American culture reached Peak Beta last week as three privileged white-male pundits wrote essays declaring that privileged white males suck.

Lifelong morbidly obese bitchy lesbian Roger Ebert apparently dismantled the presumably elaborate series of pulleys and harnesses that enable him to orally service his adiposely domineering, melanin-drenched wife in order to run that half-a-mouth of his about how “Women Are Better Than Men.” Amazingly, Ebert became privy to this startling epiphany while watching a movie about how women are better than men. Ebert, who was apparently born without male hormones, decried “testosterone.” He intimated that men, at least the brawny ones, are as obsolete as farm animals and that women will be better suited to take command of “our emerging world economy”:

Women are nicer than men. And the sooner more of them take positions of power, the better our chances as a species.

Mr. Ebert has obviously never heard of Aileen Wuornos or Elizabeth Báthory.

Ebert’s verbal genuflection before the Giant Invisible Goddess Vulva is nothing new. Nor was it as cringeworthy as other recent spectacles of public male self-neutering such as the unconsciously hysterical, vagina-dessiccating “Dear Woman” video compiled by a group of ex-men offering “a collective apology on behalf of their gender.” It wasn’t as abjectly self-deballing as the recent trend of progressive boy hamsters holding “I Am a Feminist Because…” placards in what appear to be last-ditch attempts to get laid. It is merely the latest example in a decades-long tradition of men taking pride in taking shame in being men.

The second male scribe to fire a flaming Roman candle into his own crotch last week was the profoundly unhandsome sci-fi writer John Scalzi, who apparently attracts legions of profoundly unhandsome fans who could pass for the bastard sons of Roger Ebert, all of them swinging their flaccid lightsabers of righteous self-abnegation in agreement. Scalzi, who claims he’s in the process of writing a video game, used his undoubtedly well-manicured fingers to peck out an essay called “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” Since he apparently spends much of his life lost amid fantasies, he likened American social hierarchies to a video game where being born a white male makes the game easier than it is for anyone else.

Rounding out last week’s triumvirate of white-male auto-castrati was HuffPo contributor Bob Cesca, who not only acknowledged a media double standard when it comes to reporting interracial violence—he defended it! He insisted that the double standard “has to remain”—his italics—to help dismantle “the white-dominated American power structure” until that day in the distant future when we finally reach “full equality.” Despite the mountains of narrative-subverting evidence that has leaked out in the Trayvon Martin case in recent weeks, Cesca still says that he and other sensitive white males “can understand why African American activists like Al Sharpton and others are outraged.” Apparently he can also understand how Sharpton still retains a pinkie-fingernail’s worth of credibility after Tawana Brawley, the Duke Lacrosse scandal, the Crown Heights riots, the Jena 6, and now the Trayvon case, because I don’t understand it at all.

Many modern white males appear to have been culturally conditioned to fit themselves with electric dog collars that deliver sharp, painful jolts when they so much as think of offending anyone who isn’t a white male. And somehow they seem to see this as noble and brave rather than fearful and compliant. But these self-flagellating public displays are reminiscent of the magical thinking in what I once diagnosed as “Passover Syndrome”—it’s as if by declaring that they share in an unpaid collective debt, maybe they can emerge unscathed without having to sacrifice anything tangible beyond their basic dignity.

”I am a privileged white male; that is simply a fact.”

“I Am a Privileged White Male…And honestly, sometimes I wish I wasn’t.”

“I am a formerly clueless privileged white male, who has taken advantage of my privilege….I’m pathetic.”

“I am a privileged white male Westerner who is not, and never will be, personally affected by this use of colonizing language….”

“I am a privileged white male…and so I ask the viewer to laugh at me laughing at myself.”

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Oh, I’m laughing. Laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing. You say that collective pride is a sign of ignorance, but collective shame is a sign of enlightenment. You affirm yourself through self-negation. You think it’s brave to be a pussy. You’ve raised your consciousness so high, you’ve left planet Earth entirely. You’re hilarious!

Just as I can’t see all this invisible racism, and just as I think that anyone who believes in institutional racism ought to be institutionalized, I’m absolutely blind to all this privilege I allegedly enjoy due to my skin and gender. I don’t see the privilege in being required to passively accept my nonexistent role in historical atrocities. I don’t see the upside of being constantly lampooned and demonized in media and education. And I definitely don’t see the privilege in being a white-male writer in a modern media milieu where it’s a career-killer if the first words out of your mouth aren’t, “I’m a white male, and I’m sorry.”

While working on this essay, I received an email from a white male who works in media asking if I’d seen Scalzi’s article and urging me to write about it. He’d personally experienced an extremely hostile reaction from his cohorts after criticizing Scalzi’s piece:

I tried to bring a little reason into the discussion (“Hey, I grew up in a shitheap and work three jobs so why am I more privileged [than] Michelle Obama?”) but out came the pitch forks….I’ve actually had to block a lot of people in my social media circles over this, and I’ve not been able to even sleep that much since reading all of the hateful bleating from his little sheep.

Shortly after I told him I was going to include the Scalzi article in my piece, he sent me this:

Oh, and I guess it’s too late now, but my wife is freaked out you’ll mention me in the piece. Guess she’s got a point. The progressive witch hunters are thick in my line of work and even the tiniest claim of the scarlet “R” word will ruin my life for good. I told her you didn’t seem like that kind of guy, but I also promised I’d ask. So is that okay?

I wrote him back a single line:

How much energy does it sap from you every day biting your lip and not speaking the truth?

He responded with palpable terror:

Oh. Crap. A lot….I’ve tried to speak about this—that privilege is a relative thing—and all it got me was a whole lot of misery.…I was eaten alive on Facebook, and all I want is not to have my life ruined—I am scared now, frankly. I’m just starting to dig my way out of the financial and creative morass I’ve dug for myself….My wife is already furious with me about this. We are/were on the verge of some new stuff that could dig us out of a bad situation.…You, as you’ve gathered, now have [me] by the balls. I never thought that this would happen. Are you going to break me?…I was stupid, I guess, and I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m going to do if you choose to throw me to the wolves. I just didn’t think that you would. Are you?…I’m fucked.

And I wrote back:

You’re the one who has to live with yourself and what appears to be a dominating wife….I don’t plan on identifying you, because that’s not my style unless someone’s directly attacked me first….But you helped me write this article. These emails illustrate a lot of points I’ve tried to make.

Greece, the cradle of Western Civilization, seems destined to become either the West’s coffin or the site of its rebirth. The nation’s debt crisis, combined with the fact that it’s a primary entry point for illegal immigration into Europe—in 2010, nine of every ten “migrant” outlaws sashayed into the EU zone through Greece—have helped fuel violent street clashes between far-left (i.e., internationalist) and far-right (i.e., nationalist) factions for years.

Last week’s elections were largely a repudiation of the political center, specifically the EU’s financial stranglehold on Greece. Although unashamedly pro-communist parties won a far higher quotient of the votes, most media outrage was predictably focused on the fact that the nationalist party Golden Dawn received 7% of the total. Pundits referred to Golden Dawn’s minor victory as “absurd and repugnant,” “a dark day for Greece,” “a scary development,” “a political horror,” and all the other histrionic scare terms typically spewed by compliant media lapdogs trained to establish an immediate—although immediately fallacious—connection between the merest squib of nationalist sentiment and the Holocaust.

“Truly, they have not learned the lessons of history,” lamented one pundit. “Didn’t the Europeans learn anything from history?” wailed another.

Dismissing all opposing ideas as “outdated” is a sly leftist tactic that’s seemingly been employed ever since Karl Marx posited that global communism was a historical inevitability. If you don’t swallow any of this “scientific” Marxist gobbledygook in one piece without even chewing, well, you’re living in the past, comrade. It doesn’t matter that communist thugs were cracking heads in German streets before Nazis ever existed or that Karl Marx was dead long before Gabriele d’Annunzio ever published a word.

As if it was an invisible ideological communion wafer, we are expected to swallow the idea that World War II was mainly a clash of good v. evil rather than a battle over land and resources. We are further expected to believe that the Allied victory proved that the Nazis—and via the magic of guilt by association, any ethno-nationalist impulses wherever they arise forevermore—have been refuted and discredited, when all that was really proved was that the Allies were more efficient at killing and bombing than the Nazis were.

And, lest you be called a racist anti-Semite and jailed for your thought crimes, blot forever from your mind the idea that communism killed far more people than fascism ever did. All dead bodies are equal, but some are obviously far more equal than others.

The European Union, which operates more like a financial dictatorship over its vassal states than a government reflecting the popular will, has sought to criminalize all “racist” and “xenophobic” behavior to the point where they’d probably seek to jail you merely for demanding that they provide quantifiable definitions for these slippery and ultimately idiotic smear terms. Their demand for absolute ethnic tolerance is always accompanied by absolute ideological intolerance.

The EU, displaying rank dictatorial arrogance in a 2000 document aimed at “countering racism and xenophobia in the European Union,” has instructed its media minions to goose-step in 4/4 time with its revisionist reclassification of all national pride as mental illness and character deficiency:

14. Calls on media organisations to establish a code of ethics to combat racism and xenophobia and to monitor compliance with it;
15. Calls on the European media to help provide young people with information on the recent history of Europe, particularly as regards discrimination and the extermination of the Jewish community in the Nazi concentration camps….

No mention is made of helping young people understand that tens of millions of their own blood ancestors also perished during “the recent history of Europe.”

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That same quietly genocidal 2000 document targets “right-wing extremist violence” but makes no mention of the idea that “left-wing extremist violence” has ever existed. It claims that “contemporary nationalism” is “based on obsolete and destructive ideas of homogeneity which foster division and racial hostility” and that “Europe must divest itself of the idea of a white core culture and redefine ‘nation’ to mean the community within the jurisdiction of the state….”

In other words, the softly totalitarian EU gets to dictate what “Europe” is rather than, say, indigenous Europeans. And “Europe” is now clearly a decade-old currency called “the euro” rather than the landmass that has hosted indigenous Europeans for tens of thousands of years. And if you dare to question any of this, you obviously suffer from a fresh new mental illness known as Europhobia. Kindly forget that the EU is headquartered in Belgium, a nation rapidly falling apart due to ethnic incompatibility between the Flemish and the Walloons.

None of this is meant to imply that Greece’s Golden Dawn party doesn’t play the role of fascist street goons con mucho gusto. Their well-muscled henchmen are known for physically attacking illegal immigrants, leftists, and the occasional journalist. Their latest TV ads focused on deporting illegal immigrants and urged indigenous Greeks to help them “get rid of the stench.” Their party flag resembles a swastika in the process of unraveling, and they flash one another the Roman salute with an enthusiasm unseen on European soil since the 1940s. Their party charter states that “only Aryans in blood and Greeks in descent can be candidate members,” and their leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos served prison time for possessing explosives.

Yet the ancient Greek nation once suffered under nearly four hundred years of Ottoman occupation and has recently been flooded with predominately Muslim immigrants who, according to various estimates, suddenly comprise anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the total population.

These days, hyper-centralized agencies such as the EU seem to protect “indigenous rights” for everyone except indigenous Europeans while condemning “colonialism” except when it comes to the demographic colonization of Europe.

Is it possible that the globalist mantra is wrong and that multiculturalism leads to conflict rather than harmony?

Only a detached leftist academic would think that in a time of economic depression, mass immigration of mostly unassimilable and often culturally hostile foreigners would help the working class rather than harm it. Only a deluded leftist ideologue or a media-brainwashed useful idiot would keep scratching their head at the persistently stubborn resurgence of nationalism without pausing to ponder that perhaps tribalism is an ineradicable human instinct rather than a sinister psychological aberration.

In last week’s elections, Golden Dawn performed best in crime-addled areas of central Athens, gaining up to a quarter of the vote in some precincts. What could those voters possibly know that might escape some faraway Brussels Eurocrat in their cramped grey hypoallergenic cubicle?

What about reports that in some areas, Golden Dawn serves as a “Robin Hood” agency that provides clothing and food for vulnerable Greek nationals? Is it true that in certain Athenian quadrants, imperiled Greeks are more likely to call in Golden Dawn for physical protection before they’d ever call the police? Is it possible that some Greeks feel that only Golden Dawn cares about their survival and is willing to shed blood to ensure it?

Although media outlets cast a harsh spotlight on Golden Dawn’s immigrant-bashing, they don’t focus nearly so much attention on their fervid criticism of “global loan sharks,” “bailout dictators,” and “international speculators” who are “selling us out and looting the sweat of the Greek people.”

For some Greeks, it seems to have come down to a choice between Golden Dawn and Goldman Sachs. “Why should they vote for us?” asked party leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos. “Because they have nothing better.”

Brecksville Bridge

The International Workers’ Disco Party known as May Day came early to Cleveland this year, but instead of starting with a bang, it began with a profoundly dumb silence on the evening of April 30. That’s when five bumbling young males were allegedly unable to detonate eight pounds of the plastic explosive C4 they’d attached to a bridge south of the perennially maligned Rust Belt metropolis.

Although the press has mostly taken to describing them as anarchists, these comically inept five lions were also intimately involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which had taken a hiatus over the winter months because it was too frickin’ cold to topple the oligarchy.

It would be a public-relations apocalypse for the largely left-leaning press to admit that this drab and unwashed quintet of accused wannabe terrorist bombers was in any way involved with a movement approved by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party.

It’s charming that anyone—communist, anarchist, fascist, or Polish—would want to occupy Cleveland. But according to an AP report, Occupy Cleveland spokesman Jacob Wagner initially conceded that although the “Cleveland 5” may have attended a few of their events, they were in no way “affiliated” with the group.

I suppose it depends on how one defines “affiliated.” Apparently it doesn’t involve acting as a spokesman for the group when the Cleveland Plain Dealer profiled one of their endless public temper tantrums in March. Nor does it involve staying at their Cleveland encampment while the press describes you as “one of the few remaining members of Occupy Cleveland’s physical presence downtown.” Nor does it involve posing for pictures claiming that not only do you represent Occupy Cleveland, you hope to expand the project into the surrounding suburbs. Nor does it involve organizing events for Cleveland with the word “Occupy” in their name. Nor does it involve signing a lease on a warehouse to provide shelter for a dozen Occupy Cleveland members. Nor does it mean anything when one, or even two, or, for heaven’s sake, three of the five claim not only to be “affiliated” with the group, they claim it was their employer. (A fourth claims Occupy Wall Street is his “Favorite Team,” while the fifth, bless the hidden dimples in his unshaved cheeks, apparently doesn’t have a Facebook profile.)

When finally forced to concede that at least a few of these would-be proletarian mujahideen were, OK, somehow involved with the group if only on the fringes, Occupy Cleveland spokeslady Debbie Kline still claimed they in no way reflected the fundamentally nonviolent doctrine of OWS. A subsequent press release featured this glimmering bauble of newspeak:

Occupy Cleveland has spoken out and worked against…occupations.

Now that we’ve made that clear and established that Occupy Wall Street is a peaceful, nonviolent, and unperturbably serene political movement, let’s meet our five contestants for Dumbest Accused American Terrorists of the New Millennium. If this is what the revolution looks like, the revolution sorely needs a style consultant (click thumbnails to enlarge):

BRANDON “SKABBY” BAXTER
Baxter, 20, was hospitalized in February after an apparent suicide attempt. At the time, Baxter, who claims to possess “sick ninja skillz,” was reportedly found with two knives. In 2008, he was arrested for writing the word BARF on a picnic table. A year later, he was arrested and charged with attempted murder for slashing his stepfather in the chest and forearm with a kitchen knife. (He pled to a lesser offense, and the conditions of his release included psychiatric treatment.)

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DOUGLAS “CYCO” WRIGHT
This mild-manned heartthrob, 26, has allegedly boasted that he’s lost teeth and had his nose broken in street scuffles with police. According to the FBI affidavit, he hinted to an informant that he has a felony record and if arrested again, he’d go away for a long time. He also “joked” that if he was “drunk enough,” he’d consider strapping on a suicide vest and blasting himself into anarchist paradise, where he’d be rewarded 72 white girls with dreadlocks and unshaved armpits.

ANTHONY HAYNE
Hayne, the group’s wise elder whose age is variously reported as either 35 or 37, has racked up nearly two dozen criminal charges in northern Ohio, including theft, receiving stolen property, stealing a checkbook, breaking and entering, assault, drug charges involving minors, and lying to police about his identity. When arrested in connection with the foiled bombing attempt, he had a warrant for violating probation.

JOSHUA STAFFORD
Hailing from the affluent and nearly all-white suburb of Avon Lake, Stafford, now 23, has allegedly had scrapes with the law since he was fourteen. These include arrests for assault and convictions for criminal trespass, theft, attempted breaking and entering, receiving stolen property, and criminal damaging. One of these incidents from last year involved breaking into a home, kicking out its porch railing, slicing a closet wall in the house with a knife, and stealing three bottles of wine. In a 2003 incident at a youth treatment center, he allegedly threatened to kill a teacher with a knife; he also reportedly stuck his finger in an electrical socket while kicking a teacher in the knee. In 2008 after being caught breaking into an abandoned shopping center, he told police it was because he had “nothing else to do.”

CONNOR STEVENS
Stevens, 20, appears to have the cleanest rap sheet of the bunch, although police investigated him when he was 15 for disrupting a high-school job fair and calling a police officer a “fascist pig.” In 2009, he was arrested for damaging property, underage drinking, and “stealing a cape from a Walmart store.” His mother reportedly describes him as someone who is “not a violent person but has very strong beliefs and is immature about it.” At press time, it appears that his biggest crime—except for allegedly being involved in a bomb plot—is writing extremely bad poetry.

These are the young men who seem to assume they are fundamentally less corrupt and more ethical than the “1%.”

None of this is to imply that the FBI chose Jesus of Nazareth as their confidential informant in this case. Instead they chose the 6’5”, 350-pound, 39-year-old Shaquille Azir, a felon convicted of crimes such as robbery and passing bad checks who couldn’t even keep his act together long enough to avoid being arrested twice for completely unrelated events during the sting operation. The defendants’ lawyers in the bombing case will likely question Azir’s credibility as well as raise the possibility that his involvement constitutes entrapment. Much of it may hinge on cross-examining Azir, who alleges he ingratiated himself with members of the group during an Occupy Cleveland event in October. According to the FBI, Azir introduced himself to a few of the boys after witnessing one of them say, “Fuck that!” when a speaker at the event insisted the Occupy movement must refrain from violence.

Over several months of interacting with the five suspects, Azir claims the group discussed bombing casinos, hospitals, trains, the Federal Reserve bank, the Republican National Convention in Tampa, and even a KKK or Nazi headquarters in southern Ohio—because everyone knows these latter two groups represent the global corporate elite rather than an almost entirely disempowered and ostracized societal fringe. It was even suggested that they could win public sympathy by bombing a Klan facility, if such things still exist.

It was eventually decided that they’d bomb a bridge. At one point, Brandon Baxter suggested they use tacks to flatten the tires of police vehicles giving chase. It is not known whether the group discussed painting a tunnel on the side of a mountain to distract law enforcement. With Azir as their liaison, they agreed to pay $900 in exchange for eight one-pound bricks of C4 and various items of paramilitary gear. They could only manage to cough up $450 among the five of them, but “Cyco” Wright promised he would make up the difference by becoming a weed dealer.

Last Monday night, the group allegedly planted the C4 bricks at the base of the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge, then removed themselves from harm’s way and allegedly tried detonating the explosives via text message. Nothing happened, and they were arrested shortly thereafter. They each face two federal charges of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and one charge of attempted use of an explosive device to damage or destroy real property. Today all five will appear in federal court.

The FBI affidavit is littered with several instances of the accused exulting in the idea of wreaking destruction, but naively so—they thought that bombing a bridge would somehow teach a lesson to the “1%” rather than the “99%” of people who need things such as bridges to get to work. They obviously didn’t consider that the “1%” may own helicopters or even spaceships. Stafford allegedly joined the group late but was allowed entrance due to his eagerness to do “crazy shit.” Wright said he’d be happy as long as things “got fucked up” in the bombing. He also predicted that Cleveland would be reduced to “a pile of rubble and ashes” and that he looked forward to when American anarchists would be “rioting and destroying each city.”

OWS seems to have mastered the “smash the system” part of their program, but I’ve yet to hear any of them utter a word about how they’d rebuild a society from the ashes that would be better in any way than what currently exists. From the start, I’ve seen them as nothing more than the dupes of police-state power. In that sense, they’ve been the government’s useful idiots. Beyond that, these idiots are useless.

Dan Savage

Although it remains unclear exactly what buggery has to do with ethical reporting, Professional Homosexual Dan Savage was there to unravel the mystery to a group of Seattle teens on April 13 at the National High School Journalism Convention. When he started ripping into the Bible—calling it “bullshit” and accusing it of not only being wrong about homosexuality, but also about slavery, masturbation, virginity, and, yes, shellfish—small clusters of students stood up and began leaving. Their exodus was largely quiet. They did not try to shout him down or sprinkle him with holy water.

Savage called the retreating clusters of offended and presumedly Christian students “pansy asses.” Looking so empowered that one would think he needs to carry extra battery chargers whenever he travels more than 25 miles, Savage gloated that he was “beating up the Bible,” then apologized if anyone’s feelings were hurt. “But I have a right to defend myself,” the defiant little banty rooster asserted.

But nobody attacked you, ya douche. You were attacking them, and they quietly left.

Although what constitutes “bullying” is in the eye of whoever thinks they’re being bullied, Dan Savage—it’s his real name, a coincidence as glorious as if he’d been born “Percy Fierce” or “Lance Fabulous”—has left quite a fecal slime trail of either bullying his ideological opponents or, if you don’t want to use that word, being a generally aggressive and hateful dickhead toward them.

What’s the currently acceptable term for a gay male blogger? A blaggot? A glogger? A blomo? Whatever it is, Dan Savage is probably the most prominent one in the blogosphere. He was the one who created Rick Santorum’s frothy, feces-flecked “Google problem.” He also claimed that while sick with the flu, he once licked almost everything he could find in Iowa Republican Gary Bauer’s office, including doorknobs, keyboards, staplers, phones, and clean coffee cups. (He later claimed he had made up the entire incident, and he’s also been caught repeatedly lying about his age, so he may suffer from a low T-cell count—with “T” standing for “truth.”)

He’s also displayed tremendous tolerance for diversity of opinion. “I wish the Republicans were all fucking dead,” he once told Bill Maher while cameras were rolling. He once said he wished a Pennsylvania politician would get “dragged behind a pickup truck until there’s nothing left but the rope.” He invited Herman Cain to orally pleasure him to prove, as Cain had asserted, that homosexuality is a choice. (Cain chose not to orally pleasure him.)

When Mississippi TV reporter Kandiss Crone did a story on a local adult store that led to the store owner’s arrest, Savage suggested that his readers send Crone their used sex toys. How would he feel if someone sent him an aborted baby? Or a severed vulva? Not too good, I’ll bet.

Despite all his taunting of Bible-thumpers, they seem to mostly write him off as a creepy sodomite and stay as far as possible from Dan and his bodily fluids.

It’s his comrades amid the “gay community” and sundry other pissy progressive sectarians who appear to bear a larger-than-life hatred for him—not all of them, but enough to make it really, really funny to me. I thought they were all “on the same page” about the fact that those evil, repressed right-wingers were goose-stepping toward them to snatch away their butt plugs and shut down their all-night fisting parties. I thought they had to stick together and remember Stonewall as if it was the Alamo. I thought they had to keep the rainbow intact.

Apparently not!

For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of observing leftist identity politics is its tendency to fracture…then splinter…then atomize…then, each week, suddenly discover a new subatomic level of identity. It’s a boiling, swirling alphabet soup of micro-identity where at any given moment the LGBTTIQQ2SAs at the gay bar might all suddenly accuse one another of not understanding one another, leading to heartbreak and bloodshed.

His fellow homos and similarly minded sex freaks accuse Dan Savage of transphobia, biphobia, and pozphobia (the irrational fear of someone with the ability to infect you with a deadly virus).

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Those outside the “gay community” but who still lay down their sleeping bags beneath the progressive circus tent accuse him of obesophobia, Negrophobia, proletariophobia, and vaginophobia.

Basically, there’s only one thing this “community” shares—they all suffer from lexophobia, an irrational fear of words.

Dan Savage is perhaps best known for his syndicated column “Savage Love,” but I remember it even way back when it was called “Hey, Faggot!” In 1999, Savage retired the column’s original name, arguing that he’d successfully reclaimed the word “faggot” and didn’t need to use it anymore.

Guess what, Danny boy? Words exist in international waters, and I’m swooping right past you in my pirate ship and taking the word back.

Frankly, I think you’re all acting like a bunch of fags. And I use the word “fags” strictly to denote a weakness of character. It has nothing to do with the procreative organs our blessed Lord bestowed upon you to your apparent ingratitude. If you prefer I use the term “pussies” or “babies” or “whiners” or “sissies,” well, I respect your preferences, but for now I’m still going to call you a bunch of fags.

Some of you appear to have an identity founded on persecution and manage to feel persecuted even if no one shows the slightest interest in persecuting you. At some point I start wondering, “Are you not being bashed enough? Is this why you’ve resorted to getting in people’s faces and rubbing their noses in shit—on the outside chance that you’ll anger one of them enough to bash you? Do you feel incomplete without at least one bashing a decade?”

And why don’t you go back to blowing each other instead of blowing this “bullying” thing out of proportion? Mere insults can’t drive a person to suicide. Claiming that anyone can “make” another person kill himself places far too little responsibility on the person killing himself. Anyone who takes such an extreme measure sends a message to the world that they thought there was something wrong with them. So if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, quit acting like such a fag, stop worrying what others think about you, and don’t kill yourself…OK?

That’s really all the advice you’ll ever need.

But thirty years after graduating from high school, Dan Savage is STILL acting like a fag and stewing over what was apparently some tremendous emotional scarring. Aided and abetted by such perennially bullied and oppressed entities such as Apple, Microsoft, and the US federal government—a bully if there ever was one—Dan has launched one of those “nonprofit” things called “It Gets Better” to help protect teenagers from being bullied. (Never mind that according to some studies, it doesn’t get better.)

Instead of “It Gets Better,” how about “Get Over It!” or even “Get Over Yourself!” or maybe “Didn’t You Graduate From High School a Long Time Ago?”

In order to protect the natural civil right to whine about your terrible experiences in high school for the rest of your life, the government will have to create jobs for lawyers and activists and clerks and propagandists and investigators and forensic technicians. Whereas a long time ago in a land far away American gays wanted the government to get out of their bedrooms, now they want you to give the government your lunch money so they don’t feel bullied.

Forget about rights and justice and equality and tolerance and all those other words they always use but never understand. This seems to be nothing more than a case of the squeaky wheel getting the K-Y Jelly.

Ted Nugent

All the right people hate Ted Nugent. And when I say all the right people, naturally I mean all the left people.

His pinko antagonists were screeching like freshly castrated mink at an overcrowded fur farm last week regarding comments the wild-eyed and possibly insane rocker/hunter/gun fetishist had made at a National Rifle Association convention in St. Louis, specifically this Nugent nugget:

If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.

That sort of sounds like a threat—until you pay attention for five seconds and realize the person who’s winding up dead or in jail in that scenario is Ted Nugent, not Barack Obama. Rather than making an open threat to the government, it seems as if Nugent was expressing fear of being threatened by the government.

But, lest ye forget, this is the real world, where people believe what they want to believe. A Daily Kos blogger who doesn’t think “Neon Vincent” is an idiotic pseudonym—or whose parents, the Vincents, didn’t think it was idiotic to name their child “Neon”—accused Nugent of “stochastic terrorism”—a new imaginary term apparently first imagined around the time of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting when the left was popping hemorrhoidal veins trying to imagine that right-wing rhetoricians are able to send out coded or subliminal or low-frequency messages that somehow cause psychotic lone wolves to shoot bubbly and kindhearted Democrats. A CNN writer who has dreadlocks and once received some sort of gay-journalist trophy said that Nugent should be in jail for his comments.

These are the same sort of people who for eight years walked around with picket signs featuring Bush’s bloody head impaled on a stake, so it’s heartwarming to see that they’re suddenly concerned with the sanctity of the presidential office and our sacred mission to vigilantly protect the Commander in Chief. For some reason, thug rappers rhapsodizing about using firearms to blow off civilians’ heads or threatening presidents’ lives don’t seem to alarm the progs nearly as much as Ted Nugent’s gun obsessions do.

A lonesome blogger who isn’t ashamed nor afraid to announce he’s part of some group of Dungeons & Dragons fanatics who plan to vote for Obama called Nugent a “Domestic Terrorist, Chicken Hawk, Coward, [and] Child Rapist.”

Those are some serious charges. The Secret Service appears to disagree with the “Domestic Terrorist” thing, or they probably would have arrested Nugent after grilling him about his “dead or in jail” comments last Thursday.

“Chicken Hawk” and “Coward” both likely refer to the fact that although Nugent is always blasting off high-powered firearms, guzzling ox blood straight from recently slaughtered oxen’s throats, and saying we should pull a “Nagasaki” on the Arabs, he received a military deferment in the late 1960s and thus avoided serving in Vietnam. In 1977 Nugent told a High Times reporter that he’d purposely avoided bathing for a month before his Army examination and defecated in his pants for a solid week preceding his meeting with military examiners. He later said he fabricated the whole story to prank the High Times reporter, possibly because Nugent has always been stridently anti-drugs. He also said he was lying the time he told a reporter he once stuck his erect penis through a map of West Virginia. Either way, he received a military deferment, but the official documents are inconclusive as to the specific reason.

The “Child Rapist” charge is perhaps the ickiest, especially since Nugent admitted to bagging numerous underage groupies back in the 1970s. The Nuge even took the Creep Factor up a notch when he persuaded a 17-year-old girl’s parents to allow him to become her legal guardian, in effect slaloming around pedophilia charges by becoming the girl’s ersatz father while presumably having sex with her. Courtney Love also claims she gave Nugent a blowjob when she was twelve, but I suspect that Courtney Love was born lying and giving people blowjobs—often simultaneously—so I’m not sure how to deal with that claim.

Nugent also appears to be a gullible Republican tool, gleefully supporting all the neocon-industrial complex’s post-9/11 military escapades. He also tends to unquestionably support every carcass of a presidential candidate the GOP spits up every four years. And he’s been known to chum it up with neuron-deprived mushroom-brains such as Rick Perry and Sarah Palin.

Now that I’ve gotten the bad things out of the way, there’s a lot that I find to be absolutely lovable about Ted Nugent.

He has a sort of Jack Nicholson-with-rabies charisma, and even reporters who hate what he represents say they find it almost impossible to dislike him after meeting him. He’s also one of the most quotable musicians of all time, bestowing upon the world verbal gems such as “The whole world sucks, but America still sucks less,” “If you don’t have a sense of humor, you’ll hurt yourself getting angry at me,” and “Mitt Romney has already denounced my guitar playing because it’s too sexy.”

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Nugent writes gleefully of killing and eating pigs, composes songs with titles such as “My Baby Likes My Butter on Her Grits” and “My Love is Like a Tire Iron,” and is unafraid of releasing albums with covers so sexist, they would make Spinal Tap blush.

This rope-swinging, loincloth-clad, boulder-tossing Hemingway of Heavy Metal’s entire life is so broad and hyperbolic, Nugent is almost impossible to caricature. He even hosted a reality show where the game was to avoid being hunted down, caught, and humiliated by Ted Nugent while camping on his wildlife preserve. The program was canceled shortly after the Motor City Madman accidentally injured his leg with a chainsaw, requiring 44 stitches.

Seriously—what’s not to love?

Especially after he came out of a meeting with the Secret Service last week purring like a cat. “I’m havin’ the time of my life,” he told an interviewer. “They work for me. I pay their salaries, and I mean that seriously….So when you say Secret Service, all I can do is get a big grin on my face and realize that we’ll either be shooting some taxpayer ammo at targets or we’ll be eating barbecue.” If anything, Ted’s scandal may have taken some heat off the Secret Service for their own hooker scandal.

Still, the day after the Secret Service deemed he was not an imminent threat to the president’s life, Nugent pled guilty to a misdemeanor federal charge for knowingly transporting a black (of course) Alaskan bear in 2009. Apparently some half-assed minor wildlife-transporting charge was the only thing the feds could make stick to him, at least for now.

Almost entirely absent from the furor surrounding Nugent’s comments was something he repeatedly cited in his defense of said comments—he felt he ticked off the Attorney General and the ATF with his published criticisms of the unfolding “Fast and Furious” scandal, where the feds allegedly walked guns south of the border and into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

To my knowledge, none of Ted Nugent’s guns has killed a human being, but at least one American—Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry—was killed with guns given to Mexican cartels as part of Fast and Furious.

Via Skype, I asked a Russian friend in Kaliningrad to take a gander at a clip from one of Ted’s reality shows and give me his impressions. Here, exactly as typed, are his responses as they came in line-by-line:

he is good
all Americans who like guns are good
in my opinion
he is cool
white guys mostly loosing the coolness un big metropolies like NY
hipsters are also part of culture
but wild guys are always protecting the nations
hipsters can’t protect families

Even if, as his liberal critics insist, Ted Nugent has a tiny penis and all the macho posturing is nothing more than frightened bluster, I find it refreshing that he’s at least making an attempt to be macho. As things stand, we have neutered, bespectacled, agreeable, compliant statist prog-frogs who look like this calling Nugent a “coward.” The government seems as if it wants all males, at least the white ones, to look like they write for Gawker.

To such oversocialized, hyper-urbanized jelly blobs, Nugent probably embodies some notion of violent subhuman psychotic atavism. But I’m not sure if “psychotic” is the right word to describe Ted Nugent. He may only be what my mother-in-law, who’s lived in Georgia her whole life, calls “wild.” Many urbanized nudniks would seem to prefer if everyone was rendered permanently deaf to the call of the wild. I suspect a lot of people hate Ted Nugent because there’s a part of him that hasn’t been tamed like they have. But if civilization falls apart like nearly all of us seem to think it will, only the uncivilized will survive.

Thank you, Ted Nugent, for being Ted Nugent. Your personality is a national treasure. You are the anti-Cobain. I’m glad they haven’t killed you yet.

Although yesterday, April 15th, is an annually observed National Day of Mourning, this year it fell on a Sunday, a holy day when no federal postal workers must be roused from their beauty naps. So our omniscient guardian angels at the Internal Revenue Service have postponed the filing deadline until tomorrow.

By a sparkling stroke of magical cosmological coincidence, tomorrow is also what is known as “Tax Freedom Day”—according to one calculation, the average American will work from January 1 to April 17 merely to pay off their combined federal, state, and local taxes. The idea is that tomorrow you will finally be “free” to start making your own money until the end of the year. According to an even more ominous estimate—which possibly includes consumption taxes, hidden taxes, ghost taxes, buried taxes, invisible taxes, tucked-away taxes, and sleight-of-hand taxes—the average American working serf will toil until August 12 before finally paying their personal “Cost of Government.”

By golly, by gosh, jeepers, gee willikers, and snap my suspenders until my nipples sting, but that simply doesn’t sound fair to me.

I mailed in my tax return last Friday—the 13th. Filing a tax return always feels like I’m snitching on myself. Licking that envelope shut feels uncomfortably like performing an act of oral servitude on the feds. Being forced to mail those gilded insects in DC money skimmed from my prodigious labor has never seemed fair to me, not a stinking penny of it.

Today the Senate is scheduled to vote on the Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012, also known as the “Buffett Rule.” Politicians, pundits, and the usual cyber-cluster of lobotomized chirping retards have been bloviating and flatulating over this law’s “fairness” as if such a thing could actually be measured.

Yahoo! News seems so deep in Obama’s pockets that they’re basically up his ass. Their recent reprint of a Reuters story, “Obama likely paid higher tax rate than Romney in 2011,” bore the sour stench of partisan unfairness. The first red flag is the word “likely”; the second is the fact that although Romney’s tax rate was lower, he’ll pay about TWENTY TIMES the amount of taxes to the federal government that Obama did last year. Did he use twenty times the government services? Not bloody likely, especially considering all of Obama’s international hunting safaris, local rodeo and karaoke-bar appearances in the American heartland, and hip-hop barbecues at the White House. It’s probable that Obama received a laughably larger amount in free government perks than he paid in taxes. If anything, the tax rate seems unfair to Romney, as much as it pains me to defend him in any way.

Both Romuloid and Obamatron seem like slithery slimy sneaky snakes to me. I bear equal amounts of distrust for both men. But seeing how Yahoo! appeared to selectively choose pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to create the impression that Obama was being maltreated made me realize how unfairly terms such as “fairness” and “paying your fair share” are being bandied around this election year.

Statistics are almost easier to manipulate than voters are, which is why we’ll see endless pictograms until Election Day that define unfairness in contradictory ways. We’ll hear that the dreaded “1%” make a huge chunk of the money, but not that they pay an even bigger chunk of the taxes. We’ll hear that the upper crust is paying a consistently lower percentage of their income in taxes, but not that the bottom half is, too. And even though it’s widely acknowledged that the Buffett Rule will accomplish next to nothing when it comes to digging us out of the $15-trillion trench into which we’ve been unwillingly dug—perhaps with the intent to bury us—we’re expected to take cheer that this empty gesture merely symbolizes fairness.

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“Fairness” is a poisonously subjective notion, a cheap emotional appeal. Fairness is in the eye of who feels they’re getting screwed. At any given time, that’s pretty much everybody.

People seem to have a hard time distinguishing between nature’s elemental unfairness and what’s fair in human interactions. No, it’s not fair that some people are born smarter or wealthier or better-looking than others, and if you wind up on the short end of any of these pointed sticks, you’ll likely feel that life has been unfair to you. But basing the idea of “fairness” on personal envy seems like a crass political ploy to garner votes by promising to assuage inferiority complexes from coast to coast.

Just as millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—of Americans probably feel as if they suffer unfairly from unequal wealth distribution, there’s probably an element of the well-heeled who feel as if it’s unfair to burden them with the cost of feeding, housing, clothing, and wiping endless masses of unskilled, ineducable, dysgenic Cro-Magnons. In many cases they probably feel as if anyone who contributes nothing to tax revenues should receive zero benefits from the system.

From every angle, the main problem is that it’s all being approached as a moral dilemma—the subjective notion of “fairness”—rather than as a mathematical problem. Our culture has become so soft, fat, and sensitive, people are far more afraid of appearing heartless than they are of appearing illogical.

The sad mathematical truth—which is possibly why they’re avoiding it—is that nothing that either the Republicans or Democrats are proposing will leave more than a scratch on the deficit. And that’s a monster that will eat us all alive. All the partisan moral angling seems like crass maneuvering to figure out the most “compassionate” way to stick us with a bill that they ran up at our expense.

The question shouldn’t be, “Who should pay the bill?” but rather, “How the hell did this bill get so big?” And since you insist on talking about fairness, what’s fair about forcing people to pay for things that they never chose to buy? Good luck answering that one. The deficit is currently so huge, one gets the sense that someone’s trying to force a financial collapse. But that would be paranoid, wouldn’t it?

Our trusted public servants are not handling their spending very well. And I’m not the one who raised the issue of fairness, but since they won’t shut up about it, I don’t see what’s fair about the fact that every living American somehow “owes” the government $50,000 and probably far more when you consider unfunded Medicare, pension, and Social Security liabilities.

As I see it, the fairest thing would be to indenture all living members of Congress and the Federal Reserve, past and present, to lifelong hard labor on agricultural plantations to start paying off this massive bill they’ve incurred at our expense and without our consent. I would also insist that their suffering be broadcast on C-SPAN 24 hours a day under blinding Klieg lights so they never really get to sleep. Like the Buffett Rule, this would be a symbolic gesture that has little effect on the deficit. But it would have the incalculably positive result of frightening all wannabe future financial vampires seeking to gorge themselves on the public jugular vein from ever spending another dollar beyond their means.

It’s only fair.

As I type this from my heavily black neighborhood, I hark back to my wigger days and recall something that Chuck D from black-nationalist rap group Public Enemy said to me wearily when I interviewed him back in 1990:

You tell people what you are, and people still don’t believe you.

I couldn’t have said it better.

American cultural discourse has imploded with the slimy floridity of a rectal prolapse. At the moment I kinda sorta wish the whole world had one mouth and I could vomit into it.

Still, once again, like Charlie Brown naively rushing up to kick a football that Lucy’s holding, I’m going to try and explain myself as well as I can manage, knowing that many of you jerkoffs will misrepresent what I’m saying because, well, that’s what jerkoffs do, isn’t it?

If you aren’t just another simple, lowly, retarded, brainwashed, drearily predictable zombie witch-hunter and sincerely want to understand what makes me tick, the first thing you must accept is that I’m fundamentally antisocial and never, ever, ever, ever, EVER go with the crowd, no matter what crowd it is. I figure that wherever the crowd is standing at any given moment, they arrived there for entirely the wrong reasons. Wherever a crowd has gathered, there’s never enough space for me. Accordingly, I’ve had a lifelong affinity for heretics rather than for high priests. The problem is that they keep switching them around, but I always stick with the heretics.

These days, “racist” is the favorite smear word for the ideologically intolerant. When people ask me if I’m a “racist” I always ask them for their personal definition of that eternally shape-shifting and ever-expanding social construct. I then explain either why I am or am not a racist based solely on their definition. I also explain that I think the term itself is silly and ultimately meaningless, but it’s not a word that scares me like it appears to cause testicles to leap out of nutsacks and hit the floor running nationwide. But my interrogators—or, just as often, my accusers—hardly ever seem to be looking for explanations. They don’t even seem to know the difference between scientific inquiry and the Spanish Inquisition. Rather, they seem hell-bent on using a rusty knife to pry open my cold heart like a stubborn oyster shell to discover the boundlessly irrational primal HATE they are certain throbs inside. True believers that they are, they take it as an article of faith that evil lurks within the hearts of those who don’t think like they do, and goddamnit, they’re going to find it whether it’s there or not.

There are reasons I choose to live around black people rather than white liberals. For one thing, the rent’s cheaper. Another is that I truly and sincerely hate white liberals and couldn’t stand to live around them. One day I might even go so far as to write a 15-point guide about how to behave if you should accidentally wander into a white-liberal neighborhood. The blacks tolerate me better, anyway. They have far better senses of humor than white liberals. To them I’m just that Crazy White Boy rather than that Evil White Male. And I think they appreciate and respect that “Crazy” part just enough that they don’t fuck with me.

When I was a young outsider I identified with blacks because at the time they, too, were oft-mocked outsiders rather than the untouchable sacred cultural cows into which they’ve morphed. I’m not impressed with the modern wave of anti-racist whites because there’s absolutely no bravery or risk involved with it. I crossed color lines back when there was actually a white herd with a group consciousness in America and most whites would give you flak for doing such things. When I was a fey theater fag in the late 1970s, I invited my half-black cast from an inner-city production of Godspell to my birthday party in my all-white neighborhood and caused a minor scandal because of it. There were kids at school who never spoke to me again. In the mid-80s, when it was still somewhat culturally revolutionary for MTV to play Michael Jackson videos, I was the only white guy I knew who had a black girlfriend. By that point in our nation’s cultural development, the only people who gave us static about it were black dudes. And I’m still the only white guy I know besides my son who lives in an 87%-black zip code.

Then again, it was a black guy who robbed me at gunpoint in Philly way back in the late 1970s and a black guy who robbed my wife at gunpoint in Atlanta a week after Obama got elected. It was a black guy who punched me in the face in front of a cheering black crowd during a cab dispute in which he was not involved. And I’ve had more than one black person tell me to my face that I owe them—not for anything I’ve done, but for, you know, history. So kindly shove your false notions of my sheltered, prejudiced life and lack of real-life experience with blacks somewhere that you don’t actually enjoy having them shoved.

Never once have I done or said anything that directly harmed a single black person, yet somehow I’m still made to bear the presumption of eternally indelible inter-generational collective guilt—talk about a goofball social construct! And I still don’t understand how pointing out such daffily pseudo-religious inconsistencies makes me the worst kind of human being possible rather than someone who calls bullshit when he sees it. If you could explain all that using flow charts and without stooping to name-calling, I’d be ever so grateful. I, for one, am earnestly searching for explanations rather than for witches. As I see it, pointing this all out doesn’t make me a bad person; it makes me a heretic.

It also—ironically, given that we live in a society that gives so much lip service to “diversity”—makes me a heretic to suspect that in aggregate, blacks may truly be different than whites in ways that can be quantified. I think it’s preposterous to simultaneously claim to believe in evolution while insisting we all somehow wound up equal. As a believer that the evolutionary process is real and ongoing, I believe their sub-Saharan ancestry may have lent them certain physical advantages and certain cognitive disadvantages.

I know. Horrible, isn’t it? How could anyone in this day and age, after all we’ve been through as a society, believe in what all the evidence suggests and zero evidence disproves? HATE must be the answer; logic has nothing to do with it. Only the unenlightened don’t realize this.

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I hold this truth to be self-evident: No one is created equal. I also realize that this self-evident truth is so heretical these days, people want to kill you merely for expressing it.

Equality is our modern religion, the glue that holds our shaky social coalition together, and it is never to be questioned. The notion of innate blank-slate human equality must be supported with torch mobs and moral panics and mass delusions and speech codes, because there’s nothing—not a shred—in science or logic to support it.

Egalitarianism cannot operate like a science, because there is nothing scientific about it. Since it goes against human nature and biological reality, it eventually must depend on totalitarian tactics in order to sustain itself. In the philosophical realm, it is not supported by logic, so it must operate like a religion instead.

With all this in mind, I have coined two new handy neologisms:

EGALITOTALITARIAN -n 1. One who believes the false concept of equality must be vigilantly enforced by rule of law, whether federal or that of posse comitatus.

EGALIANITY -n. 1. A strict religious system based on the myth that all people are born with equal cognitive and physical qualities.

Every religion needs a Devil, and the Church of Universal Human Equality depends on the utter dehumanization of a stock character called “the racist.” This term used to mean any white male wearing a brownshirt; these days it signifies any white male who isn’t constantly flogging himself while clad in a hairshirt.

The same people who say they’re against organized religion are all card-carrying members of the Church of Universal Human Equality, which is perhaps the best organized, most well-funded, and least tolerant mythological system on Earth. I don’t even think Islam can compete.

I don’t think you anti-racist white witch-hunters wrapped in your golden curtains of righteousness and riding your pale little white ponies hate “racists” so much as you hate heretics. And my guts tell me that 100 years ago, you would have all been in white racist lynch mobs while I would have been the one crazy white guy in town trying to stop you. That’s because you are herd animals and I’m forever swimming upstream. Rather than social revolutionaries, way down at the bottom of the tailbone of your souls, you are conformists. Drones. Worker ants. Oooh, how I despise you.

You’re right that I have hate in my heart. But you’re wrong about the target.

I get along fine with my black neighbors. It’s you, Mr. & Mrs. Snarky White Hipster Anti-Racist Witch Hunter Scooter Club 2012, that I truly hate.

I hate the gross selectivity of your witch-hunting and the fact that you amplify certain racial crimes while blotting others from your collective memory banks.

I hate your movements and your petitions and your boycotts and your perpetually selective outrage. I hate your group shaming, your ritual self-shaming, and the constant status-jockeying that you can only seem to achieve via shaming others.

I hate your endlessly gluttonous lust to punish sinners for committing racism, sexism, and homophobia.

I hate this thing you call “evil” that is always somehow safely quarantined outside of yourself.

I hate the fact that you creeps live your lives with your noses ass-deep in the perceived sins of others.

I hate the primitively moralistic screenplay inside your head where one side is always presumed guilty and the other side is always innocent.

I hate your gross displays of public moral preening.

I hate that you marginalize and dismiss ideas not because they’re wrong, but because they don’t flatter your herd’s self-image.

I hate the fact you’ve created a climate of fear where opinions that huge swaths of the public seem to sincerely hold in their hearts are currently forbidden to even discuss in public forums.

I hate the horrid unreality of your deluded optimism and half-baked utopian schemes.

I hate the special hatred you reserve for those braver than you are.

I hate your arrogant tendency to frame any ideological dissent as a mental-health issue or a cancer of the soul rather than a simple disagreement.

I hate your shallow outrage at people not for saying something that’s false, but because they dared to even say it aloud.

I hate your undying obsession with the presumed guilt and turpitude of others.

I hate your strong urge to punish anyone not like you.

I hate that you are only willing to hate what it’s socially acceptable to hate.

I hate that you don’t even realize you operate like a lynch mob. But you’re worse—too chickenshit to do the lynching yourself, you instead enable certain currently endemic forms of racist violence by refusing to acknowledge their very existence.

I hate that I tell you what I am, and you still don’t believe me.

May you choke to death on your own smugness.

We are doomed, indeed.

You silly white-liberal wabbits, always looking for hate in all the wrong places, never realizing that my loathing has almost always been exclusively reserved for you—only you, and you alone.

There—I’ve explained myself.

Understood? I hope so. Now get off my lawn.

Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum has been the Republican primary season’s Surprise Moral Warrior. He has already won eleven states, and depending on how he performs in Wisconsin tomorrow, he may continue to battle the icy Mormon cyborg Mitt Romney for the nomination.

Based merely on those who hate Santorum, I suppose I should love him.

After all, he has a rare talent for ruffling progressives’ preening peacock plumage, and that’s usually a good sign. To hear his haters tell the story, he is THE HEART OF EVIL and a DISGRACE TO THE HUMAN RACE who wants to pillage, rape, and divest all of America’s gay anal wombs of their Goddess-given recto-spiritual progeny—or something like that. They say he is a grotesquely bigoted bully whose heartless heart pumps solely on unrefined nitro-powered hatred, a sadistic closet case who is waging a violent Hate Jihad against women, homos, atheists, and every other untouchable pink lamb of modern sensitivities. As is the ironclad rule these days, the Anti-Hate Crusaders employ rhetoric and tactics that ooze far more palpable hatred than the “hate” they’re supposedly fighting, as evidenced in how they deliberately smeared his name with frothy brown anal lube in devising his “Google problem.” Because they took umbrage at the fact he supposedly said SHAME SHAME SHAME at them, they scream SHAME SHAME SHAME back at him, only ten times more loudly. They appear blind to the fact that the problem is hive-brain lynch-mob shaming itself, not which side’s doing it. Shame on all of you!

Last week he was targeted by the Racism Industrial Complex for allegedly calling Obama a “nig-” before correcting himself. I’m not convinced he said “nig-” on that video, but in the past he’s lied about calling people “black,” so it’s possible. Either way, I rate lying as far worse than using forbidden words, but I’m abnormal.

But despite the fact that I hate his antagonists’ shriekingly misguided moralism, I can’t muster one positive micron of feeling toward the man. For starters, I have problems with his face. And his personality. And his politics. And his priggishness. And his authoritarian impulses. In politics as in life, the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. In many cases, it’s merely some other jerkoff I dislike for entirely different reasons.

First there’s his face. Sure, it’s unfair to blame him for that incongruous nose jutting out of his lumpy head as if someone jammed a cheese wedge into a potato, so I will not hold him accountable for what is either an act of God or an accident of nature. But he is entirely to blame for that dorky, smug, imperious smirk that his attitude seems to have forever welded onto his visage. His is the mug of a priggish hall monitor who’s forever smelling something unpleasant.

But it’s so much more than his face. At a regrettably low, sad, destitute, and lonely point in my life a few months back, I found myself watching a couple of the Republican primary debates, and his personality rubbed me the wrong way like a Brillo Pad scraping against herpes sores. Both Santorum and I were raised as Pennsylvania papists, and he conjures distant memories of some generically uptight, passive-aggressive, repressed schmoe I would have hated during my dozen years of Catholic school. The fact that he’s Italian doesn’t help, either.

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And then there are Mr. Sanitarium’s Santorture’s Santumor’s Scroturum’s Santorum’s politics, at least what I can discern of them amid all the hyper-moralistic soapboxing. He is allegedly opposed to eugenics, says there’s no constitutional right to privacy, has vowed to wage a “war on porn,” and recently said the economy is not the main issue in the upcoming election.

Not scoring any points with me so far.

He is unflinchingly pro-life, whereas I’m only in favor of saving the lives of people whom I like. And the story of him and his wife cuddling his infant son’s corpse will remain creepy throughout ten thousand eternities.

He seems to wish that gays would cease to exist, whereas I only wish they’d shut the hell up and quit acting so gay about everything. Even so, the fact that he discouraged a young male from using a pink bowling ball is all kinds of gay.

He appears to think Iran poses a much larger threat to Israel and America’s existence than they do to Iran, which doesn’t make any sense in any universe bound by things such as logic and facts.

His fulminations against Islamic theocracies ring especially hollow from an American theocrat who also staunchly defends the Israeli theocracy. Since I’m an agnostic who’s highly wary of anyone who claims divine authority to intervene in my life, it freaks me the frick out that he claims to be fighting against Satan and apparently believes that God asked him to run for president.

Worst of all is his chronic moralistic flatulence that mirrors the tiresome prig-progs who are constantly engaging him in pietistic one-upmanship. From my experience, the most truly ethical people never blab too loudly about morality, and I’ve come to view theatrically self-righteous public displays as nothing more than crass social status-jockeying.

Rick Santorum is probably the loudest “social conservative” currently in American politics, and many of his loudest opponents are self-defined socialists. I’m suspicious of anything with the word “social” in the title. That’s because I’m antisocial. For me, politics isn’t so much about what sort of society I want to live in as much as what sort of people I want to avoid. I consider myself a misanthropic individualist, but lately many collectivists have taken to depicting anyone who resists the blind herd’s undertow as a “sociopath,” so it’s fine to call me that if it makes you feel better about your weak-ass conformist sheepishness.

It is precisely this moralistic mob mindset where both sides—Rick Santorum and those who hate him because they think he hates them—lose me. Both sides are uptight control freaks who value “morals” over logic and display meddlesome authoritarian impulses.

For a moment I wondered whether I’d rather eat lunch with a socialist or a social conservative, and I instantly resented myself for daring to suggest such distasteful options. In a perfect world I’d stick both sides with the check, grab some takeout, and run.

Trayvon Martin

According to the police report of his fatal shooting on the night of February 26, Trayvon Martin stood exactly six feet tall. In death, he has become a hundred times larger.

I believe that’s because crass opportunists are using his corpse as a political Macy’s Parade balloon.

I could be wrong, you know. Unlike a lot of mouths spouting off about the events leading to Trayvon’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman on that rainy Sunday night in the seedy little gator-hunting town of Sanford, FL, I don’t claim to know what happened. That’s because I wasn’t there. More importantly, I don’t claim to know WHY it happened. That’s because I wasn’t inside the killer’s mind.

Sorry if that may strike you as an impudently objective approach. I realize that many people find even the feeblest attempt at non-partisan fairness to be off-putting at the very least. These days, any public display of open-mindedness makes a lot of people dizzy and has been known to induce agita in readers with sensitive metabolisms.

Although modern journalism suffers no shortage of liars, most of the false impressions it creates are more due to a careful omission of facts. And in the Trayvon Martin case, I’ve seen a whole lotta cherry-pickin’ goin’ on. Due to the way the saga is being framed, as well as the fact that it’s swollen into the top news story in America, a rancid little tug in the pit of my stomach tells me this could all get a lot more dangerous, and quickly.

The flames are being fanned by paid scribes and well-compensated activists who’ve been salivating for a good old-fashioned white-on-black hate crime, even though this isn’t technically one of those.

But the torches are being carried by those who are acting like they know exactly what happened—even though, like me, they weren’t there, either. They are gathering in mobs, donning hoods, and demanding blood vengeance just like people gathered in mobs, donned hoods, and demanded blood vengeance a hundred years ago. And just like the mobs from a hundred years ago, they seem to have the sympathy of the media and the president on their side.

Maybe that sounds a little hyperbolic. Well, then, let’s go hyperbowling:

“White boys who wear hoodies and eat Skittles don’t routinely get shot to death,” hyperbolized a black writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Black boys do.” (Martin was returning to his father’s house with an iced tea and some Skittles when he was killed. To my knowledge, he is the only black male ever to be killed while simultaneously wearing a hoodie and carrying Skittles on his person.)

“It appears that Trayvon Martin was stalked and murdered…the nation must ensure that this pattern and practice of people attacking and killing black men with impunity is ended,” says NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous, who, if anything, seems jealous that his skin isn’t darker.

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, reminded us all that “the murder of innocent black men in the American South is nothing new. Fifty-seven years ago, the White murderers of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta were acquitted of the crime in a clear case of racial injustice.”

“I am tired of burying young black boys,” Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), said in Congress regarding Martin’s killing. “I am tired of watching them suffer at the hands of those who fear and despise them.”

“After a while one gets tired of the same old script being played out again and again,” said Bishop Donald Hilliard, a black church leader who recently met with US Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss the possibility of bringing federal hate-crime charges against George Zimmerman.

You know what? I’m getting tired of all this, too. I think a lot of people are.

Half-retarded “racial arsonist” Al Sharpton, apparently unashamed of showing his face in public after supporting the dubious causes of Tawana Brawley, Crystal Mangum, and the Jena 6, naturally fled down to Sanford, FL and led a mostly black crowd in a series of primitive chants and possibly subliminal voodoo incantations. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, still unscathed by last year’s charges of gay harassment, reared his porpoise-shaped head to claim that if Zimmerman is not arrested, “the protests will intensify and spill over into other dimensions,” which sounds vaguely threatening.

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Taking it up a notch, three-foot-tall one-time filmmaker Spike Lee Tweeted George Zimmerman’s home address and asked for his followers to spread it far and wide.

Upping Spike’s ante, the New Black Panthers—sort of the New Coke of hate groups—have offered a million-dollar reward for Zimmerman’s capture. At a rally in Sanford, a New Black Panther who calls himself Mikhail Muhammad—somehow I suspect that’s not what his mommy named him—led a group in chants of “Justice for Trayvon!” and “Black Power!”

Celebrities and even Philadelphia’s District Attorney posed for pictures of themselves defiantly wearing hoodies in honor of Trayvon. On and on and on, from NBA teams posing in hoodies to surly protesters wearing boxes of Skittles around their necks in his memory, the meme sprouted like a hundred million nasty little mushrooms—Trayvon Martin was murdered in cold blood for no other reason than walking the streets of racist America while black. That was the script, and there was to be no deviating from it.

The reason they know this is because Trayvon was black. That, and because George Zimmerman is white. OK, not really—he reportedly self-identifies as Hispanic, and to look at him, he seems to have picked up his mother’s Mesoamerican genes—but he’s white enough.

And that’s all the evidence they need.

Well, that and the fact that Zimmerman identified Martin as black to a 911 dispatcher only minutes before the shooting. Then again, that’s only because the dispatcher asked him to specify whether the person walking through his gated community in a hoodie was white, black, or Hispanic.

Well, there’s the fact that Zimmerman muttered “fucking coons” on the 911 call. Or at least it sounds like he did. Or at least CNN went to absurd lengths to isolate and sound-sweeten a segment of his 911 call before suggesting to listeners that he said “coons” and then played it ten times in a row in a dogged attempt to find hate where it might not actually have existed.

“You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Barack Obama said from the Rose Garden last week.

Yeah, we know, Mister President. We know exactly what you mean.

This country is racially psychotic. We’re at the point where the focus is what was in the killer’s mind rather than the fact that he killed someone, and that’s psychotic.

For days now we’ve been shown old pictures of a cherubic Trayvon and a brooding Zimmerman rather than much newer pictures of a gold-toothed Trayvon and a smiling Zimmerman.

We’ve been told that Trayvon weighed a hundred or so pounds less than Zimmerman—which is possibly untrue—but not that he was at least three inches taller than Zimmerman.

We’ve been told that Zimmerman was arrested in 2005 for an altercation with an undercover police officer, but not that Trayvon was visiting his father hundreds of miles from school on the night of his death because he had been suspended—possibly for trespassing on unauthorized school grounds. (His parents were able to have his high-school records sealed.)

We’ve witnessed surreal scenes where sound technicians try to determine whether Zimmerman said “coons,” but very little about a Facebook photo where someone reputed to be Trayvon Martin calls himself a MADE NIGGA.

We’ve heard very little about George Zimmerman’s statement to police that Martin had jumped him from behind, nor that the police report said Zimmerman was bleeding from his nose and from the back of his head, nor that a neighbor told reporters he saw Martin standing over Zimmerman and beating him.

After all, why should we hear any of these things? They don’t fit the script.

As I write this, the name “Trayvon Martin” yields over 15 million results on Google, up from about 11 million yesterday. In contrast, the name “Allen Coon” coughs up fewer than 8,000 hits. The unfortunately named Coon was the 13-year-old white kid in Kansas City who was doused in gasoline and set ablaze by two black teenagers as they told him, “You get what you deserve, white boy.”

This gruesome attack happened more than a week after the Trayvon Martin killing. Why haven’t you heard about it? Because it doesn’t fit the script. You’ve probably never heard of the Knoxville Five or the Wichita Massacre. Don’t blame yourself—they aren’t in the script, either.

When the media allow the usual race pimps to blow their rusty horns about how black males are under siege in America, they’ll never tell you that statistically, the biggest danger to black males isn’t the police or white males or even chubby Florida neighborhood-watch volunteers of vaguely Peruvian ancestry—it’s other black males. But you won’t find that in the script. It’s actually a very small and tidy script.

When a story becomes this huge, it’s being exploited for political reasons. If the media were really all that concerned with verifiable racially motivated murders, three white males pled guilty to “hate crimes” only last week regarding the death of a black man in Mississippi who was targeted for his skin color.

Problem is, Mississippi only counts for six electoral votes and always swings Republican. Florida boasts 27 electoral votes and is considered a crucial swing state in the upcoming presidential election. That could be a huge reason why Obama made loud noises about Trayvon Martin but apparently not a peep about Mississippi murder victim James Craig Anderson.

With all this talk about hatred I must confess that at the moment, I feel filled with hatred—at least up to my gills and possibly up to my sinuses. But I am willing to take a polygraph test to determine which group I hate more—American blacks, American politicians, or mainstream American journalists. The boys in the hoodies wouldn’t register a blip.

Invisible Children's Jason Russell

Two weeks ago a super-fabulous yet nominally heterosexual slacktivist named Jason Russell achieved instant celebrity when his half-hour propaganda piece about ruthless African warlord Joseph Kony became the most viral video in Internet history. In the film, KONY 2012, Russell demanded Kony’s arrest by the end of the year.

An arrest came last Thursday morning, but not of Kony—San Diego police briefly detained Jason Russell before handing him over to psychiatric authorities. In a heavily trafficked area of Pacific Beach, CA just before noon, several witnesses reported seeing a naked man mincing and flitting around the street while wagging his finger like a disapproving Mick Jagger. He was reportedly screaming at passersby, pounding his fists on the pavement, interfering with traffic, and vandalizing cars. According to at least one witness, Russell was openly masturbating in the warm California sun. At press time, it remains unclear whether the alleged masturbation and car-vandalizing were separate incidents or were instead fused into one very weird act of vehicular sexual assault.

My initial reaction to the sudden upsurge of Konymania two weeks ago was a jaded shrug—it’s Africa, what did they expect?—but Russell’s recent display of nude-ass beachfront grandiosity made me reassess the Kony craze as yet another example of social-media-induced mass public psychosis. Russell merely couldn’t be satisfied with helping the World Police catch the Big Bad Wolf. He had to squeeze a reality-TV meltdown into the whole rancid burrito.

I’m not sure whether people are actually getting dumber or if technology’s merely making it more obvious. People these days see politics as one big rock video. They eagerly swallow simple slogans as if they were gobbling free psychiatric medication. Just as brainless cyber-dolts were mindlessly bleating HOPE and CHANGE four years ago and WE ARE THE 99% six months ago, suddenly everyone and their lesbian aunt was chanting STOP KONY two weeks ago. They’d obviously been spoon-fed this mantra from forces on high who want to “bring us all together” under the smothering umbrella of “one world.” Likewise, they all happily swallowed the notion that this was a real grassroots people’s movement rather than another scary digital-age manifestation of expertly manipulated useful idiocy.

Fully aware that it may permanently rob me of basic cognitive abilities, I decided to watch the KONY 2012 video not once, but twice. Lawdy me almighty, what a cloying, treacly, gag-worthy one-world Coke commercial it is. (Witness my favorite screenshots from the film HERE.) White beta males dance the funky chicken with actual living Africans, Godwin’s Law is repeatedly invoked both consciously and unconsciously, and the filmmakers blame money for everything while also soliciting money. Taking half a second to dig one millimeter below the surface reveals the whole project to be a scam justifying authoritarian globalist military intervention in Uganda.

Mere moments after the film begins, it quickly becomes apparent that not only was Jason Russell eager to see Joseph Kony captured, he was also determined to capture far more screen time than Kony. The film is less about how bad Joseph Kony is and more about what a great, caring, loving, humanitarian, compassionate, understanding, sincere, humane, swell, righteous, groovy, empathetic son-of-a-gun Jason Russell is. As the film’s director, Russell’s approach was openly masturbatory.

Russell also narrates the film, and from the moment he opens his obviously moist and well-hydrated lips, he radiates thermonuclear waves of gayness. That boy just barks GAY like a tiny French poodle. This would hardly be an issue if Russell didn’t creepily exploit his young son as a theatrical prop/beard throughout the documentary. It also wouldn’t bear noting if Russell’s organization, Invisible Children—never trust a grown man who works for a place with the word “Children” in its name—didn’t receive funding from anti-gay Christian groups as well as align itself with Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, sponsor of a “Kill the Gays” bill as well as a critic of “anal licking” and a public simulator of gay fellatio. Russell also appeared at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University—Falwell once published a newsletter suggesting that a Teletubby named Tinky Winky was a homosexual—to enthuse about his dream of making Broadway musicals and how “We can have fun while we end genocide.”

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So maybe Jason Russell, whom Invisible Children’s website describes as their “grand storyteller and dreamer,” suffers from some deep internal conflict which might have caused him to peel off his clothes and leap around like a psychotic pink gazelle once he started receiving massive public attention. His mannerisms are so in flagrante delicto homo, it almost seems righteous to want to gay-bash him out of the closet for the sake of everyone’s sanity.

Real-life Africans wound up throwing rocks at the screen during a recent outdoor showing of KONY 2012 in Northern Uganda, complaining that all the film’s heroes were white and that neither Kony nor his Lord’s Resistance Army have been spotted in their country since 2006. An open letter to Russell from a Northern Ugandan advocacy group calls KONY 2012 “inaccurate, offensive, and harmful propaganda,” suggesting that its timing “has more to do with your commercial interests than humanitarian interests” and wondering whether “Invisible Children is more about defining the American do-gooders (and making them feel good), rather than the Ugandans.” Other African writers said that “Invisible Children’s Approach…has unpleasant echoes of colonialism” and “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” An American girl who says she was born in Uganda went on YouTube to call Russell’s film “bullshit.”

Kony may be a sweaty little cockroach, but he’s hardly a giant threat. He may in fact be dead, and his Lord’s Resistance Army has dwindled down to only a few hundred, all of them exiled from Uganda. While encouraging US military cooperation with Uganda’s government (Obama installed 100 military “advisors” there last October), grand storyteller and dreamer Jason Russell’s KONY 2012 makes no mention of the fact that Uganda’s current election-thievin’ dictator Yoweri Museveni has stacked up millions of bodies during a bloody reign reaching back to the mid-1980s. It fails to note that Museveni’s forces have reportedly engaged in rape, amputation, electroshock torture, disembowelment of pregnant women, and the forcible enlistment of child soldiers before Joseph Kony even got in the game. It doesn’t mention that Museveni once set up concentration camps to imprison two million of the huddled Northern Ugandan peeps that Jason Russell claims he’s trying to save. Russell’s film makes not a squeak about other genocides actively occurring in Africa.

KONY 2012 emits not one prissy peep about the undeclared war between the USA and China for Africa’s resources, including oil reserves recently discovered in Northern Uganda. It doesn’t discuss the fact that all 28 of the people the International Criminal Court has publicly indicted, including Joseph Kony, are Africans. It makes no mention of US efforts to establish a military presence throughout the Dark Continent via its AFRICOM agency.

Then again, one shouldn’t expect too much from a closeted evangelical metrosexual naked hipster filmmaker from Southern California. During this somber moment of reflection as the men in white coats evaluate his mental condition, we must never forget that Jason Russell once suggested issuing T-shirts that said AFRICA IS SO HOT RIGHT NOW and AFRICA IS THE NEW PINK.

When dealing with Africa, it’s important to never forget that you’re dealing with Africa. Maybe it’s best to let Africans deal with it.

Jason Russell’s handlers at Invisible Children dismissed his public freakout as “an unfortunate incident,” a mere “personal health issue” caused by “exhaustion, dehydration, and malnutrition.” His wife/beard Danica Russell claimed her hubby “did some irrational things brought on by extreme exhaustion and dehydration.”

If I had known that public masturbation can cure dehydration, I never would have guzzled all those Diet Cokes.

I pray for Jason Russell. I pray that for an encore, he does something even funnier than running around naked while diddling himself.

If Joseph Kony is alive somewhere, I suspect he’s laughing. And masturbating. And somehow I’m certain he has the good sense not to do it in public.

Get in line, all ye racists—they have a pill for you now.

Last week, several supposedly respectable websites erupted in a blinding sunshower of bigot-hating joy at a recent Oxford University study involving a common blood-pressure pill called Propranolol. Headlines said the study proves the pill “reduces in-built racism,” “Makes People Less Racist,” and even has the spiritual potential to “open hearts and minds.”

As a friend of mine asked, “What’s next: an enema that cures homophobia?”

The study, “Propranolol reduces implicit negative racial bias,” was recently published in Psychopharmacology, and all the Tribbles on the Starship Equality are purring with glee at the idea that science has FINALLY found a pill to cure the evil racist scourge. Online comments sounded happy little bugles at the advent of a Brave New Progressive World in which Propranolol replaces Soma:

This pill should be mandatory for all right-wing Republicans, tea bags, KKK, people who hate the immigrants and want them deported, etc. What a much better world this would be.

Let’s put Propanolol in the water supply and stamp out the ugliness of Republicanism forever.

Stop being so paranoid, and take a chill pill. So what if the white race are wiped out.

There’s already a pill to cure racists, it contains cyanide :)

Why, that last comment there might be the gosh-darned cutest use of a smiley emoticon in the service of literally exterminating one’s ideological enemies that I’ve ever seen!

Ironically, Propranolol was developed by a Scottish scientist whose surname was Black. The pill appears to target brain areas that regulate fear, making that lion who’s stealthily creeping toward you seem like a furry little pussycat.

The recent Oxford study regarding the pill’s ability to reduce “racism”—a social construct which to this day no one has been able to define to my satisfaction—was based on an unforgivably tiny sample of 36 participants, only 18 of whom received the Propranolol while the other 18 took placebos. Displaying what perhaps is egregious explicit racial and gender bias, researchers selected only white males as their guinea pigs.

In summarizing her study’s results, lead author Sylvia Terbeck said something that resonated with me emotionally:

Implicit racial bias can occur even in people with a sincere belief in equality.

Hey, I think that’s happened to me, too. Even though I sincerely wanted to believe people are equal, something inside me told me that they aren’t. So now there’s a pill for that? I simply pop a pill in my mouth, and everything’s eraced?

The researchers noted that the pill had no effect on “explicit” racism, a presumably measurable object they measured by giving the participants a questionnaire regarding how “warm” one feels toward ethnic groups and left/right politics in general. Researchers conceded that the “dominance of political norms of equality and tolerance in Western democracies limits the overt expression of prejudice”—in other words, publicly expressing “racist” views threatens the prevailing political power structure and is almost universally considered a thought crime.

The study’s observed differences were all in the mystically mossy realm of “implicit” racism, which supposedly measures one’s subconscious bigotry by making you play a rapid-fire online game.

High-paid anti-racist witch hunters get blisters on their feet walking coast to coast trying to find evidence of discrimination and overt racial hatred these days. Yet despite the lack of visible barriers, they note—accurately—that not everyone in society is performing equally. So they insist that such “disparate impact” is caused by fundamental unfairness rather than something as screamingly obvious as disparate ability.

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So rather than wasting their time waiting for that next Alabama lynching that never seems to come, they’ve decided to look inside you. They’re peeking inside your heart, even though you didn’t ask. It doesn’t matter that your behavior causes zero literal harm to other races; they’re going to find a way to prove you’re a racist, anyway.

And if you resist, well, that’s all the proof they need.

The yardstick these “scientists” wield to measure the evil that lurks within your heart is known as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), brought to you by our friends at Harvard, home to such eminently Caucasian-friendly personages as Noel Ignatiev and Derrick Bell.

You can take the test online. You’re instructed to plow through it as fast as possible—this will tap into your “subconscious” mind. You use your left and right fingers to make selections while white and black faces along with positive and negative words (e.g., “Happy,” “Sad,” “Glorious,” “Awful”) flash before your eyes. They’ll switch the “good” and “evil” words back and forth between the “European American” and “African American” sides, and your reaction time supposedly measures how rapidly you associate good and evil words with each side. The assumption is that if you quickly associate evil words with the black side, you’re prejudiced against them rather than, oh, the former victim of an armed robbery at the hands of five black assailants.

I took the test five times without chemically altering myself for the duration. Twice the results said I favored whites, twice they said I favored blacks, and once it said I’m neutral. If I’d decided to, say, pop a black-market Quaalude halfway through the testing and waited until it kicked in, the results could have been even more skewed and I may have wound up simultaneously loving and hating everyone. And this is the “science” they’re using.

But even making the shaky assumption that the tests are accurate, some studies using the IAT yielded results that may not please progressive researchers’ fluffy golden ears. One of them concluded that whites were more color-blind—i.e., less “racist”—than blacks and Latinos. Another showed that physicians who scored as more “biased” in the IAT tests actually tended to discriminate less in practice than supposedly non-biased ones. One study’s results suggested that in day-to-day life, blacks preferred to interact with whites whom the IAT had categorized as “highly racially biased” than with whites who weren’t. Another study claimed the IAT is fundamentally flawed because its results seemed to be based more on simple cognitive inertia at speeding through all those flashing faces and words.

In short: This recent Oxford study is worthless.

What deserves further study is a fairly recent leftist trend to eagerly dive into the murky waters of the Eugenics Ocean provided that the “science” can somehow prove that they are biologically different than their thought-villain nemeses on the right. After rolling their eyes, holding their noses, and chanting “la-la-la-la” at any studies that appeared to establish innate racial differences, they are now wrapping their slender pink tentacles around any study—no matter how dubious its methodology—that suggests leftist egalitarians are almost a different race than their ideological enemies. After decades of claiming they’d eternally discredited what they called “scientific racism,” they are launching forward with a new academic discipline I’ll call “scientific anti-racism.” Or maybe “totalitarian liberal eugenics.” Or maybe I’m still working on its name.

Leftists shrieked like happy hamsters at a recent Canadian (of course) study linking “prejudice” and “right-wing” ideology to “lower cognitive ability.” They also squealed like shiny baby piglets at another recent study that purported to show that liberals and conservatives (whatever that means) have different brain structures.

And though they claim to celebrate the rainbow of differences that Goddess has bequeathed us, somehow they find room in their wide-open minds to cheer for the day when we breed all of those differences into extinction. Neither will these diversicrats tolerate any true diversity of thought—they’re lurching toward Soviet-style political psychiatry by suggesting that ideological disagreement on racial matters is a mental disorder requiring medication.

Sound paranoid? I’m sure they’re working on a pill for that.

Sanity is in many ways a social construct, one that varies widely from society to society. In a pragmatic sense I’ll admit it’s crazy to go against the crowd, however abjectly deluded and brainwashed that crowd may be. If you run with them, they’ll stomp right over you like wild buffalo.

Despite the soul-blotting excesses of Soviet and Maoist totalitarianism, many neo-Marxists still appear to believe that the control freaks and power psychos are confined to the right.

How about we work on a pill that cures extreme partisan psychosis?

Or one that cures stupidity? Lotta that going around.

I haven’t dabbled in science since that seventh-grade project I did with the snails, but it’s obvious to me that “social science” is anything but a science. This new anti-racism snake oil they’re peddling is an unholy amalgamation of soft eugenics and punitive psychiatry. The Two Joes—Mengele and Stalin—are shaking hands inside a tiny little heart pill. Pop it in your mouth and smile.

The wombs of America’s women are in the spotlight once again.

At a mock hearing arranged by DC Democrats in February, a lantern-jawed 30-year-old law student named Sandra Fluke (pronounced “Fluck”) predicted a looming Ovarian Holocaust among her sob sisters at school because the Catholic college’s healthcare plan did not include free contraception:

Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy….Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school.

With the flinty resoluteness of a young Sam Waterston, Miss Fluke told the committee that $3,000 could suck up a student’s entire summer wages, which I suppose is true if you work at Burger King.

Fluke’s lips flapped about women’s emotions, about women’s needs, and how women were suffering and terrified and resentful because of society’s “barriers” and “burdens.” She said women are not being “taken seriously”—you know, the typical women’s-activist stuff. Unless it was a joke, she seriously claimed that the university was cruelly forcing the Wombs of Georgetown to “pick between a quality education and our health.”

She spoke of how a female friend—a gay one, naturally—had ovarian cysts that required birth-control medicine, but she also let it slip that even her Jesuit college’s healthcare plan covered such prescriptions in cases of medical necessity—as do most healthcare plans. Fluke claimed her Sapphic fellow traveler is “struggling to pay for her medication” and may even lose an ovary or die of cancer unless the feds pry open the Catholic Church’s doors with a tire iron and force them to tolerate contraceptive methods that go against their beliefs.

At the end of her speech, the Democrats all applauded just as the 8GB thumb drives planted in the back of their necks told them to do.

Last Wednesday, gaseous radio personality Rush Limbaugh called her a slut (It could have been worse. He could have said, “Fluke you!”):

What does it say about the college coed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a Congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception.

I’ve always found Limbaugh to reek of discount salami, but I’ve also felt that way about other political commentators who call women sluts. But is it really such a ghastly word? Weren’t the swinging mammaries of radical feminism in the midst of “reclaiming” it, anyway?

On Thursday the adipose cigar-fellating radio host, former prescription-pill addict, and onetime suspected Viagra smuggler upped the “ewww” factor a hundred notches:

So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.

Yeah, gals, he’s a creep. We don’t agree on much, but that oily butterball’s one icky fella.

But that’s not to say that your hyperbolic backlash wasn’t equally repulsive.

The alarm bell was quickly sounded to waken the nation’s sleeping prog-crickets to Stand With Sandra Fluke because Rush Limbaugh was “attacking all women” and wanted the government to pull out of their vaginas. A professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin said Limbaugh’s hate-soaked words were “a method for exerting power and control over women.” An assistant professor of Gender Studies at Texas A&M said Limbaugh’s comments represented “a form of sexual violence.” As her supporters proceeded to call Limbaugh a bald fat angry sterile impotent old white pig who needed to die, Fluke said that his comments were “outside the bounds of civil discourse.” Limbaugh was repeatedly accused of “bullying,” since that seems to be the hot word inside the Beltway these days. Fluke insisted that she and the Traveling Sisterhood of Birth Control Users would not be silenced, as if Limbaugh had tried to shush them in the first place rather than giving them tons of free publicity. Even our president wrapped one of his giant ears around a phone receiver and called Ms. Fluke to console her and the rest of America’s weeping wombs.

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Ultimately, the Legion of Marching Ovaries’ well-organized caterwauling caused Limbaugh to lose a few sponsors, so on Saturday he apologized for calling her a “slut.”

So maybe she’s not a slut, but did she have a point?

Either she’s fornicating like a rabbit or she’s getting soaked for contraceptives ($1,000 a year?), because even without insurance, she could buy generic birth-control pills for less than $10 a month at pharmacies within walking distance of Georgetown’s campus. If she bothered to walk three miles, she could get them for free at a number of local Planned Parenthood clinics. So her insinuation that women were struggling financially because they were unwilling to walk to free clinics is ludicrous.

Fluke and her supporters also liberally tossed around the word “rights,” insisting that women have a “right” to free birth control and that religious fanatics were trying to deny them this “right.”

Naturally they’re all “pro-choice,” too. Pro-choice? Yeah, I’m for that. So why can’t the university choose not to pay for your birth-control pills?

Did it ever occur to them that maybe some people feel they have a “right” not to pay for others’ lifestyle decisions? Or that legally, taxpayers have no “choice” but to pay up under threat of incarceration? Doesn’t the Catholic Church have some basic “right” not to provide for contraceptive methods they find morally repugnant? Don’t private employers have a “right” not to provide healthcare for their workers at all? Don’t private insurers have a “right” to refuse providing free contraception? Not according to Congress.

In political equations, it’s always best to consider who’s being coerced. No one’s forcing Sandra Fluke to have sex, although it appears she feels that someone besides her should be squeezed into paying for her contraception.

Some will argue that it’s cheaper for society to nix a fetus with a birth-control pill than to force society to pay to raise a child. That’s undeniable, but it also presumes that “society” should pay to raise everyone’s babies.

Fluke says the main issue is “women’s health,” which sort of implies that pregnancy is a disease. But “The Pill” is classified as a Group One carcinogen. In 2005 the World Health Organization said that oral contraceptives can be carcinogenic at certain dosages. The Mayo Clinic says “using birth control pills for longer periods of time increases your risk of some cancers….”

So how much does it really have to do with health, and how much is simply about political power?

Once you peel off the media glitz, it’s clear that Sandra Fluke and Rush Limbaugh are being used as chess pieces in this year’s electoral power play. There are around 75 million registered female voters and 70 million Catholic voters. One side’s trying to say the Republicans have declared war on women, while the other says Democrats are doing battle against Catholics. And neither side seems to care about anything beyond winning. Expect this issue to get as messy as afterbirth until the November election.

Mind you, I’m not against contraception. Look around you. Obviously there is far too little contraception in the world. I believe society would be healthier if contraception was so ubiquitous, the only people who had kids were those who chose to have them.

But if you choose to party, I don’t think it’s fair to expect others to pay your cleanup bill.

Brandon White

Is it ever permissible to find a “hate crime” funny?

Granted, “funny” is in the eye of the beholder, and I’d wager that any pair of eyeballs not irreparably stained by armchair sadism would likely not find the attack itself to be a laugh riot.

What I find hysterical here isn’t the cowardly lopsided beatdown, but the colossal bloody smoking flaming 20-car freeway pileup of ugliness, vanity, lying, sanctimony, and flailingly befuddled identity politicking that followed in its wake.

Professional hate-crime hunters are now reevaluating the three-on-one filmed attack—which went down outside an Atlanta grocery store where accomplices yelled NO FAGGOTS IN JACK CITY as perps pummeled the victim into a fetal ball—as to whether it was a hate crime at all.

The beating happened on February 4 in a rundown Atlanta neighborhood known as “Pittsburgh.” In the video, one of the suspects is seen wearing a sweatshirt that says JACK GANG on the back. The crew suspected in the beating alternately calls themselves “Pittsburgh Jack City” or “Jack City 1029,” the latter in reference to the corner grocery store (1029 McDaniels St.) where the beating took place. In a 2010 reprazentin’ video, Jack City members are shown milling outside the store acting as if they couldn’t recite the alphabet even if forced to do so at gunpoint.

Beating victim Brandon White, 20, told an interviewer he had gone to the JVC Grocery & Deli to buy a humble piece of chicken on a sunny Saturday afternoon. He says he initially decided not to press charges and to “let it blow over” until he unwittingly became an Internet celebrity over the next couple days.

Whatever genius filmed the beating thought it wise to upload it to WorldStarHipHop, which serves as a sort of YouTube for hastening Western Civilization’s demise. The footage quickly went viral, inspiring the sort of predictably holy outrage from the usual suspects.

Leading the stampede for “justice”—and managing to wriggle himself into nearly every ensuing TV report about the case—was a young gay black “activist” named Devin Barrington-Ward from a group called Change Atlanta. Ward effortlessly parrots moldy old civil-rights rhetoric in his quest to “empower this young generation” and to “fight for justice, equality, safety, and change.”

Ward stood behind beating victim Brandon White looking resolutely concerned as White held a press conference only four days after the assault. White himself looked, well, not exactly permanently disfigured. (Apparently the Jack City Gang members didn’t land many solid head shots.) Seeming a mite prissy and impertinent, White called his attackers “monsters,” denied knowing them, and implied he was curb-stomped “for just being a gay male.”

Saying he feared returning to the scene of his beating, White was absent from a rally held the following Saturday at a church across the street from the chicken-wing joint. The rally’s most famous guest speaker was Congressman John Lewis, who apparently lied about Tea Party members barking the “N” word (hint: It isn’t “nougat”) at him after he signed Obama’s healthcare bill.

A “social-justice minister” who claimed he had also been gay-bashed in the past told the rally members:

At the end of the day, I am Brandon White and all of you are Brandon White.

A woman named Holiday Simmons representing an organization called Lambda Legal told the crowd:

We are Brandon White, but we are also the attackers.

Nuzzling himself into a seat on the Everyone-in-the-World-is-Brandon-White bus, Devin Barrington-Ward wrote on his Facebook wall:

I stand with Brandon because in some way we all are Brandon…

Ward also told the rally members:

I thank God for giving me a passion for public service and the ability to express myself through oratory.

Oh, I’ll bet you do, Miss Thang!

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While Ward and likeminded Facebook Rainbow Soldiers—gay Atlanta scenesters have such super-fab handles as JaeMar Larue Kardashian-Thomas and Keith Tastee Dynasty-Dupree—were fighting the good fight, police rounded up the three beating suspects, all of them in their teens—Christopher Cain, Dareal Demare Williams, and Dorian Moragne. Both Williams and Moragne were charged with Aggravated Assault and Robbery—the latter presumably for snatching White’s cell phone during the beating.

But last week when Devin Barrington-Ward decided to interview Moragne’s family about the incident, the story took a queer turn indeed.

On Friday, Ward was again on local TV, but this time insinuating that Brandon White had lied about not knowing his attackers. Moragne’s mother and lawyer apparently told Ward that Brandon White had been assaulted because his cell phone contained video footage of one or more of the attackers performing homosexual acts.

Terik Jackson of Change Atlanta told TV reporters:

That’s why the cell phone was a target. They didn’t just beat him up because he was gay.

Another man featured on the broadcast claimed:

It’s a video of somebody performing a sexual act with one or a few of these young men….Brandon was basically agitating these young men about personally exposing them for being DL gay…on the Down Low, possibly gay. The young men responded because they don’t want their families to know.

Ward and his tireless civil-rights unicorns seem to be arguing that if White was attacked for revenge rather than his sexual orientation, it ceases to be a hate crime. I disagree. If the new account is true, this was an attack spurred on by self-hatred—the funniest kind of hate crime there is.

On Saturday, Change Atlanta and Moragne’s mother held yet another public rally urging for truth, justice, righteousness, healing, reconciliation, hope, hopefulness, change, and never-ending clichés. But according to Brandon White’s lawyer, her client was not invited. Change Atlanta has apparently shifted its sympathies from the beating victim to one of the alleged assailants. Brandon White appears to have betrayed a community far more important than the gay one.

America’s black community, such as it is, isn’t quite known for openly embracing white ideas of what constitutes “gayness.” And when it comes to identity politics and the all-important hierarchy of victimization, blackness seems to trump gayness every time. Reverend Al Sharpton still manages to have a career posing as an anti-hate warrior despite referring to Western Civ icons as “Greek homos” and calling a talk-show combatant a “punk faggot.”

No matter how it may make white progressives squirm out of their gold-trimmed paisley jockey briefs to hear this, polls and voting patterns show American blacks to be “the nation’s most homophobic population.” According to a report from the National Black Justice Coalition, blacks are “more likely than other groups to believe that homosexuality is wrong, that sexual orientation is a choice, and that sexual orientation can be changed.”

Professor Griff, former Minister of Information for radical black hip-hop group Public Enemy, once said, “there’s not a word in any African language which describes homosexual….There are no such words. They didn’t exist.”

This doesn’t mean that same-sex activity doesn’t exist (or—cough—isn’t rampant!) in black communities. It only means that blacks generally tend to deny the very existence of a phenomenon called “homosexuality.” According to observers of “Down Low” culture—the black version of being “in the closet”—a “faggot” is typically seen as a white male who acts like a girl. “Gay culture” is seen as the sole product of weak white perverts actin’ a fool again. But two butch black males can aggressively engage in the sweatiest sodomitical acts without either of them being homosexuals—so long as it’s kept on the “Down Low,” i.e., no one sees the cell-phone videos.

If there’s one thing worse among blacks than a “faggot,” it’s a snitch. It’s as if by threatening to “out” a few street-corner gangsta numskulls, Brandon White wanted to shame the entire black “community,” or at least its carefully cultivated self-image. Too late now. The fags are out of the bag.

Unfortunately for the “community,” Down Low culture is a primary agent of HIV infection for American blacks. One study revealed that among all groups of closeted males, blacks are more than three times as likely to be HIV-positive. In terms of HIV infection, blacks are overrepresented by almost 400%. So in terms of demonstrable damage to the “community,” the fact that Brandon White’s assailants could be HIV-positive and murderously infecting their unwitting female partners probably far outweighs an occasional gay-bashing that doesn’t even leave cuts or swelling four days after the attack.

Just don’t expect any of the activists to acknowledge it. If it’s a simple choice between defending “the community” and saving it, they’re acting a little defensive. Where things really count, I’d say the activists are being far too passive.

I haven’t had a sip of alcohol in thirty years and I’ve never been fond of hanging out with retarded people, but if one is foolish enough to establish any presence whatsoever on social media, it’s mathematically impossible to avoid people who act drunk and retarded.

One is undeniably afflicted with an extra chromosome if they ever argue on the Internet, so color me a chronically recidivist Mongolian idiot for recently arguing online with a standup comic who can’t see the irony in throwing his flabby bulk behind the OWS movement, which I see as basically a huge crowd of hecklers.

He has simultaneously accused me of “preaching anarchy” as well as being a “fascist” and a “libertarian.” To be fair, he also wrote, “Not everything has to make sense”—good thing for him that it doesn’t. He quotes lyrics from The Clash amid political discussions and also appears to have a psychedelic painting of Che Guevara above his computer. I’ve recently discovered he describes himself as a “revolutionary socialist,” but the only time I ever met him—a 2005 party in Death Valley—my general impression was that he’s a “drunken boob.”

Like the boundlessly patient and intermittently forgiving man I am, I repeatedly asked him to explain his murky allegations that the OWS protesters are “oppressed,” and he repeatedly avoided the question. At one juncture during our repartee he brought up Fox News, at which point I informed him I don’t watch Fox News. I again asked him to explain his comment about oppression. He disappeared for ten days and finally came back with this:

Not really sure what you’re trying to do really. Your writing seems clever but the bottom line is I can get the same point of view from FOX.

Since I hate team sports and don’t classify myself politically, when someone accuses me of deriving my opinions from Fox News—or even that my opinions reflect those of Fox News—it comes off like a Christian telling an atheist, “You must read the Koran.” I’d previously endured this inane accusation 999 times, but since the possibly drunk and retarded standup comic was the thousandth one to make it, the bells went off, the confetti and balloons came falling down, and I decided to do this article about a relatively new logical fallacy I’m calling argumentum ad Fox Newsem.

I spend much of my online time skeet-shooting at similar lazily tossed memes: that if you criticize the government or public unions you’re a willing livery driver for plantation-owning oligarchs, or that if you cast the slightest aspersion at one side you by default belong to the other side. So let’s examine the latest tard-meme in the assembly line: If you say anything that offends progressive zombies, you must be a Fox News zombie.

The Fox News (or “Faux News” or “Faux Noise”) cable channel was established in 1996, but it seems like only the past three or four years that self-identified leftists, liberals, and progressives held a secret meeting and collectively decided that the magical phrase “You must watch Fox News” effectively shuts down any argument and renders the person accused of watching Fox News the loser.

It’s also a sneery smarmo-snarky putdown, as it seems to imply that the accused is an empty vessel incapable of arriving at any opinions without having them pumped into their skull by a corporate TV fiefdom. This sort of passive gullibility may be true of most people, but it’s also true of those who unquestioningly swallow liberal TV propaganda.

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Although I initially told my verbal combatant that I’d never seen Fox News, upon a scan of the memory banks this has proved to be untrue. The only time in my life I’ve ever seen the channel on television was in a Honolulu hotel room in 2007. I thought Glenn Beck seemed somewhat chubby and Red Eye seemed somewhat funny. Beyond that, I can’t remember anything. Through the years I’ve seen a smattering of Fox News video clips online, usually in the course of researching an article. But I’ve never cited them as a source, and I can’t see how they’ve ever influenced any of my opinions, even the stupid ones.

So in real hours and minutes, I’ve seen the Fox News channel far less than I’ve seen progressive pod-peas lecturing the world that Fox News doesn’t deserve to exist. Have you noticed that those who reflexively accuse others of being brainwashed by Fox News always act a tad brainwashed themselves? The “You must listen to Fox News” crowd tends to be the sort of partisan-psychosis Media Matters automata who’ll toss blanket condemnations at the entire Fox empire simply because a couple audience members in a Fox-sponsored debate booed at a gay soldier or because a few commenters got all niggly with the racial epithets in Fox’s live feed of Whitney Houston’s funeral.

We are told that Fox News is funded by the rich and powerful, and although that is true, the implication seems to be that no other major media are. In dollars and cents, Fox’s News Corp. is hardly the most powerful when it comes to oligarchic media ownership.

Fox viewers are routinely depicted as dumb corn-shucking banjo-playing Swamp Caucasians, but a 2007 Pew poll found those who watch The O’Reilly Factor are roughly as informed as those who listen to NPR and watch The Daily Show. A recent Fairleigh Dickinson University study said that Fox viewers in New Jersey were less well-informed about current events than people who watch no news at all.

People who watch no news at all? That would be me. And, yes, I’d presume I’m more well-informed than your average Fox viewer, since I’m neither average nor a Fox viewer.

As far as I can tell, Fox News is mostly Irish guys and blonde chicks who say we need to fight Israel’s wars for them, so I wouldn’t say I’m generally sympathetic to their politics. So to settle the topic hopefully forever—although there are too many drunk and retarded people for that wish to ever come true—I don’t watch Fox News and don’t agree with most of their propaganda.

To me Fox does not seem “Fair & Balanced” as their trademarked slogan claims. It’s transparently biased, but whether it leans toward “the right” would require a thousand-year marathon of defining that term, so I’d say they’re biased in favor of Republicans. I’ve never been a registered Republican, and the only time I’ve ever voted for a Republican was in a recent local election during a quixotic, ill-fated attempt to oust my mentally handicapped Congressman. And I made that decision based on Armed Services Committee footage of my mentally handicapped Congressman wondering whether islands can capsize, not anything I’d seen on Fox.

Last year as I was preparing to write about the Seven Ideas You Can Never Discuss on Television, one of the ideas I’d selected was that you weren’t ever allowed to question the Federal Reserve’s sanctity. But while preparing the article, Glenn Beck announced he’d be doing a whole episode of his show about the Federal Reserve, so I shelved that item because it seemed like it was a topic that wasn’t entirely banned from discussion. Only twelve days after that show aired (and after the “Seven Ideas” article was published), Fox News and Glenn Beck announced they’d be parting ways. So maybe you’re only allowed to discuss the Federal Reserve once on television, then you’re blackballed.

Recently after delivering what I found to be a rather stirring speech about the two-party fraud—it definitely had me nodding my head more than anything I’d heard from a politician in decades—Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show was canceled. It was originally speculated that the speech got Napolitano fired, but it turns out that the Fox Business channel had canceled its entire primetime lineup at once.

Rumor has it that Napolitano will be joining Glenn Beck on a new TV project.

Wait—a new TV network that’s openly critical of both the Federal Reserve and the two-party system? Forget about my aversion to television—how do I subscribe?

I guess I haven’t been paying attention, but it looks as if a lot of you haven’t been paying attention. During an online forum discussion the other day, after I’d asked some guy about the 139-word sentence he’d just written, he revealed to me—and all the world—that he had ADHD. Within moments—before I had a chance to become distracted—someone else chimed in that they had ADD.

Now, I had a vague familiarity with these labels—one meant you had trouble paying attention, the other meant you were a spazz about it—but I’d tried to avoid thinking about them. Yet suddenly I felt forced to confront them, to sniff them suspiciously, to poke at them, to taunt them, and to question their very existence. After some research I realized that the very fact I dared challenge the consensus wisdom about Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder could mean that I, too, suffered from these ailments—at least one, and probably both. Yes, definitely both.

Maybe because I’m crazy, I question the validity of all psychiatric diagnoses, but especially ones that result in millions of prescriptions for legal amphetamines. I arch my eyebrow even higher at the fact that tots as young as THREE can be prescribed Adderall to “cure” a “condition” that is diagnosed by means no more scientific than answering an old-fashioned questionnaire.

Suddenly, yes, this has my full attention.

An estimated one in ten American schoolchildren has been diagnosed with ADHD, an “illness” that miraculously didn’t exist until it was formally enshrined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987. As a result of the new illness and all the new diagnoses, kids are being showered with Ritalin and Adderall as if Skittles and M&Ms were raining from the sky.

Then, almost as if by coincidence, it was “discovered” that adults weren’t paying attention either, so the nice men in the white coats let them have speed, too. All the speed they wanted. Verily, and so the office workers, the door-to-door salesmen, and the college students throughout the valley all took speed, and yea, it was good.

No one seemed to pay attention to the fact that this might become a problem.

The main problem is that these “diseases” are not caused by germs or viruses or, as far as it seems, anything remotely resembling indisputable chemical or brain-scan evidence. This is nothing more than speculation that diseases exist based on the act of describing common symptoms.

OK, I saw one brain-scan study where the ADHD kids had smaller brain areas than the normal kids, but it was later revealed that—ta da!—it may have been caused by the fact that these kids had already been on Ritalin for years. So there’s possibly some confusion about cause and effect there.

So I’m not convinced that “ADD” and “ADHD” are anything more than ideas. At least that’s how it seems to me at the moment. I can be persuaded otherwise, but you’ll have to be very, you know, persuasive. I suspect that what is often misdiagnosed as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is actually Teacher Charisma Deficit Disorder.

After ignoring these so-called attention disorders for years, I did a little research and was surprised to discover that there are no blood or DNA tests needed for a diagnosis. A standard ADHD questionnaire is chillingly vague. You can just fidget a lot, talk a lot, maybe act a little bored, then WHAM!—they’re scrubbing your brain with amphetamines.

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And these are not your everyday bargain-bin rusty-bathtub amphetamines, either. I should know. I’ve driven around the old raceway a few times, if you know what I mean. Over an 11-day stretch back in college, I snorted enough slushy, dirty Philly crank to churn out 115 pages’ worth of term papers. I even smoked ice maybe a dozen times, not that I’m proud of it. And I still drink roughly a keg of coffee daily. But never in my life have I taken any form of speed that felt as pure as the little blue Adderall tablet I popped many years ago—maybe a day or two before the Statute of Limitations would have run out, to be perfectly safe. I felt like someone had attached my nipples to a car battery—and not in a good way! Except for the coffee, I’ve never done speed since. It wasn’t even a big dose, but that single experience made me decide that Adderall was just as bad as cocaine or meth—possibly more dangerous, because it was stamped with the Holy Seal of Legality.

If you had told me thirty years ago that they’d be prescribing amphetamines to kindergarteners who acted up in class, I would have said you’re crazy. Now that they’re actually doing it, I say the world’s crazy.

Suddenly everyone’s depressed. Suddenly everyone’s anxious. Suddenly everyone’s distracted. And suddenly there are pills for all of it.

My adrenaline starts pumping when I repeatedly see phrases such as “long-term data are scarce,” “Long term effects…are unknown,” “There is limited data regarding long term use of stimulants,” and “The long term effects on the developing brain and on mental health disorders in later life of chronic use of methylphenidate [Ritalin] is unknown.”

They’re the experts, right? Shouldn’t they know? For short-term profits, they’re using millions of Americans as meth-lab guinea pigs?

A US government report describes how “A 9 year old female experienced visual hallucinations (started seeing jellyfish on the floor and bugs crawling on her), while taking Adderall XR” and “an 8 year old girl, was hospitalized for suicidal threats and explosive temper one day after discontinuing Adderall XR 30 mg.” That sounds much worse than if they’d just been left alone to fidget in their seats.

A 12-year-old girl’s Adderall-induced psychosis made her fantasize about stabbing holes in her brother. A North Dakota man shotgunned his infant daughter and himself dead only ten days after he started taking Adderall. Popping too many “study buddies” allegedly drove a Tennessee college student to step in front of a train and commit suicide in 2009.

Long-term amphetamine use can lead to trifles such as strokes, convulsion comas, schizophrenia, hallucinations, depression, psychosis, cognitive impairment, cardiac death, kidney failure, and erectile dysfunction, but hey, don’t let that spoil your fun.

Maybe it’s not the best idea to be mega-dosing Americans with speed merely because they have short attention spans.

Maybe they’re just bored. Or a little slow. Maybe they’re too polite to tell you what they really think of you, which is why they’re avoiding eye contact.

I’m sure if I was a kid today, they’d have me gakked-out on so many grams of Kiddie Cocaine, I’d be running around like a tiny pink sweaty Tom Arnold.

During grade school, I was told the reason I acted up in class was because I was smart and found the subject matter they were teaching to be boring. Even at six years old, that alibi didn’t ring true with me. I wasn’t paying attention to the teachers because they weren’t very interesting. But aside from a few detentions, the worst I got out of it was an “F” grade in Conduct one semester. These days they’d diagnose me with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and herd me onto the Kiddie Cattle Car of the American Speed Train.

There’s no better time to question authority than when they make the very act of questioning authority into a mental disorder.

Sometimes boys are made to misbehave, and it’s healthier to let ’em do it. At least it’s better than if in some misguided attempt to make them behave, you create a prematurely burned-out tweaker in the process. Right now, I’m happy it’s just me, my unbroken restless spirit, and my coffee.