet that night, there I was, waiting for Stevens to show up.

He never did.

I don’t know how much money former L.A. deputy district attorneys make, but I can tell you this: It’s enough to afford a $3 late fee.

So another of Bewbs’ regular customers was Joe Flaherty. To be clear, he never perved on her; he was never anything but a gentleman. But once he found out she was an actress (she never hid that fact, not that she had to—you live in this town long enough you can spot actresses like an Appalachian can spot Ned Beatty’s supple ass), he very helpfully gave her career pointers. And once I found out he was a regular, I told her I’d do anything to meet the guy.

So here’s where the stalking comes in: She informed me when his latest video was due back, and I staked out the store…for five hours, waiting for him. Like an assassin. A tiny Jew assassin. Lee Harvey Oyswald.

When Flaherty showed up to return his video, Bewbs introduced us.

It’s the only time in my life I felt starstruck—I was in the presence of a legend. But he was so down-to-earth, so friendly, I felt at ease.

I didn’t even speak first; Bewbs did. “My fiancé based his entire life on Guy Caballero,” she blurted out.

I nearly lost my concentration because she said “fiancé.” Uh, I’m not sure we agreed on that, babe. Maybe we need a chat.

But I was snapped back to reality when Flaherty replied, laughing hysterically, “You based your life on him? That’s horrifying!”

Now, keep in mind I’m recounting a 22-year-old conversation. I’ve played it over in my mind so many times, though, that I think I still have it accurate (as accurate as any memory can be). I told him, “You created something on a deeper level than other comedic characters. Guy Caballero understands that respect is illusory. Does the violent thug get respect, or fear? And doesn’t fear sow resentment? Maybe the better way to manipulate people is not by puffing yourself out, not via violence or threats of violence, but by playing the cripple. By playing weak while, under the surface, being a viper. Nature makes scary snakes look scary because animals announce themselves. Human snakes don’t. They sneak up on you, and I’ve used that lesson as a guard against snakes and, at times, to be one. And it’s a lesson that’s never let me down.”

Flaherty laughed and nodded, which I really appreciated. He said he’d never known someone to overthink Guy Caballero, and I told him, “I’m not even done yet.”

I explained that Caballero also represents something endearing. Yeah, he was a snake. Yeah, he hated SCTV Network and all the idiots who worked there. But every episode was him trying to make the network succeed. He hated the place, hated everything about it, but he wouldn’t give up on it. Sure, every new scheme would fail. But he could never walk away. It was hell, but it was his hell.

And isn’t that me today? Yeah, I’m a dick. Also yeah, I’m stuck on the political right, and every week I try to pound a little sense into our nuttiest of nuts, and I never succeed. I keep getting banned even as way worse people get championed. But I don’t give up.

I’m still Guy Caballero. I’ve always been Guy Caballero. The faux-crippled snake who, at heart, actually does kinda care, which makes his weekly failures funnier, because what’s funnier than a morally gray character who decides, “Maybe I can actually do good in the world,” and then gets repeatedly kicked in the nuts?

That’s comedy. And Joe Flaherty got it, better than anyone who ever lived. You have to know twenty different cultural touchstones to understand his picture-perfect satire of Thicke of the Night, and again, just like with Caballero, the core of the joke is a man sincerely trying to do something good but failing. And if you get it, it’s the funniest thing ever.

I’ll never forget the night that Joe Flaherty was just trying to return a video but ended up giving me twenty minutes of his time to talk about Guy Caballero.

Joe, God bless you. No one was better.

Okay, next week, back to politics, Elon, and the Holocaust.

Like Guy Caballero, I’m still stuck in hell.

But it’s my hell.

Did you eat a lot of chocolate for Easter last weekend? If so, did your choice of which particular color of candy egg to swallow say something deeply significant about you as a person?

Personally, I tend to prefer white chocolate to ordinary brown milk chocolate, and I certainly prefer the latter to bitter dark chocolate. But is this merely a case of de gustibus non disputandum est (“matters of taste are beyond dispute”), or a reflection of my profound internalized sense of racism and hideously white supremacist outlook upon the world?

The most popular brand of white chocolate here in the U.K. is Nestlé Milky Bar, advertised for decades by the Milky Bar Kid mascot, a bespectacled infant cowboy with strawberry-blond hair, pastel blue eyes, and skin as pale as monumental alabaster. Way back when I was a Milky Bar Kid myself, I remember hearing playground whispers about a little black boy threatening to sue Nestlé on racial discrimination grounds for not allowing him to play the part of the Kid in their adverts. As an adult, I presumed this was just a satirical urban myth: Looking it up today, I find it was actually true!

Events occurred in 1994, when 10-year-old Nathan Brandy turned up for auditions at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, and for some reason was surprised to find himself the only black child amongst 600 others who had arrived seeking to fill what was virtually an albinos-only part. According to Nathan’s mother, Maureen Gray, Nestlé “just want[ed] a blue-eyed white boy” to play their famously white and blue-eyed white chocolate mascot, which was obviously horribly racist. Risibly, the aptly named U.K. actors’ union Equity spinelessly agreed with her.

This being the pre-BLM era, Nestlé themselves were still made of sterner stuff, dismissively saying that “We are definitely not going to cast a black or Asian child in the part,” as this would just be pure cultural appropriation of the white man’s sacred heritage. “That’s what the Milky Bar Kid looks like [i.e., white, like milk] and there is no reason to change it.” Given their apparent belief that any and all such roles should be cast on an absolutely racially blind basis, I wonder what the family’s reaction would have been had Nestlé, in a similar spirit, innocently told Nathan to try his luck applying for a role as the Coco Pops Monkey instead?

Wife Is Like a Box of Chocolates
In the thirty years since, chocolate, just like everything else, has been unable to avoid falling foul of changes in contemporary social mores. Belgian chocolatiers quite happily used to sell severed chocolate hands to children, a reference to an obscure old Belgian legend. Today, a new antiwhite legend has emerged that they instead refer back to 19th-century colonial times, when white administrators in the Belgian Congo used to cruelly cut off the right hands of Congolese slaves as punishment. Pretty soon, I predict, you won’t be able to get a tray of chocolate hands in Belgium for love nor money; except in the Molenbeek area of Brussels, naturally, where sharia-compliant sweetshops will still keep some spare stock on shelves as a tasty reminder of the good old days back in their customers’ homelands.

As brown skin and brown chocolate are both, self-evidently, brown in color, it was once a common marketing ploy across Europe to name sweets after now-archaic terms for black people: The Swiss formerly sold Mohrenkopf, or “Moors Heads,” these being cores of fluffy white marshmallow covered in an encasing layer of rich, dark chocolate, but, following the public meltdown of George Floyd in 2020, these were removed from shelves by various under-pressure supermarket chains. The director of the company that manufactured the Mohrenkopf mallows, Robert Dubler, tried spouting the NRA-copying line “Chocolate products are not racist, people are,” but the stores that began boycotting his treats were forced to disagree. Given the level of pointless self-righteous outcry, you’d think it was one of the sweets themselves Mr. Floyd had actually choked to death on.

In Germany, meanwhile, similar chocolate-covered marshmallows are traditionally known as Negerkuss, or “Negro’s Kisses”; today, they have been rebranded as Schokokuss or “Chocolate Kisses,” which, being a form of obscene sexual practice much favored by homosexuals, is far more acceptably diverse.

One manufacturer of such items, Super Dickmann, caused offense by putting out an online Facebook advert to link in with Marzipan Meghan Markle’s marriage to well-known Ginger Nut Prince Harry back in 2018. The ad showed a cute cartoon image of a choco-skinned Negerkuss done up in a bridal outfit in a manner that made it look like one of the ghosts from Pac-Man wearing drag and waving at the camera. This led to a series of outraged comments in response, such as one user’s entirely reasonable “Saw Dickmann’s commercial and want to set something on fire.” Any old excuse for BLM supporters, eh?

Kinder Stupid
Another German advert, put out by the Italian candy giant Ferrero, was also accused of stoking racial hatred in this respect. In the German market, besides their most famous Kinder Surprise plastic-toy-filled hollow chocolate egg line, Ferrero also sell a hazelnut-snack product called Ferrero Küsschen, or “Ferrero Kisses,” the white chocolate versions of which are traditionally only available at Christmas, their color echoing festive snow. However, the Kisses were so popular that there was a public campaign to get them sold all year round, a demand Ferrero obeyed.

As such, Ferrero’s advert announcing this fact was styled around an election theme that had been won by an outlet called something like the White Party, who easily defeated their prime opponents the Mars Bar Party and its esteemed leader, Mick Jäger. Footage showed jubilant Jerries gathered at mass Nuremberg-style rallies applauding wildly and carrying placards saying things like “Germany Votes White,” “White Nuts Stay,” and the Barack Obama-referencing “Yes Weiss Can” (“Yes White Can”). “We all want to change the country for the tastier, we want white nuts forever!” said another banner.

Was this a Nazi-like call for low immigration and an immediate end to interracial breeding across the entire Neo-Reich? No, it was an advert for sweets. “All our assertions were purely about white chocolate,” not white skin or white sperm, Ferrero spokesmen felt obliged to confirm, before withdrawing the ad. Did anyone seriously think otherwise? Yes, because this is the pathetic world we now live in.

An even clearer example of a racial pyramid system allegedly existing amongst chocolate products occurred a few Easters back when U.K. retail chain Waitrose likewise apologized for selling “racist” three-packs of chocolate Easter ducklings, one white, one brown, one dark. The light and dreamy white one was called “Fluffy,” the hard and crunchy milk chocolate brown one was called “Crispy,” and the dark, thick, and unpleasantly bitter one was called “Diane Abbott”—or, at least, so you might have thought, given the subsequent feathers that flew.

Actually, it was called “Ugly,” as in “The Ugly Duckling” from Hans Christian Andersen, but purportedly it was really a dog-whistle insult against the flower of black maidenhood (presumably none of the complainants had ever read the fairy tale in question, in which the Ugly Duckling actually grows up to be the fairest swan of them all—after undergoing professional skin-whitening procedures at the hands of Michael Jackson’s old plastic surgeon). The ducklings were rapidly withdrawn from shelves and forcibly rebranded with new names by their owners, leading to a secondary complaint subsequently being filed against Waitrose by the ghost of Kunta Kinte.

Cadbury’s Caste System
History’s most elaborately racist chocolate bar was Cadbury’s limited-edition “Unity Bar,” sold in India to mark their national Independence Day in 2019. Intending to “celebrate a country that stands united in its diversity,” Cadbury’s inexplicably decided to design a bar illustrating the country’s 3,000-year-old racial caste system, with six squares of white chocolate at the top, six of beige Caramac-type blond chocolate stuff just below, then six more of creamy brown milk chocolate, with six degenerate and despised squares of literally Untouchable dark Bourbon-style chocolate at the bottom. Suck a few squares from each section at once and commit mass miscegenation in your mouth!

“Congratulations to Cadbury’s for solving racism,” said someone non-white from the NYT in response, presumably sarcastically; unless, of course, he was just holding the whole bar upside down and therefore actually meant these words 100 percent seriously.

According to a 2022 essay, “White Chocolate Matters,” from pseudo-intellectual online blogger The Kitchen Scholar, such “Systemic hierarchy among chocolates” really does exist, as “an antithesis of institutionalized racism and colorism towards human lives in a sense that darker and more bitter chocolate products earn the conditioned privilege cards of consumer love and enthusiasm over the pale, light and milky ones that, in turn, rank above niche sugary white chocolates.” The blogger’s claim here was that, globally speaking, dark chocolate sells the best, above brown milk chocolate, with vile white chocolate being popular only amongst racist freaks like myself with miniature Klansmen for taste buds.

“Unlike black lives and black bodies,” the learned “Scholar” continued, white chocolate actively deserves to be racially discriminated against on the grounds that it is, supposedly, objectively of a gastronomically inferior quality to its darker-skinned overlords. So, in the chocolate world, racism did exist, and it was wholly justified—because it was racist against whiteness. You can even find similar sentiments being taught at Harvard these days, as I have recently detailed elsewhere.

Death by Chocolate
The inevitable overspill of such endless fountains of chocolaty crap into actual real-world scenarios can best be summed up by a social media post titled “Crazy lady thinks I’m racist because I chose white chocolate instead of dark.” You can post whatever you like on social media and there’s no guarantee that it’s actually true, but have a read and see what you think.

The story comes from a young white girl who enters a store and accidentally knocks some boxes off a candy shelf. Bending down to restack them, she is approached by a black woman who, seeing her acting thus, thinks she works there. “What type of chocolate do you recommend to me?” she asks. “White chocolate. It’s super tasty!” the girl replies. What the girl did not realize, however, was that this was in fact Maureen Gray, mother of the wannabe black Milky Bar Kid from 1994-era Nottingham, meaning her reply to this advice was the eminently reasonable “SO, A DARK-SKINNED CHOCOLATE ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?… HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME LIKE THAT, YOUNG LADY! YOU RACIST LITTLE CUNT!”

Maureen then gets out the manager. “FIRE HER!” she demands, like the man’s rightful racial overlord, “SHE TOLD ME THAT BEING DARK IS BAD AND SHE HATES ME!” “I have never seen this girl before,” protests the manager. “YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR OWN EMPLOYEES?” screams Maureen, probably demanding he fire himself on the spot, too. After consulting security camera footage and establishing who was actually in the right here, the manager quickly had the black woman escorted out from the store—whereupon the alarms began ringing, as she had been shoplifting.

Cadbury’s unacceptable Unity Bar may now have been discontinued, but I bet there’s another long-abandoned bar the long-suffering shopkeeper in question momentarily wished was still in existence across America instead. It was called the Color Bar.

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