I didn’t expect to see so many derelicts in Music City USA. I thought the home of country music would be a little more…country?

Last week I fled the Atlanta metro area to spend three days in Nashville for my birthday. As a Philly-born expat who’s lived in all four corners of the USA, I’ve lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi River for nearly seven years. I’m especially fond of the Upland South, which includes nearly all of Tennessee except its western lowland fringes that are capped off by that ugly and battered fake gold tooth called Memphis.

Since Nashville is a country-music mecca surrounded by rolling mountain greenery, I anticipated something far more wholesome and unspoiled, something more befitting the Upland South than the South Bronx. I thought I’d see red-and-white checkered shirts, cowboy hats, and hoop skirts. What I saw were dreadlocks, sideways baseball caps, and stained sweatpants.

Much of this was due to my motel’s location, perched right off Interstate 65 on the city’s east side, across the Cumberland River from downtown and Music Row. The latter areas were clean and unexceptional. But except for the shimmering glass-and-steel C&W museums where I presume you’re able to view an array of Porter Wagoner’s nudie suits for $20, it could have been any relatively unthreatening downtown area in America. Except for the tourist traps, downtown Nashville could have easily been downtown Spokane or downtown Indianapolis. But the east side was more like Detroit.

Whereas the downtown area featured new neon and glittering hotels, the east side had old neon and lodging of a decidedly more downscale nature. East Nashville remains somewhat visually interesting because it has escaped the brute beige force of gentrification and urban renewal. Here on the mangy, flea-ridden side of town, it’s all cracked cement, overgrown weeds, barbecued-rib shops, and used-tire stores.

I knew there would be poverty in Nashville—this is Tennessee, after all—but what astonished me was the utter lack of country rusticity. I wasn’t expecting Beverly Hills, but for some reason I thought the poor people would look more like Li’l Abner than Lil Jon. In short, I expected to see more hillbillies and fewer gangbangers and wiggers. But east Nashville is a place where “Music City” has a distinctly different meaning.

Sure, there were scraggly shirtless cigarette-smoking white homeless men clustered in packs under tree shade. There were sunburned bikers wearing German helmets. There were 400-pound grit-gobbling pasty women waddling out of diners with their 300-pound sausage-gnawing ofay mates. But after a while it became evident that anyone who might fit the cultural stereotype of a “redneck” skewed older than average.

Most of the younger proles on Nashville’s east side—and numerically they seemed about evenly split between blacks and whites—fit more of an “inner-city” stereotype. America’s underclass has by definition always been poor, but they used to be somewhat culturally different from one another. But now the hillbillies are dying out, and in the proletarian interracial culture wars, black urban culture has won. All the poor whites—or at least the “youths” and a surfeit of middle-aged (or perhaps prematurely aged) white welfare mothers—now seem to act black. And dress black. And talk black.

At least that’s the impression I got during a ten-minute visit to an east Nashville gas-station convenience store to buy a frosty beverage on a hot and humid June afternoon.

Upon entering, I was met by a glowering pair of gangsta types with corn rows, oversized shirts, and teardrop tattoos under their eyes.

The place was what one might expect from any inner-city convenience store: rolling papers, flavored cigarillos, lottery tickets, herbal stimulants, condoms, and reputed libido-enhancing supplements encased behind a wall of Plexiglas. At the cash register stood a sweaty and swarthy clerk of apparent Hindu derivation. Cramped food aisles featured snacks and treats crammed to the gills with sodium and sugar. Beef jerky was abundant, and I doubt there was a gram of dietary fiber in the entire establishment.

As I surveyed the refrigerated soft-drink section, a very short and stocky white male who resembled a semi-retarded junior-league rugby player grabbed a beer from behind an adjacent glass door. A pale, pear-shaped, and bedraggled white woman kept telling her three mulatto children that they’d had enough candy while they kept pestering her for more.

{pagebreak}

Through it all rose the din of an even paler, fatter, and more exhausted-looking white woman with one leg in a cast who stood up near the counter, heckling the Indian clerk: “Why you doin’ me like that? Why you doin’ me like that?” Apparently covered head to toe in the tattooed names of every gang member who’d ever had his way with her, she kept asking him why he was doing her like that, and I don’t think he understood her question.

After selecting my beverage—diet green tea if you must know—I made my way to the counter, only to be bumped out of place by the diminutive rugby player. He muttered something at me, I grumbled something back, and a genial middle-aged black man intervened to chide the midget for cutting ahead of me in line.

In my discomfited haste, I had unwittingly cut in front of the tattooed white woman, and when I apologized, she told me that it’s all good and she was only wondering why the Indian clerk was doing her like that.

At some point an elderly black man in a mobility scooter motored his way into the store, crowding it to the point where it all resembled an interracial ghetto version of the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera.

I made my escape safely. The next day I drove 80 miles east to bask in the sun on rocks at Cummins Falls State Park. But even out there, tucked away in hillbilly country, the gas-station owners were Indians. It didn’t matter that they sold boiled Cajun peanuts and what were alleged to be fried chicken livers, although I suspect they may have been alligator testicles—they owned the place. The white hill folk who’d inhabited the area for centuries still couldn’t get it together enough to own a simple gas station. It reminded me of how in Georgia, all of the reputed “country buffet” restaurants seem to be owned by Asians. Even my downscale Nashville motel was helmed by Indian proprietors.

I can only imagine what these enterprising and disciplined Asian and Indian immigrants think of America’s white and black underclass. Not much, I’d presume. And seeing how what are now the “natives” have devolved into one dysfunctional Jerry Springer nightmare super-blob, I can’t say I blame the invaders one bit.

When big-bootied FLOTUS Michelle Obama was heckled last week by a grizzled lesbian activist who sort of resembles Glenn Beck with AIDS, the entire progressive coalition nearly came crashing to the ground.

Mrs. Obama was speaking about somethin’-somethin’ black when the activist interrupted her to start screaming about somethin’-somethin’ gay, at which point Obama left the podium to confront the woman. Video documentation of the event is scant, so it’s unclear whether Obama did that black-lady thing where they wag their finger and swivel their head.

“She came right down in my face,” said gay heckler Ellen Sturtz. “I was taken aback.”

Then, but of course, Sturtz was accused of using “white privilege” and “coded racial words” to play into ancient, hateful, and obviously disproved-by-science stereotypes of an “angry black woman.”

One can only imagine the furor if the lez had accused Michelle of chimping out.

A fat black lesbian who says she embraces the term “BlaQueer” to describe her multiple Identities of Oppression wrote a Huffington Post puff piece about how she couldn’t decide whose side to take:

I, like many other queer people of color, can’t separate my race and its history from my sexuality (or my gender performance/identity) and its history.

Like my mom always said, “‘Can’t’ means ‘won’t.’”

In the event’s wake, pro-homo serial event-interrupters Code Pink apparently made remarks critical of Michelle Obama on Twitter, then offered a groveling apology when told to check their privilege.

This shit never ends, and I love it. Since a white penis dangles atween my legs, progressive identity groups have designated me as their natural-born enemy. Therefore, I take tremendous pleasure when my supposed enemies start shooting each other with friendly fire.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the O. J. Simpson murder trial is that it forced the progressive-minded to take sides: Do they go against the woman-killer or the racist cop?

There are numerous examples of such seemingly insoluble liberal dilemmas, all of them hilarious to me.

Do you protect the environment, or do you allow the Third World to continue breeding like dusky hamsters?

Do you support Islam or the women who are getting their clits sliced off?

Do you come down on the side of unions or illegal-alien scab laborers?

Do you support Greenpeace or Injun whalers?

Do you oppose censorship or rape jokes?

Black female activists or Jews?

Such constant squabbling usually devolves into pissing contests about who is more oppressed and who exactly is bullying whom.

{pagebreak}

The term for when one person’s oppression collides with another’s is intersectionality. It was allegedly coined by a black female lawyer named Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the way she spells “Kimberly” is really all you need to know about her. The general concept supposedly arose in the 1970s when black feminists started bitching about white feminists over who was more oppressed. In other words, it was the fruit of infighting among leftist identity groups, the result of cannibalism among the oppressed.

People who buy into this notion that they suffer from multiple forms of oppression—rather than the more likely explanation, which is that they suffer from multiple personalities—tend to explain intersectionality in ways either histrionically angry or academically tortured.

A shining example of the histrionically angry school is a screed called “MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT!” written by a “Latina” who claims she screams so much, it sometimes scares her cat.

Intersectionality, because it is by definition an insane if unfalsifiable notion, has gained traction in the so-called social sciences. In Sweden (of course), you can get a master’s degree in it. Never have so few used so many words to say so little. Intersectionality’s proponents prattle on about standpoint epistemology and interlocking matrices of oppression, about how intercategorical approaches are needed to determine how essentialist identities foster stereotyping, about how power carries gendered connotations and has androcentric biases that promote racialized belonging, and about how straight white males suck.

This is one of the reasons I sort of hope for a wholesale economic collapse—because people who talk like this will not have jobs.

The concept of intersectionality is also related to the “progressive stack,” which assumes that white males at all times bear noxious degrees of unearned power, which is why they have to get to the back of the line and let all the legless black lesbians speak first.

So much for transcending labels and viewing one another as individuals. These people want to institutionalize such labels. They balk at the concept of “assigned identity,” yet they also seem unable to live without it. So many of these multitudinous oppressed “identities” seem like nothing more than cheap cloaks to mask nakedly annoying personalities. People with bad personalities seem to have a built-in defense mechanism that makes them believe you actually hate them for any other possible reason besides their bad personalities. With all the banter about oppression, it’s hard to think of anything that stifles free speech and free expression more than such strident humorlessness.

As an unapologetic white male and therefore a designated cultural pariah, I take a sort of emperor’s glee in the gladiatorial spectacle of these special-interest ninnies eating each other. But it’s different from lions eating Christians. It’s more like Christians eating Christians.

Personally, I found these people far more likable when they were disenfranchised.

Though it’s medically possible to work oneself to death—especially among the Japanese—I know more people who are digging their own graves by not working at all.

Day after day, more and more people around me seem to be turning off, tuning out, popping pills, and joining the Anomie Army. The ranks of the gumption-deficient seem to swell with every passing minute.

I was reminded of this by the saga of Michael Cole, an on-the-dole British alcoholic in his 50s who recently murdered his wife then botched a suicide attempt due to an all-consuming sense of hopelessness. With no jobs, no children, no future, and no apparent motivation, Cole said the only bright spots in the couple’s bleak and barren lives were when they found something worth watching on TV.

I’ve known far too many people like the Coles: those who painted themselves into depressingly numb and comfortable corners and allowed their spines to disintegrate while basking in unearned income, intoxicants, and endless television.

There was a writer I knew who exploited the well-intentioned but ultimately misguided kindness of a wealthy benefactor who essentially wiped his middle-aged anus for him whenever he made a poop on the floor, which was often. He had a roaring Xanax addiction—up to four bars, AKA 16 doses, in one swallow—and would fritter away most of his days playing video games on a computer while a TV perched right above the computer blared in his face. His benefactor paid for his multiple stints in rehab as well as all his medical bills. Her generosity was rewarded with a searing and repugnant ingratitude—if she didn’t cover his bills quickly enough for his liking, he’d call her an asshole—but never to her face, since that might have jeopardized his free ride.

There was a girl whose father had allegedly been the West Coast’s wealthiest pimp until he died and left her a sizable inheritance, enabling her to essentially act disabled. Her house was a dusty, cobwebbed, cluttered amalgam of Miss Havisham’s abandoned wedding feast and an episode of Hoarders. Her dietary regimen consisted of two packs of cigarettes and two six-packs of beer a day. This was supplemented with tomato juice that she’d pour into a morning glass of beer next to her night table. As a large-screen TV continued droning by the foot of the bed, she’d sip the vile concoction while puffing on the day’s first cigarette, often falling asleep and adding another hole to a blanket already pockmarked with at least a hundred cigarette burns. On especially exertive days, she’d go down to the corner store to buy more beer and cigarettes.

There was a Vietnam veteran with a back injury who subsisted on government benefits and swallowed what seemed like a cupful of prescription painkillers and opiates daily. He would never awake before 2PM, at which point he’d rouse his flabby husk and plant himself in front of a large-screen TV, where he’d passively sit without burning a calorie until he fell asleep and the cycle began anew. Doctors at the VA hospital spotted something grapefruit-sized growing on his kidney, but he didn’t fret in the least about it. When I asked him what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, he said he didn’t know or care.

And there was a girl who, after a series of personal setbacks, fell into a rabbit hole of Xanax, antidepressants, and a full-blown relapse of prior heroin or meth addictions, if not both—I’m not sure. The inside of her house looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. She could never keep a job and sucked money lamprey-like from the government and everyone around her. And none of it seemed to trouble her a whit.

{pagebreak}

I could have easily become one of those people, except for the fact that life and the government didn’t afford me the opportunity. In my high-school graduating class of 955 kids, I had the second-highest SATs but due to no looming sense of urgency and the fact that I had a roof over my head during my teens, my grades saw me graduating around 650th in my class. Then at 19, when my father died of colon cancer, it hit me—I’d either have to get my shit together quickly, or I’d become homeless in due time. With no safety net to cushion me, I hit the ground running, enrolled in college, and graduated at the top of my class. Without that gun to the back of my head and that carrot on a stick dangling in front of me, I likely would have lapsed into a life of petulant, indolent alcoholism.

Ever since then, my life has been an uninterrupted parade of having my balls busted and busting them myself—often simultaneously. And I feel I’m the better man for it. Rather than choosing to spend my life fleeing from pain and conflict and challenges, I tackle them head-on as if I was wrestling a gator. I’m in my 50s, but rather than allowing my body to melt into a sagging blob of failing organs, I hew to a rigid exercise and dietary regimen that would make Yukio Mishima—or at least Travis Bickle—proud. When the Grim Reaper finally comes a-knockin’, I will swing a barbell at his head and try to take him down with me.

And this is why I despise the cloying, coddling delusions of socialism and the welfare state it engenders—because it misapprehends basic human psychology, Dysfunction is rewarded and productivity is penalized. Citizens are plied with pain pills when they really need a shot of adrenaline. Rather than helping people realize their potential, socialism only stunts their growth. Socialism brings out the worst in people, resulting in dysfunctional societies that are, in a perverse way, antisocial.

We are all social animals to some degree, but only the weakest among us are strictly social animals. It would be naïve to deny that one’s lot in life is often shaped by external influences beyond one’s control, just as it would be foolish to disregard the overwhelming influence of personal decisions and will power. If that sounds too Nietzschean, Hitlerian, or G. Gordon Liddyan for your liking, I still deem it better than being some bearded, over-medicated couch potato who knows far too much about Star Wars and jerking off.

Idle hands engage in masturbation. I would rather work myself to death than slowly die while sitting on a couch chewing on day-old pizza and playing video games.

There’s a reason so many people “suffer” from little or no self-esteem. It’s because they don’t deserve it. They haven’t earned it. They seek it through others rather than through themselves. Society will only start to repair itself when individuals start to repair themselves. The best advice I could give to the demoralized, intoxicated, teat-sucking Anglosphere comes from a friend: “Pull your head out of your ass by your bootstraps.”

Last week saw prolonged riots in Sweden and a surreal midday beheading in England, while the paid parrots of the Multi Cult spared no effort in blaming everyone but the rioters and the murderers.

Sweden has long been held up by naïve proponents of statist socialism as a blonde, suntanned example of how high taxes and cradle-to-grave welfare are effective. This has always been a simpleminded delusion that ignored the Scandinavian nation’s small population and—until recently—ethnic homogeneity. But now an estimated 15-20% of Sweden’s population consists of foreign-born immigrants, and deep wrinkles are starting to appear in the country’s Big Brother smiley face.

After Swedish police shot dead a Portuguese immigrant who was variously reported to be aggressively wielding either a machete or a knife on May 13, disgruntled immigrants used the incident as an excuse to smash and loot and burn and beat their way through Stockholm and its environs over several nights. Much of the mayhem took place in Stockholm’s Husby district, where an estimated 80-85% of residents are not indigenous Swedes. Automobiles were torched, windows were smashed, and a policeman was beaten while a joyous child filmed it and exclaimed “Allahu Akbar!”

In the London district of Woolwich last Wednesday afternoon, a pair of English-born black Muslims rammed their car into a white British soldier who was wearing a “Help for Heroes” T-shirt, then proceeded to stab, slash, and behead him with a machete and a meat cleaver. His hands warm with his victim’s blood, murder suspect Michael Adebolajo—who was reportedly born into a Christian family but later converted to Islam—delivered the following soliloquy to a passerby who was filming him:

The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers, and this British soldier is one, is a eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone….I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is gonna get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians are going to die? No it’s going to be the average guy, like you, and your children.

In Sweden, England, and elsewhere, the excuses came quickly and predictably.

Rumors spread like fire through charred Volvos that Swedish police had used slurs such as “rats,” “monkeys,” and “niggers” to taunt and inflame the rioters, although it has been alleged that the latter term may have actually been neger, the Swedish equivalent to “Negro.”

Swedish Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag noted that there was “discrimination in these areas” where the riots occurred. Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask tried explaining that “Social exclusion is a very serious cause of many problems, and we understand that.”

Other pundits blamed white flight and unofficial “segregation,” “marginalization,” “institutional racism,” “disenfranchisement,” “Thatcherite trickle-down economics,” “cuts in state benefits,” and that old standby, “wealth inequality.” Again and again, the paid megaphone-mouths of multiculturalism blamed Sweden’s government and native citizens for “failing” to integrate a largely hostile, pervasively unskilled, and resolutely unassimilable horde of parasitic cultural invaders.

No one seemed to note that Sweden boasts one of the cushiest social safety nets on Earth and that in nearly all cases, the immigrants enjoyed a level of safety and prosperity completely unknown to them in the homelands from which they fled. None dared to point out that whatever wealth they accrued at the expense of indigenous Swedish taxpayers was highly “unequal” compared to the meager existences they’d scratched out in Somalia and Afghanistan.

Although Swedish police adopted a non-intervention policy when dealing with most rioters, it did not stop meter maids from issuing tickets to the owners of cars that had been torched.

{pagebreak}

Even after being pelted with rocks when he attempted dousing a blaze near Husby, Swedish fireman Mattias Lassen wrote an obsequious note to his assailants on Facebook:

I’m here if your dad needs help if he crashes his car; I’ll help your sister if a fire starts in her kitchen. I’ll swim through icy waters to help your little brother if he falls from a boat. I’ll help your grandmother if she has a heart attack and I’ll even help YOU if you fall through the ice on a sunny day in March.

Commenting on the riots, Swedish-born black rapper Ken Ring, who once spit lyrics about raping Sweden’s Princess Madeleine, said that “Stockholm is a crazy place nowadays….This is Sweden. It is not supposed to be like this.”

I agree. Sweden is not a place where one expects to see several nights of non-indigenous rioting, nor where one expects rappers to rhapsodize about raping the Princess. Nor did it used to be a place where Islamic interlopers allegedly commit the majority of the country’s sexual assaults and joke about how Swedish girls “get fucked to pieces.”

In England, that small, soggy nation that once ruled the world and then decided to feel guilty about it, newspapers seemed less concerned about the ghastly decapitation performed in Allah’s name than in a “backlash” by those dreaded “evil” right-wing racists and extremists formerly referred to as “indigenous Britons.” A compliant press that was largely reticent to refer to the London rioters of 2011 as “mobs” used the same term to describe the English Defence League’s reaction to Wednesday’s public decapitation, accusing the group of being “extremists” who created “ugly scenes.”

Sorry, but it’s hard to think of an uglier scene than that jihadist beheading in broad daylight, but that’s what you’d expect a racist to say, isn’t it?

In an ominous foreshadowing of the sort of legally enforced thoughtcrimes that may soon reach America’s polluted shores, at least 11 UK citizens were arrested for making “anti-religious comments” on social media after the Islamic beheading.

Perhaps most depressingly, a recent poll of British citizens shows they disapprove of British nationalist groups such as the EDL and BNP far more than they disapprove of Muslims.

As illustrated in the Battle of Tours and the Siege of Vienna, there was a time long ago when indigenous Europeans had a spine and would repel Islamic invaders. But as evidenced by recent events, continental Europe and the British Isles have regressed into an invertebrate life form, a pathetic jellyfish that apologizes to its captors as they squash it to death.

I’ve recently been made aware of a strange new tribe who refer to themselves collectively—they do everything collectively—as “progressives.” I think they used to call themselves “liberals” until it became clear that they don’t care much for liberty. Males and females in this tribe both tend to wear beards and gather in urban coastal areas, where they pay too much for apartments, water, coffee, and bean sprouts.

They speak a strange and exotic tongue unfamiliar to my ears. But they repeat certain terms so frequently, I feel as if I’ve begun to get a handle on what they’re driving at. To the best of my ability, I will try to decipher what these buzzwords mean.

ACTIVIST—A person who isn’t actively performing activities at an actual job.
ANTI-RACIST—A person who makes everything about race.
APOLOGIST—Explainer.
BLAMING THE VICTIM—Daring to suggest that conflicts between humans are often complicated and that it’s therefore childishly naïve to believe that one person is always entirely guilty and the other is always entirely innocent.
BULLIES—People who must be bullied into silence.
CHOICE—The act of forcing people to pay for a woman’s one-night stands.
CORPORATIONS—Malevolent yet generally non-coercive superorganisms that must be combated with a malevolent and entirely coercive superorganism known as government.
CRITICAL THINKING—The act of swallowing the laughably implausible tenets of blank-slate equality without asking a single question.
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM—An antiquated system that must be destroyed in order to pave the way for the newer, more global form of cultural imperialism.
CULTURAL OTHER—White heterosexual Christian males.
DEBUNKED/DISCREDITED—A topic or idea that we don’t really want to address, because we haven’t actually debunked or discredited it.

DISADVANTAGED—Dumb and unskilled.
DISENFRANCHISED—People who’ve received a free public education yet still can’t spell “disenfranchised.”
DIVERSITY—A magical incantation used to divert your attention from the fact that it is strikingly similar to the words “divide” and “division.”
DOG WHISTLE—A high-pitched screech from the enemy that only progressives are able to hear. Lately this term has been deemed offensive to canines and should therefore be replaced with “coded speech” wherever possible.
ELITES—Wealthy people on the political right. This term is never used to describe wealthy people on the left who control much of the media, government, and academia.
EMPOWERED—Loud and annoying.
EQUALITY—A concept that nearly everyone believes but no one has bothered to prove.
EVOLUTION—An indisputably true biological process that stopped occurring roughly 100,000 years ago when everyone became equal. Only Christians don’t believe it’s real, and only racists believe it didn’t stop 100,000 years ago.
EXTREMIST—Someone whose beliefs make us extremely uncomfortable.
FAIRNESS—A political strategy requiring that winners be treated unfairly.
FALSE EQUIVALENCY—A real equivalency that suggests our beliefs are false.
FASCIST—One who must not be tolerated under any circumstances and should instead be either lynched, sent to a gas chamber, or stomped under our boots.
FAUX NEWS—A biased news channel that presents an alternative to our preferred version of biased and false news.
FIGHTING THE POWER—Allowing oneself to be used as the unwitting tool of global power elites.
FORWARD—The direction one moves when headed toward a cliff.
FLYOVER STATES—Where the bad people live.
GLOBAL VILLAGE—A concentration camp from which there is no escape.
GLOBAL WARMING—A fashion trend that replaced the global-cooling fashion trend of the 1970s.
GOVERNMENT AID—Money the government takes from taxpayers and then partially redistributes to non-taxpayers after taking a cut for itself.
GRASS-ROOTS—Elite-orchestrated protests that occur in places where there is usually no grass and plenty of cement.
GREEN—Naïve and inexperienced.
GUN NUT—Anyone who owns a gun yet doesn’t belong to the group that actually commits the majority of American gun violence.
HATRED—Anything that we hate.
HERSTORY—The part of history that is usually ignored because not much really happened.
HETERONORMATIVE—Sexually normal.
HIERARCHICAL—Anything that posits there is true diversity among human individuals and groups when it comes to skills and intelligence.

{pagebreak}

HOMOPHOBE—Someone with a distaste for sex that involves feces and AIDS.
HONEST CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE—Condescending lecture about race.
INDIGENOUS—Anyone too stupid to figure out how to defend one’s own land.
INSTITUTIONAL RACISM—A persistent hallucination of ubiquitous racism that is so deranged, anyone who experiences such hallucinations should be institutionalized.
ISLAMOPHOBE—Someone so terrified of Islamic retribution, they’re afraid to say anything bad about Islam.
LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD—Severely tilting the playing field to achieve unnaturally equal results.
LOOKISM—A term used by ugly people to explain why beautiful people won’t fuck them.
LOW-INFORMATION VOTER—A voter who refuses to accept our brand of low information.
MARRIAGE EQUALITY—The act of pretending that two people of the same sex who can’t produce children are equivalent to opposite-sex couples who can produce children.
MISOGYNIST—One who believes that women are human beings who are fully capable of intentionally harming others.
NEANDERTHAL—A term that became acceptable to apply to those of European ancestry shortly after it no longer became acceptable to refer to those of African ancestry as apes.
NEGATIVITY—Anything that negates our naïve worldview.
NONPROFIT—A tax-exempt organization that pays its staff members handsome salaries.
OBJECTIFICATION—The act of noticing that women possess an object called a vagina.
OCCUPIER—Someone who eagerly flouts the law and will eagerly threaten lawsuits if you challenge them.
OFFENSIVE—Things that hurt our feelings and thus make us go on the offensive, whether through litigation or mob action, in order to counter them.
ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY—Someone who actually understands history and thus can see where all this is going.
OPEN-MINDED—Someone whose mind is closed to anyone who questions modern culture and modern authoritarian structures.
OUT OF TOUCH—Unresponsive to our relentless propaganda.
PARANOID—Justifiably skeptical of human nature and the manmade power organisms through which it operates.
PATRIARCHY—The group who invents everything, does most of the work, fights the wars, is at a legal disadvantage in gender disputes, and dies younger.
PSEUDOSCIENCE—Actual science that makes us pseudo-crazy.
PROGRESSIVE—Someone who sees no contradiction in using the almighty state’s blunt force to help “Fight the Power.”
PROGRESSIVE POLITICS—Politics that favor a government that is progressively intrusive.
PROGRESSIVISM—The idea that progress can only be achieved by transforming the First World into the Third World.
RACIST—A word used by anyone, white or not, who hates white people.
RACISM—A derogatory scare word to describe a natural tribal instinct that is currently forbidden to only one tribe.
RAPE CULTURE—A fantasy society dreamed of by women who fantasize about being raped.
REDNECK—A racial slur used to describe people we assume are always using racial slurs.
RIGHTS—Things we wish to take away from the political right.
SEX-POSITIVE—A term almost exclusively used by someone with whom you would positively never want to have sex.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCT—A term used frequently by people who have never constructed anything of social value.
SOCIAL CONTRACT—A nonexistent legal document that no one in society has ever signed yet which binds everyone under threat of force.
SOCIAL JUSTICE—A fairy-tale belief system positing that the winners are solely responsible for the losers’ plight.
SOCIOPATH—A non-socialist.
STARTING A DIALOGUE—Starting a monologue.
SUSTAINABILITY—A term that applies strictly to agriculture and the environment and is never to be used in economic, demographic, or cultural contexts.
TOLERANCE—Ideological intolerance.
TRANSFORMATIVE—Something in the process of accelerated change, as in when a normal cell mutates into a cancer cell.
TRIVIALIZE—To weigh mitigating circumstances and/or place into a proper historical context.
TRUTH TO POWER—The act of speaking obvious untruths in a quest to gain political power.
UPRISING—A violent riot characterized by looting, arson, rape, murder, and random acts of cannibalism.
URBAN—Negroidal.
WHITE—The color of evil.
WHITE PRIVILEGE—The honor of being constantly blamed for everything bad throughout world history.
WHITE SUPREMACIST—Any white person who isn’t constantly apologizing for their skin color.
WORKING CLASS—A heroic tribe of simple-yet-noble people we’ve never met but have read about in books.

Jason Richwine

Spring is in the air, which means that it’s time for another insane moral panic regarding the Great Egalitarian Unmentionable: The idea that true diversity of the cognitive kind exists between human ethnic groups.

The latest polite-‘n’-erudite researcher to be guillotined by the naïve-yet-bloodthirsty egalitotalitarian headhunters is Jason Richwine, a Harvard graduate and, until last Friday, a policy wonk for the Heritage Foundation.

Last Monday the Heritage Foundation released a report coauthored by Richwine and Robert Rector titled “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer.” To summarize it in a smooth, dispassionate, and unwrinkled nutshell, the paper argued that providing amnesty to “unlawful immigrants” might ultimately “pose large fiscal costs for U.S. taxpayers,” seeing as how those who tend to sneak across the border in search of a better life are statistically likely to be “net tax consumers,” i.e., a drain on the public piggy bank.

In a stroke of unabashed and unhinged hatred, the paper attempted to base its argument on “facts” and “math” and “statistics” rather than sappy-assed emotional appeals to dim notions of universal brotherhood.

Clearly, this was unacceptable.

It didn’t take long for the lavishly well-funded pro-amnesty forces to firmly affix devil horns atop Richwine’s noggin. The spotlight was quickly diverted from Richwine’s Heritage Foundation report to his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, which was titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” (Readers with weak stomachs and soft brains are advised to avoid reading the dissertation, seeing as how it’s buttressed by mountains of statistical evidence regarding persistent IQ disparities between native-born American whites and Mexican immigrants.)

Their brains washed clean in the sparkling spring waters of liberal creationism‘s preposterously implausible tenets, most of Richwine’s assailants needed to read no further than his dissertation’s abstract before their jaws dropped to the floor and their testicles retracted within their bodies:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.

The outcry came quick, loud, hard, and stupid: If we allow such thinking to continue, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump straight into gas chambers and ovens. Business Insider featured a headline stating that Richwine’s “Comments” (rather than, oh, his data) were “Awful” and “Racist.” This was to be a persistent theme among the criticism—that Richwine had spewed his ill-advised and unfounded “beliefs” and “opinions” and “prejudices” rather that what appeared to be the case, which is that he offered voluminous evidence to support a well-reasoned and dispassionate argument. He was accused of being a bigoted clodhopper with an “inferiority complex” who needed to “feel better than” other people, because as we all know at this late stage of the game, feelings are far more crucial than facts. He was charged with peddling “appalling,” “outdated,” and “discredited” notions that perhaps evolution is an ongoing process that bestowed mean cognitive abilities inequitably among different ethnic groups, a virulently hateful idea that, as we all know, inconveniently happens to be supported by every shred of evidence in existence.

{pagebreak}

Why, it’s not as if a 2001 meta-analysis of over five million human subjects determined that the average IQ gap between American whites and Hispanics was 11 points. Nor is it true that SAT scores tend to skew along stubbornly persistent racial lines. Nor is there any evidence that a nation’s mean IQ is strongly correlated with a nation’s relative prosperity.

But even if all those troublesome facts and statistics are correct, SO FREAKING WHAT? Why, in the midst of this landmark immigration debate, should we be concerned that the mass importation of people who are possibly genetically disposed to subpar intelligence might have a drastically deleterious effect on the nation’s culture and economy? Who but an obsessive and paranoid hatemonger would worry about whether we’re paving the way for a dysfunctional and hopelessly fractured Third World idiocracy so long as we all feel good about it?

Instead of flinging poo at people such as Jason Richwine, all that is required from the faithful members of the Sacred Church of Egalianity is basic documented evidence that Mexican Americans, whether they’re newly arrived or have been here for generations, are indeed the intellectual peers of native-born white Americans. And I don’t mean individual aberrations to the statistical pattern—I’m talking about valid, peer-reviewed studies with large sample groups that establish once and for all that those whose corazons throb with mestizo blood are the intellectual equals of Americans who are genetically derived from non-Spanish European stock.

Just show the studies that prove average Mexican IQs are not lower. That’s all that’s needed. That’s all I ask. Even one study would do. Why is that too much to ask? Why, amid all the screaming and screeching and clawing and caterwauling and demonizing and torch-carrying, can’t anyone offer rudimentary evidence that would end this debate forever?

Because it’s obvious that when Jews or Asians or women score higher than white males on these “meaningless” and “useless” intelligence tests, these same egalitarians gleefully discard their impotent protests that IQ is irrelevant. For some reason it’s OK to claim that certain groups are smarter than white males, but never to concede that some groups may be dumber. And if they can scrape up a study, no matter how dubious, that conservatives are dumber than liberals, they never shut the fuck up about it.

The great lesson to be learned here is that we are all born with equal cognitive abilities, except for those who don’t believe we are all born with equal cognitive abilities, because they are transparently dumber than we are.

The next step is clear: I’m filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of cognitively disadvantaged nonwhites against the natural evolutionary process for creating disparate impact in IQ test results among ethnic groups.

Meg Lanker-Simons, who I’ll presume hyphenates her surname to prove she’s not beholden to the patriarchy, is a bespectacled female wildebeest who grazes the campus of the University of Wyoming, always on the lookout for sexual harassment but never quite able to find it.

On Thursday she will appear in court to face misdemeanor charges that she interfered with a police investigation by fabricating an online male identity who claimed he wanted to “hatefuck” her and thus transform her into a “good Republican bitch.” After this initial—and, according to police, self-generated—post on April 24, Lanker-Simons responded by saying, “I’m left to wonder if there’s someone out there with a violent fantasy about me….”

I’ll bet she wonders that a lot. Or maybe “hopes” is a more apt choice of words.

Simons, a blogger that received kudos from Think Progress and is also chums with terrorist bomber Bill Ayers, appeared to bask like a whale shark in the odd sort of attention that only modern-day victims, real or imagined, seem to enjoy. That is, until a warrant for her arrest was issued.

Rather than upbraiding her for wasting public resources and staining the school’s reputation, the University of Wyoming issued a statement that Meg’s arrest should not be remembered as an example of third-wave feminism gone psycho, but it should be honored in that it “sparked an important discussion” about how the school has “no tolerance for sexual violence,” even if, well, a mentally unbalanced woman is simply imagining it.

I’ve seen bumper stickers that say feminism is the radical idea that women are people. But in practice, it seems more like the pseudo-religious delusion that women are innocent.

Twisted misogynist that I am, I actually do see women as human and thus fully capable of malice and deceit in order to achieve their ends.

But don’t try telling a modern radical feminist that women sometimes lie, especially about the unpardonable sins of rape and sexual assault. She’ll call you a slut-shaming, patriarchy-supporting, dickless scumbag rape apologist who denies we live in a “rape culture” that constantly sends out loud messages that rape is cool and groovy and ginchy and happenin’. 

Feminist author Catharine MacKinnon and her wrinkly, desiccated vagina once wrote that “feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.”

If so, feminism is built on a shaky house made of soft tampons.

Depending on whose stats you believe, false rape accusations comprise anywhere from 1% to 90% of all rape accusations.

It’s not as if women have ever been caught fabricating rape accusations as a form of revenge against their lovers. They’ve never concocted stories to get their ex-husbands nor their ex-boyfriends jailed. They’ve never cried rape to get rid of a current husband, either. It’s not as if adult women cheat on their partners and then try to cover it by crying rape. This never happens. Never. No, not even once. It’s not as if teenage girls do this, either. Mistresses never cry rape, either. It’s not as if a woman has ever lodged a false rape complaint merely because a man forgot her name after a one-night stand. And it’s certainly not as if false rape accusations motivated by a thirst for romantic vengeance have happened again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

Modern feminism also teaches that it is the supremely evil patriarchy whose hairy, talon-tipped hands have molded a society that makes women feel ashamed of their sexuality. Therefore, it is impossible that women sometimes genuinely feel ashamed for engaging in consensual sex and then deal with their guilt by falsely accusing men of raping them. It’s not as if they feel guilty for having consensual sex with strangers and then turn around to falsely accuse them of rape. It’s not as if they sometimes consent to sex with multiple partners simultaneously and then claim they were gang-raped. It’s not as if they feel guilty for one-night stands and subsequently cry rape, so get that thought out of your mind, no matter what you read in the papers.

{pagebreak}

Women never willingly seek out kinky S&M situations and then falsely accuse their partners of rape. Never.

They never get drunk, willingly have sex, feel bad in the morning, and decide it was rape. Not even with two men under the bushes in the park.

Women never use false rape accusations as a twisted tool of vengeance in family relations. Mothers never persuade their daughters to falsely accuse men of rape. And without coercion, daughters never falsely accuse their fathers of raping them, either. Nor do they ever falsely accuse their stepfathers.

Women never create self-inflicted injuries as part of a false rape claim. They never give themselves black eyes, tear their own underwear and scratch up their faces, tie themselves up, or slash themselves in the face in order to frame men for imaginary sex crimes.

They never stand by their lies until photographic or video evidence proves that they’re lying.

Women never make a series of false rape accusations against a series of men. They never do it eight times, and they certainly never do it 11 times.

And I can state with authority that women never lie about rape, because it has never happened to me.

In all my douchey conversations with all the douchey guys I’ve known, never once has another man told me he fantasizes about raping women. But I’ve probably had at least two dozen women confide to me that they often fantasize about being raped. Mostly they explain that they are aroused by the idea of a man that finds them so desirable, he simply can’t help himself. And despite what feminists tell you, this is apparently a very common fantasy. According to one study, four in ten women fantasize about being forcibly ravished about once a month.

Despite all that, it makes me little more than a gynophobic pig to insinuate that many women make false rape accusations because their fantasies go unfulfilled. As regards other cases, I’m only unveiling my sinister misogynist heart to suggest that many women make false rape accusations because they know they can wreck a guy’s life without ever having to prove anything.

I suggest that if it can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that a woman deliberately made a false rape accusation against a man, she should be forced to serve the prison sentence he would have served if convicted.

This doesn’t apply to the case of Meg Lanker-Simons, because the man who wanted to violently “hatefuck” her existed only in her head. I’m only using her trampoline-sized body as a springboard to discuss an issue that too many people deny. Many others don’t deny it because they seem unaware it even exists.

I’ve known quite a few women who’ve confided tales to me of being raped or sexually harassed, either by family members or acquaintances. Depending on their demeanor and the details they share, I often believe them. And for decades if not centuries if not millennia, many women suffered such traumas without being believed. I think that’s wrong.

But the pendulum has swung so violently in the other direction that many modern psychopathic females take advantage of a widespread societal presumption of female innocence in the same way that many hate-crime-fabricating nonwhites prey upon the idea that only whites can be racists. As a result, many men—no matter how innocent—are stigmatized, ostracized, and shamed into suicidal silence the same way that women used to be. I think all of this is wrong, too.

A common slogan during the riot grrrl-crazed 1990s was that “Boys Lie.”

Yes, they do. That’s because they’re human.

But I believe that many girls lie, too. That’s also because they’re human.

George Jones

Country singer George Jones, who to my ears had the greatest voice ever recorded, died on Friday. A genius of phrasing and nuance, Jones had a stratospheric voice that captured human heartbreak with bottomless poignancy. I once read that when he was a kid, Jones’s father would wake him up in the middle of the night and threaten to beat him if he didn’t sing for him. Whether or not that’s true, his voice conveyed a tortured soul that was unmistakably human.

Standing outside an Atlanta club on Friday night where I’d performed an amped-up version of “White Lightning” in honor of Jones’s passing, a self-proclaimed fan of mine told me he’d mentioned Ol’ Possum’s death on Facebook, only to receive a verbal feces-smearing by someone who called Jones a “racist” and a “redneck” who deserves to “rot in hell.”

As far as this guy could tell, his Facebook buddy felt Jones’s main transgression was that he was a white man who sang country music and was therefore automatically less than human.

Apparently, progressives only believe in hell when their perceived ideological enemies have died, hence the joyous “death parties” when Margaret Thatcher gave up the ghost and the cowardly gloating over Andrew Breitbart’s still-warm corpse by sneering, bucktoothed hacks who weren’t fit to sniff his underwear.

Without ever feeling a need to apologize, I’ve done a great deal of hating in my life, but I’ve never seen a group of twisted, self-satisfied losers so unabashedly hate-filled as modern prog-bots. This is unforgivably and punchably ironic mainly because their entire platform is erected upon shaky Popsicle sticks of “compassion,” “tolerance,” and respect for the “cultural other.” Since their default defense mechanism is to accuse their enemies of being motivated primarily by hatred, it reinforces my belief that the primary impetus of modern leftist psychology is blind, stupid, hypocritical projection.

Just as normal cells mutate into cancer cells and metastasize, the word “liberal” has strayed far from its original moorings and now tends to indicate someone who despises liberty and freedom and is a pathological control freak that wants to obliterate the mere suggestion of any thought that would undermine their bloated and unwarranted sense of self-worth.

More and more, the modern leftist resembles an 80-year-old film actress who never quite made it in the business and lives huddled somewhere in a dusty Hollywood apartment with 20 cats and five pounds of makeup on her face. Peel away the thick mask she’s painted on her crinkled mug, and you have Medusa in curlers.

More and more, it strikes me that leftist compassion is truly skin-deep and goes no further than the epidermis. Oh, sure, they will tolerate a multitude of skin colors (except for the paler manifestations), a sickening array of reconstructive genital mutilations, a Boschian tableau of divergent sex organs crammed into improbable orifices, and any yapping, screaming vagina no matter how hateful or insane the she-beast obviously is.

They will tolerate racial violence as long as the targets are correct. They will applaud homicidal sexism so long as the victims are male. They won’t blink if you demean others’ sexual orientation so long you’re shitting upon the straights. Obviously, their tolerance is massive and ever expanding.

But don’t you dare think differently than they do. Their tolerance does not extend to what’s in your brain.

{pagebreak}

If you dare to disagree with them, they will attack like a pack of starved rats. Their behavior suggests that they believe others should suffer literally—even corporeally—not because of their actions, but because of their thoughts alone. This will manifest as bald aggression rather than fuzzy compassion. And when they mock and threaten, it’s not bullying. When they get you fired from your job or reveal your home address, it isn’t McCarthyism. When they call you a piece of shit, they aren’t dehumanizing you. And when they wish ass cancer upon you, there’s nothing hateful about it. They’ll engage in purely totalitarian tactics while calling you a fascist.

This is not the behavior of people who are secure in their beliefs. This is the hysterically phobic reaction of those who dread that they might be wrong. If you base everything on a false premise of equality, you’ll have to become a liar to keep propping it all up. You’ll have to enact codes and laws and punishments for anyone who dares question the sanctity of their fundamental premise.

They demand a rainbow on the outside, but internally, they insist it’s all the same dull shade of grey. Their behavior suggests that if they had their way—and through pharmacology and ceaseless propaganda they may one day get it—they wouldn’t so much like for everyone to think identically as they’d prefer that everyone share the same brain, an ideological cloud computer that they’ve meticulously seeded.

Born in 1961, I caught at least two decades of the so-called Red Scare, but what’s going on now with political correctness, AKA the bloody afterbirth of the civil-rights movement, is the most egregious moral panic I’ve seen. This is far more than a battle for the “right” to interracially date or to engage in same-sex soixante-neuf. This goes far deeper than such trivialities. This is a war of attrition to control thought and language and culture, to demean and ostracize anyone who doesn’t fall obediently in line, to declare certain subjects beyond discussion and maybe even one day to make it impossible to think differently than the herd.

I often wonder what quotient of the population feels effectively silenced. How many Americans fear speaking their minds in the workplace because they don’t want to get fired or sued? How many people feel like a pithed frog, mute and helpless, their brain severed from their spine? I suspect that it’s quite a few—perhaps even the majority. Although I don’t like the feeling, I have a firm sense that it is not me, but rather the whole world around me, that is rapidly going insane. But unlike the modern, deeply indoctrinated, progressive hive-mind robot, I allow the possibility that I could be wrong.

Whereas such ludicrous constructs as Negrophobia, homophobia, and misogyny—which are, by semantic alchemy, presumed never to be the fault of Negroes, homosexuals, or women—are said to be based in a fear of the other or a fear of the unknown, leftist ideological intolerance seems based in a fear of the misunderstood. At times it seems rooted in a fear that if the threatening idea were to be properly and soberly apprehended, it would invade their consciousness, infect their brains like a virus, and send them into a state of ideological vertigo where they finally realize they are as full of shit as their detractors have always said they are.

So unless you’re ready to fight back and never let down, don’t ever tell a brainwashed person they’re brainwashed. They can handle indoctrination fine, but the truth drives them crazy.

David Sirota

Observing the noxious media aftermath following last week’s Boston Marathon bombings, it has become abundantly clear that we, as a nation, need to start racially profiling liberal writers.

I first heard about the bombings from a little old white lady at a gas station down the street last Monday afternoon, and she said that “terrorists” were the likely culprits.

As someone who’s increasingly bewitched and bewildered by the political use of semantics, I have severe misgivings about the word “terrorism.” The US has been carpet-bombing massive swaths of the Middle East in varying degrees of intensity ever since the first Gulf War, which undoubtedly induces terror among the locals there, yet magically that’s somehow not “terrorism.” To me, “terrorism” is to “authorized military bombing” what a “cult” is to a “religion”—the main difference seems to be that neither the cults nor the terrorists have gone pro yet.

Even the most conscientiously objective among us have our biases, formed mostly by life experiences and where we find ourselves in the social pecking order. I find myself more suspicious of the major media and the US government than I do of either Muslims or rural redneck rubes, and when I got home from the gas station to read online that the bombings had occurred at the Boston Marathon, my first thought was of the 2010 British film Four Lions, where a quartet of bumbling jihadists blow themselves up at the London Marathon. But I didn’t suspect Muslims as much as I suspected some pill-popping, attention-seeking, media-addled copycat.

And since the feds bleed what I presume are tens of billions from taxpayers such as myself to fund the CIA yet won’t divulge exactly how much they’re bleeding from us nor how they’re spending that money, you can’t shame me into silence by calling me a “paranoid conspiracy theorist” that I also wondered whether the bombings may have been a false-flag operation.

So although I had my suspicions, I reserved judgment, because that’s what a journalist is supposed to do, or at least that’s what they taught me in journalism school before modern academia became entirely submerged in the ever-rising floodwaters of Cultural Marxism.

This wasn’t the case with many other alleged journalists. Those on the “right” tended to suspect Muslims, and those on the “left” were fairly wetting themselves with gleeful anticipation that it was one of those gun-toting, tax-resisting, rural Angry White Males that has served as their cultural “other” and chief movie villain for generations now.

Since I’m a white male and not a Muslim, I don’t quite cotton to such rank defamation and stereotyping.

Michael Moore stopped gnawing on his Flintstones-sized rack of barbecued ribs long enough to note that being white would help you escape scrutiny as a bombing suspect. Moore would know something about being white, seeing as he owns a sprawling mansion in an area that is estimated to be 98% white and has no black residents.

Racial witch-hunter Tim Wise, who looks like the bastard love child of an albino beaver and Dr. Evil, allegedly lives in an area that is 97% white and 0% black; if that’s true, then he, too, ought to know a little about the “white privilege” against which he’s constantly railing.

Wise kinda-sorta claims to be white in an apparent quest to score self-flagellation points, but not really, since he says his Jewish ancestors were only able to achieve success by slyly passing as white. So if I’m understanding him correctly, even though he insists he’s white and that white guilt is a real thing, don’t try and pin any of the bad stuff about whiteness on him, because he’s not really white. This, apparently, is how he’s able to feel justified in plotting the “destruction” of the “conservative old white people [who] have pretty much always been the bad guys” while he refers to Jews as “my people.”

Fuck me with a dreidel if that “destruction” line doesn’t sound somewhat genocidal, Uncle Tim. But what the hell do I know—I’m rendered deaf, dumb, and blind by “white privilege,” right?

Although the Boston bombings had nothing to do with whiteness, Wise immediately squirted his shopworn “white privilege” meme all over the blood and guts in Boston.

{pagebreak}

Picking up the bash-whitey baton from Tim Wise was David Sirota at salon.com, who last Tuesday signed his name to an article titled “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” No, I’m not kidding. That was the title. After facing a ferocious backlash, Sirota doubled down and pissed out another screed called “I still hope the bomber is a white American” a day later.

In his first piece, the scrawny and apopleptic Sirota, who Wikipedia says “describes himself as ‘a Jew’” and once worked for AIPAC, argued that unlike Muslims, white males are not perceived as an “existential threat,” despite the fact that white males have endured a couple of generations of ceaseless stereotyping and outright collective blood libel at the hands of American media and academia.

I’m not sure why Jewish writers tend to treat Muslims far more gingerly than they do non-Jewish white males. Do they honestly think Muslims are fonder of Jews than white males are? Or is it that, unlike non-Jewish white males, Muslims tend to bite back? Whether it’s primal fear, a misguided sense of compassion, or some cockeyed combination of the two, it appears that “Muslim privilege” rather than “white privilege” is what’s at work in the leftist double standard.

On Thursday the FBI revealed the bombing suspects to be Chechen Muslims, who are technically Caucasian but not “white males” in the commonly understood pejorative sense.

I’m no fan of Muslims and I also understand there has been a civilizational clash between the Islamic world and what’s known as “Christendom” ever since Muhammad started slaying everything in his path and bedding preteens. But it seems as if modern jihadist bombings only started in earnest after Zionists started bombing what was once known as Palestine in their quest to establish Israel. So why is it that when we think of terrorist bombers, it’s either McVeigh or bin Laden and never the Stern Gang? And why do leftist bombers wind up with tenure at prestigious universities?

Could it be that the leftist media downplays, or even ignores, such acts of terrorism because that part of the media is egregiously stacked with a wildly disproportionate quotient of a specific minority Who Must Never Be Named Under Threat of Eternal Damnation? Perish the thought! (My Jew-sniffing dog sometimes makes mistakes, and it’s not as if Americans of that ancestry always advertise their heritage, but to the best of my research skills I counted anywhere from 13 to 19 “chosen” peeps from the 25 on that list, which would comprise 52%-79% of the total and thus a whopping statistical overrepresentation of anywhere from 2600% to 3950%. And there’s not one black person on that list. Holy mackerel, Andy!)

Is it a mortal sin to question why those who never zip their lips about trash-compacting “diversity” into every nook and cranny of American life tend to come from a tiny and stubbornly non-diverse demographic?

Maybe if you’d been able to restrain yourselves from endlessly screaming about the unique evil of white people, I wouldn’t have started to look into exactly who was doing most of the screaming. Since you apparently can’t help yourself from continually profiling me, don’t cry foul when I start profiling you. And I don’t think it qualifies as imagining there are Jews in my sandwich when anywhere from half to three-quarters of the hoagie you’re feeding me is stuffed with kosher meat.

Palefaced XY-chromosome devils have been persistently framed in popular discourse as eternal oppressors and congenital spewers of venom, bile, and hatred. But despite everything the media has been peddling for generations, it appears that this oft-maligned demographic suffers from a fatal flaw, one that runs contrary to the stereotype—they’re way too nice. They’re not homicidally intolerant so much as they’re suicidally tolerant. And unless their antagonists—whether they’re self-loathing crackers such as Michael Moore or anyone else in the increasingly hostile and jeering Rainbow Coalition—learn to cool it with the screaming, it appears that the only option is to start screaming back. Otherwise it seems evident that the tireless bashers of everything white and male don’t view white males as a powerful oppressor so much as an easy target.

Kermit Gosnell

I once read that all societies throughout history were consistent in that they deemed it wrong to kill another human being…but they were wildly inconsistent in how they defined the term “human being.”

Such universal contradictions are compounded by the monotheism under which much of the world’s minds have been yoked for millennia, a strange philosophy that posits a God who says “Thou shalt not kill” yet who kills every creature he creates.

We currently have a culturally dominant and largely atheistic left, who never shut the fuck up about how many people have been killed by religion, Nazis, racists, and guns. Yet they’ll try to shout you into silence if you mention how many people that atheistic communistic egalitarians have killed.

And they don’t dare mention how many people that abortionists have killed, because to them, “personhood” begins at birth rather than conception.

They never tire of trotting out 70-year-old Holocaust pics and century-old lynching pics. Yet through semantic sleight-of-brain, they’ll insist that modern abortion pics are “sensationalistic.”

And I’ve marveled for years at how they openly gloat at the death—either through demographic erosion or straight-up murder—of those with whom they disagree. Apparently Woody Guthrie felt no twinge of conscience about scrawling THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS on his guitar, because to him, fascists were somehow less than human.

That’s because fascists killed people. Therefore, it’s OK to kill fascists.

Are you following that logic? If so, that makes one of us.

Rare is the individual who doesn’t condone, either actively or by inaction, the killing of others. In one way or another, almost everyone on Earth belongs to the Pro-Death Movement. Those who don’t are either masochistic or naïve. Even the misguided policies of super-pacifists will lead to overpopulation and an inevitable natural mass culling of the Earth Herd.

The same media progbots who pooped their diapers at the murder of children in Sandy Hook last November are pooh-poohing the idea that one would dare draw parallels to the case of abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell, currently on trial for murder as the result of alleged misdeeds performed at his grisly West Philadelphia “House of Horrors.”

The grand jury report on Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Center is some of the most gruesome “gore porn” you’ll ever read. Approach with caution. I’ll summarize it in the next paragraph, which you can skip if you have a weak stomach.

Over nearly 300 pages, the report tells of a fetid, malodorous, blood-and-feces splattered clinic stocked with rusted, stained, and broken equipment. Of fetal remains stuffed everywhere—in refrigerators, milk jugs, cat-food boxes, and even a bizarre collection of several fetal feet displayed in jars. Of medical-waste-filled boxes leaking blood onto the floor. Of unwashed and contaminated medical instruments spreading disease. Of third-term live births cut short after Gosnell or associates would “snip” them at the neck to “ensure fetal demise.” Of one baby delivered into a toilet and thrashing around so that it appeared to be “swimming,” whereupon it was lifted from the commode and had its neck slit. Of one baby whose weight was estimated at six pounds, whereupon Gosnell reportedly “joked” that it was big enough to “walk me to the bus stop.” Of him also joking as one baby writhed while he slit its neck, “that’s what you call a chicken with its head cut off.”

Dr. Gosnell is a black abortionist. Some have suggested that at first the media gave scant notice to his trial because it involved the tarnishing of two progressive sacred cows—abortion and black people. In a perverse sense, he’s very lucky he wasn’t a white doctor shooting black babies with a gun.

For one side of this tedious team sport, guns are only meant to kill. To the other side, abortion is only meant to kill.

I have news for both sides. Guns and abortions are both only meant to kill. That’s a statement of fact, not a value judgment. I may be the odd bird in the flock here in that I admit I don’t necessarily think killing other humans is always bad. Where I’m the Uber-weirdo is that I see them as all human, despite their morphological or ideological differences from me. If someone were trying to kill me, I’d do my best to squash him or her like a roach without blinking. And since I feel the world already has far too many people, I don’t see anything wrong with aborting many (if not most) fetuses before they plop all wet and slimy into the world and further degrade the ecosystem.

{pagebreak}

Not all abortionists behave like Kermit Gosnell. Then again, not all gun owners behave like Adam Lanza. And not all racists behave like Adolf Hitler. And not all egalitarians behave like Mao. Yet the infantile modern-day left/right herd mentality is ever eager to jump in a toboggan and careen down the slippery slope.

But as is the case with all binary political discourse these days, one side seized the details to attack, while the other side avoided the details and tried to deflect the sunlight. Some blamed abortion itself; others blamed a culture of poverty that sent poor women to clinics such as these. Very few mentioned that condoms or morning-after pills could have averted the whole bloody Grand Guignol banquet.

Perched as I am on another planet, I try to take the middle road. On one hand, this case doesn’t say much about an unregulated free market, because Gosnell was making loads of cash—one estimate had it at $15K a day—not only on third-trimester abortions, but on peddling pain medication. On the other, it doesn’t say much for government regulation because state officials ignored nearly two decades’ worth of complaints about the clinic. If government workers can’t be trusted to regulate a private clinic, who but a fool would trust them to clean their own house?

Far be it from me to eagerly stomp on everyone’s toes, but the private and public sectors are both filled with human beings. Therein lies the problem. With rare exceptions, humans can’t be trusted.

Despite the universal human urge to paint everything in moralistic terms, it seems obvious to me that nature is amoral. Just as all societies condemn murder unless they’re murdering people they don’t deem to be human, there’s an almost universal human definition of good and evil:

If it enhances my survival, it’s good. If it harms it, it’s evil.

It’s the application of that definition that becomes insanely subjective. I can’t think of a war in history where the combatants didn’t think they were on the “good” side fighting the “evil” side. What are the odds?

And that’s why political discourse, at least these days, consists of little more than apes flinging feces at one another. It’s a social-status game to prove the other side is morally “evil” rather than factually wrong.

The feminists fatales who run their necks about their “bodies” and their “rights” consistently ignore the presumed rights of the little bodies growing inside them, as well as the rights of the sperm donors without whom those little bodies never could have been created. “Rights,” as well as who gets to define what’s right and wrong, are zero-sum games and always have been.

Same goes for who gets to define what constitutes murder.

Come now, all ye tired, poor, and huddled masses of illegal immigrants and bomb-tossing Islamists—according to the Associated Press Stylebook, you don’t even exist anymore. Despite the fact that you are now officially unpersons, America’s useful idiots and dhimmis-to-be welcome you to our fatally tolerant nation and hope you have a pleasant stay.

Last Tuesday, AP Senior Vice President and spokesvagina Kathleen Carroll announced that her organization “no longer sanctions” the term “illegal immigrant” to describe those who’ve, well, migrated to the country illegally. This was despite the fact that the AP affirmed usage of the term as recently as November 2011. Any suggestions that the AP’s sudden turnabout is related to recent announcements that a bipartisan Congressional group expects to push forth the soft, vague, intangible term “immigration reform” by the end of this week will be dismissed as bias, conspiracy theorizing, and, sure, what the hell, “hate speech.”

Paying apparently no mind to the feelings of those who were born here or who applied for citizenship legally, Kathleen Carroll argued that “illegal immigrant” is a term that “dehumanizes” those toward whom it is applied, and we’re all aware under threat of extreme censure that feelings are more important than facts, especially for an objective news agency. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus praised the AP’s decision, although it would be bigoted to suggest that such an organization suffers from bias. And one must never ponder whether such immigrants, legal or not, don’t yearn to assimilate rather than rain suffering and racial vengeance against those whom they perpetually accuse of racism in order to crowbar their way into our milk and honey.

The AP has not suggested a new term to replace “illegal immigrant,” so others have rushed in to fill the void. Phrases such as “border jumper” and “undocumented Democrat” have been nominated, though I suggest “national intruder” or “national trespasser.” If Martians were to land and hang outside Home Depot looking for day labor, I’d label them “undocumented earthlings.”

On Thursday, hot on the heels of those suddenly nonexistent illegal immigrants, the AP counseled that the term “Islamist” should no longer be used to describe “Islamic fighters, militants, extremists or radicals, who may or may not be Islamists.” Never mind that in a sane world that was actually concerned with semantic precision, “Islamist” would refer to anyone who adheres to Islam, much as “Buddhist” refers to those who follow Buddhism. But again, we wouldn’t want to besmirch anyone who may literally seek to subvert and eventually destroy our civilization by use of force. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), who had lobbied the AP to make the change, gave a high-five to Allah in response.

This is not the first, nor the thousandth, time that the Associated Press has been accused of bias. A 2008 statement by AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier that he planned to steer news coverage toward “sharp, edgy analysis” that would “stick it to somebody who deserves it” suggested that the AP was slaloming down the slippery slope from objectivity to advocacy. And a 2011 internal memo from the AP encouraged a new style of “journalism with voice…with more interpretation” that through the magic of doublespeak “does not mean that we’re venturing into opinion, either.”

A huge quotient of the seemingly endless cultural and ideological wars hinges on how terms are defined. Those who claim authority to declare what words mean are able to shape public thinking like a sculptor molds clay. Although facts—which are what news organizations are supposed to peddle—seem immutable , words are forever in flux. Both “liberal” and “progressive” now mean almost the opposite of what they did a century ago. Such semantic squabbling also leads to absurdities such as how the phrase “colored person” was deemed hateful and replaced with the far more sensitive “person of color.” Terms such as “racist” are almost never applied to nonwhites, and if you dare tell a militant feminist that she’s “sexist,” she may scratch out your eyeballs. And don’t even dare to ask for a quantifiable and consistent definition of “Semite” lest you be deemed “anti-Semitic.”

{pagebreak}

What’s worse, many of these politically charged terms never seem to achieve stasis. Over the past generation there’s been a ballooning expansion of terms such as “racism,” “sexism,” “white supremacy,” and, the granddaddy (sorry—Earth Mother) that supposedly spawns them all, “hatred.” Yet if you dare to ask anyone for a concrete definition of such terms, they’ll consider you automatically guilty of all the cultural sins these derogatory terms are intended to describe. As US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously explained, although “obscenity” may not be readily defined, you’re supposed to know it when you see it.

And if you persist in claiming that neither do you know it or see it, these words will be used as hammers to pound you into submission. In the sort of foam-flecked hyperbolic insanity that seems to suggest a culture either ready to implode or finally yield to ideological totalitarianism, you will be accused of ranting, slamming, bashing, and scaremongering merely for asking questions—even if you ask them in a timid and sincere voice without a wisp of malice.

Curious about how the AP defines other hot-button terms that are flung around like ape feces in modern political discourse, I bought a subscription to their online stylebook. Not only was I disappointed that I didn’t find anything resembling a comprehensive “book,” I also found the site extremely user-hostile. I found zero results after searching for the terms “white supremacist,” “hate crime,” “demographic genocide,” “postjudice,” “Europhobia,” or “social engineering.” There was, however, one hit for “racist” under their “Statement of News Values and Principles”:

We take great care not to refer readers to Web sites that are obscene, racist or otherwise offensive, and we must not directly link our stories to such sites.

For an organization that prides itself on linguistic precision, you’d think they’d at least offer definitions for what constitutes things that are “obscene, racist or otherwise offensive.”

Nope. I guess you’re supposed to know it when you see it.

Undeterred, I called their online help center and spoke to a genial man who said his name was Mike. I told him I was having trouble navigating the site and wanted to know how the AP defined the term “racist.” Mike seemed surprised that he couldn’t find a definition in the online guide. He asked for my phone number and assured me that an expert would call me back.

At press time, I’m still waiting for that call.

Why is it that those who pride themselves on slaughtering sacred cows always seem to have a herd of them in their own barnyard?

As a politically unaffiliated agnostic iconoclastic skeptic asocial lone wolf with perhaps a spicy dash of intermittently explosive personality disorder, I can’t think of anything I hold sacred besides the truth. Well, there’s also my own life and the lives of those close to me, but I covered that last week.

So when I write about human social groups and their quirks, peccadilloes, and seemingly congenital incapability to refrain from engaging in large-scale guilt-projection, scapegoating, and hypocrisy, I approach these subjects as an outsider and a critic rather than a participant and an advocate.

Sorry that all needed explaining, but apparently it can’t be explained enough. Such is the eternal curse of Wandering Jims such as myself who care far more about facts than I do about social approval. It’s an often lonely and thankless existence, but I prefer it to being a lemming. I don’t mean to offend any (or all) of you lemmings out there, but lemmings seem hardwired to believe that anyone who isn’t with them is somehow against them.

It is this sort of binary ingroup/outgroup herd mentality that breeds and encourages the exasperating persistence of the whole “left/right” delusion rather than the real struggle, which should be between true and false. If those were the teams, I’d join Team True and fight on the frontlines until death. This is why I lament the seeming nonexistence of real journalism these days, because it seems as if almost all modern writers approach facts from ideological bias rather than anything resembling an interest in, well, facts. They tend to put the cart before the horse. In many cases there’s no horse at all—only a prefabricated cart that’s perpetually stuck in the mud.

As Jack Webb said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.” When did that become blasphemous? I suspect it was right around the time that Dragnet got canceled—namely, 1970 or thereabouts.

These unforgivably long introductory statements were pried out of me by the recent “Stomp on Jesus” contretemps at Florida Atlantic University.

The facts of the case are still frustratingly blurry, rife as they are with denials, disputations, disciplinary actions, gag orders, and paid administrative leave.

Roughly, it seems to have proceeded something like this: About a month ago, a certain Dr. Deandre Poole (“Deandre,” in case you didn’t know, is a French term meaning “of Andre”) was teaching a class in “Intercultural Communications” as if it was something that students needed to learn more than logic and math. Poole is a graduate of the “historically black” Howard University and a member of the “predominantly African-American” Church of God in Christ, but don’t you for a minute dare to think that this might color his views, because that would be a slight upon the inviolable sanctity of black American cultural traditions. Hardly an objective type, Poole focuses on “issues of justice and inequality” and peddles some sanctimonious doggerel about how “influential authorities dominate and oppress marginalized groups of people.”

Never mind that a natural-born oppressor such as myself would kill for the sort of perks he enjoys as a Professor of Nonsense and the pension he’s promised by whining ad nauseam about how oppressed he is. In fact, I’m deeply remorseful for even bringing it up. One must never question modern notions of what’s sacred lest one be deemed a witch.

The teacher’s manual for Poole’s “Intercultural Communications” class encourages students to engage in the following activity:

Have the students write the name JESUS in big letters on a piece of paper. Ask the students to stand up and put the paper on the floor in front of them with the name facing up. Ask the students to think about it for a moment. After a brief period of silence, instruct them to step on the paper. Most will hesitate. Ask why they can’t step on the paper. Discuss the importance of symbols in culture.

Sure, cultures and the sheep they breed are generally organized around collective notions of what’s sacred and taboo, but isn’t asking students to step on the name JESUS a mite douchey?

Well, not unless the students in question are Christians.

{pagebreak}

Ryan Rotela, a Mormon student in Poole’s class, says he objected to the exercise, at which point he says he was “punished,” although the school denies anyone was “disciplined,” although there was an alleged “Notice of Charges” lobbed at Rotela by a school administrator with the highly colorful name of Rozalia Williams. The school later apologized after Florida Governor Rick Scott got involved. They placed Professor Poole, who remains shtum about the whole event, on paid leave.

The school also released a statement containing the following passage:

As an institution of higher learning, we embrace open discourse in our classrooms, but with that comes a level of responsibility.

Right. I’ll believe they “embrace open discourse” when they sprout sufficient cojones to teach classes on human biodiversity, Holocaust revisionism, and democide. I’ll believe it when their social-sciences instructors are made to stomp on images of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Karl Marx, Franz Boas, and Muhammad.

Until then, this tiresome flatu-fest seems like only another battle in the ongoing culture war rather than any honest quest for truth, which is what I, amid my endless daydreaming, thought higher education was supposed to be all about.

Despite the whole stomping-on-Jesus thing, modern education and its relentless assault on Western Civ is biblical in its own way. It reminds me specifically of this passage in Exodus:

But you shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves.

As far as I can tell, they’re stepping on Christ’s toes not to question the very notion of sanctity, but to smash ancient traditions and immediately replace them with shiny new taxpayer-funded altars to enshrine such illusory, unquantifiable myths as “justice” and “equality.”

I’m probably in the minority here—which, if I was the litigious type, would probably mean I’d be able to sue for discrimination—but I say we smash all the altars in modern education. Raze them all to the ground until all that’s left are facts. And while we’re at it, knock it the hell off with the creepy sort of cultural-guilt brainwashing that has students reenacting the Holocaust and American slavery. We should discourage students and teachers from getting offended every five minutes rather than helping them change their diapers every five minutes. Don’t teach them how to feel, teach them how to think. Then maybe this country won’t seem nearly so stupid.

Sherry West

On a sunny September afternoon when I was eight, I was standing on the concrete steps outside our suburban Philly house when I heard my mother unleash a piercingly loud animal wail from inside. She’d received a phone call that my oldest brother, a deaf mute, had been stabbed to death while on vacation in Paris.

After some agonizing wrangling with French authorities over the price of embalming and shipping his body back to the States, they finally sent him to us in a wooden box. Though they issued certificates claiming they’d embalmed him, his corpse was stinking and decaying upon his arrival.

His killer was never found—I doubt they ever so much as tried to find him—and for all I know it could have been an Arab from the slums of northern Paris. Still, the French authorities treated his cadaver as if it was a turd. So despite the fact that I am partially of French ancestry, I harbor a lingering and lifelong hatred for the French—all of them. I wouldn’t blink if the entire nation were incinerated. Despite my French blood, my brother’s blood means more to me. He was closer to me than the entire French nation could ever be.

I realize that this hatred isn’t logical, yet it feels deeply and indelibly instinctual. I don’t think that any amount of calm and clinical reasoning, nor even dozens of psychiatric injections and hundreds of electroshock-therapy sessions, could ever chase it out of me.

And this, I fear, is the main problem when one discusses tribal instincts and logic. In many if not most cases, they seem incompatible. On one hand, the will to survive and protect one’s progeny makes perfect evolutionary sense; on the other, such instincts often blind people and prevent them from soberly weighing the facts in any given case.

Last Thursday morning in a small coastal Georgia town, a white woman was strolling her blue-eyed infant son when a pair of young black males—she said the younger one appeared to be only ten years old—confronted her at gunpoint and demanded her money. She says she told them she didn’t have any money, at which point the older male fired two bullets at her, one grazing her ear and the other hitting her leg. He allegedly then pushed her out of the way and fired a shot point-blank into the infant’s face, killing him.

On Friday, police in Brunswick, GA arrested 17-year-old De’Marquise “Money-ville” Elkins—who, judging from pictures, appears to be a “Blood” gang member—and an unnamed 14-year-old accomplice on suspicion of murder.

The dead baby’s mother, Sherry West, says she hates the accused killer and wants him to die.

As nature and genetics could have predicted, Elkins’s family members say he has a “good heart” and couldn’t possibly have shot a baby in the head.

Once again, hot blood trumps cold facts. The “logic” behind blood vengeance is that of personal survival. But it sometimes makes people illogical when dealing with the facts.

A friend of mine once joked that there should be an iPhone app called “Imagine if the Races Were Reversed.” One is either blind or retarded to deny that if a pair of white youths had been accused of murdering a thirteen-month-old black baby, it’d be an international news story for months if not decades. There would be righteous marches, keening outrage, a pious comment from Barack Obama, and possibly even riots.

{pagebreak}

But I’ve yet to see any major news outlet suggest that this murder was a “hate crime.” I tend to believe that this is due to an ongoing national delusion that blacks are perfectly entitled to continue seeking blood vengeance for past atrocities committed against them, although no one seems to have delineated exactly when “justice” will be achieved and everyone can finally calm the hell down and get past all the tribalism.

And I get queasy thinking that the main reason for this is because it may be impossible for people to ever get past what may be a hard-wired instinct. Maybe “civil rights” were about vengeance rather than equality all along. Maybe many whites have been lulled into tolerance, only to find that nonwhites interpret this as weakness instead. And maybe there’s no easy way out of this dilemma.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes perfect sense for black Americans to seek vengeance against whites for historical atrocities committed against their kinfolk. And from the same evolutionary standpoint, it makes perfect sense for white Americans to resist such vengeance at all costs. It also makes perfect sense why such a volatile situation is likely to lead to conflict rather than harmony. It isn’t about equality; it’s about survival.

Naturally—in other words, according to nature’s laws—the growing numbers of white people who feel no shame for being white seem convinced that the accused black teens are guilty, that the perps killed the baby merely for being white, and that they deserve to be hanging from trees or beaten into paste by Aryan prison gangs.

And just as naturally, most American blacks who’ve commented on the case don’t seem nearly as outraged. Some of them, joined by a repugnant little cabal of self-loathing white enablers, have gone so far as to allege the mother staged her own son’s death and then framed a pair of innocent black teens.

But since there were no third-party eyewitnesses, only Sherry West, De’Marquise Elkins, and his alleged accomplice know what happened. Yet that doesn’t stop most people from jumping to conclusions, ones that tend to skew according to bloodlines.

I’ll reserve judgment in the case because I wasn’t there and it doesn’t involve any of my family members or close friends. Since I’m not involved on any emotional level, I prefer to hear the facts as they become available, just as I did in the Trayvon Martin case. But if, say, anyone tried to harm my four-year-old son, I wouldn’t rest until they and three generations of their family were dead. I doubt I’d wait to let the law handle it. I’d operate purely on gut instinct and if my guts told me I’d found the perpetrator, I’d make them rue the day they were born. It wouldn’t be logical, but it’d be perfectly understandable.

UPDATE: The mother and aunt of De’Marquise Elkins have been arrested and charged with providing false information to police.

UPDATE #2: Georgia Official Charged With Obstruction of Justice in Stroller Shooting Death

Katrina vanden Heuvel

As a blinkered young leftist back in the late 1980s, I subscribed to The Nation magazine for a year or two. Since I was a plumber’s son who put myself through journalism school by driving a cab on weekends, I naively identified with any media outlet that claimed to speak on behalf of the working class.

Then, as life’s cruel realities slowly peeled the scales from my bleeding eyes, I began realizing that many such propaganda machines, despite their eternal claims of uplifting “the people” in a noble fight against “the elite,” were themselves the organs of a certain class of astronomically well-heeled elites. They didn’t represent all of the elite, mind you—only a weird segment that seemed to exist in a perpetual state of denial about their own elite status.

My disappointment mutated into a lingering resentment as it became clear that such elites’ showboating “populist” efforts never really seemed to help the poor and the working class. Years of observing the mystifying spectacle of people who were quantifiably and undeniably members of the “1%” blabber nonstop about how they represented the “99%”—all while lecturing me about my imaginary “privilege”—led me to believe that such types cared far more about sculpting a compassionate public persona for themselves than they did about actually helping anyone beneath them on the economic ladder. Their relentlessly ghastly hypocrisy suggested they were interested mainly in soothing their own wealth guilt.

In a previous article about limousine liberals, I mentioned Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and part owner of The Nation. Although she never shuts the frick up about sticking it to “the wealthy” via higher taxes, this didn’t prevent the sanctimonious multimillionaire from reputedly engaging in a protracted legal battle with the IRS to skirt paying her own inheritance taxes. This icy and passive-aggressive child of stratospheric privilege, who’s never had to work a day in her life yet somehow has deluded herself into thinking she’s qualified to speak on behalf of the working class, is perhaps the most egregious example of a limousine liberal alive today.

Yet the term “limousine liberal” is a comically extreme understatement in her case. A limousine is far too small to contain her hypocrisy. The term “cruise-liner liberal” is far more apt.

Every year The Nation sponsors a cruise which liberal activist Jim Hightower once referred to, with apparently not a whit of irony, as “a floating palace of populism.” Never mind that 99% of “the people” would never be able to afford a cabin on this cruise. Nor that The Nation advertised that the cruise offered “a world of comfort and easy elegance” and “all manner of sophisticated amenities” such as “fine chocolates on your pillow at night,” “extra-fluffy Egyptian cotton towels,” and such resolutely bourgeois perks as “all-weather pools, fully-equipped gym, aerobics classes, personal trainers, court sports, jogging tracks, full-service salon, hydrotherapy pool, [and] yoga classes.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel is so emblematic of the underprivileged that she’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She’s so disentangled from the world of power that her father served as an executive assistant to William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, commonly known as the “Father of the CIA.” Her father later became a board member of the Farfield Foundation, commonly suspected of being a CIA front group that funds propaganda outlets such as The Nation. And though she’s ceaselessly accusing the “right wing” of being pathological liars, she once claimed on television that she understood the plight of the poor because she lived in Harlem, although in reality she lives in what has been described as “a multimillion-dollar townhouse in a posh section of Morningside Heights.”

{pagebreak}

Founded in 1865, The Nation’s “founding prospect” made a bold promise of journalistic objectivity:

The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body.

Boy, did they drop that ball somewhere along the way, seeing as they are a relentlessly biased propaganda megaphone for the left, a robotic apologist for all things leftist (vanden Heuvel’s husband is known for downplaying Soviet atrocities), a reflexive duo-chromatic reality filter that depicts all things leftist as good and all things right as evil. And yet, like all good team players and true believers, they’ll insist it’s only the other side that caters to biased, lying ideologues.

Naturally, their economic and political hypocrisy extends into cultural hypocrisy. Just as they live safely sheltered from the downsides of the economic policies they espouse, they also are protected from the less pleasant aspects of the coercive multiculturalism they champion. Last year when The Nation dogpiled on the absurd and fabricated controversy over the HBO show Girls for being “too white”—curiously, the show’s creator said that of the four main characters, two were goyishe and two were Jewish, although few seemed to take the show to task for being “too Jewish”—I left a comment on their site suggesting that some people could fairly say their editorial staff was stacked to the rafters with a disproportionate quotient of a certain ethno-religious minority. I was blocked from commenting the next day.

Perhaps the most succinct analysis of leftist hypocrisy came from Ted Kaczynski, who suggested that all the drumbeating about “compassion” was merely a cover for fundamentally hostile personality types with an insatiable lust for power.

That appears to be what we’re dealing with regarding people such as Katrina vanden Heuvel and magazines such as The Nation. They don’t represent the nation at large; if anything, they’re a “nation” that doesn’t even have a country behind them.

So for all their grandstanding about fighting “the wealthy” and “the powerful,” the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the owners and writers of The Nation are inextricably entangled with power and wealth. In the relentless Texas Death Cage Match between corporate power and governmental power, they take the government’s side. So they’re not fighting power at all. They’re merely picking a team. Not that this is necessarily bad; I merely wish they’d have the honesty to admit it. Their behavior suggests that they know absolutely nothing about the poor and the working class and only use such people as chess pieces in a cynical game of moral status-jockeying against other elites.

I could be wrong. But the only thing that could make me change my mind would be if Katrina vanden Heuvel were to actually give all of her immense wealth to the poor and go live in a Harlem housing project amid roaches and crackheads and welfare queens. For once in your life go and get your hands dirty trying to uplift your imaginary comrades. You’d last about five minutes.

Until that happens—and it never will—I’ll be forced to conclude that she’s a rank hypocrite who feigns virtuousness to cover her immense selfishness.

Rand Paul

Starting shortly before noon last Wednesday, the curly-haired and elfin-faced Kentucky Senator Rand Paul spent thirteen hours filibusterin’ Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s balls about whether the federal government claimed the right to kill American citizens on US soil without trial. His performance earned both praise and scorn from both left and right, which suggests that the country’s prefab and punchably tiresome blue/red divisions may be undergoing a tectonic realignment.

Or maybe not. Despite the tremendous publicity his marathon speech generated, Paul did not appear on the usual Sunday-morning round of political TV programs, which chose instead to interview the puffy-cheeked and criminally unexceptional Jeb Bush, who’s sort of the Carl Wilson of the Bush family dynasty.

Still, the tremendous reaction to Paul’s speech suggests that while he may not be as principled as his father Ron, he might be a far shrewder politician. The fact that a Republican can deliver a 13-hour speech that draws praise from Bill Maher and Jon Stewart while angering John McCain and Lindsey Graham hints that Paul may have some sort of strange and unprecedented cross-platform appeal.

The filibuster was technically aimed to delay the nomination of new CIA Chief William Brennan, but it focused specifically on a leaked Department of Justice white paper that raised the question of “imminence” and whether the feds had the right to use drones to kill American citizens within US borders if they felt someone posed an imminent threat to national security. Paul said that Barack Obama had made comments suggesting such a right existed. Paul said he’d also hectored Attorney General Eric Holder and his egregiously obnoxious mustache whether such a right existed but that Holder’s responses were evasive.

Paul said that just as the feds have continually expanded their definition of what exactly constitutes a “terrorist,” he expressed concern that they would expand the neocon illusion that America is engaged in a “perpetual war” against terrorism to the point where the battlefield extended into American soil:

I think our rights are gradually eroding. I think they are gradually slipping away from us….The problem is, they don’t see an end to the war. They—they see perpetual war, perpetual war without geographic limits, and they see the battlefield here. So they want the laws of war to apply not only there but to apply here. Another way of saying the laws of war is martial law. These are the laws of war, these are the laws that are accepted in war. We accept a lot of things on the battlefield that we don’t want to accept here. I acknowledge, we accept it, you don’t get Miranda rights on the battlefield. You don’t get due process. You don’t get an attorney.

During the course of his 13-hour exposition he cited Friedrich Hayek and the mighty Lysander Spooner as well as sundry modern bloggers and pundits. He was careful to praise Martin Luther King while condemning Jim Crow laws and calling Adolf Hitler a bad, bad, bad, bad, evil man. After thirteen hours he could maintain bladder control no longer, which astounds me since I can rarely last thirteen minutes.

Twitter exploded with over a million Tweets during Paul’s marathon, leading to the creation of the hashtag #StandWithRand. His performance earned the expected praise from Tea Party and libertarian types as well as mainstream right-wing stalwarts such as Matt Drudge, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and breitbart.com.

{pagebreak}

Far less enthusiastic were the sclerotic mainstays of the neoconosphere. The ancient squirrel-jowled failed presidential candidate John McCain quoted a Wall Street Journal article that said Paul’s speech was designed to “fire up impressionable libertarian kids in college dorms” and lamented that it’s “the wacko birds on right and left that get the media megaphone.” An unidentified McCain aide allegedly said, “Jumping on the Rand Paul black helicopters crazy-train isn’t good for our party.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said Paul was “ill-informed” and that his complaints were “ridiculous.” Neither McCain nor Graham attended the filibuster, as they were busy having dinner with Barack Obama.

Charles Krauthammer, whose face, indeed, resembles sauerkraut that has been smashed with a hammer, derided the idea that the feds would authorize the killing of American citizens on US soil without trial as “ridiculous and absurd.” William Kristol, who cleans his fingernails with the dried bones of Muslim infants, dismissed Paul’s speech as “fearmongering” and “kookiness.” David Frum, who I imagine masturbates to footage of Middle Eastern drone strikes, said that Paul “emerges from a milieu in which far-fetched scenarios don’t seem far-fetched at all.”

On the left side of the Holy Church of Left/Right Binary Thinking, MSNBC’s Krystal Ball (who expects people not to laugh at her name) and the eternally smirking Touré (who, when it comes to smarminess, is the equal of any white man) mocked the idea that a nice black man such as Barack Obama would ever abuse his executive power. A writer at Mother Jones, who apparently possesses the mystical ability to read his enemies’ souls, said that Paul didn’t mean a word of it and only pulled this stunt so he could release a fundraising letter the following day. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who won an award as the homeliest and least charming anti-racist witch-hunter in world history, said that Paul had stirred up the paranoid and utterly baseless delusions of leftist nutjobs as well as “the black helicopter crowd of the folks on the far right.” And a blogger for AlterNet wondered why Paul never expressed such concern that the USA was drone-bombing “innocent brown people abroad.”

Miraculously, Paul was able to at least temporarily win the approval of leftists such as bullet-headed commie Van Jones. The wacky and disruptive antiwar group Code Pink even delivered chocolates and flowers to Paul’s Senate office. And during the filibuster, Oregon’s Democratic Senator Ron Wyden summed up in 26 words what it took Rand Paul 13 hours to say:

Mr. President, what it comes down to is every American has the right to know when their government believes that it is allowed to kill them.

But even though Rand Paul was able to impress people across the arbitrary and ultimately nonexistent left/right spectrum, he has often had trouble appeasing his own tiny core base. Hardcore acolytes of his father have repeatedly slammed him for endorsing Mitt Romney and kowtowing to Israel.

On Thursday, Eric Holder yielded to pressure and sent Paul a terse letter conceding that the government does not have the right to kill its own citizens on US soil without trial, and it’s refreshing to see Eric Holder concede to anything.

Only time will tell whether Rand Paul emerges as a formidable presidential contender in 2016 or whether he threw all his lightning bolts in one shot and will slowly fade away. For now he remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma swaddled in the Constitution.