A well-dressed gentleman in New York today looks like a shadowy figure in a sepia-colored old photograph. I’ve been here for two weeks and have yet to see anyone wearing a suit and tie, except when I passed a window and saw a reflection of yours truly. Between Patagonia fleece vests donned by Wall Street hustlers and the schlubby hoodies of Silicon Valley wannabes, the city is slob heaven, its innocence, spontaneity, and reckless promise that once defined the city long gone.

The youth of the place, needless to say, makes for a bright future, except that over 70 percent of a major high school class in the city thought Russia fought America in World War II. Yep, the city’s regressing, but the black mayor, the black attorney general, and the female governor of the state are not to blame. It’s racism and sexism that’s done the city wrong. You’re getting this invaluable info from Taki, a man who is never wrong, and if I say racism and sexism are to blame, so be it.

Just a walk around town reveals there’s no such thing as an enlightened urban oasis despite the billions poured in annually to help minorities who look to me like great majorities by now. What I actually see is a dystopian, garbage-filled place where crime has soared 53 percent, and whose affluent citizens are fleeing as if the place were San Francisco. Progressives who rule the city forgot that law and order are essential for progress of any kind, so now what we have is crime, dirt, noise, and the biggest-spending state and local government in America, with a daily life that often looks as though no government is in charge at all.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Noo Yawk is also becoming a nudist colony, with subway stations turning into heroin shooting galleries and half-naked addicts roaming the human-feces-covered platforms. Exhausted passengers, many with children in tow, rush past the freaks, stepping on the needles that cover the ground while holding their noses. The subways descended—exploded, rather—into drug dens during the pandemic, especially uptown around 181st Street in the Bronx and downtown near Greenwich Village. The ones I feel the most sorry for are the cops who have to deal with these animals, and I apologize to my four-legged friends. It all has to do with getting something for nothing, the welfare trap, the so-called Great Society of Lyndon Johnson that became a pitfall for millions of Americans, mostly black Americans.

The great New York senator Patrick Moynihan warned against it and suggested “benign indifference” but was called a racist. Basically, what the “Great Society” managed to do was to endow even those with a strong work ethic with the apathy that comes with government assistance. The more children one had, the more free meals and moola. At least Bill Clinton did something about it, linking assistance with efforts to work. Now we’re back to the bad old ways, with Biden giving money away as inflation is going out of style. And people have learned to work the system. And those who know how to work it pass it down to those around them. How can I get more free stuff, more free housing, more food stamps, more cash? Young people who are willing to go out and get a job are advised by their elders not to because it could jeopardize the government assistance the family is receiving.

The culture of dependency is obviously most prevalent in the black community, hence the crime figures that show African Americans leading the numbers of those incarcerated. It is very depressing, but not as depressing as the thinking of white liberals who blame racism for black crime. The left in America, starting with The New York Times, want to indoctrinate Americans to believe that the only thing that matters about someone is his or her skin color. Critical Race Theory is poisoning the country with a theory that the whites are bad people while the blacks and browns are innocent and pure and victims. The kind of brainwashing that is going on in America today makes Nazi and communist ideology seem feeble. The irony that Times writers and their ilk know better makes it an even bigger crime. The media in America is a horror show, with gutless blow-dried know-nothings raving against Trump, whites, and anyone earning a good living, and let’s not forget those ghastly people who fought against the North back in 1861.

The only way out of this terrible predicament I cannot put in writing. Biden is beholden to identity politics, so if he wins, which I believe he will, alas, it will only get worse. As I said, I cannot write what my solution is because it entails putting lotsa people away for good. As I said, it is very depressing and it is bound to get worse. Unifying the country is an impossible dream, and it will only happen when everyone including phonies like Zuckerberg and Bezos joins the welfare crowds.

O.J. Simpson’s death last week reminded me of the glorious period in American history when we finally got liberals to stop their infernal race baiting. It came right after O.J. was found not guilty of a double murder he’d obviously committed. That too-brief suspension of racial agitation, what preceded it, and what followed, is recounted in thrilling detail in my book, “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama.”

For 30 years, the nation’s cities were maelstroms of race riots and inner-city violence, egged on by feckless politicians and an army of journalists scribbling mad defenses of the perpetrators.

In other words, life was much as it is today. Every police shooting of a disaffected inner-city youth was instantly branded an act of unadulterated racism, every racist accusation presumed true, and every crime committed by a disaffected inner-city youth denied.

Eventually, the truth would come out, disproving the official version, whereupon the story would simply fade from the news, as if the media were reading a bedtime story to a child, whispering the ending and tiptoeing out of the room.

(Speaking of which, where are the big, blaring headlines following up on the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs parade in February, the mass shooting in a New York City subway in 2022 and the 2021 Christmas parade massacre in Waukesha, Wisconsin?)

The main job of a journalist was to gin up mobs of angry disaffected inner-city youths, with prizes awarded to those who managed to incite the most destructive riots.

In 1991, Los Angeles’s KTLA television network edited the tape of police officers subduing a deranged suspect, Rodney King, cutting about 10 seconds from the beginning. Viewers never saw King lunging at an officer, taser darts hanging from his body. This made the cops’ response look like a senseless act of police brutality, rather than the officers’ final efforts to subdue a powerful and violent suspect after all other methods had proved futile.

When the jury acquitted the officers — as everyone who actually watched the trial thought it should — the resulting riots left 63 people dead, thousands injured and did a billion dollars in damage. (See especially Roger Parloff’s and Lou Cannon’s reports on the trial.)

KTLA won a Peabody award for its presentation of the tape.

The most enduring image from the L.A. riots was the savage beating of Reginald Denny, who’d inadvertently driven his 18-wheeler into the middle of the mayhem. Four black men pulled Denny from the truck’s cab and savagely beat him, smashing his head with a 5-pound oxygenator and a claw hammer. With the world watching live footage of the riots, Damian “Football” Williams dropped a cinderblock directly on Denny’s head, fracturing his skull in 91 places, then did a victory dance around Denny’s lifeless body.

Or, as Rep. Maxine Waters put it, “there were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes.” No sooner was Williams arrested than Waters showed up at his mother’s house, offering to help him, saying, “her doors were open.”

This was life in America, pre-O.J. verdict.

But then at 10:07 a.m. on Oct. 3, 1995, the world changed, when an estimated 150 million people turned on their TVs to watch the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial: not guilty.

Ninety-five million Americans had watched the slow-speed car chase that had ended with O.J.’s arrest.

Thanks to live television coverage of the trial, nearly everyone in the country had seen the same evidence the jury saw, including O.J.’s blood all over the crime scene.

People saw the Black Congressional Caucus give O.J.’s defense lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, a standing ovation three days before his closing argument.

They saw the juror who was a former Black Panther give O.J. the “black power” salute after the verdict was read.

And they saw blacks across the country cheering the outcome — most shockingly at the esteemed, historically black Howard University Law School. Witnessing black law students whooping and applauding O.J.’s acquittal had the same emotional impact as seeing Muslim and BLM college students celebrate the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

In black neighborhoods throughout the country, car horns honked in victory when O.J. was acquitted. At a McDonald’s in Clayton, Missouri, the all-black staff burst out in cheers and high fives, while the mostly white customers watched in disbelief. At one high school in St. Louis being filmed for TV, black students cheered for five solid minutes.

At another high school, after hearing the verdict, 20 black students beat, kicked and stomped a younger white student while shouting “black power!” Outside the Los Angeles Criminal Courts building, a Hispanic man was assaulted by an angry crowd of blacks merely for saying he thought O.J. was guilty. In Colorado, a black man beat up his white girlfriend because she disagreed with him about the verdict. He told her Nicole Simpson deserved it and maybe she did, too.

White people took it all in and said: That’s it. This has drained the last reserves from the Guilt Account. After that, mau-mauing appeals to white self-condemnation were futile. Accusing someone of racism suddenly stopped working, as if there were a glitch in the subway system and Metro cards didn’t open the turnstile anymore.

It was the best thing that had happened to black people in a very long time. No longer did they have to endure pompous whites treating them like children: Do you like your ice cream? Is that good?

Black criminals were locked up, saving tens of thousands of black lives. The very next year, welfare reform became law and hundreds of thousands of black women left the rolls and got jobs. Race hucksters lost their power to intimidate, and talented black people rose to the fore.

Black Americans had won the final civil rights battle: The right to be treated like adults.

But you can’t suppress liberal patronizing forever. A dozen years passed, memories faded, and a half-black Hawaiian who’d never faced one iota of race discrimination, except in his favor, ran for president on the most left-wing agenda in history. (That is, until President Senile Dementia’s staff became president.)

With that, white liberals breathed a sigh of relief and returned to their favorite hobby: accusing other white people of racism.

So now we’re right back where we started, but this time with a vengeance.

The Masters tournament on the second weekend of April is the Rite of Spring for golfers in northern America. In places like Chicago, grass is finally turning green after the bleak winter, but the weather is usually still dire. So, golfers mostly stay home and watch the Masters on TV being broadcast from ethereally beautiful Augusta National in Georgia and make plans to play the next weekend themselves.

So, that’s a timely excuse for a column on golf.

The New York Times ran an op-ed titled “The Most Famous Golfer at the Masters Is Black. Why Aren’t There More Players Like Him?” by Peter May, who is promoting his book about the breaking of the Professional Golfers Association’s color line in 1961:

When the Masters Tournament commenced on Thursday, featuring 89 competitors, there was exactly one Black golfer in the field: the one we all know, Tiger Woods. Beyond that, the field for the 88th Masters didn’t look all that different from the previous 87.

That raises a good question: Where are the black golf stars? As The Onion headlined in 2012:

Golf Pretty Sure All Those Young Black Kids Inspired by Tiger Woods Should Have Arrived by Now

The obvious answer for why few blacks have followed the famously mixed-race Tiger into the upper ranks is that golf is a costly sport.

Yet, there were nine top-level black touring pros in 1965 versus only two today (assuming that Tiger, who shot an 82 on Saturday, is effectively retired).

So why has the number of black touring pros declined since a half century ago? The answer explains a lot about changes in American society over my lifetime.

From 1961 to 1986 five blacks (Pete Brown, Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, and Jim Thorpe) won a total of 23 PGA tour events. And more of the same generation later became winners on the Senior Tour for 50-and-overs, such as Jim Dent, Walter Morgan, and Charles Owens, who played cross-handed and introduced the long putter.

The early black golf stars tended to lead lives both inspiring and entertaining. For example, Elder, the first black to qualify for the Masters, was employed as a teenager by Titanic Thompson, America’s most legendary gambler, as his caddie and chauffeur as they hustled their way through the country clubs of the South. While negotiating the terms of the bet with a couple of overconfident local hotshots, Thompson would point to his liveried chauffeur polishing the limo and exclaim, “I bet you couldn’t even beat me if I was partnered with him, and he’s never even tried golf before.”

Since 1986, Woods has won 83 tournaments. But no other black triumphed on tour again until Cameron Champ in 2018. (By the way, Champ looks white, but he has a perfectly reasonable claim to membership in the African American community through his very black grandfather, who taught him golf.)

Champ and Harold Varner III of the Saudi-financed LIV golf league are the only black or part-black touring pros of note at present, but neither qualified for the Masters this year. While Masters champ Scottie Scheffler could well be golf’s next superstar, current golfers tend to be less consistent from year to year than in the days when Jack Nicklaus could win eighteen major championships from 1962 to 1986.

This is perhaps due to the increasing violence of the modern swing: Current club and ball technology entitles golfers to lash harder without losing control. But driving the ball over 300 yards takes its toll on the body, rather like how throwing close to 100 miles per hour puts contemporary baseball pitchers on the injured list more frequently than their predecessors. To young pitchers, the 257 (and counting) career wins of 41-year-old Justin Verlander must look as primordially monumental of a number as Cy Young’s 511 wins would seem to Verlander. Nobody who will be under age 30 on July 1, 2024, has at present more than 65 wins.

May goes on:

This is not what Charles Sifford envisioned when he and Stanley Mosk, the attorney general of California, fought to integrate the Professional Golfers’ Association of America.

The story of how the great Jewish liberal Mosk prevented the Jewish Brentwood Country Club in Los Angeles from hosting the 1961 PGA Championship is indeed an interesting one. Jewish country clubs had been the venue of a number of U.S. Opens and PGA Championships before WWII, but they then shied away from volunteering to put on more after Mosk embarrassed Brentwood.

But the sheer existence of Jewish country clubs (even in today’s highly multiethnic Los Angeles, Brentwood’s membership remains 97 percent Jewish) is evidently too thought-provoking for The New York Times’ sensitive subscribers, so May prudently doesn’t mention it.

On the other hand, the integration of the PGA, shameful as it was to lag a decade and a half behind the end of the color line in baseball, still happened a full 63 years ago, so this history, intriguing as it is for its own sake, doesn’t seem all that relevant to the black lack on tour in 2024. But we live in an age of antiquarianism in which any and all shortcomings by blacks, even ones as benign as a failure to dominate professional golf, must be explained away by antiblack policies in the increasingly distant past.

May argues the need for quotas:

Until private country clubs, elite prep schools and Division I golf programs actively recruit and train Black golfers, Sifford’s legacy will remain unfulfilled, and the game will continue to be dominated by white players.

Yet, American golf in 2024 doesn’t seem exceptionally dominated by white players. Of the top 25 U.S. golfers this week following the Masters, 17 are white, two are East Asian (Collin Morikawa and Kurt Kitayama), two South Asian (Sahith Theegala and Akshay Bhatia), two are mixed race (Xander Schauffele is white and Asian, while Rickie Fowler is white, Asian, and American Indian), one is a Mormon Pacific Islander (Tony Finau), and Max Homa is a Persian Jew, who would presumably be classified as Middle Eastern and North African under the Biden administration’s new rules.

Asian-Americans are clearly overrepresented, especially South Asian-Americans, who have been almost invisible in American sports before. Golf is an expensive sport.

Perhaps more interesting than that none of the top U.S. golfers is black is that nobody is Hispanic, considering that Latinos now outnumber blacks by 40 percent. But few pundits are terribly interested in Hispanic representation.

The decline of black pros was forecasted way back in the late 1960s by Joe Dey, the first commissioner of the PGA Tour, who prophesied: “By the turn of the century, there may not be one black playing the tour.” Dey had a perfectly sensible reason for his prediction: Most black pros of his time started as caddies, but motorized golf carts were replacing human bag carriers. So, fewer blacks would get introduced to golf while young.

And, unlike in Dey’s time, you now pretty much have to start early these days to succeed at golf. The winningest black golfer before Tiger, Calvin Peete, grew up poor and didn’t play golf until his 20s, yet went on to win a dozen tournaments in his late 30s and early 40s. Similarly, a white peer of Peete’s, ten-time winner Larry Nelson, didn’t try golf until he came back from Vietnam at age 21. But that kind of late start seems inconceivable these days.

Consider how many team-sport superstars like Michael Jordan dream of retiring to the golf course and playing on the over-50 tour. But only the late 49ers quarterback John Brodie ever won a senior tour event.

Moreover, American culture became extremely hostile toward the idea of a black man serving a white man, even as a caddie. Thus, in the early 1980s the Masters dropped its requirement that tour pros use Augusta National’s local black caddies and instead could bring their regular caddies, who were increasingly white.

Because, it turns out that white guys love having servile jobs…as long as they are on beautiful golf courses. The typical tour caddie these days is often a fraternity brother or a college teammate of the player. The last time I had a caddie was at the National Golf Links of America in the Hamptons, where Duke U. students fly in for the weekend to tote bags for Masters of the Universe. The enthusiastic young men who unload your golf clubs from your trunk at the upscale daily fee course are likely upper-middle-class golf fanatics.

But Tiger Woods himself also probably played a sizable role in the lessening of chances for blacks in golf. I presume that Amy Chua’s coinage of “Tiger Mother” is a reference to the famous intensity of effort that Tiger’s parents put into preparing him to be a golf champion. That a part-Asian was trained from infancy to become the best golfer in the world—and in the dozen years from 1997 through 2008, Tiger was no doubt the best ever—had a galvanizing effect on Asian and other ambitious parents.

In the 27 years since the 21-year-old Woods’ twelve-stroke victory at the 1997 Masters, the level of parental investment in youth training has soared, which hasn’t helped blacks’ chances.

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.

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