For years I worked as police reporter for The Washington Times, spending long hours in squad cars in various cities getting to know cops well. Now I listen to nice white people in the suburbs, and self-assured voices from NPR, talking about the police. They know nothing of the world where the police work. They do not know the bad sections at 3 a.m., the yawning dark alleys and lightless facades of buildings, the boredom, and the radio, the soul of a squad car, the laconic chat of the net. Slow night.
Not all are slow. I rode one night with the Arlington force, the Virginia county just outside of Washington. The call came: “Man down, gunshots reported.” Dark residential street, tree-lined, too late for the suburban houses to have lights. The guy, maybe Hispanic or Asian, was on his back, breathing but not moving. The bullet had cut a furrow in the top of his head, brains swelling out like pink vaginal lips. We listened to the stertorous breathing. There was nothing to do. The ambulance came and the parameds worked on the guy. There was no point in it, but it is what they are paid to do.
You see things you don’t want to see. On a foot beat, in the Shaw district of D.C., late, streets empty, we found a blonde woman, maybe 30, crawling on the sidewalk, drunk, bottle of whiskey clutched in one hand. Late-stage alcoholism. Seeing a cop, she crawled toward an alley, hugging her bottle. She had wet her pants.
We walked on. The cop wasn’t heartless, but it was Saturday night, the jails and shelters would be full, and there is nowhere that wants a terminal alky. What was her story? Bad marriage? Lost her job? Everybody has a story.
From the Virginia side of Key Bridge across the Potomac, a bike path runs through grass past the Pentagon to the Washington Sailing Marina. Someone had reported a foul smell. I and three cops went to investigate. Following the smell, we found a dead guy in a clump of bushes. Judging by the pistol next to him, he had offed himself. A dead guy after several days in the August sun is not attractive, skull white where not covered by gunch remnants sliding off.
Cops see this stuff. You can’t let it get to you so you do the macho thing. So do female cops. This time someone said, “Maybe mouth-to-mouth would save him.” There was grossed-out laughter. It wasn’t contempt. Nobody thought the dead guy was funny. But you can’t let it get to you. It turned out later that he had a hard breakup with his girlfriend.
You probably don’t know what “immersion cuffs” are. If you hold a little girl’s hands in boiling water, the submerged part puffs up pink, like cuffs. That there is a name for this suggests that it is not isolated. Cops know about these things. They see them. It is why they grind their teeth at night and have a high divorce rate. One cop told me that he had turned down a job on the child-abuse unit because he would kill somebody. Abuse by police can have its appeal.
A Maryland cop once invited me to his home and was showing me photos of things he had seen on the job. One was of a human face that had been completely skinned with an X-Acto knife. See? It’s not a job. It’s an adventure.
In the sprawling crazy nights in the big cities, a camaraderie unites the three street trades, police, fire, and ambulance. If the crews do not know each other personally, which they often do, there is a unity that comes of sharing a world that nobody else knows. You likely have never tried to intubate a man copiously spewing blood from his mouth after going through a windshield, crushing his chest. You might think something wrong with people who can stand around such a scene talking about are you going to Jack’s barbecue Saturday? You can’t let it get to you.
Things can be amusing in a screwy way. Ages ago, when Reagan emptied the asylums onto the streets, one of these mandated escapees was a woman who entered office buildings and turned off lights, announcing herself as being with Trash Police, who don’t exist. Finally, the police told me, she decided to help the telephone company by putting on a pair of pole-climbers in one of their trucks and began trying to climb a pole. This allowed the cops to invoke “danger to herself or others” and take her off the street.
The racial element is always there with police because almost all the crime is perpetrated by blacks. At NPR, saying this would elicit cries of racism. NPR does not live in the real world. Cops do. For them, the racial makeup of crime is a matter of daily observation. Blacks dislike cops and cops come not to like blacks. The black world deep in the big cities is another country, another civilization, and immiscible with the outlying white culture. Black cops know this as well as white cops know it.
Sometimes you can just about lose all belief in human decency. The small black girl found in a Dumpster, wrapped in garbage bags, something like 30 pounds underweight for her age. She had rope burns on her wrists, some fresh and open wounds, others just scars. It turned out that she had been kept always in a closet and barely fed. She died, it was concluded, because to muffle her cries her parents had put her in a hooded jacket backwards and she had suffocated.
Think what you will of cops. They are not perfect. But they are out there, day and night, amid the blood and snot and cum, the screaming freshly raped girls and the desperate old women dying amid their vodka bottles and the insane and miserable. Try it, and then judge.
Inundated by the constant tidal wave of horrible news hitting us here at home, as well as abroad as the world finds itself in the express lane toward a massive regional Middle East War that could easily blossom into a global conflict, the relief and schadenfreude that comes along every once in a great while these days with even the smallest scrap of good news is always welcome. In fact, there are a couple of such stories that have been flying under the radar that certainly could fall into this category. What’s more, many of my estimable colleagues believe they’re not merely anecdotal but strongly indicative of major societal trends that have the potential to blossom into popular movements to stop and perhaps reverse our seemingly inexorably leftward trajectory.
At least, that’s what they appear to be on the surface. I too am desperate to cling to these and any optimistic predictions, but my optimism is tempered by the knowledge that the ideologically driven incompetence and lust for absolute power of the anti-American Democrat-Left flies in the face of all logic and reason. The era of Bill Clinton-esque “triangulation,” even if it meant just a temporary retreat or just a short pause of that leftward trajectory, is now an unacceptable price to pay by those who now run that party and movement. They’re within a red nether hair’s breadth of grabbing the brass ring of permanent absolute power, and because they have the instrumentalities of government and the private sector at their command to achieve it—and have wielded them nakedly and shamelessly—traditional political considerations are not only moot, but could be toxic, politically and otherwise.
The first case in point is the full-court press by the Joey Sponge-Brain Sh*ts-Pants Junta to dismantle the fossil fuels, abolish the internal combustion engine, and replace both with electrically powered vehicles. Regardless of the fact that the infrastructure to charge millions of EVs is nonexistent, ditto battery technology in terms of range and safety, and most of all the cost of owning an EV makes them out of reach of the average consumer, they are hell-bent on imposing them on America. Because of this, the American consumer has rejected EVs to the point that every major manufacturer, from Mercedes-Benz to Toyota and GM, is either massively scaling back or outright eliminating EVs from their lineups.
And perhaps the best-known brand in that sector, Tesla, is now following suit:
Tesla, the most iconic of EV manufacturers, seemed to be avoiding this skid. Unfortunately, the realities of being a niche market with every increasing cost associated with production have caught up with the firm headed by billionaire Elon Musk.
“Tesla will lay off more than 10% of its global workforce, according to a memo sent to employees by CEO Elon Musk. The company’s shares closed down more than 5% on Monday. ‘As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity,’ Musk said in the memo obtained by CNBC. ‘As part of this effort, we have done a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by more than 10% globally,’ the memo said.”…
Furthermore, EV sales continue to decline and other car companies are beginning to make alternative production plans as a result. Until there is a charging infrastructure network that can accommodate the entire American public, an electric grid that can handle capacity, enough natural resources to build models at a moderate price, and technology that doesn’t ignite when it gets wet or won’t start when it gets too cold, this may be the beginning of the end of the road for EV-mania.
Well, except for in the minds of lunatic eco-activists who are pushing their insane “Net Zero 2050” agenda. If we could power cars with their hot air and smugness, then we would be able to run our vehicles forever.
On a recent Cut Jib Newsletter podcast, historian and science blogger Bob Zimmerman and I affirmed that we’re actually fans of Elon Musk, mostly because SpaceX is a giant thumb in the eye of the Junta’s drive to wipe out independent, free-market entrepreneurialism as well as for X/Twitter being perhaps the last large bastion of free speech open to conservative voices of opposition. As for Tesla, well, EVs are nothing more than souped-up golf carts; status symbols that at present are just not capable of supplanting gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles. That assessment is the sane, rational one. And yet, the Junta and the enviro-Marxists persist. Hint: They do so for anything but altruistic reasons like saving the planet by stopping so-called “climate change.”
Hold that thought for a while as we examine another category entirely, the entertainment industry. The collapse of the movie industry as a whole, with Disney being the prime example, as a result of backlash from ticket buyers and content subscribers against “woke” agitprop strangling golden-egg-laying geese from the Marvel Universe to Star Wars to James Bond and everything in between, should be seen as a lesson to the Bob Igers and Kathleen Kennedys of this world. Should be.
Before answering that question, here’s another little bit of schadenfreude to dunk into your mug of “covfefe”:
Left-wing billionaire Jeff Skoll’s woke film studio Participant is reportedly shutting down operations and eliminating most of its staff—the latest victim of Hollywood’s sharp downturn that has seen a bloodbath of layoffs and budget cuts.
Participant, founded in 2004, often financed projects with social justice and globalist themes, including former Vice President Al Gore’s climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth and its sequel. Other titles include the Obama’s Netflix documentary American Factory and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg doc RBG….
Hollywood’s tectonic shift to streaming entertainment has wreaked havoc with the specialty movie model that depends heavily on theatrical distribution to generate word-of-mouth business and awards-season buzz. Specialty titles that would once have received a theatrical release now almost all end up on streaming platforms in lieu of cinemas.
Participant also experienced a number of high-profile box office flops—including the environmentally themed Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo, and the Matt Damon thriller Stillwater…. Hollywood studios have been hit hard in the past year, enacting deep budget cuts amid a perfect storm of economic chaos that includes Americans continuing to cancel their cable TV subscriptions, the steep downturn in TV advertising, and streaming losses in the billions of dollars.
For sure, the rise of alternate personal venues from computers to smartphones to streaming services absolutely put pressure on traditional movie theaters. Yet this was a natural evolution and change of the culture as to how the consumer, now younger and more tech-savvy, wanted to consume/experience entertainment. The COVID lockdowns, gradually rising and then skyrocketing costs since the installation of Joey Sponge-Brain Sh*ts-Pants, plus the rejection of the majority of normal Americans of ham-fisted “woke” propaganda are the death knell of Hollywood as it was. Or at least should be. Here too, they still persist.
Yet again, the question is why? Why continue to waste billions of dollars producing films and shows or EVs no one wants to see and no one wants to drive? Why take the far-and-away No. 1-selling beer in the nation and kill it along with tainting all the other labels of Anheuser-Busch?
Elon Musk and Tesla aside, since he is essentially an enemy of the State, the reason is because ideology now trumps sanity. Plus the fact that the corruption that has all but destroyed the American system of government and the Constitution has crept into the so-called private sector mostly via at least three generations of academic brainwashing.
Considering brainwashed Marxist automatons and power-mad venal tyrants control virtually all of the instrumentalities of government that, because of their lack of ethics, morals, aforementioned lust for power, and in-your-face hatred of this nation, people, history and culture as founded, and now their willingness to use it to crush us like insects as can plainly be seen with Donald Trump’s show trials among many other things, nothing can deter them from flooring the gas pedal (or the potentiometer?) and hurtling the car into the Grand Canyon.
Even if woke studios go broke, even if EVs are no longer to be made, that does not mean ipso facto that non-woke if not pro-American Judeo-Christian-affirming or plain old normal stories will be made or that a return to the sanity of gasoline-powered vehicles is guaranteed.
Quite the opposite. It makes no difference. The bottom line is total control of the citizenry by an all-powerful State. How? By seizing control of “the means of production” and prohibiting any alternatives. Any voice that challenges accepted State policy or woke worldviews will be silenced. Total control is the goal. Whether you refuse to purchase an EV because you don’t like it or because you can’t even afford one—coupled with the strangulation of the internal combustion engine, leaving no practical, affordable alternatives—you are essentially stranded in place, so the end result is the same: total control by the State.
Remember, it’s hard if not impossible to subjugate a highly mobile society. QED.
Soon the government might shut down your car. [So-called quote-unquote “president”] Joe Biden’s new infrastructure gives bureaucrats that power. You probably didn’t hear about that because when media covered it, few mentioned the requirement that by 2026, every American car must “monitor” the driver, determine if he is impaired and, if so, “limit vehicle operation.”…
The kill switch is just one of several ways the government proposes to control how we drive. California lawmakers want new cars to have a speed governor that prevents you from going more than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit.
That would reduce speeding. But not being able to speed is dangerous, too, says Fix. If “something’s coming at you, you have to make an adjustment.” New cars will have a special button on the dash. If you suddenly need to speed and manage to find the button when trying to drive out of some bad situation, and it lets you speed for 15 seconds. For all these new safety devices to work, cars need to spy on drivers. Before I researched this, I didn’t realize that they already do….
Biden’s infrastructure bill also includes a pilot program to tax you based on how far we drive.
“A mileage charge seems fair,” I say to Fix. “You pay for your damage to the road.” “Correct,” she replies. “But when you start allowing them to do this, they could say, ‘We don’t want you to buy a firearm.’… ‘We don’t want you to go to that destination. So we’re not going to let you start your car.’ It’s about control.”
I push back. “They’re not controlling me.”
“They can,” she replies. “Wait until you get a bill for your carbon footprint. ‘You’re at your maximum for carbon credits. We’re not going to let you drive today! Take the train. Take the electric bus.’”
“This is paranoia,” I suggest.
“Maybe,” says Fix. “But so far, everything that I’ve said about these things, each step keeps coming through.”
“Control” was supposed to be a Janet Jackson song, not a how-to-do-it manual.
Yakov Smirnoff, a refugee from the old Soviet Union who was Borat decades before Borat, and unlike Borat actually funny, making a highly successful career as a stand-up comic poking fun at the crumbling former communist dictatorship, famously quipped:
In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.
So, a kill switch on a car to prevent you from driving too fast, or even driving at all. Media that prevents you from expressing your own opinion or hearing opinions and messages contra the Junta. Banks and credit card companies that monitor what you purchase and to whom you donate. At some point, if you want to donate to Trump or your pro-life charity, the bank will not process it, via its own “kill switch.” For your own good, of course!
On the classic TV show Get Smart, Control were the good guys and Kaos evil. But in this case, the invisible hand of Adam Smith—the millions of individual choices made by millions of individuals—is in one sense a form of chaos. That is, a controlled form of chaos where many individuals through their freedom of choice control the market and everything that flows from it. That kind of elegant, natural freedom and independence is in direct contravention of those who have unleashed ideologically driven chaos by destroying freedom of choice in the quest to “control” individuals as just one mass of a populace. Again, for our own good because we’re too stupid and unenlightened to know what’s good for us.
Children guided and molded by benevolent parents? Or sheep herded to the slaughter?
(On a point of personal privilege, I have been absent from these pages as well as from my own blog for a few weeks due to a serious medical situation that for the time being is under control—no pun. I’m in good spirits, feeling no pain, and not impaired in any way that impedes my daily activities, at least for the time being. I will continue to post essays until my consult with the doctors next week, to see whatever treatment lies ahead. Hopefully, it will be as minimally invasive as possible, and I can be back up and writing on a regular basis as soon as possible. That said, I can’t begin to express my gratitude for all the prayers and words of encouragement I’ve received and truly believe, God willing, they do work miracles.)
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.
