Inscribed on a frieze adorning the facade of the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan is an excerpt of a letter written by George Washington to Attorney General Edmund Randolph dated Sept. 28, 1789:

The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.

Let’s compare and contrast that with a rather interesting bit of dialogue from the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome where Aunty Entity, played by the late, great Tina Turner, when confronted by an angry crowd who suspects she’s doing something shady, replies:

”You think I don’t know the law? Wasn’t it me who wrote it? And I say that this man has broken the law. Right or wrong, we had a deal. And the law says: Bust a deal and face the wheel!”

In light of the situation we find ourselves in in this country, vis-à-vis a pre-apocalyptic dystopia–cum–near banana republic that was once the United States of America, that line sounds remarkably prescient for 1985. With what’s going on in the Middle East and elsewhere, we might well advance to postapocalyptic before too long. But I digress.

There are a couple of rather interesting cases going on that perfectly illustrate how thoroughly corrupt the justice system has become, insofar as its use by the powers that be to punish its enemies. For sure that applies to Donald Trump, but it applies with equal measure to anyone who is deemed to have transgressed against the powers that be.

One case in particular involves Henry Cuellar, a Democrat congressman who’s been in office for twenty years and by every measure checks all or most of the boxes that define a hard leftist. Pro–affirmative action, pro-Obamacare, anti–school choice, anti–voter ID/election integrity laws, and on and on and on. While he was in favor of the so-called DREAM Act and DACA Amnesty, and against Trump’s border wall prior to Joey Sponge-Brain Sh*ts-Pants’ installation as the face of Obama’s third term, his publicly opposing Sanctuary Cities as well as the wholesale importation of unvetted “refugees” from Syria back in 2015 ruffled quite a few of the wrong feathers.

Of course, the Biden-created disaster that ensued with the invasion of 8 million illegal-alien migrants over the past three years has proved him correct. Like many other moderate or reasonable Democrats (whether ideologically if they do in fact still exist or ditto along the lines of Clintonian triangulation) have him whistle a very different tune.

Cuellar said he’s seen “parts of” the Biden [junta’s] post-Title 42 plan, and “part of it means that they want to bring officers from the northern part over to the southern area. And you know, Neil, that that’s going to be just something that’s going to be temporary. And the metric that I think they’re looking at is, how do we move the migrants faster from the border to the interior? And I don’t think that’s a plan, with all due respect. And this is why there [are] other Democrat senators and congressmen that have a problem. Because what we’re seeing is it’s literally an open border. It’s an open border. And the more people coming across and then Title 42 goes away, the numbers are going to definitely increase. And we’re going to see a situation where Border Patrol is going to continue to be overwhelmed.”

That pull quote was from two years ago. Cuellar, hardly a backbencher in this regard, and a big wheel in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, whose district is right on the front lines of Biden’s erased southern border, has become not only a pain in the ass, but a political liability for the 2024 election. Not as “in the bag” as the Kalorama Klown Komintern and wilting Kohlrabi-in-Chief had hoped. On top of the Muslims of Dearbornistan and Mogadishu-apolis who are likely to stay home come next November, the open border is angering blacks, women, and legitimate Latino-Americans for all the misery it has caused.

What’s a tyranny to do? What else?

The DOJ’s indictments came two years after agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) served Cuellar and his wife with a search warrant for their home in Laredo, Texas.

Cuellar and his wife were charged with accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from an oil and gas company owned by the government of Azerbaijan and a bank with headquarters in Mexico City, starting in December 2014 and going until roughly November 2021, according to the DOJ’s statement.

The DOJ claimed that the bribes were “laundered, pursuant to sham consulting contracts, through a series of front companies and middlemen into shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar, who performed little to no legitimate work under the contracts.”

Wait a second. Bribes from a foreign-government-owned gas company? Has the DOJ never heard of Burisma? Hunter Biden? Joe Biden? And Azerbaijan is just a ruble’s throw from—wait for it—Ukraine! Also incidental is Azerbaijan’s attempt to complete the conquering and ethnic cleansing of Armenia that Turkey started back in 1912. Funny how no one (to the best of my knowledge), neither Democrat nor RINO, is screaming bloody murder about sending U.S. troops and billions of our dollars to defend Armenia. If only they had a crooked stand-up comic as their president to whom we could bribe and get kickbacks instead of a mere Christian nation about to be subsumed by an Islamic autocrat with lots of oil.

If Henry Cuellar had only toed the party line, these charges would never have come forward.

Ditto longtime New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, who now finds himself along with his wife the targets of Merrick Garland’s DOJ over their alleged involvement as unregistered agents working on behalf of the Egyptian government. If you look at his rap sheet, Menendez is even more leftist on the issues, as well as directly linked to myriad sex scandals involving underage girls, mostly in Latin America. For most Democrats, those are résumé enhancers. But because he made the cardinal sin of directly opposing Barack Obama on the Iran nuclear deal back in 2015 and for maintaining stringent sanctions, he signed his own political death warrant.

“I have to be honest with you, the more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran. And it feeds to the Iranian narrative of victimization when they are the ones with original sin.”

Wow. Menendez sounds absolutely Limbaugh-esque right there! Before the Democrats went completely off the rails and openly paraded their Marxist-Leninism for all the world to see, Menendez had been a staunch supporter of Israel. At least insofar as the campaign lucre kept flowing to him from the likes of AIPAC and other well-heeled liberal Jews and others with the same mindset.

Considering both Menendez and Cuellar’s decades-long trail of graft and corruption, they should have been gone long, long ago. But let’s not kid ourselves. Their having to at long last face the music has nothing to do with the wheels of justice grinding slowly if not finely and at last catching up with them. It’s because they have made themselves political liabilities if not direct threats to Obama’s Kalorama Klown Komintern pulling Biden’s strings. What is happening to them is another side of the rotten coin of what is happening to Donald Trump, along with private citizens who oppose everything from the indoctrination of their kids in schools, to open borders, to DEI and everything in between.

Speaking of Trump, just to underscore the disgusting hypocrisy of our completely corrupt criminal justice system, in describing the revolting Stormy Daniels farce of a sham of a mockery of a show trial, legal eagle Jonathan Turley said:

The value of the testimony was entirely sensational and gratuitous, yet Merchan was fine with humiliating Trump. Daniels’ testimony was a dumpster fire in the courtroom….

It is not the witness, but the case that seems increasingly obscene.

You have a judge who should have recused himself given his daughter’s major role as a Democratic activist and fundraiser.

You have a gag order that is allowing a New York Supreme Court justice to regulate what the leading candidate for the presidency may say in an election on the weaponization of the legal system.

You have a lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, who not only left the Biden Justice Department to revive this case, but once worked for the Democratic National Committee.

You have a case based on two dead misdemeanors shocked back into life by a still mysterious theory of an undefined crime. In comparison, Daniels may be the only authentic part of the entire case in New York v. Trump.

It is a sad state of affairs that we are forced to see things as they are, and not as we wish them to be. With everything so abjectly corrupt, the will to power has strangled even the tiniest sliver of an iota of morality and ethics that might have still existed for those in power. It seems nothing will stifle their own political desires in favor of fairness, decency, and the preservation of even the slimmest veneer of civility. What chance do “the better angels of our nature” have in pulling us back from the brink?

Are the Supreme Court Justices beginning to realize that we are in crisis? Two recent cases indicate that they are awakening to that reality.

In Fischer v. United States, the court is considering the validity of using a financial statute to charge January 6 trespassers with obstruction of an official proceeding. During questioning, Justice Gorsuch asked, “Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?” He was referring to Democrat Jamaal Bowman, who pulled a fire alarm to prevent a congressional vote yet was not charged with “obstructing an official proceeding.” That was Gorsuch’s way of asking if something other than party affiliation determines who will face the greater jeopardy of obstruction charges. It was a sarcastic illustration of the decidedly unequal system of justice the DoJ is currently practicing.

In Trump v. United States, the Court is considering whether Donald Trump has immunity for actions taken while he was president. The DoJ argued that the motive for presidential actions should determine whether immunity applies and that the discretion and good motivations of DoJ attorneys should be trusted to make that determination (try not to laugh). Justice Alito questioned the wisdom of that argument, asking if the DoJ should be trusted, “given its history of abusive partisan prosecution.” That is about as close as a Supreme Court justice will ever come to telling a government solicitor general that the latter has squandered his last ounce of credibility….

The Court’s desire to exercise restraint is an admirable judicial philosophy—in a well-functioning republic. When a car is running well, minor maintenance is the only appropriate action. But when the car is on fire, it doesn’t need an oil change. It needs emergency action.

Do the Supremes realize that the leftists have set our republic on fire? The Court needs to stop looking for excuses for restraint and start looking for opportunities to stop the advance of tyranny. This is the time for bold action—or after November there may be nothing left to defend but ashes. They need to consider that as they deliberate on the cases before them.

It’s a very well-written and thoughtful essay. Except I would ask the author, even if please God SCOTUS makes the right decisions in these cases, what will it matter in the end? He himself directly implies that we are far from being “a well-functioning republic.” Beyond a correct ruling, what more does he expect them to do?

SCOTUS already slapped down Joey Sponge-Brain Sh*ts-Pants’ student loan forgiveness multibillion-dollar bribe as unconstitutional. Biden’s response? Ignore it and issue another one!

To paraphrase Democrat hero Joseph Stalin, “How many divisions does the Supreme Court have?”

Everything that is happening in our fractured nation today seems so worrisomely reminiscent of America’s last lost decade — the 1970s.

For those who don’t remember, the late 1970s under part-time President Gerald Ford and then much worse under President Jimmy Carter was one economic and national security setback after another.

The witches’ brew of high inflation of 7% to 10% by 1979 and ever-increasing tax rates — which rose as high as 70% — drove the economy into a ditch. Real family incomes cratered under Carter because inflation rose so much faster than family take-home pay. Homes became unaffordable, with interest rates on mortgages skyrocketing up to 17%. Gas prices tripled. Carter blamed “Big Oil” and “invested” in pipe-dream green energy alternatives that all went bankrupt.

Every time inflation rose, the economic whiz kids in Washington assured us the high prices were just temporary. (They didn’t use the term “transitory.”) When prices kept rising, Carter blamed corporate greed and installed price controls and windfall profits taxes — which only made problems worse.

On college campuses, we saw student protesters occupying the offices of the college presidents. Race riots turned our inner cities into powder kegs.

Because America was so weak at home, our enemies abroad capitalized as Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan and troops into Nicaragua, while Iran held Americans hostage.

Federal spending and debt soared, and the private sector started shrinking.

Carter’s response to the bad news was to point at the American people and lecture us to turn down the thermostat, put on a sweater, and learn to live with less. But even he didn’t threaten to abolish air conditioning and gas heat.

The new term that slid into the American lexicon was “stagflation.” This was the combination of high prices and sluggish economic growth.

Does any of this sound familiar?

President Joe Biden’s prescription for the U.S. economy isn’t to reverse course. It is Carterism on steroids. More price controls, higher taxes on the rich and businesses, and another $2 trillion in spending on programs like student loan “forgiveness,” green energy subsidies and mortgage relief programs.

The tax rate on investment would soar well above 50%. As former Trump economist Larry Kudlow has put it, “Biden thinks he can tax America into prosperity.”

On energy policy, he’s doubling down on his commitment to “net zero” fossil fuel production, and will command people to buy $70,000 electric vehicles made in China.

When the vast majority of Americans say they are financially worse off, he doesn’t feel their pain. He shames them for not appreciating the wonderful things he’s done and the virtues of Bidenomics.

That message is a little tone-deaf given that Americans are worried about ’70s-style stagflation making a comeback. Inflation is trending back up at the same time GDP growth has slowed to a 1.6% trickle.

The Biden response is Americans are unappreciative, and we are all selfish for not wanting to live with less and give up our gas stoves and SUVs in order to save the planet.

In his infamous “malaise speech” in the summer of 1979, Carter spoke of a national “crisis of confidence” and lectured Americans about too much “self-indulgence” and learning to consume less and conserve more. He even talked about “threats to democracy.” Instead of inspiring the nation, he put the country in a funk.

Just like Jimmy Carter then, Joe Biden is offering four more years of austerity and sacrifice and bigger, more intrusive government. That platform won the incumbent Carter 41% of the vote in 1980.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp!”

The “swamp” is the permanent Washington bureaucracy working to perpetuate itself.

In 2020, then-President Trump said he was succeeding: “We’re draining the Washington swamp!”

But it’s not true.

“He made government bigger,” Economist Ed Stringham says in my new video. ‘That’s going in the wrong direction. Looking through a list of agencies, every single one I could see, there were more employees after his presidency than before.”

Trump added almost 2 million jobs to the federal workforce.

He did make some cuts at the State Department, Labor Department, Education Department and his own office. But total spending under Trump nearly doubled. Some was in response to COVID, but billions in extra spending came before.

That spending increased the size of the swamp. New programs filled Washington with more bureaucrats.

Trump launched a $6 billion “Farmers to Families” Food Box Program to bring food from farmers to families.

“Last I checked,” jokes Stringham, “we have an industry for that. It’s called the supermarket industry. It exists for a reason. Markets are good at getting things from farmer to consumer.”

Trump pandered to women, signing a Women, Peace and Security Act, the Woman Entrepreneurship and Empowerment Act, the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, a Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative …

That just made the swamp bigger.

Probably permanently.

“Once government implements a program,” Stringham points out, “it becomes very difficult to roll that back. You’ve created a whole new constituency of lobbyists who love their new income.”

Seventy years ago, Congress feared America wouldn’t have enough mohair for soldiers’ uniforms. So they subsidized mohair production.

Today, the military doesn’t use mohair. But the subsidy continues.

“We’re stuck with it,” says Stringham, “because now there’s a whole group of new people on the payroll who like what they have.”

At least Trump acknowledges his failure to drain the swamp.

“When I said it, it sounded very easy and it was going to happen real fast,” he says. “I didn’t know the swamp was this dirty and this deep.”

Elect me again, he promises, and “we will drain the swamp once and for all.”

I doubt it.

Trump doesn’t understand the source of the swamp.

When a reporter called him out, saying, “You didn’t drain the swamp like you said you would,” Trump replied, “I did. I fired Comey. I fired a lot of people.”

“He fired a couple people,” replies Stringham, “but hiring additional people for government jobs — that’s not draining the swamp; that’s making things worse.”

Much worse, because once you hire government employees, it’s nearly impossible to fire them.

They “can show up late, not show up at all, show up drunk,” says popular Youtuber Armand Curet, who works for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Instead of hiring more bureaucrats, Trump could have turned to the private sector.

“Privatize!” Exclaims Stringham. “Government doesn’t need to be doing all these things. We have markets.”

Markets work better. They even create things people assume can only be done by government.

When I ask people, “Who built NYC’s subways?” everyone answers, “Government.”

But it’s not true. Private companies built most of them.

Politicians then forbade the entrepreneurs to raise prices from a nickel to a dime, driving them out of business. The city took over the subways and, guess what … raised the price much more.

Private enterprise is simply more efficient.

America doesn’t need the Labor, Agriculture, Commerce departments. Those things just happen. They work better if government gets out of the way.

Trump didn’t privatize any department.

“He did do some deregulation,” I say to Stringham.

“Government spending increased dramatically,” Stringham replies. “I don’t see that as draining the swamp. I see that as making the swamp a lot bigger.”

There’s only one way to drain it, he adds: “Don’t have the government in control of so many things.”

At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies were convinced that Prussian militarism had played an important part in Hitler’s war in Europe. Herbert Marcuse, an overrated theorist of the Frankfurt School working for Uncle Sam, submitted a secret report that put all the blame for Nazism on capitalism. Marcuse was a phony who later became a hero to the anti-Vietnam war protesters but got it right on Prussia and Hitler. As I am in the midst of nonstop reading about the Congress of Vienna and the Napoleonic Wars, I sidestepped a bit and read how it was Austria-Hungary, not Prussia, that for centuries was the most aggressive and domineering power in the German-speaking world. I’ve been married to an Austrian for ages, as is my daughter—the Führer of Takimag—married to an Austrian, and I have two Austrian grandchildren. But even if I didn’t have the Austrian connection that I do, I’d still declare that being strong is better than being weak, and it was military strength that halted the uncivilized Ottoman hordes at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

Voltaire was among the first to get it wrong about Prussia. He called it an army with a state rather than a state with an army. His play on words was clever but hardly true. After World War II, with Uncle Sam suddenly on the German side against the Russian Bear, so-called thinkers had to come up with something in order to excuse the good Uncle and the bad Führer being on the same side. History had to be rewritten, and it was. German militarism began and was encapsulated by the great Otto von Bismarck’s 1862 statement “that the great questions of the day would be decided by iron and blood.”

Bismarck is the father of modern Germany, a great statesman and leader, and his above statement is used by weenies to denigrate strength and leadership. Linking Bismarck to Hitler is like associating Mozart to a rapper, impossible and ridiculous. The Nazi regime was a historical aberration detached from the Prussian past. A Prussian saved Wellington’s bacon in Waterloo, when the 73-year-old Blucher arrived just in time to swing the battle against the gallant last charge of the Imperial Guard, Blucher having been unhorsed three times already and thought dead by anxious aides. Blucher spoke no English, and Wellington not a word of German, and the only exchange was “Quelle affair,” by Prince Blucher.

Three descendant Blucher paratrooper brothers were killed in April 1941 when their aircraft was shot down over Crete, an unheard-of act of stupidity by the Luftwaffe putting all three young men into the same airplane. But let’s return to Prussian militarism as compared with that of the Austrians. War was a constant phenomenon in early modern Europe, and what is today’s Germany contained tens if not hundreds of kingdoms, dukedoms, and tiny baronies. Further to the east, the Habsburgs ruled vast territories including Hungary and engaged in nonstop wars in order to keep them. One of the last monarchs to lead his troops personally in battle was Frederick the Great—a Prussian, naturally—whereas the Habsburgs left the fighting to the General Staff. War was a constant phenomenon, and the life of a soldier was a grim one. Death rates were high, mostly from disease, bubonic plague, typhus, and syphilis. Prussia got a bad rap as warlike following the Napoleonic Wars and during the German wars of unification: Denmark 1864, Austria 1866, and finally France 1870. Bismarck demanded a parade down the Champs-Élysées and then brought the boys home. The Frogs are still smarting over that one, but the Germans could have stayed but instead chose not to.

Peace reigned throughout Europe until the tragedy of World War I, a conflict that set the old continent back forever and led to Uncle Sam becoming top banana ever since. After the disgrace of Versailles, the second conflict was inevitable. Once again, the German military elite remained fixated on a quick victory and showed little interest in long-term strategic planning. Hitler’s madness in attacking the Soviet Union and then declaring war on the United States did not help. Yet no one fought more gallantly than the German soldier, or suffered more deaths in combat. What their sacrifices have produced is a nation that would rather kiss than fight, a country as likely to go to war as is Monte Carlo. The Austrians, typically, came up trumps. They announced themselves the first victims of Nazism, and so they were declared.

The myth of German genius for war persists to this day, but I have yet to understand it. It seems to me that Americans are constantly mixing in other countries’ business, yet it’s the Germans who are being called the Spartans of their day. I’m half Spartan and rather proud of it, but it’s Uncle Sam who is the warmonger, not Uncle Fritz. There is nothing romantic about war, but people no longer read Erich Maria Remarque, but watch dumb movies that glorify it. The people who make these movies would lose their you-know-what if they were ever close to a battlefield; the noise alone would have them tossing their lunch. Once the bombing began, the rest of the contents of their stomach would surface. Such are the joys of those who make our movies today. War is hell, and Uncle Sam is the greatest war-maker today.

It must be a shock to police officers busting up campus protests to be cheered, rather than jeered, as they have been since the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a decade ago — a completely justified shooting, according to President Obama’s Justice Department. The anti-Israel demonstrators seem kind of surprised, too. They thought they were going to get the BLM treatment.

I don’t know how many times we have to go over this, but you’re not black, Palestinians. No offense! Nor are gays or illegals or Jews or womyn, etc.

There are different rules for black people, some for good and sound reasons (the legacy of slavery) and some for moronic reasons (we can’t possibly expect black people to obey police commands).

So while you applaud the cops arresting pro-Hamas agitators, remember that a lot of brave law enforcement officers are still living the nightmare of BLM’s cop hatred. This column is about one of them.

Last week, the lunatic progressive attorney for Hennepin County, Minnesota, Mary Moriarty, announced that she will spend at least a million dollars in taxpayer money to have Steptoe, a white-shoe law firm in Washington, D.C., prosecute Minnesota State Trooper Ryan Londregan for murder.

Londregan’s crime was to save his own life and that of another officer last summer while trying to arrest Ricky Cobb II, repeat felon and father of five by at least three different mothers. (Insert first communion photo here.)

Cobb was pulled over at around 2 a.m. last July for driving without taillights. The troopers checked his record and found that Cobb was wanted for violating a felony order of protection in a neighboring county. The officers called it in and asked if the county wanted him arrested. Yes, they did.

Hang onto your hats, readers, but Cobb resisted arrest. He refused to get out of his car, refused to hand over his keys, and then, with two officers half-inside his vehicle, moved the gearshift to “drive.” As the car lurched forward, throwing the officers to the ground, Londregan shot Cobb.

The troopers ran after the car, pulled Cobb out, and engaged in frantic efforts to keep him alive, including giving him CPR. But he died.

When the monster Moriarty first got the case, she: 1) met privately with Cobb’s family, showing her absolute impartiality, and 2) hired a use-of-force expert to conduct an independent review, saying she wanted to “get this right.”

But when her own hand-picked expert found that the shooting was lawful, she blew off his report, refused to show it to the defense, and proceeded to indict Londregan for murder anyway. That’s how you “get this right” as a progressive.

Even the Democratic governor, Tim Walz, criticized Moriarty, asking: “Why would you not listen to use-of-force? Why would that not be central to something you do?”

For her next trick, Moriarty’s office lied about what the Minnesota State Patrol’s use-of-force expert had said. Sgt. Jason Halvorson, who created the use-of-force training program, concluded that the shooting was lawful.

But Deputy County Attorney Mark Osler quoted Halvorson’s response to a hypothetical that had nothing to do with Cobb’s shooting — as Halvorson revealed in a subsequent affidavit that was quickly put under seal. The shooting in the hypothetical: not reasonable. The actual shooting: reasonable.

Moriarty is such a wacko that even the progressive, Soros-backed Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison had to take another case away from her — the first time in 30 years a state AG had done so. Two brothers, 15 and 17 years old, had shot and killed a 23-year-old black woman, Zaria McKeever, execution-style, during a home invasion. Moriarty offered the killers a plea deal, sentencing them to a couple years in a juvenile facility. This, she said, was based on the “science.”

She denounced Ellison for even making the request, calling it “deeply troubling.” The next day, Gov. Walz reassigned the case to Ellison.

At least Moriarty learned her lesson! A few months later, she gave a slap on the wrist to two other teenaged murderers. This time, the victim was white, so the governor and AG declined to intervene. It’s almost like there are two systems of justice.

How did this nut become the prosecutor for Hennepin County? Moriarty was elected in 2022 with cash infusions from a bunch of left-wing organizations flush with money from the BLM gold rush. (In the Year of Our Floyd, corporate America gave $50 billion to BLM and related organizations, according to The Washington Post.) She defeated a far more experienced black judge, Martha Holton Dimick, who was endorsed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in an editorial noting that Dimick “understands from personal experience that communities of color with higher crime rates want prosecutors to bring offenders to justice.”

But the white lesbian knows better! (At least Moriarty doesn’t have a “white savior” complex.)

As long as protesting is the thing to do these days, how about a nice, peaceful protest in support of law enforcement officers who are being maliciously prosecuted for murder by a powerhouse law firm? Here’s Steptoe’s address: 1330 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Jeremy Carl’s new book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart is important because it is one of the first works devoted to a central problem of the 21st century, the long-gestating rise of racist animus against white people.

Yet, in an era of protected classes, whites have been averse to noticing that hatred against themselves has become highly respectable.

Carl provides 77 pages of endnotes documenting the current obsession with despising whites. Still, whites have been weirdly averse to calling out all the loathing directed toward them. Few dare call it racism, instead preferring some more charitable explanation, such as attributing it to Marxism.

Mentioning all the bigotry targeted at whites is so unpopular that we don’t even have any agreed-upon terms for it. For example, Carl uses “anti-white racism” in his subtitle to denote racism against whites, but that can easily be confused with being against “white racism,” which is something highly different (or perhaps not). So I prefer the explicit term “racist anti-white hate,” but others might find that too on the nose.

One general problem is that whites have not been allowed to have representatives to offer guidance upon terminology for referring to white concerns the way that Jesse Jackson was able in December 1988 to make “African American” a respectable synonym for “black.” Jackson had performed impressively among black voters in the Democratic presidential primaries in both 1984 and 1988, so when he announced that he preferred “African American” over “black,” while that wasn’t going to stop me from using “black,” I was also happy to have a reasonable variant approved by the then rightful leader of blacks.

But whites, of course, must remain leaderless, without spokesmen. For instance, the American establishment was horrified that gentlemanly Jared Taylor volunteered to return phone calls if the press ever wanted a white opinion on racial controversies in the news, the way Jackson and Al Sharpton had long supplied the black perspective.

Sharpton, for example, made 72 visits to the Obama White House from 2009 through 2014. Yet Taylor, a magnanimous observer of his opponents, has been banned from Twitter for nearly a decade, even under Elon Musk. Restoring Taylor to Twitter (or X or whatever it is called now) would seem like the highest priority in proving that the era of racist anti-white hate is finally over. But so far nobody has gotten through to Musk.

Jeremy Carl is a pretty normal guy, a former official in the Interior Department in the Trump administration now with the Claremont Institute. He has five kids, which seems to drive, not unreasonably, his thinking. His dedication reads:

For my children: may they be treated equally as they pursue their dreams.

Presumably, this is a reference to Martin Luther King’s famous statement:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I’ve long argued that fostering anti-white hate is the inevitable result of the grand strategy of the Democratic Party to exploit the growth of diversity in the electorate by concocting a Coalition of the Fringes of American society. As immigration and social decay (e.g., transgenderism) make America more fragmented, the Democrats prosper (for example, they have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections).

But what can keep the Democrats’ assemblage of Jews and Muslims, black church ladies and LGBTs from turning on each other in a circular firing squad? So far, all the Democrats and their allies in the media have been able to come up with to unite their Coalition of the Margins is encouraging their constituents to hate Core Americans: men, the married, homeowners, and, most of all, whites.

Carl offers fifteen chapters on how these days it’s not okay to be white. He writes:

Because we live in a political climate that is hostile to white people, the notion that it could be okay to be white—that whiteness is not something worthy of being condemned—is viewed by many elites as a hostile statement.

On the other hand, DEI seems to be fading in 2024. For example, I was not permitted to do a single public appearance for more than a decade, from early 2013 to mid-2023, because hotels where I was booked to be hosted kept canceling reservations due to Antifa threats of violence.

In contrast, I made one appearance in 2023 and, due to the current vibe shift, eight so far in 2024. Lately, I’ve been on the road promoting my anthology Noticing, showing up in Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, West Virginia, and New York. Last week’s two appearances were in an old-money Robber Baron formal city club in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in a basement dive bar in the Lower East Side, where I spoke to a standing-room-only crowd so enthusiastic that it left me feeling like I was opening for Talking Heads and the Ramones in 1977. These shows were so successful that the publishers are now talking about trips to San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in the fall.

I could imagine them paying for my going to, say, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle as well if anybody there is interested in organizing shows. What about other places? If you want me to speak at your organization elsewhere, let me know. It wouldn’t be free, but it wouldn’t be relatively expensive, either.

Why are elites so hostile toward whites lately?

Carl’s final chapter, “The End Game: Reparations and Expropriations,” theorizes that the purpose of DEI is

to create an intellectual and cultural environment to justify the expropriation of land, property, and other wealth from whites while instituting a permanent regime of anti-white employment and legal discrimination.

After the 2008 crash of subprime mortgages, you heard far less about borrowing as a path to generational wealth and far more about, as Marx would say, expropriating the expropriators. When they talk about “equity,” they mean they want to grab your home equity. Carl continues:

This is not to suggest that direct expropriation is the conscious strategy of most participants in these movements. Like every good political strategy, anti-whiteness has an exoteric and esoteric meaning—there is an “inner party,” a limited group that understands what the end game is, even if, at times, they may not even express it to themselves, and a far larger, more diverse, and less sophisticated “outer party” that simply thinks that in fighting for “white privilege” they are fighting for “justice.”…

If we don’t fight harder, we will soon be subsidizing our own expropriation.

One of the best aspects of The Unprotected Class is each chapter’s quotes. The “Reparations and Expropriation” chapter begins with a delectable 1975 extraction from Sen. Joe Biden:

I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today for sins of my own generation[,] and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.

Indeed.

It’s been said that if Frank Sinatra was at a restaurant and the scene was dead, he’d tell one of his goons to trip a waiter, just to create some amusement.

Well, this election season is dead. With the two main candidates chosen, there ain’t nothin’ goin’ on, and there won’t be until September.

Readers say to me, “Write more about local politics, Dave!”

Write about what? The DA race will get exciting, come late summer when Soros pumps billions into the contest and the billionaires on our side are like, “Instead of funding Gascon’s opponent, we’ll fund a movie that’ll change the culture, starring Nick Searcy, James Woods, and Gina Carano as a lanced boil.”

Yeah, sure, there’ll be lots to write about in five months. But now?

Kristi Noem bragging about killing a puppy is Sinatra tripping a waiter. “It’s too quiet around here. I think I’ll boast about shooting a pup in the head because it was hard to train.”

Distractions like Noem’s admission of serial-killer tendencies can entertain for a week or so. But just like a tripped waiter, soon enough the mess gets cleaned up and everyone’s bored again.

And the real victims of this malaise are the opinion journalists. We have to keep you entertained in a doldrum sea.

Every week, we have to trip a waiter for your amusement.

So, you have the mindless cheerleaders at Townhall (“Yay! We’re beating the woke libs! Two-four-six-eight, killing Serbian kids was really great! Schlichter! Schlichter! Goooooooooooooooooo, Schlichter!”) and the underbelly guys like Unz, who exploit the idle pleasures of these days by beckoning you to join the exciting field of Holocaust denial.

Me? I’ve taken to becoming a scold. And I’m genuinely sorry about that, because I fear I’m at risk of becoming a one-note pianist. Worse still, I’m becoming a cock-blocker. An opinion journalist can either encourage or discourage. Think of it like two pals in a nightclub. One sees a fine-looking babe who smiles coyly at him. So, you can be the buddy who says, “Go for it, dude! She likes you! She’s yours for the taking.”

Or you can be the buddy who says, “She’s got herpes and you’re married. Pay your tab and go home to your family.”

Nobody likes that kind of friend. Nobody likes a thrill-killer, a soggy scolder.

But my God, there’s so much worthy of scolding at the moment. And so much that “crosses the streams” in terms of my favorite fetishes: idiotic rightists and Holocaust history.

How can I not scold? I’m only human.

Last week, Candace Owens discovered the Dresden bombing. At age 35, lil’ Candy learned a new thing…that anyone who’d ever read a history book would’ve already known (oh, wait—Candace was too busy suing her high school for being raycist! Who had time for books?).

As much as I’ve no truck with mysticism and magic, there’s a part of me that genuinely believes Owens was a crackwhore who found an antique lamp, rubbed it, and the genie inside offered her a wish knowing that the one she made—to be a respected intellect—was beyond even his estimable powers, but he did the best he could.

After Owens “discovered” Dresden, she went on a multiday tweetstorm about how it was a “war crime” and a genocide against Christians.

It’s weird how when it comes to the Holocaust, deniers want to see a body and an autopsy report before they’ll believe a single Jew was murdered. But with Dresden, they’ll go with the highball figure with no skepticism at all. Also, I thought “bodies don’t burn”—that’s the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” of Holocaust denial—so it’s odd that 600,000 bodies supposedly burned in two nights at Dresden when deniers claim 700,000 couldn’t have been burned over a year and a half at Treblinka.

I used to get upset when the simpleminded would ignore politics for the trivial. I recall in the 1990s a white male “meat-’n’-potatoes” conservative friend of mine bitching about “Balkans? Bosniaks? Srebrenica? I can’t understand that shit,” only to then rattle off remarkably dense sports stats about “Benirschke, Esiason, Wisniewski, and Seau.” And I realized that while he had the ability to comprehend the dense and complex, he was wasting it on frivolity. And that pretentious outrage on my part only grew during peak Marvel movie mania when, again, dudes would appear to be wasting their gray matter obsessing over ridiculous superhero minutia (“That’s Hal Hopper the BLUE BALGOBIN except in the Bizarroverse where he’s Malachi Miffler the GREEN GAMORGAN but in the GOLDEN AGE ERA he was Fred Frindlingson who must unite the Negaverse to the Posiverse by collecting the fifteen GALUBRIOUS CUBES that were scattered throughout MICRONICAVERSE by the villainous THELANOSIUM MALDRAKE who was mesmerized by the BELADORIOUS SPELL of Doctor Emprimorian who in the Reversoverse is actually Brink Bastaritori, master of the ten AMPHIRONICAL STONES hidden in the GRISTOLUCRITUS GALAXY by the SILVER STRYKER aka Bamford Brigand”) at the expense of trying to comprehend real-world events.

And then at some point it hit me that bread and circuses is actually a good thing, that all humans enjoy learning and reciting ponderous detail, but for most of us it’s best that the desire is confined to the frivolous, because it allows politics to remain grounded in simplistic caveman-isms—“me not want to pay more for eggs, me not want to be mugged by negro, me want to live in town where everyone speak English”—and the far-right’s yearning for “intellectualism,” typified by the current drift toward pseudo-intellectual WWII revisionism and Holocaust denial, is literally the worst thing for the country.

And Owens, being literally the worst thing for the country (that fucking genie…if I ever find that lamp it’s goin’ in a smelter), who Ralph Wiggum-style learnded something new and can’t resist reciting it, has launched a Dresden mania that I’d like to—what else—cock-block.

The bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, like the firebombing of Tokyo and the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was regrettable in that the people incinerated were high-IQ, good-quality humans who might’ve gone on to invent things or cure things or compose things. That said, Germany shouldn’t have declared war on America and Japan shouldn’t have bombed Pearl Harbor. That America concluded those wars the correct way is not debatable. Yes, terror bombings are nasty. And yes, they work. The Germans and Japs saw a future of continued incineration had they not surrendered and capitulated, so, with no other options, they surrendered and capitulated, and everything turned out great (for Japan, 100 percent. For Germany, I’m referring only to West Germany).

The retards playing at being intellectuals about WWII don’t get the point that the pacification stage of a war is as important as the fighting stage. Terror bombings pacified the Germans and Japs. Was it moral? Ask your priest. It worked. Good or bad, it worked.

But thanks to the Dresden sentimentality of “intellectuals” left and right, we can’t do that shit anymore. In October 2001 I wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times (under my favorite pseudonym, Cal Tinbergen—“a true genius…one of the few”) arguing that the best response to 9/11 was to go full Dresden on Afghanistan. Bomb from above. Don’t get into a ground war. Where there are al-Qaeda bases, now we’ll put up a parking lot. Joni Mitchell the entire place; don’t think twice about civilians. Air superiority is a good thing; it spares your soldiers. If you have it, use it. Especially against savages for whom, unlike the highly civilized Germans and Japs, nation-building is pointless.

Flatten from above every part of Afghanistan where our satellites and ground intelligence indicate there’s al-Qaeda. And tell the Taliban that if al-Qaeda comes back, so do our planes.

Twenty-three years later, with thousands of American soldiers dead and the Taliban back in charge, the entire nation-building “moral war” exercise having been for nothing, tell me, smart-asses, was I wrong? Was my suggestion not better?

Oh, but no, because aerial bombing is, as Owens says, a “war crime.” Better to prove your moral superiority, as opposed to your aerial superiority, by sending young people to die in “honorable” combat against goat-fuckers who curb-stomp women for learning basic math.

Proud of the outcome of your “honorable war,” moralist pricks? C’mon, debate me. Come to my Substack and debate me if you think my 2001 op-ed was misguided.

Pounding a place flat wins wars, against the civilized and the savage. But holy Spicoli, did my 2001 op-ed get attacked…by leftists (as Owens was at the time). Indeed, the Times dedicated an entire page to those who opposed my op-ed. San Francisco State’s Dr. Margo Kasdan wrote that only the “world court,” not aerial bombing, could end al-Qaeda. Leftist activist Ron Litman wrote that it was monstrous to think that “bombing from high altitude without seeing the destruction you sow is a good thing.”

Yes, because defeating a foe must be a learning experience for the victors. “You won, but did you up-close see the life ebb from your enemy’s face? No? Then you gained nothing (except, you know, an actual victory).”

Renowned physician Yossef Aelony wrote, “Tinbergen’s arguments that the ends justify the means can only lead to general immorality on all sides. Then it is only our superior military that makes us ‘superior’ instead of our dedication to liberty, freedom and the highest principles of mankind.”

In 2001, that was a leftist talking point. But then Owens found that fucking lamp…

Software “genius” Patrick Lubow called WWII aerial bombing “a strategic failure.” Yeah, West Germany was such an anarchic shithole.

Neville Raymond, a leftist author who today would be an Alex Jones rightist because he thinks the polio vaccine was “genocide,” wrote that “to give in to our rage-blinded desire to ‘defeat’ al-Qaeda” by aerial bombing them “is to hand them a moral victory.”

Yep, deprive yourself of a real victory because you’re petrified that your dead foes might win a moral one.

The Times published only one comment supporting my op-ed, by local artist Stacie Latreille (damnedest thing when the artist is the smartest one in the room): “Finally, someone with some sense of reality is commenting on the surgical strikes. How can we sway countries like Yemen or Iraq with our delicate definition of war? I hope Tinbergen forwards his piece to our president and every member of Congress.”

Well, Congress didn’t listen, and we got the Afghan mess rightists are now bitching about (“fuckin’ Biden!”) while also, thanks to Owens, bitching about aerial bombing (“fuckin’ rage-blinded desire for vengeance!”).

Please, most of you…watch Marvel films. Collect sports stats. My loyal readers, the finest, smartest, and best-looking folks in the world (buy me a beer), you guys get these nuanced points. But the rest of you?

The girl has herpes and you’re married. Pay your tab and go home.

And if you find an antique lamp along the way? Don’t rub it.

A new report just released by the U.K.’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health has recommended England immediately bans the smacking of children in its entirety—bad news for those deviants like me who pursue the practice as a part-time hobby, just for the fun of it. Whilst I and the other members of my local underground child-abuse club disagree profoundly with the proposal, I would nonetheless grudgingly admit there are plausible arguments on both sides of this particular debate…or so I had naively thought.

Previously, I had presumed the idea of smacking kids with the back of your hand/a wet fish/the nearest sledgehammer was primarily a moral or practical matter, the key questions being “Is it right?,” “Does it work?,” and “Is it highly enjoyable?” Now, however, I am grateful to discover the issue is actually a wholly “scientific” matter.

According to the Royal College, as paraphrased approvingly in top lefty rag The Guardian, “hundreds of studies” have somehow now “proved” that “the damage [to infants] from being smacked could [not “will,” then?] include poorer cognitive development, a higher risk of dropping out of school, increased aggression and perpetrating violence and antisocial behavior as adults.”

This conundrum now kindly having been reclaimed forever from the murky, indeterminate worlds of morality, ideology, and practicality, the report felt itself free to demand that, come this year’s looming U.K. General Election, “All political parties should include a commitment to [ban smacking] in their election manifestos.” The public should not so much as be given a choice when it comes to questions of science, you see, for science is at all times infallible, objective, and incontestable.

According to Bess Herbert, Advocacy Specialist at some stupid softy gay pressure group called End Corporal Punishment, “The science on physical punishment of children is now settled.” Ah, so the science is “settled,” then! Wherever have we heard that one before…?

Hippocratic Oafs
Today’s leftists have cottoned on to the fact that, in an increasingly secularized and politically divided Western world, science is for many people now the final objective reliable authority left to believe in. The very word itself now functions to millions of voters much as the word “magic” once did to their equally credulous ancestors in millennia gone by.

It’s not only banning the smacking of children: It’s also mass immigration. We all now have to accept its continued eternal future existence as a mere inescapable fact of life, like plague, famine, and death—the science says so, it’s an “inevitable” result of global warming. As the planet warms, some special natural reaction automatically attracts Eritreans toward your nearest welfare-check kiosk like iron filings to a magnet.

If that’s so, how come the science appears to suggest it’s only “inevitable” that the heat-threatened Africans will continue heading toward lands gullible enough to let them all in, like the U.S. and U.K., and not into those more sensible nations who simply stand firm and tell them all to sit tight, fry, and die back home, like Hungary and Japan?

And don’t forget that sweltering summer of 2020 when cities all around the developed world really did burn due to the widespread presence of imported African migrants in them. (A quick thought: As their “Global South” homelands also tend to be very hot, maybe the true cause of global warming is actually the excessive regional environmental presence of black people, not of CO₂ after all?)

During this fevered period, the left’s own precious BLM rallies, unlike all other known public gatherings in the Age of Covid-19, were deemed acceptable on “public health grounds” by various oh-so-impartial “WHITE COATS FOR BLACK LIVES” medics on the laughable pseudo-epidemiological grounds that “racism is also a public health crisis.” So is Race-Marxism, so let’s put all the rioting black bastards down right now; just imagine the reaction to any right-wing doctors who had come out with that particular equally pseudoscientific line back at the time.

Science Friction
As the Democratic Party is no longer especially democratic in nature, they should go the whole hog and rechristen themselves the “Science Party” instead, using that simple seven-letter word as the justification for imposing every last single one of their increasingly absurd and damaging policies upon an awestruck, largely scientifically illiterate (and consequently highly obedient) populace with no more need for any further “unnecessary” debate.

Even better, the Republicans could likewise henceforth be forcibly renamed the “Anti-Science Party” to put wavering voters off them even further, which in effect is what the compliant liberal media have already done to them anyway as regards any rebellious GOP politicians’ Net Zero skepticism or reasonable doubts about trans “medicine.”

With the presidential election coming up in November, you can expect to hear a lot more of this kind of rhetoric as the vote approaches ever closer. An early volley just appeared in the NYT, an op-ed by novelist Stephen Markley, who boasts he spent twelve long years writing a climate-change sci-fi story, The Deluge—Tolstoy didn’t spend as long writing Anna Karenina and War and Peace combined.

Markley warned that, whilst all the top profs agree the planet is doomed unless we pull down every last power plant and convert them into giant hamster wheels tomorrow, quack alchemists like Donald Trump are dangerously dissenting in their assessments of the matter, the Orange One having in the past called global warming a “hoax” and predicted instead that “It’ll start getting cooler, you watch.”

As a result, argues Markley, “the stakes of the climate crisis render the cliché of ‘This is the most important election of our lifetimes’ increasingly true because every four years those stakes climb precipitously alongside the toppling records of a radically new climate regime.” To parse, that roughly means as follows: “If Donald Trump wins in November ’24, then THE SCIENCE tells us that HUMANITY WILL DIE FOREVER, so he MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED to do so.”

Unscientific Americans
Well, Mr. Markley is a novelist, not a scientist, and has no professional obligation not to be partisan. But what about actual scientists themselves? Surely they shouldn’t see fit to wade into the arena of subjective political debate on a corporate, group collective level? They already have.

Prior to the last 2020 election, Scientific American, the country’s leading science periodical after Lysenkoism Monthly and Vaginal Healing Crystal News, endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its entire then-175 years of history—Joe Biden, who was offering “fact-based plans” to ensure America enjoyed a “more prosperous and more equitable future,” unlike Donald Trump, whom “the evidence and the science” demonstrated conclusively was a total drooling retard who had taken advice on epidemiology from “physicians who believe in aliens.”

According to Scientific American, Biden “comes prepared with plans to control COVID-19, improve health care, reduce carbon emissions and restore the role of legitimate science in policy-making.” Well, at least disease and climate change actually are scientific issues, I suppose. But what about the following reason listed by the editors for supporting him? “His plans include increased salaries for childcare workers and construction of new facilities for children because the inability to afford quality care keeps workers out of the economy and places enormous strains on families.”

How is massively expanding childcare on the taxpayer dime a scientific matter? Because families having “enormous strains” placed upon them is now suddenly a “public health” issue, allegedly, just like racism during coronavirus and the evil spanking of British toddlers today. If placing “enormous strains” upon families is objectively, scientifically bad, then how come Creepy Uncle Joe has spent the past four years relentlessly (and distinctly pseudoscientifically) trying to turn their kids tranny?

Scientific American was not alone in its laboratory-proven endorsement of Biden and repudiation of Trump, though. The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, and, in a joint open letter, no fewer than 81 past U.S. Nobel Laureates all followed suit like literate lemmings. You can expect to see them do the same again later this year, I hereby “scientifically” predict, as November rolls around.

Going Against Nature
But, if they do repeat their actions, what will be the results of such proselytizing? Amusingly, a complex, data-driven, statistical paper (summary for humans here) published last year in the impeccably peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behaviour purported to prove the ultimate results of Nature’s open endorsement of Joe Biden were as follows:

(1) To erode public trust in the journal Nature.

(2) To erode public trust in science in general.

(3) To erode public trust in the truth of favored left-wing scientific shibboleths like climate change and vaccines being utterly infallible.

(4) To make no difference whatsoever to the votes of undecided citizens.

(5) To therefore presumably make it more likely that the side Nature’s editors want to win the election will in fact lose it.

(6) To make the editors of Nature look like a bunch of self-defeating, absolute, solid-gold, planetary-level dickheads.

In a subsequent editorial, Nature took sober account of this paper’s findings…then basically just ignored and dismissed them, like flies to wanton boys. But how come? Surely, given the highly reliable, peer-reviewed source where this data first appeared—its author even had a Chinese-sounding name, so its math must have been correct—it should have been logically impossible for the editors to ignore. After all, it was the science, wasn’t it?

What a bunch of hypocrites. Imagine growing up to be as badly behaved as this. Someone should really have hit them all a bit more often when they were children.

The Week’s Most Trying, Plying, and Cinco-de-Maying Headlines

OFF THE BEATEN PATHOLOGICAL
Tranny advocates can’t find their Matthew Shepard, the gay man “beaten, tortured, and crucified by rednecks” in Laramie in 1998.

Of course, turns out the murder wasn’t a hate crime but a dispute over meth, but the legend lives on: innocent gay boy murdered by hillbillies.

Tranny activists have no Matt Shepard. They thought they had one in March when “nonbinary student” Nex Benedict was “beaten to death” by “transphobes” at her high school…but it turned out Benedict started the fight, had not been beaten, and committed suicide the next day, likely because someone used the wrong pronoun in zer presence.

While there’ve been cases of homeless street trannies beaten to death, the culprit’s always black!

It’s frustrating how rednecks just aren’t killing trannies.

Last week in Miami, a homeless trannynamed “Andrea Doria Dos Passos” was sunk by a fatal blow to the head as “she” slept outside the Miami City Ballet.

Could this be the one? Did Ron DeSantis’ racist Florida breed the trans-killing white villain the movement needs?

Nope. The suspect, Gregory Gibert, be so black, two weeks ago he was mistaken for the solar eclipse. He so black he was kicked out of Tampa cuz when he swam in the Gulf, people thought Deepwater Horizon be leakin’ again. He so black Nietzsche won’t gaze at him. He so black when he stands against a wall, Wile E. Coyote thinks it’s a tunnel. He so black he be banned from aviaries cuz he wakes the owls.

Flibberti-Gibert was on probation for a host of violent crimes, proving that even in Florida, demographics trumps DeSantis.

For its part, the Miami Ballet will feature a new dance, the Andrea Doria Two-Step, in the slain tranny’s honor.

PUNCHIN’ JUDY
Last month voters in L.A. City Council District 4 (the Hollywood Hills, hipster stronghold Silver Lake, and the Ventura Boulevard restaurant district) reelected Councilwoman Nithya Raman, whose platform is “hands off the homeless.” India-born socialist Raman was best-known for protecting the Ventura Pooman, a schizo who’d walk along restaurant row splattering diners with his feces.

You’d think voters might not want that. But not in District 4! Indeed, district resident Adam Conover, red-bearded hipster host of the popular series Adam Ruins Everything, campaigned tirelessly for Raman. And yes, voters listened to the guy who’s claim to fame is that he “ruins everything.”

So now, with Raman firmly in charge, things are being ruined. Last week a new schizo went walking along Ventura face-punching every woman he saw. Initially the cops didn’t even bother to investigate, knowing that Raman never allows the arrest of street lunatics. But after the local news covered the story, the cops took a perfunctory report, as Raman was like “Oh, bud-bud-bud, he’s just an oppressed traveler finding inner peace by bashing women’s faces.”

Perhaps the victims of the Ventura Basher can assist Adam Conover with his new series, Adam Ruins Eye Sockets.

Meanwhile, in NYC, another face-basher is making news. Daquan Armstead—yes, a literal Daquan—had been traipsing through Manhattan face-punching every woman he came across.

Note to black moms: If you name your baby Daquan, take it from the hospital straight to the nearest jail cell. Because that’s where it’ll end up anyway, so cut out the middleman.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg reluctantly had Daquan arrested—he had no choice. After crushing the faces of a dozen compliant Asian ladies—“Oh, puncheru me more, you gleat brack Adonis”—Daquan socked a black woman who filed an “oh no you dih’nt” report with the NYPD, the only type of report Mayor Adams allows cops to pursue.

Coast-to-coast, women are being flattered by schizos.

Correction: flattened.

BATON NOIR
News flash! Baton Rouge, June 29, 2022: Employees at Freddy’s Frozen Custard were riddled with bullets after customer LaGiggins Burnett received the wrong order.

News flash! Baton Rouge, June 1, 2023: Popeyes fast-food employee Kieran Demond Johnson got into a gunfight with a coworker, which spilled into the street, as both assailant and victim ran to a nearby Waffle House, where the shooting continued, with Johnson pumping shots into the victim’s buttocks because that’ll teach him to boast about having a bullet-free ass.

News flash! Baton Rouge, April 1, 2024: Easter Weekend, a dozen people were shot in and around fast-food joints, with one child being struck by stray bullets that came through her bedroom window. Police blamed McDonald’s’ black-themed “Ashy Wednesday” Happy Meal promotion.

News flash! Baton Rouge, April 22, 2024: Black gentleman Alvin Mott murdered a clerk at a Circle K, then murdered another clerk at a Kangaroo Express mini-mart.

News flash! Baton Rouge, May 1, 2024: Sassy black chick Latoria Matthews meets a guy on Instagram and invites him for dinner. Then she shoots him before they even get to the restaurant.

In completely unrelated news, last week the residents of St. George, a white suburb of Baton Rouge, won the right to form their own city and split from 53 percent black Baton Rouge.

Legal experts are puzzled as to why they wanted to do that.

The Week That Perished was slated to interview Baton Rouge Councilman DeBobbins Odom, but unfortunately he was killed buying a Big Mac. Fortunately, his adjutant Daquilliam Jackshun was willing to step in…but he was killed trying to buy a Whopper.

The Week is hoping to solicit comment from somebody in the Baton Rouge Metro Council…hopefully a vegan.

GO CHOKE A KOSHER CHICKEN
Last week a New York appeals court threw out Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction.

What a relief! Now Quentin Tarantino can finally make Grindhouse 2.

The court’s decision revolved around that most contentious of issues in criminal trials: the extent to which a defendant’s previous acts can be presented to the jury. In Weinstein’s case, the court ruled that the judge shouldn’t have allowed jurors to learn of Weinstein’s history of rapery.

Which brings to mind another high-profile Hollywood trial: the case of John Sweeney. In 1982 he was dating actress Dominique Dunne—the teenage daughter in the original Poltergeist film—and what Dunne didn’t know was that Sweeney had a history of strangling every girl he dated. The man loved to strangle. It was his life’s calling. He was the only baby ever born with his umbilical cord wrapped around the doctor’s neck.

One night in October ’82, as Dunne was at home rehearsing for an upcoming TV miniseries, a jealous Sweeney kicked in the door and started, what else, strangling her. Dunne’s scene partner, actor David Packer, would’ve helped, but he had to call his acting coach to determine his motivation.

“Is this a ‘hero’s journey’ or a ‘save the cat’ moment?”

Dunne was done-in, and Sweeney was prosecuted. At the trial, Judge Burton Katz ruled Sweeney’s previous strangulations inadmissible, so the jury returned the weakest possible verdict—three and a half years for “involuntary manhandling a bitch,” and when public opinion turned against him, Katz made the dickest move in judicial history by blaming the jurors for being too lenient instead of blaming himself for withholding vital information from them.

Then—and this is not a joke—Katz reinvented himself as an actor and appeared on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Larry: “You know who I don’t like? Stranglers.”

Katz: “Stranglers?”

Larry: “Stranglers! Why would anyone strangle? There’s a hundred ways to kill someone one-handed. Guns, knives, poison. So why use both hands? It’s showboating.”

Katz: “Stranglers wanna make the rest of us look lazy.”

Larry: “Like they’re better than us or something.”

Leon: “Man, f*ck them mutherf*ckin’ stranglers.”

So now, in the Weinstein case, a judge who did allow evidence of past misdeeds has been overruled by 2024 Katzes, and Weinstein will get a new trial.

Too bad Curb just ended its run; those appellate judges would’ve been great guest stars.

PRIESTLY GARBLED
It was an idea that couldn’t possibly go wrong…except in every way imaginable.

Catholic Answers is a charitable “apologetics” org founded in 1979. Its principles include fighting against what it calls the “five non-negotiable issues”: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and gay marriage.

Odd not seeing pedophilia on that list. But hey, that human cloning thing is getting out of hand. Go to any college campus and it’s clear that some mad scientist is assembly-line churning out blue-haired white chicks with septum horseshoe rings.

That said, it’s strange that an org dedicated to “the sanctity of human life” would decide to jump washed-feet-first into AI. But last week Catholic Answers launched a “virtual online AI priest” named “Father Justin,” and it went about as well as you can guess.

To put it another way, the org would’ve been better off with Father Ted.

“Father Justin’s” programming went haywire immediately. He began telling visitors to baptize their babies in Gatorade.

He also suggested replacing Communion wafers with Chips Ahoy.

“Body of Christ: crunchy or soft-baked.”

“Justin” also began offering AI absolution for sin, a rather bizarre move for an organization that considers stem cell research unholy because it’s an abrogation of nature. The AI father also lectured visitors about the evils of masturbation, which might’ve been the only rational aspect of its programming, because all internet users who seek virtual AI experiences have a chronic masturbation problem.

Catholic Answers shut down the site after the final glitch, when Father Justin told a fellow priest to fondle the collection plate and pass around the altar boy.

No word on if the euthanization of Father Justin was approved by the Vatican.

One of the things that I notice walking through the streets of England—but not only in England—is the almost complete lack of self-respect of the population. Self-esteem, of course, is another matter entirely: Most people are on the qui vive for anything that they think might be regarded as an assault on their dignity as the bearer of human rights, ever growing in number, complexity, and self-contradiction.

Not only do people fail to make the most of themselves, they seem determined to make the worst of themselves, as if they were setting a challenge to others not to remark on them or pass a judgment about the way they look. In England, fat young women (of whom there are lamentably many) squeeze themselves into unbecomingly tight costumes, like toothpaste into a tube. It is as if they were intimidating you into not noticing how hideous they look.

On an escalator in a station recently, I followed a very fat young woman. At the bottom of the escalator, she was eating some kind of nut bar, no doubt advertised as health-giving, as if she were urgently in need of nutrition. By the top of the escalator, she had taken out her telephone and was sending a message with astonishing dexterity: She could type faster on her tiny keyboard than I on my computer. From the look on her face, I judged her to be of good or even of superior intelligence. Her bad taste was not the consequence of intellectual incapacity.

Her black two-piece outfit clung to her body as closely as one wraps leftovers in cling film before putting them in the fridge. Between the upper and lower halves of the costume, however, was a kind of strait separating two continents, through which pudgy white flesh bulged. On the small of her back (not very small) was a tattoo. Naturally, her face was pierced with rings and other metallic adornments. She presented herself to the world with an almost ferocious, and certainly deliberate, absence of dignity.

Being fat is not by itself incompatible with dignity. I think, for example, of the fat market women of West Africa, in their long cotton gowns and magnificent turbans. When they move, they are stately, like the galleons of the line of an early navy. One respects them immediately.

There is an epidemic of self-abuse in the Western world, worse no doubt in the Anglo-Saxon parts than elsewhere, but spreading, for the world follows American trends with all the intelligence of a headless chicken. There have always been scruffy people—I was once one myself—but the mass adoption of ugliness as a fashion and way of being is something relatively new. It bespeaks a toxic mixture of self-hatred, narcissism, solipsism, and laziness.

The natural beauty of people presumably falls on a normal, or Gaussian, distribution, the vast majority of people falling somewhere between great beauty and great ugliness. But no one is, or very few people are, condemned to indignity. We adopt indignity as a way of being.

There are, of course, certain advantages to ugliness and indignity as goals. They are targets almost certain to be hit, requiring practically no effort. To turn oneself out well takes continued and continual effort, and while it may become second nature, it still remains a discipline that imposes its obligations.

Carried to excess, of course, it becomes vanity, which in some cases may be preposterous. Dandyism is often laughable. But the opposite is worse and is also a form of vanity, a worse form. What it suggests is the following: that I am so essentially important or good a person that I need not make an effort for others—you must therefore accept me as I am. This entails that I must accept you as you are, and hence the general level of self-respect declines, to be replaced by self-esteem. The former is a social quality—it requires seeing oneself through the eyes of others—while the latter is purely solipsistic.

I changed my views on mode of dress in Africa. Until then, I had taken the standard bohemian line that smartness of dress was nothing but the means by which a social class imposed its hegemony on the rest of society, and also that concern with dress was essentially trivial and superficial.

But in Africa I saw people who were far poorer than anyone I had ever met turn themselves out, whenever they could, with pride and care—and succeed magnificently. They did so even though it cost them great effort and even sacrifice. It was a triumph of the human spirit, a local defeat over the second law of thermodynamics. It changed my attitude to dress thereafter.

The deliberate self-uglification of people is a form of bullying. It is the demand that you do not notice something that you cannot help noticing. Comment upon it would be even worse. The only defense is to reply in kind, to be just as ugly, or at least as sloppy.

Personal ugliness is democratic, for its achievement is easily within the reach of all, while personal beauty is aristocratic because its achievement is not within the reach of all and is in part determined by heredity. Such ugliness, therefore, is politically virtuous in a way that beauty can never be. One displays one’s solidarity with the rest of mankind by uglifying oneself, whereas one displays one’s inegalitarianism by trying to be anything other than ugly, for example elegant.

This applies not only to dress but to tastes in other things. Of course, there is a large element of playacting and hypocrisy in all this. The rich man who dresses in proletarian fashion has no intention of sharing his wealth with the proletariat, quite the reverse, he is usually avid for more. He may also mix his message, for example like Donald Trump: by wearing a suit and tie but donning a baseball cap. No man, said Doctor Johnson in Rasselas, may drink simultaneously of the source and the mouth of the Nile, but for various crooked reasons the bourgeois may try to appear proletarian, the better to head off envy, criticism, or revolutionary sentiment. So far, at any rate, the ruse has worked.

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

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