The Gaîté Lyrique theater, in Paris’ third arrondissement, has a long and très glorieux history dating back to 1862, once playing host to operettas by the likes of Jacques Offenbach, but today the establishment seems to prefer staging live-action exercises in the Theater of the Absurd.

Falling into disrepair during the 1980s, in 2002 Paris City Hall decided to reopen the famous building as a new, renovated cultural center devoted to the contemporary arts—the chief such contemporary art being that of hoodwinking the unwilling French taxpayer into funding his own forcible ethnic replacement.

Bad Actors at Play
Today the establishment is self-described as being not simply an ordinary theater, exhibition space, or concert hall, but as nothing less than a “factory of our times”: one remorselessly devoted toward churning out ever more identikit left-wing drones and activists.

On its website, the Lyrique boasts of being a place that “seeks to address pressing cultural, social, democratic and climate issues,” thereby hoping to combine “creation and social engagement to help people put ideas into practice.” Apparently it is “critical to elevate their [i.e., audiences’] civic-minded initiatives and their environmental, social and societal responsibilities,” as opposed to simply putting on a good show to entertain them all, as in the primitive era of Monsieur Offenbach.

It was in this utopian spirit that, on Dec. 10, the establishment organized a free conference titled “Reinventing the Welcome for Refugees in France.” The Lyrique certainly did that, as around 250 homeless African immigrants immediately turned up to the theater’s superbly refurbished and warm 19th-century building to sit enraptured by lectures from eminent French academics and senior officials from the Red Cross. So spellbound were they by such talks’ content, in fact, that once they were over, the immigrants concerned steadfastly refused to leave the building.

Today, their numbers now swelled to around 300, the squatters are still there, saying they will remain in situ until local Parisian authorities agree to give them some free permanent housing to which they claim to somehow be entitled, despite presumably never having paid a single centime in tax into the State’s coffers in their entire lives. Where could these poor, desperate street people have gotten such an erroneous idea from? Quite possibly from some of the bleeding-heart lectures the Gaîté Lyrique had just organized on their behalf back on Dec. 10.

The Children’s Crusade
Rather than being a theater, the Gaîté Lyrique has now essentially become a gigantic doss-house for illegal immigrants, most of whom had arrived in France claiming to be aged under 18, and thus able to be classified as “unaccompanied minors,” which would indeed have qualified them for the legal right to be housed by local authorities.

Yet they were judged by skeptical officials to have in fact been adults merely posing falsely as children in order to trick free homes from the French State, and so ended up sleeping on the street instead. Being failed child actors, it was perhaps only natural for such individuals to then gravitate toward their nearest theater.

As the Lyrique’s halls and display spaces are now full of makeshift beds and soup kitchens, there is little space left for their usual patrons, as photo galleries clearly show. As such, the theater has been forced to cancel or move out-of-house all scheduled events and exhibitions until at least Jan. 24. This is proving to be a very large problem, as its funding model is based upon receiving 30 percent of its running costs from the State, and 70 percent from ticket sales to visiting gullible Left Bank pseuds wearing berets.

Can’t the Lyrique’s board just call in the cops, the lawyers, and the bailiffs to kick the “kiddies” out? Not without looking like massive hypocrites. Evicting “children” during the cold winter festive season is a highly bourgeois, capitalist, right-wing, and Scrooge-like measure to pursue, even though said enfants are not really children at all, but postpubescent impostors. As such, to act in their own rational self-interest here would undermine the publicly paraded left-wing credentials of the theater’s management, so this option is not currently open to them.

Instead, they settled for issuing a statement supporting their building’s unlawful occupiers, saying it would be “unthinkable” to “throw them out on the street…in the middle of winter,” and proudly proclaiming “the legitimacy of the collective’s demand to obtain a roof” over their heads, even if said roof was in fact the Lyrique’s own, and the immigrants’ presence there risked pushing them rapidly into bankruptcy.

The Occupation of Paris
When you examine the kind of exhibitions being staged by the Gaîté Lyrique of late, you could argue the staff were only reaping what they had sown. Consider their vibrant “educational workshop” called “The Migration Fresco,” which promised to begin “Changing the way we look at migration routes.” According to its online blurb:

“Taking the form of a collective and fun workshop…the Migration Fresco offers to discover the stories of Asrallah, Kamal, and Mila to retrace their migratory journeys from their country of origin to their arrival in France. These workshops are educational and invite us to redefine terms that are often used incorrectly in everyday language, and in particular in the media, such as ‘refugee,’ ‘migrant,’ ‘exile’ [what about the word ‘child’?]…. The Migration Fresco encourages us to deconstruct prejudices about the challenges of reception in France and Europe, and encourages sharing and multicultural encounters. The objective? Together, we must change the way we look at migratory paths!”

Objective successfully achieved! Ironically, this was one of the very pro-immigrant exhibitions that, due to the excess presence of immigrants in the building, has since had to be rehoused elsewhere, just like the immigrants themselves now demand to be.

Pictures at an Exhibition
Other exhibitions may have been resettled in other areas purely for their own safety. Most of the Lyrique’s immigrants are black or Muslim, hailing from culturally conservative lands in France’s former African empire, like Mali. As such, one can only imagine their likely reaction to the Lyrique’s “Trans*Galactique” photography exhibition, originally due to have run until Feb. 9, billed as being “An artistic plunge into trans identities” and “A visual exploration celebrating trans and queer identities and questioning notions of gender, identity and resistance in a rapidly changing world.”

The stated aim of the photo show was to display large images of various black and brown men dressed unconvincingly as women in order to begin “paving the way for more inclusive and supportive alliances,” placed “Against a global backdrop of rising intolerance” against transgenderists worldwide. Would that be a “global backdrop of rising intolerance” against them in foreign Muslim lands like Mali, where many of the immigrants currently occupying the Gaîté Lyrique were born, perchance?

A now-relocated special female-led workshop of erotic emancipation aimed at helping attendees “Put some poetry in your sexts,” meanwhile, may also have drawn ire from some of the more oversensitive infants on site who hail from lands where women are expected to wear burkas and yashmaks all day long, not send unsolicited images of their naked genitalia to strangers via Snapchat.

By deliberately encouraging individuals from such cultures to pour into their country unimpeded, do the left-wingers who run the Lyrique really not see how they will only end up undermining their own liberal values about things like gender and sexuality, which they profess so very loudly to love?

Collectif Insanity
It is not even as if the occupiers demonstrate any noticeable gratitude toward the Lyrique’s board for deliberately ruining themselves by playing their hosts. Every day, the immigrants gather outside on the steps of the theater, loudly banging drums and shouting demands and slogans, further putting the public off from approaching anywhere near the place.

Legal immigrants and their descendants in the area are also having their lives and livelihoods destroyed by the selfish squatters. U.K. broadsheet The Times sent their Paris correspondent out to interview the manageress of the Bistrot de la Gaîté, a restaurant that sits (now generally emptily) next to the theater.

Despite being the child of legal Algerian immigrants, the manageress told The Times that the new illegal immigrants “are ruining my business. They hang around outside my terrace, smoking joints and fighting among themselves. Not only do we no longer get theatergoers because the theater is shut but we don’t get passers-by either. They’re being frightened away by all these young men.”

According to the native French left-wing activists ultimately responsible for organizing the whole migrant occupation in the first place, the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, the Lyrique had become a center for their sacred “anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle.” I wonder if the seemingly successfully integrated and financially self-supporting Bistro owner from the former French colony of Algeria would welcome their wholly unasked-for “anti-racist” and “anti-colonial” efforts on her own alleged behalf?

Reading From the Same Script
Non-French media, getting hold of this story, have treated it very much as a lone one-off, but this is not so. During 2023 and 2024, several municipal public buildings in Paris became occupied by immigrants at the behest of the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, often cultural centers run by white-guilt-ridden, leftism-sympathizing useful idiots like those at the Gaîté Lyrique, who prove easily susceptible to such crude moral blackmail backed up by mob rule.

One such location was the Maison des Métallos show space, which was similarly flooded with around 230 strangely tall and well-developed foreign “minors” for three months until eventually Parisian authorities gave in and agreed to transfer the immigrant invaders to more suitable accommodations elsewhere in the city.

A better alternative might have been to forcibly transfer members of the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville to semipermanent accommodation within a French State prison, as in the good old days of the Bastille. Capitulating to such morally self-entitled individuals only gives them the green light to go away and do precisely the same thing over and over again, as can currently be seen with the grand débâcle at the Gaîté Lyrique today. As ever, just like Rudyard Kipling once warned, if you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane—or the Malian either, apparently.

This entire self-defeating attitude is summed up perfectly in a comedy sketch from the 1994 spoof BBC news sketch show The Day Today, in which the program’s host, Chris Morris, tells viewers about the sad plight of one young foreign war orphan he has just encountered using the following highly emotive words (look around 22:37 minutes into this video): “I have a child about his age myself. When I phoned him ten minutes ago, I told him to move out of the house to make room for his new brother.” Back in 1994, that was still considered just a joke. Now it appears to be official French artsworld policy.

Are events currently playing out at the Gaîté Lyrique more truly a comedy or a tragedy? Either way, someone really should write a play about the whole thing.

The Week’s Most Shaking, Baking, and Year-of-the-Snaking Headlines

DOODLER DIDDLER
Darrin Bell had it all…Pulitzer-winning Trump-hating black political cartoonist for the WaPo and syndicated comic-strip artist. Yep, the gargantuan, overweight Bell had everything. Except that 134th kiddie porn video. He’d successfully downloaded 133, but just like when he’s at a Thai buffet, he just had to go back for one more yung prik.

That final video tipped off the cops, who found more than 600 child porn images on his computer along with the 134 videos. Bell’s strip Candorville, about a middle-aged loner who can’t relate to adults, seems way less funny in hindsight.

The L.A. Times, home of Candorville for two decades, ran a blank panel the day after the arrest, informing readers that Bell’s strip would not return, and the comics page will remain one short until a replacement strip is found.

Odd that notoriously anti-Israel Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and his Marxist daughter Patricia Late-Shiong didn’t tap in-house “journalist” and Hamas supporter Adam Elmahrek—who in 2023 claimed that Jewish women rape themselves to frame Palestinians—to draw up a replacement. He has some boffo ideas:

Li’l Grabner: The adventures of a bestial Jew who seizes Arab land to increase the size of ZOGpatch.

MarmaDavidDuke: The plastic-surgery-obsessed Klansman is transformed into a Great Dane to escape his cruel Jewish pursuers.

Faminely Circus: The rollicking adventures of a Gaza family that has no food but lots of gumption and bombs.

Nancy: Nancy Mitford is constantly foiled by her Hitler-loving sisters Unity and Diana, along with their Mosley Blackshirt thug Sluggoy.

Blondi: Hitler’s dog serves large sandwiches to hapless Standartenführer Dägwald to keep him well-nourished for the fight against the Bolsheviks.

The Fareed Side: Fareed Zakaria discusses the two-state solution with cows, dinosaurs, and cavemen.

Rabbinicalvin and Hobbes: A young rabbi pits his imaginary tiger against Hamas’ imaginary commitment to peace.

DEADLOCKS
According to The Guardian, leftists have protest fatigue; Trump’s second inauguration brought no mass marches or riots.

Apparently, the power of the pussy hat was greatly overestimated.

Indeed, per the paper, leftists are resigned and depressed. And illegal immigrants?

Well, they’re not waiting for Trump to “take them out.”

Last week two Jamaicans decided to flee NYC for Florida, from there to sail back home. They had guts, determination, everything but a flight ticket.

Loaded up on ganja and looking to get even higher, they hid in the wheel well of a Jet Blue plane. And by the time it landed at Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood Airport, what fell out wasn’t so much Peter Tosh as Peter Squash.

Looking more like Ragu than reggae, the two mon died either by being crushed by the landing gear as it retracted, or, worse, they may have been crushed but not outright killed, dying from oxygen deprivation once the plane reached cruising altitude. And even the Jamaican brain, accustomed as it is to living in thick smoke, still needs some oxygen.

Decompression songs,
All I ever had,
Decompression songs,
These songs of bleed-’em.

It took airport officials several hours to fully recover all the body parts, as various extremities had become jammed in the gear.

We’re jammin’,
We’re jammin’ cause we can’t get on board.
Gear jammin’, jammin’,
Cause we’re carry-on not properly stored.

These men may not have been Bob Marley, but they likely died wailing.

Word has it that the Toyes are reworking their biggest hit in honor of the two ska’d marks:

I broke two joints in the morning,
At night I broke two joints.
I broke two joints when I got crushed by the wheel,
And with my frequent flyer points, I broke two joints.

I broke two joints, so rest in piece, I’m flattened to the floor,
I broke two joints before I broke two joints, and then I broke two more.

As maintenance crews clean up the runway goo, R.I.P. the Jamaican globsled team.

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNSTILE
Los Angeles has taken several measures to ease life for residents during the fire disaster.

And as always people of color are bearing the brunt of it.

The L.A. Metro subway and light rail system has suspended fares for the duration of the emergency. And just like that, the city’s taken all the fun out of riding the trains for local blacks.

“We’re still gonna jump the turnstile anyway,” rapper and baby-daddy D’Ashy Dermis told the L.A. Times. “But it just ain’t the same doin’ it with permission. It’s like, what next? Make it legal to shoot someone over fries? How much joy can they rob from us?”

Meanwhile Boyle Heights Beat, the newspaper for the 95 percent Latino East L.A. neighborhood, ran a piece highlighting how residents are coping with the fires. Boyle Heights is geographically quite far from the coastal hillsides of Pacific Palisades. But, as the paper notes, ash carried over the county is falling everywhere.

And the neighborhood is fighting back in a way that you’ll think is a joke but in fact is one of those “no joke can top it” moments: As the paper notes, with so many gardeners as residents, the Mexis are using their leaf blowers to repel the soot.

The beans have formed an impenetrable “Siegrefried Line” against ash.

Unfortunately, L.A. County has issued an official order banning leaf blowers during the crisis. The directive reads, “The use of leaf blowers is prohibited until further notice. These devices stir up ash and particulate matter into the air, further worsening air quality and increasing health risks, particularly for those with respiratory conditions, older adults, children, and other vulnerable populations.”

No more leaf blowers? Forget “deportations day one”; robbed of their defining tool, Mexicans are already marching back over the border. This is like when Hitler banned Jews from banking.

Exodus, meet Mexodus.

BEAU JEST
Can we go one Trump victory without a “Hitler salute” controversy?

In 2016 it was Richard Spencer and his “hail Trump” and sieg-heiling followers.

Spencer’s the guy in the room who always has to kill everyone’s buzz. The “can’t leave a good thing alone” dude. Cousin Oliver, but he’s with the show from the start. The shark, but it’s in the Happy Days pilot. Two and a Half Men, but the first line of episode 1 is “I have AIDS from whores.”

And now, with Trump II: Trump Harder, we have Elon Musk making a gesture that resembled a sieg heil even though that may not have been his intent. And while rightists blame the media (of course), it’s an unfortunate fact that even Musk’s own people don’t know what their boss intended.

Andrea Stroppa, a “close confidant of Musk who’s acted as a middleman between the billionaire and far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni,” claimed that Musk was doing the “Roman salute.” Stroppa then deleted that post and blamed the “salute” on Elon’s “autism.”

With Musk, it’s impossible to know if he’s trolling, being serious, or being retarded…a kind of Schizödinger’s Cat with multiple outcomes, none of which seem befitting a man influencing a president.

Upon seeing Musk’s mess, a bunch of Australians replied, “Hold me Foster’s.” The crew of a Melbourne-to-Hobart cruise ship shocked passengers as they marched across the deck dressed in KKK robes and hoods.

Worst Love Boat episode ever.

Captain Stubing: “I hear you’ve been stealing ice.”

Isaac: “Yeah, those fifty lashes hurt like hell.”

According to the cruise company, the crewmen were dressed as “upside-down snow cones.”

Yes, from Coldstonewall Jackson Creamery (made with Emmett Tillamook).

The Aussie press is backing the crewmen, claiming that the KKK is unknown in that country (and remains so, as Django Unchained was banned there due to Tarantino’s accent).

To be fair, Australian racists never needed a KKK; give the aborigines a piece of string to play with, they end up accidentally lynching themselves.

THE SURE-STANK REDEMPTION
Robert Keith Packer, an old-timer inmate, sits before the parole board. The lead interlocutor asks Packer if he feels he’s been rehabilitated.

Packer speaks.

“Rehabilitated? Well, now, let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means.”

(Very long pause)

“I mean, I really don’t. I’m illiterate.”

After being told the meaning of the word, Packer continues…

“To me, it’s just a made-up word, like the Holocaust or the moon or the globe. Am I sorry for what I did? There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret for storming the Capitol wearing that ‘Camp Auschwitz: Staff’ hoodie. Because I forgot the ‘Juice Deserve a Noose’ cap that comes with it.”

Last week Packer was able to collect his sweatshirt and go home, along with every other J6 rioter, including the ones who beat the crap out of cops.

Trump claimed that pardoning the violent felons was the first step toward “reconciliation.”

He then added, “To me, that’s just a made-up word.”

While all J6 rioters were allowed to simply walk out of prison, many didn’t, preferring to tunnel their way out by digging a hole behind their poster of Candace Owens.

Packer: “I remember thinking it would take a man 600 years to tunnel through that wall…but I’ve already been here four just trying to figure out which end to hold the rock hammer.”

Still, some of the rioters freed by Soros (oops, sorry—Trump) did manage to tunnel out…most ending up in Mongolia.

Here’s to the J6ers, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side of the world because they lack basic common-sensory skills like knowing up from down or north from south.

Most people are inclined to suppose that if there were justice in the world, they would be better off. This, of course, is the merest prejudice. Hamlet was, perhaps, nearer the mark when he said, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall ’scape whipping?” If this is itself an exaggeration of the truth, I can at least think of many people to whom it would apply. Luckily for them, justice is not the only desideratum in human affairs: Mercy, humanity, understanding, decency, kindness, and compassion all have (within limits) their claims, limits that are always a matter of judgment. We are rightly horrified by the title of an 18th-century pamphlet, Hanging Not Punishment Enough: There must be a limit to the severity of the punishments that we are prepared to inflict, whatever the deserts of the punished.

From the point of view of justice, though, dismissal of persons employed in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is not enough. If justice were done them, they would have to disgorge all that they had been paid (not earned) during their employment and furthermore compensate their companies, institutions, public services, etc., for all the harm that they had inflicted upon them and upon society in general.

No doubt at some time in the distant past—what counts as the distant past these days is a shorter and shorter time ago—some of these persons meant well, or thought that they did. That history is full of the most terrible injustices can hardly be denied, though those who concentrate on them are apt to overlook the achievements of the past, which are taken for granted in a way in which injustices are not.

But the goodness of good intentions tends to disappear when they, the good intentions, are turned into career opportunities by bureaucratic alchemists; and I think that malignity always lay lurking in the minds of those who wanted to right the wrongs of the past. They saw an opportunity and seized it.

The very term “DEI” is one of the most perfect examples of newspeak in current usage, in which words are made to connote the very opposite of what, in practice, they mean. Alas, connotation often triumphs today over denotation. Perhaps it always has triumphed but seems to do so with ever greater frequency in the information, or misinformation, age.

Diversity means uniformity, in precisely the same way as freedom meant slavery in Nineteen Eighty-Four; if, that is, the only diversity worthy of a university’s consideration, in a country in which citizens are equal before the law, is diversity of thought. It is perfectly obvious that there cannot be positive discrimination without the negative variety, and if the grounds for positive and negative discrimination are racial, say, then the discriminators are at least racialist if not racist.

There is in theory a difference between a racialist and a racist. The latter thinks that there are inherent differences between human races that place the races on a hierarchy of desirable and undesirable qualities or characteristics, and that, as a consequence, individuals of races ought to be treated as representatives of those races, not as individuals. The former, the racialist, need not place races in a hierarchy but believes that racial categories should play a role in determining proper policy. This, perhaps, is a slender difference, but it exists.

I think that DEI is, in practice, racist, and not merely racialist. He or she suspects or fears in the recesses of his or her mind that there is a race, or there are races, that without their supposedly benevolent intervention would remain underrepresented in the higher ranks of society for inherent reasons. This is precisely what the racists thinks, though more openly.

Such people do not rejoice to learn that many formerly impoverished groups prosper when legal obstacles to their advancement are abolished, even when a degree of social disdain or prejudice against them persists, at least for a time, and is not reinforced by legal disabilities. This suggests to them the dangerous thought, which they must instantly repress, that differences in outcome between groups in an open society cannot be explained simply by the kind of discrimination that it is their ostensible goal to eliminate. Of course, they do not really want to eliminate it, for to do so would do them out of their jobs, their income, and their power, so they find it everywhere in the way that a paranoid person finds evidence of persecution everywhere he looks. The parallel with the witch-finders of old is close.

The DEI discriminators mean by equity not fairness but the kind of cosmic justice that Thomas Sowell has so acutely analyzed. This cosmic justice is inherently totalitarian, for it would not require only the fair treatment of every person, but that every person should have an identical genetic endowment and past starting point, for all differences not derived from, or by, his own effort would be inherently unfair. The equity of DEI could not be achieved until all humans are clones of the same embryo and raised in identical hatcheries. In other words, it is a job for as long as mankind survives.

Inclusion in the DEI sense would be destructive of all human association whatsoever, for associations, by definition, both include and exclude. If they have no power to exclude, they have no power to exist and are not associations at all. I presume that even those most in favor of sexual inclusivity would not wish Jeffrey Dahmer or Dennis Nilsen—who found sexual release or pleasure in serial murder—to join them. There is no inclusion without exclusion.

It does not require much reflection to understand the obvious deficiencies of DEI as a social philosophy. They are so obvious that even recent university graduates should be able to see them. I suspect that, at some level of their minds, those employed in departments of DEI know that they are engaged in a kind of elaborate fraud, one that is far from harmless or victimless. In the circumstances, suspension of full pay such as Mr. Trump has decreed for federal officialdom engaged upon it, presumably as a prelude to dismissal, is singularly lenient.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).

Who was Monday worse for? MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal or people on the streets of D.C. selling M.L.K. merch?

I say the Journal. MSNBC hates Donald Trump and opposes him no matter what he says. He could come out against sinkholes and MSNBC would have to be for sinkholes. Monday was just another day at the lunatic asylum.

But the Journal is supposed to be a Republican newspaper and, for decades, its most impassioned advice to Republicans has been: more wars and, above all, more immigrants!

Then along comes a New York Times-Ipsos poll — consistent with a half-dozen other polls over the past year — showing that Trump’s single most popular issue is his “mass deportation force.” And Trump’s second most popular issue is his promise to stop intervening in other countries’ wars — for example, by sending billions of dollars to Ukraine.

Both of these positions would be different from yours, Wall Street Journal.

Nearly 90% of Americans (87%) support deporting illegals who’ve committed crimes. About two-thirds (63%) support deporting the illegals who’ve come in the last four years under Joe Biden. A clear majority (55%) support deporting every illegal in the country — or as the Times puts it, “everyone living in the United States without authorization.” In other words, illegals just lost the Electoral College vote and the popular vote.

But since the 1990s, the Journal has been denouncing “the GOP’s anti-immigrationists” for sending a “cramped, pessimistic message,” and exhorting Republicans to be like Ronald Reagan, who “celebrated immigration.” (This was back when the illegal alien population was estimated to be about 2 million, compared to well north of 40 million today.) The paper routinely champions Republicans who adopt the WSJ/Ramaswamy position that any given immigrant is better than any given American. Then, they invariably go on to lose.

Trump, the biggest “anti-immigrationist” of them all, got more votes than pro-immigrationist John McCain. Today, more Hispanics want to deport illegals than voted for either Trump or McCain. Is it still the official position of the Republican Party that winning is preferable to losing?

Most recently, the Journal was flacking for the Democrats (and one idiot Republican from Oklahoma — what’s the matter with you, Oklahoma?) and their so-called “border security” bill that would have written into law the entire Biden policy on immigration. Which was to defy existing written law on immigration.

As is now conceded by pretty much everyone, the main reason Trump won all seven swing states, the Electoral College, the popular vote and “Employee of the Month” at McDonald’s was precisely because of Biden’s great idea to throw open the border and drag in more than 11 million illegals, many of whom were covertly flown to locations inside the U.S. under the cover of darkness, never to be heard from again until they were arrested for murder.

MSNBC’s approach to the poll is to deny reality, which is actually Item No. 2 in their correspondents’ stylebook. On Monday, Joe Scarborough cited the Times-Ipsos poll, but rushed to assure his viewers that an “overwhelming” percentage of Americans don’t want to deport illegals who’ve “played by the rules.” (Other than that one rule about not sneaking into our country illegally.)

By “overwhelming,” Scarborough means “a minority” or — for you math majors out there — “less than half.” Specifically: 42% think some illegals should be able to stay, compared with 55% who say they’ve all gotta go. To put this in perspective, more Americans want abortion to be illegal in almost all circumstances than want any illegals to stay.

Contrary to the Journal‘s cheerleading for our involvement in the Ukraine war, 60% of voters agree with the statement, “We should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.” That includes 75% of Republicans.

Remember when the WSJ‘s Rapid Response Team slapped down Gov. Ron DeSantis for saying Ukraine’s “territorial dispute” with Russia was not as important as America’s own territorial dispute over its border with the entire rest of the world?

The Journal sneered at DeSantis’ “naivete” and warned that he would come to regret questioning whether Ukraine’s border is one of America’s VITAL NATIONAL INTERESTS. “[H]ow to explain [DeSantis’s] puzzling surrender this week,” the editorial asked. It then went on to cite a series of irrelevancies, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Robert Taft and “GOP isolationism.” Also Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. At the Journal, it’s always 1980, unless it’s 1939.

If DeSantis had sneered right back at the Journal, 75% of Republicans would have agreed with him. But instead, he semi-backtracked by floridly denouncing Vladimir Putin, then wandered off into digital currency, term limits, school choice, abortion, a constitutional convention and a million other micro-issues notable for not being immigration or ending foreign entanglements.

Reagan ran and won on two issues: winning the Cold War and cutting taxes. Trump ran and won (at least twice) on two issues: immigration and no more foreign adventurism. He didn’t run on the Cold War because that’s over, Wall Street Journal. Good news: We won. And he couldn’t run on immigration in 2020 because he hadn’t done anything about it. Here’s hoping his second term will be different!

I wish great Republican leaders like DeSantis would learn the good things about Trump — helpfully compiled in “In Trump We Trust”! — and not keep reverting to the standard Republican playbook, advanced by the Journal. (School choice, one of the Journal‘s favorite hobby horses, just lost 65% to 35% in Kentucky — a state that Trump won by 30 points. It’s not a winning issue, Republicans. Please stop taking political advice from the Journal.)

Most interesting, the Times-Ipsos poll found that Trump is not even especially popular. He is viewed “more negatively than any other president about to take office in the last 70 years.” But his issues were a runaway hit! So much for the “cult of personality.”

Trump’s a good negotiator. How about he makes this deal with the Journal: His mass deportation force will allow one illegal alien rapist to stay for every WSJ editorial writer who self-deports?

How do we recognize artistic merit today? What relation does it have with popularity? How important is fame in measuring the artist? Why is merit often unmatched by success, whereas the latter and mediocrity are almost one and the same? All one has to do is look at Hollywood and its products of nonstop horror films, but I’m not going there, the place is a burned-out case, pun intended.

The vexing question implicit in my quest is how do we recognize artistic merit? Everyone knew that Mozart was a miracle and that Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, and countless others were geniuses. Their merit stuck out; just think of poor old very talented Salieri. Among poets Keats is the greatest, but you couldn’t get Byron to agree. He badmouthed the dirt-poor and dying Keats because deep down inside he must have known his Byronic verses to be inferior. (Not many will agree with me, but unlike the Brits who adore the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know philhellene, I’m a romantic, and Keats is number one.) Music, painting—the greatest of all is Edward Hopper, the worst the late Picasso—and poetry aside, writing is the art that most intrigues me, an art that can easily be faked, or so it seems at times when I read modern fiction. (Which I admit I never do past a page or two at most.)

Regular readers of yours truly know all about Hemingway and Fitzgerald and how they are the two writers I can never get enough of. The third one is an Englishman, almost unknown today, but he was the richest and most famous of his time, Somerset Maugham. The Bloomsbury literary elite put him down, as they would, their experimental crap being unreadable, they being mostly homosexual, frustrated, and pretty ugly to look at. But Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, “Rain,” The Letter, The Razor’s Edge, and countless other stories are superb, psychologically deep, imaginative, technically superior, and precise.

Maugham called himself three-quarters homosexual, but he had fathered a daughter, Lisa—whose beautiful daughter is a friend of mine and is now Countess Chandon—with Syrie Maugham, who by all accounts was a ballbuster. Somerset had at one time four plays running simultaneously in London, and his books were all bestsellers. He was rich and famous and generous, but the English and the critics never went overboard, and I think I know why. Envy is the English disease, and Maugham chose to live in the grand style and visit places most Brits had never heard of.

Is genius originality? I’m not so sure because there are too many con men and con women out there faking the original. Maugham created the perfect human being in Larry Darrell, which is quite a feat for a novelist. Max Kelada, hero of “Mister Know-All,” is annoying, a braggart, a drunk, and a womanizer, but as it turns out more of a gentleman than anyone else on board. Once you’ve read Maugham the mostly feminine auto-fiction of today becomes unreadable. Critics of the time had reservations about him, most likely due to envy and the fact the writer examined pure artistic desire unmotivated by outside influences. Maugham was always extremely humble about his talent, always putting his writing down, but it was not a pose. Like all great writers his passion had chosen him, not the other way round. His books became bestsellers from day one, yet another reason for the envious critics to find fault.

Writing about people of his class didn’t make him many friends. But Maugham’s novels and short stories were wonderful and so interesting because they had little to do with everyday life. His novels and short stories were redolent with moral questions and touched upon inequality of talent rather than the banality of economic inequality. Elites in any field are more interesting than the common man, and his stories were about places and people off the beaten path. He adored meeting and writing about murderers on Devil’s Island, where he was allowed to roam free and mix because of his fame. Reproducing the atmosphere of our everyday life was not for him, thank God. Yet his technical skills that were always praised by critics were equal to his psychological depth. Larry Darrell’s search for meaning in The Razor’s Edge was most likely also the author’s, Larry being a messianic figure entirely self-sufficient.

I had an opportunity to meet the author a couple of years before his death in 1965. A friend of Maugham’s, a flamboyant homosexual, had asked me to lunch at Maugham’s magnificent Villa Mauresque in Cap-Ferrat, on the Riviera, but I chickened out. I’ve always regretted it, but it was the author who had first warned us about the Riviera: “A sunny place for shady people.” Maugham sure got that right, among many other things.

Breathtaking: There’s no other word for the sheer ambition and scope of Donald Trump’s second inaugural address.

President Trump is back with all the confidence of a man delivered from death for a purpose.

Voters save his political life and legacy, too, by reelecting him in the face of every accusation and criminal charge against him.

Trump has been given a second chance — by God and the country alike — and his address left no doubt he intends to use it to transform America.

“The future is ours, and our golden age has just begun,” he promised.

Other presidents have struck optimistic notes, but Trump also laid out an agenda bolder than anything since the New Deal.

John F. Kennedy pledged to take America to the moon — Trump says we will “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”

The president backed down from nothing he vowed on the campaign trail or in the weeks since his reelection.

He described the immigration crisis in the language supporters and opponents alike have come to expect, but probably no one guessed he’d invoke 1798 legislation regarding “alien enemies” as authority for a new push against foreign gangs and criminal groups operating in our country.

And cartels ferrying drugs and human beings across our borders will now officially be designated as terrorist organizations.

Trump reiterated his belief that Panama has not lived up to its obligations to America concerning the canal, overcharging our ships for passage and giving China too much influence over the critical strategic waterway.

Yet “fire and fury” wasn’t the theme of Trump’s address — quite the contrary: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he said.

Trump’s plans for the military include expunging “radical political theories” and “social experiments” imposed on service members, and he intends to reinstate, with back pay, anyone expelled for refusing the COVID vaccine.

“Our armed forces will be free to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies,” he announced, along with an aim of rebuilding and strengthening the military.

Yet diplomacy received equal emphasis:

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

The speech had terrific turns of phrase reflecting the turnarounds in policy and results of Trump promises:

“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” he said, heralding the creation of an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariff revenue.

Can Trump achieve all this with the House of Representatives barely under Republican control?

For that matter, will the GOP Senate give Trump the backing to follow through on what he sees as his popular mandate?

While the president still peppers his prepared remarks with casual asides, there was no improvisation in the substance of the speech:

Trump has a plan, and he told the nation exactly what it is — in detail.

Experience has taught him powerful lessons: Unlike in 2017, this time there will be no waiting on Congress to help set priorities.

Trump feels the wind at his back, and his enemies haven’t yet regrouped from the rout he inflicted on them last November.

The very words of this inaugural address could change Washington, drawing new battle lines and scrambling old playbooks.

Republicans have long criticized gender ideology and DEI, the identity-based policies euphemistically branded as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

But Trump declared full-on war against these core progressive commitments of the 21st century.

He reads the election as a referendum on the protection of women’s spaces against intrusion by biological males.

And although the president didn’t use the words “affirmative action,” his address signaled the entire system of racial preferences and dogmas that identity politics depends on is up for dismantling.

Before Trump spoke, administration officials briefed reporters on background about how the president’s executive orders would put his vision into effect.

They won’t leave any doubt about what it means to be a woman, for one thing:

For purposes of government documents, including passports and visas, and for the protection of “intimate spaces,” from now on federal agencies will recognize only two innate sexes, not a plethora of socially constructed genders.

There’s even an order to redefine birthright citizenship so the children of illegal immigrants won’t automatically be considered American.

These orders will be contested in the courts, of course.

But they’ll also be contested in elections, and Trump seems certain his agenda will win at the ballot box just as he has.

This was the address of a man who dares everything, which is what Donald Trump’s supporters want and what his critics most fear.

I never did get to do my New Year’s “wrap-up” column (I got distracted by the H-1B visa thing, then the fires started). I feel bad not only because it broke a long-standing tradition (a New Year’s column that’s looser, less formal), but also, you only get that one blessed window per year…those weeks between Christmas, when all’s comfort and joy and politics be damned, and MLK Day, when we’re reminded that rapists are our betters, followed by Black History Month, the turdiest float in the Racy’s Parade of identity months we’ll have to suffer through till next December.

So even though, much like Eric Clapton’s son, I plowed right through my window, I do want to do a slightly looser column this week, because what better time to be frivolous than when your city’s burned to the ground?

Justine Bateman has been on figurative fire since the literal fires engulfed the town. Her Twitter’s ground zero for keen perspective on the disaster area. And by that I don’t mean Pacific Palisades, but Mayor Bass. Regular readers know that I gave Bass every benefit of the doubt when she was elected…perhaps out of sentimentality more than anything, as we attended the same high school. But I haven’t seen a black person mismanage a fire this badly since Richard Pryor.

Bateman’s been going after Bass and Newsom like a dervish. And I feel bad because I took a swipe at her in a 2023 column about the WGA strike, and looking back, it was undeserved.

I’m very proudly an arrogant douchebag, but you can only get away with that shtick if your broadsides are justified.

In fact, Bateman has a sharp wit, quite evident in her autobiography Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, which I strongly recommend; it has the same stream-of-consciousness, foulmouthed, breezy prose as my own Amazon-bestseller-turned-Amazon-banned autobiography.

The highest praise a banned author can give is to recommend someone else’s book.

One of Bateman’s tweets was in response to Newsom tweeting “Stop encouraging looting by lying and telling people it’s decriminalized. It’s not. It’s illegal—as it always has been. Bad actors will be arrested and prosecuted.”

To which Bateman replied:

You and Gascon and Bass sent out the invitations long ago to all criminals to come to CA and LA and practice their “craft.” You boasted that you would not prosecute rioters, trespassers, looters, shoplifters, etc. And they came. From other states, from other countries. You created a hostile living environment for all of us. That anyone thinks they can loot and commit arson in Los Angeles or anywhere in CA with impunity is because YOU made sure they got an invitation.

Go get ’em, Mallory!

When Newsom bitched about Trump’s nickname for him—“I remember the guy who called me Newscum in 7th grade”—Bateman replied, “Sounds like even at 13 years-old, people noticed something insincere about you.”

Coulter retweeted that one.

I had a huge crush on Bateman as a teen; I guess I still do. This is the first time in ten years I wish Friends of Abe still existed. With the sane members looking like the Happy Merchant and the good-looking members being bipolar religious fanatics, I loved bringing in new attractive female inductees because only in that hall of grotesqueries could I be the presentable one.

If you find a room where the curve favors you, treasure it.

I’ll offer this word of advice, though: Stay away from the Daily Wire, Justine! The whole thing’s just a shell company so Jeremy Boreing can write off his toupees.

I do want to offer context regarding one of Bateman’s tweets. In response to a tweet asking why the people of L.A. elected Bass in the first place, Bateman wrote “A vicious and highly-coordinated campaign against her very competent and qualified opponent @RickCarusoLA.”

Well, yes and no. Caruso was competent and qualified, but one thing stopped him from becoming the next Richard Riordan (L.A.’s last Republican mayor, 1993–2001). Riordan, who won the Hispanic vote, always had faith that you could be honest with voters, even brown ones, and win. Caruso was too timid. In the 2022 election, he refused to mention crime.

Talk about not reading a room. He thought it was still 2020 and we were all wearing George Floyd mourning armbands (which double as heroin vein tie-offs). In fact, L.A. grew sick of that shit by 2021, and, as demonstrated by Gascon getting booted in a landslide and Prop. 36 winning every county in the state last year, we were very ready for a leader to roll back BLM-mania.

Caruso could’ve been that guy.

Of course, I saw this clear as day in 2022, and I reached out to one of Caruso’s top aides (remember, just because nobody whose name doesn’t rhyme with Ran Roulter admits to reading me, people of note do read me, and know me). Caruso was running on two issues: Bass’ razor-thin connection to Scientology, and abortion. Caruso was so worried he’d be seen as antiabortion—which, yeah, will kill any candidate in this city and this state—that he spent every campaign dollar trying to assure voters that he was as pro-choice as Bass.

And sure, that was an important thing to mention.

Mention. Not build an entire campaign around, not when you have an issue on which you surpass, not equal, your opponent (in this case, crime).

So on 10/28/22 I let Caruso’s guy have it with both barrels (I’m redacting his name and response because it was a private communiqué):

I received a campaign letter from your team yesterday (all my neighbors did), so I thought I’d send you my reaction.

For the life of me, I don’t know why you’d send a letter like that to this neighborhood without mentioning crime. It’s such a bad move, it’s almost unbelievable. Who’s making these decisions? People in Beverly Hills-adjacent L.A. (Beverlywood, Cheviot Hills) are concerned with crime first and foremost; cars get stolen, catalytic converters get swiped, homes get broken into, we get robbed at diners, and our DA has damn-near stopped prosecuting all property theft.

And yet Campaign Caruso concentrates on Bass’ tangential association with Scientology (in the same year that a Tom Cruise movie is #1 at the box office, showing how LITTLE anyone cares about Scientology connections), and vague abstract scandals that don’t connect to voters’ daily concerns.

You’re NOT gonna win an abortion pissing-contest with Bass. Your only hope is to go hard on crime. Yes, you’ll lose some black votes (you were never going to win them anyway), but a coalition of whites/Hasidics/Persians and swayable Hispanics (have you even done polling on Hispanic attitudes toward law enforcement? Very positive; 50% of LAPD and LASD is Hispanic) could put you over the top.

Didn’t it even register with you why Bass refused to say “defund” in 2020? She knows it polls badly here. Only you don’t seem to know that.

So you ignore crime in favor of “I’m as Democrat as Bass” platitudes. No single-issue “who’s the better Democrat” voter will choose Caruso. You have to aim for the perfunctorily Dem/independent demo, and the not-passionately-partisan folks who notice the rise in crime and care about it.

It’s just stunning how badly this campaign’s been run.

Whoever’s been giving the advice will own the loss.

Yes, I’m an arrogant dick, but I always peg it.

L.A. was the first city in the U.S. to recall a mayor: 1938, when corrupt Republican Frank Shaw was recalled and replaced by fellow Republican Fletcher Bowron, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.

And you know what issue drove Bowron’s victory?

Crime.

Bowron won 64 percent to 33 percent.

I’d be very happy to see a rerun of that. And I’d love to see Caruso give it a second go-round. But for fuck’s sake, Rick, take my advice this time and say the “c” word.

BTW, one bit of trivia about Bateman (remember, this is my “loose, informal column”): In her book she writes about how these days, with social media, it’s become too easy for trolls to harass celebrities. She boasts that in her day, when fans had to make the effort to send missives via hard-copy mail, she never received a single “poison dagger” letter.

Not true, Justine. You got ’em, you just didn’t see ’em.

In 1985 my childhood best friend, “the boy who tried to rape me” (I wrote about him years ago), had an entry-level job at Paramount: the mail room, where all young starfucks started back in those days.

Rapey McMee and I had made a full-length film together at age 13, and that actually meant something back in the early 1980s. But whereas I always knew I wasn’t made of corporate stuff, hence why I ended up in the world of indie film, Rapey wanted to do things the standard way: mail room to production assistant to “fuck the right fella” to producer.

So summer 1985 one of his jobs was opening Justine Bateman’s fan letters (she was on Family Ties at the time). All fan mail would be screened to keep the talent from seeing the truly awful stuff. And Rapey would call me to read the shit Bateman was receiving.

And man, was it ugly. Rape fantasies, S&M, fecal fetishes. I recall one letter from a guy claiming to be a doctor who said he’d discovered the cure for cancer but he’d only share it with the world if Bateman would blow him.

Dude’s name was “Dr. Salter.” I remember because Rapey and I made it a comedic trope that summer. We’d “Salter” people just for fun.

To a waitress: “I’ve discovered the cure for cancer but I won’t share it with the world unless you take this overcooked steak back to the kitchen and bring me the fucking rare I ordered.”

To a liquor store owner: “We’ve discovered the cure for cancer but we won’t share it with the world unless you sell us a twelve-pack without seeing ID.”

Bateman’s autobiography is highly critical of the industry, but she should know that she had people working hard to protect her from undue ugliness. And people like Dave ’n’ Rapey who found unending humor in the undue ugliness.

Rapey’s career went as planned, at first. He made his way up the corporape ladder, getting all the way to network VP, only to experience a terrible fall, most likely after inserting something where it shouldn’t’a been inserted inside a person not welcoming of the gesture, and now he’s completely out of the biz. He serves as an adjunct assistant professor at an NYC arts school.

Our academic institutions never fail to impress with their choice of faculty.

As for L.A., well, we’re boned too. But also, we’ve never been more primed for another Riordan. I hope Caruso, or somebody, recognizes that opportunity and takes it.

And follow Justine Bateman on X. We may have been robbed of a cancer cure because of her, but her tweets are decent compensation.

As already reported on Takimag, there are plenty of lunatic theories out there at the moment about what really started all those California wildfires currently raging. Jewish space lasers? A sinister attempt to destroy and cover up evidence of the crimes of P. Diddy, or the true origin of all those mystery UFO drones I wrote about on this site last week? Or, even more laughably, was it all the result of something even more outlandish and fictional called “global warming”?

These are hardly the stupidest theories out there about what may secretly be causing natural disasters across the world, however. The direct opposite to wildfires are floods—destructive phenomena that, according to one woman, may well all be down to the even more destructive phenomenon of straight white maleness.

Water Torture
Tammi Gissell is an Australian dancer and museum worker who, to look at her, you would think was white. But, as with Ali G, appearances can sometimes be deceptive, and she identifies as being “Blak”—not simply “black,” that’s something very different, apparently. Specifically, she is a Muruwari-Wiradjuri woman; or an Australian aborigine, to you or me. She’s also very queer indeed.

In 2023, in her capacity as the resident dancer and indigenous scholar in Australia’s Powerhouse Museum chain, Gissell was invited to join in a Powerhouse-sponsored forum called “Queering Climate,” whose participants mainly hailed from queer Polynesian/Micronesian/Melanesian-type backgrounds.

Here, the island daisy chains of the Pacific region were acclaimed as being inherently transgender somehow, Australasia as a whole supposedly being “a fluid oceanic continent” whose native non-white inhabitants had been sexually amphibious, as it were, until colonized and oppressed by wicked white European Christians, who had cruelly forced them to think of themselves as fictional beings called “men” and “women.”

Contributors to the forum were full of strange statements about how “all of the four genders worked in unison” across Australasia before the white man came, and Tammi Gissell herself emitted equally odd utterances like these:

The river is queer, it can flow this way or that, depending on its own needs. It doesn’t need a nameless, faceless gatekeeper in a high tower doling out her currents. True flooding is natural. True flooding is queer. For to queer something is to simply take another course to where you need to be. Queering is a natural part of surviving in and on Country [i.e., in the natural, pre-colonized Australian landscape]…. Only those capable of queering the utterly abnormal courses set by the ignorant and the greedy [i.e., Western river engineers] will be living in true responsiveness and service to Country.

What does Gissell mean by this, apart from “Give me a job, I’m gay and Blak and can vomit all the associated fake academic lingo accordingly”?

Simply that, by attempting to control nature—for example, by building flood defenses, dams, canals, or rerouting rivers—human beings were actually only making the resultant eventual floods in places like the Australian outback even worse.

But only one specific particular class of humans are ever responsible for this whole disastrous trend, of course: white male heterosexual ones. After all, the Abos never built any reservoirs, did they?

Why Are Canals So Straight?
Rivers are naturally wavy and “queer” in their nature, unlike man-made canals or irrigation channels, which are, literally and figuratively, “straight.” To try to force a wavy river into a straight channel is akin to a form of forced liquid gay-conversion therapy, it might be said, an abuse against Nature. As a fully trained professional dancer, however, Gissell herself claims to be inherently fluid in both body and soul, like a gracefully curving and arcing river:

I’m a dancer by trade. Everywhere I go and every step I take there is conscious thought about the way that I sit in space and the way that space sits around me. It’s my job to keep stories in me, and to keep them in a state that they can be brought forward and brought back.

As a fully paid-up lover of musical theater, Gissell’s true alleged job—i.e., poncing around the museum to the accompaniment of a rhythmical beat looking all bendy and fluid—is to act as the metaphorical river of imaginative counterpoint to the straight, rigid, set-in-stone (because otherwise it would fall down…) architecture of the white man’s Mother Nature-raping museum.

Widening this self-ascribed salvational role out from the white man’s museum toward the wider white man’s industrially altered landscape within which the building itself sits, Gissell comes to realize that being lesbian (or bi or trans or genderqueer, whatever she actually is) somehow holds the solution to the entire alleged climate crisis. As she says:

We need queer bodies in action. In this sense, I guess we’re queering the climate of these colonial architectures by offering alternative courses to the rigidities that they’re founded on. I think I’ve actually come to realize in chewing over this that a healthy climate is already queer. That it’s the colonial architectures imposed upon Country which need to be removed or queered themselves in order to get our climate back in balance. Colonial architectures of the mind…combined with the stone-cold constructions upon Country, hampers the natural flow of nature. Colonizers have created this accelerated climate change here in Australia, and that’s the truth of it.

This seems to indicate that Gissell somehow hopes to solve problems like flooding and drought via the medium of dance—and the medium of gay dance, at that. Quick, call in Steps and the Village People, it’ll never rain too heavily or too little in Australia ever again!

Sold Down the River
Then again, is flooding really such a bad thing? To most normal people, maybe, but queerness these days is abnormal by design, and Gissell seems no exception.

The future dancer was brought up as a child near to Australia’s Barkaa River, which seems to have entered into her very bones and soul, like damp rot. She claims the Barkaa is her actual mother, and that the nearby Menindee Weir is “a guillotine” whose blade is sitting on her neck.

Or maybe Ma Barkaa’s neck is really being knelt upon by a white Australian policeman, as in the following description Gissell makes it sound uncannily like George Floyd: “Our Barkaa River is sick. She can’t breathe. Her queerness, her ability to be response able [sic] for herself has been taken from her for too long.”

How does Gissell manage to intuit all this stuff? Because, in a sense, Gissell is the river, or a personification of it, like Lorelei to the Rhine, but Blak, not Aryan. So, when she comes out openly and unapologetically as queer, this is just like how the Barkaa likewise bravely emerges as a giant watery liquid homosexual during its flooding.

Bigoted, white, straight colonial males may try to channel queer Blaks and queer rivers alike down certain predetermined, predefined straight routes, but ultimately both will break free, just like comically cross-dressing Freddie Mercury, and wash away the accumulated sins of the old, heteronormative white colonial world entirely:

Like the Barkaa will carve her own course, we [queers] will flood and we will drought in line with the flow that we sense to be the right one for our survival and flourishment. And we have to fight for the right of our Country to do the same. Nature is queer as nature honors both the father and the mother…. Nature is he, she and they in perpetual motion and interplay. Nature’s climate is already queer. People need to queer up to get in on the natural flow, lest they be washed away in the devastation of sticking to a failing course.

A Very Queer Fish
But Australian politicians have thus far singularly failed to “queer up,” leading to mass genocide against Mother-Father Nature’s native fish stocks. Gissell speaks of “60 million fish murdered in five years”; that’s ten times worse than the Holocaust of the Jews, numerically speaking.

In recent years, Australian rivers like the Barkaa have run dry, or else all the fish in them have died, and according to Gissell this is because water was being selfishly siphoned off from them through weirs like the Menindee and away from neglected outback Aboriginal communities, presumably to provide complete fripperies like tap water for the white man’s distant cities.

Surprisingly (possibly most surprisingly of all to themselves), these dead fish are also homosexual, their deaths being just the latest example of the white colonialist genocide against gays that is(n’t) happening today worldwide:

Trying to push the river is really, really stupid. The water needs to flow where it needs to flow. The fish need to swim where they need to swim, just as we need to love who we need to love. I reject all attempts to commandeer the flow of our lands and our waterways, and the flow of our bodies, minds and spirits…. It is the birthright of these fish to swim and live their lives, just as it is for all people to live their lives free of obstruction and damage to their environment and to their lifeblood. We as queer folk are only queer in the sense that we have had to, by necessity, queer off courses laid down by colonist oppressors and their rigidity to dogma.

Her own Queer Critical Theory dogma sounds rather rigid in itself to me—I thought Gissell was supposed to be a river, not a canal?

Canalize This
Time was that attributing floods to sexuality was the sole preserve of those “Far-Right extremists” we hear so much about these days: a term that is often simply a euphemism for “Christians.” Who, for example, can forget the time in 2016 when the media delighted in the ironic fact that, after calling storms and floods of the day “a sign of God’s wrath” against the Democrats’ newly legalized fake homo weddings, U.S. pastor Tony Perkins ended up getting washed out of his own home on a wave and a prayer too?

How is that when a devout white Christian claims the God of the Bible causes floods because of deluded human attitudes toward sexuality, he is immediately labeled as mad, whereas when a devout Blak queer claims native rainbow river god/desses cause such environmental disasters for very similar homosexuality-related reasons instead, she is given an official academic museum post?

I notice that one current conspiracy theory about the present California wildfires is that the mainly male firefighters involved have been attempting to put them out by flouncing around like hard-helmeted pansies and ineffectually throwing small volumes of water carried within women’s handbags into the flames at the behest of politically correct officials who had foolishly given away all of their real firefighting equipment to Ukraine. Was one of these officials Tammi Gissell herself, perchance?

What kind of weird, rainbow-obsessed solipsist honestly looks at diagrams of rivers and canals on a map and divines, apparently in all seriousness, that one is hetero and one is homo?

Then again, from “anal” to “canal,” I suppose it only takes one letter.

The Week’s Most Tiresome, Miresome, and On-Firesome Headlines

CLOWNTOWN L.A.
You know you have a frail infrastructure when a birthday clown can cripple your power grid.

Two days before the start of the worst fires in L.A. County history, 3,000 Angelenos were left in the dark after a birthday balloon hit a power line.

As the balloon was shaped like a doggy, cops rousted children’s party clowns. APBs went out for Professor Puddingpants, Commodore Chuckles, Bozoe Saldana, Whoopie Cushion Goldberg, Emmett Till Kelly, and the comedy trio of Larry, Çurly, and Mow (the Three Mexican Gardener Stooges). The LAPD describes the latter as last seen traveling in a Volkswagen Beetle stuffed with fifty other illegal harlequins.

Meanwhile, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is taking heat for being in Ghana when the fires broke out. She was attending the inauguration of the new Ghanaian president, who took over for the previous one who died of AIDS, who’d taken over for the previous one who died of malaria, who took over for the previous one who died because he ate a black mamba to cure his AIDS and malaria.

Upon returning to L.A. after catching Ghana’s fastest overnight mode of transport (baboon-pulled rickshaw, aka the “red-ass”), Bass found an “unwelcome home” party in her city, after word got out that she’d slashed the Fire Department budget.

Her defense: “I only cut $17.6 million. I wanted to cut an additional $49 mil, but the City Council wouldn’t let me.”

She then sat back and waited for applause that never came. Good to know that with Kamala in the wind, we still have one prominent black female politician who can’t read a room.

CRANK, CALL
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, a being from another galaxy arrives on Earth. Equipped with a brain far beyond that of man, the visitor quickly absorbs all human knowledge and history.

A reporter asks the intergalactic visitor if he has any questions.

Alien: “I do. In the 2004 Democratic primary, Governor Howard Dean was booted after going ‘yeeeeeaaaargh.’”

Reporter: “Indeed.”

Alien: “I must be missing pertinent data. Did he go ‘yeeeeeaaaargh’ and then strangle someone?”

Reporter: “Nope, he just went ‘yeeeeeaaaargh.’”

Alien: “Did he go ‘yeeeeeaaaargh’ and fling feces?”

Reporter: “No, just ‘yeeeeeaaaargh.’”

Alien: “But then in 2028, Gavin Newsom…”

Democrats get to write the end of that skit. How will the party that once considered “cheering clumsily” a fatal error deal with a presidential aspirant who responded to a desperate fire victim by faking a call to Joe Biden?

You’ve seen the video. A distraught mom confronts the governor over the terrible flaws in the state’s fire response. And Newsom attempts to evade the conversation by saying, “I’m literally talking to the president right now.” When the woman asks to hear the call, Newsom, who’s as fast and loose with the word “literally” as he was with his own lockdown rules during Covid, replies, “There’s literally…I’ve tried five times, but there’s no signal.”

Never in history has there been a better time for the “you keep using that word” meme.

Newsom should’ve been more creative:

“I called 1-800-CORN-POP, but he wouldn’t connect me. He’s a bad dude.”

Let’s not look too stupid to that alien visitor; when added to the rampant looting and arson going on in the fire zone, and Newsom’s well-known opposition to last year’s Prop. 36 tough-on-crime initiative, the phone incident should end him for good.

Unless today’s Democrats are so far gone that Newsom’s deceit won’t bother them.

Alien visitor, prepare to be literally baffled.

FIRST NON-RESPONDER
In the 1980s, NBC produced a series of Saturday-morning informational shorts called One to Grow On, in which celebrities gave safety tips to children.

One spot showed two black kids home alone when a fire starts. Dwight Schultz of the A-Team appears and tells them, “Don’t try to be a hero!”

Apparently those kids grew up to be L.A. Fire Department DEI chiefs.

A widely circulated video shows LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson, an obese black lesbian, telling citizens that if they get trapped in a fire, it’s they own damn fault. Don’t come lookin’ to her for no help, ya ofay smoke-inhalin’ Freddy Krueger-lookin’ flammable crackas.

In a promotional video—and yes, this was an on-purpose LAFD video, not a surreptitious recording—Larson slams normies for asking if she’s strong enough to carry someone from a burning building. “‘You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire?’ Which my response is, ‘He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.’”

“Don’t you be gettin’ trapped in no fire, I just got mah nails did” is the new LAFD slogan.

The only reason an LAFD diversity hire would race into a burning building it to heat up they fries. Though to be fair, Larson’s more likely to be eating tacos.

Larson’s attitude will soon be reflected in other DEI-dominated professions.

Medicine: “Don’t come to me wit’ yo disease, honky. You got dat brain cancer from thinkin’ too much racism.”

Air Traffic Controller: “Take yo’ mayday and shove it, KKK. You got yo’self up there, you git yo’self down.”

Pharmacist: “You want me to label yo’ pills? I can’t even read.”

DEI—the gift that keeps on taking.

SHE-RO SANDWICH
Last week Metro U.K.’s “gender reporter” Alice Giddings declared the greatest menace of 2025 to be “white alpha males.”

Tell that to the postman who last week encountered a Hispanic alpha she-male.

Musician Warren Zevon, terminally ill with cancer in 2002, gave an iconic piece of advice to his fans regarding making the most of life: “Enjoy every sandwich.”

A fine notion…unless there’s a tranny around. In which case it’s the desire to enjoy a sandwich that’ll kill you.

Postman Ray Hodges, a black gentleman, was on his lunch break when he stopped into a Harlem deli for a sandwich. Also in the deli was Alvin “Jaia” Cruz, a 6’5″ tranny with a history of stabbing people and, because it’s NYC, a history of being immediately released lest the city appear “transphobic.”

As the mailman was about to pay for his order, Cruz, a male-man, demanded that he let “her” go first, lest he appear transphobic. When Hodges, with limited time to eat and get back to his route, refused, Cruz pulled out a butcher knife and gutted him. Literally, cut out his guts.

The good news is, this was a murder of a federal employee, so Biden can pardon Cruz before leaving office.

No word on the sandwich Cruz wanted to order, but most likely it was a meatball sub(human). Or an LGBLT. Or a naanbinary. Or maybe a ho’boy. Or a pork tenderloin district (surf-and-TERF). Perhaps a faguette with the soup-of-the-day, dys-phở-ria. Hopefully not a Dragwood, as those take forever to make.

And Hodges? He ordered the Croak Monsieur.

At trial Cruz will likely claim that it wasn’t murder at all; he just transitioned Hodges to a corpse while performing “bottom surgery” on his intestines.

As for Hodges’ guts, police couldn’t locate them. Considering that the deli was located in a shady bodega run by foreigners, it might not be a coincidence that the newest item on the menu is black pudding.

ABANDON HOPI, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
You gotta feel sorry for the Native Americans. The white man wiped them out with diseases (because Indians die if you sneeze on ’em), defeated them in war after war (because Indians never developed steel; you have to have a Bronze Age before a Steel Age, and the natives were stuck in the Stick-and-Mud Age), and bartered their land for a six-pack and a Chivas.

What do these poor, defeated people have left?

Their homegrown psychedelics, of course! The drugs they take to forget they’re Native Americans.

But now the white devil is even taking that away. According to The Guardian, increased use of psychedelics among Americans has led to a shortage of peyote. The rise in peyote use is due to the fact that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1994, signed by Bill Clinton while he was high as f*ck, allows for the legal use of the hallucinogen among Native Americans.

Hence why most people caught with the substance claim Indian heritage, from kids at Beverly Hills High (“My legal name is Rachel Abramowitz, but my Indian name is ‘Never Goes Down on Boyfriend’”) to the Chicago ghetto (“Man, I’m an Injun; my name is ‘Killer of Ten Bearers of Cold Fries’”).

The Guardian describes peyote as “a small spineless cactus,” ironically the British public’s nickname for Keir Starmer. Peyote only grows in the Southwest, so the supply is finite. And according to Navajo leaders, should it run out, the natives have few other options to escape the deadening reality of their lives.

“Yes there’s paint-huffing,” a Navajo spokesbrave told the paper, “but that’s a little too high-tech for us. Few of us have the know-how to operate heavy machinery.”

The Navajo chieftain, “Presides Over Detritus,” has a plan to catch Americans who speed down the winding desert roads of the reservation.

“An anvil attached to a rope will drop the moment we hear the ‘meep-meep’ of a speeding car. I will be in charge of lighting the rope on fire so that it snaps exactly as the road riders pass underneath.”

Sadly, on the first attempt, the rope didn’t fully break, the car got away, and the chieftain walked under the anvil and looked up to assess the problem.

The new chieftain promises that his rocket-powered car-catcher will work much better.

In the struggle between ideology and reality, ideology often emerges victorious—for a time only, however, reality being that which cannot be indefinitely denied. As Horace said, albeit in Latin, “Though you drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will return, victorious over your ignorant confident scorn.”

It is the same with all reality: It catches up with you in the end.

For many years, the British population was indoctrinated by politicians into the belief that its National Health Service was a great triumph of social justice and efficiency, and that, without it, people would die like flies as they supposedly did in other countries without such a system. In his poem “Recessional,” Kipling wrote of “lesser breeds without the law,” and it is probably fair to say that for a long time most British people thought of the inhabitants of other nations, who had not their national health service, as lesser breeds without their pills.

Indeed, Mrs. Thatcher’s right-hand man, Nigel Lawson, once said that the National Health Service was the nearest that the British came to a national religion (Anglicanism having collapsed under the weight of its clergy’s pusillanimity, evident disbelief in its own doctrines, and unctuous sentimentality).

This religion was founded upon several false tenets. The first was that, before the foundation of the National Health Service, health care hardly existed in the country. This, of course, was nonsense. Indeed, in the report first suggesting the establishment of an NHS, it was acknowledged that the British health care system (if system it deserved to be called, for it was an amalgam of many different institutions) was among the best in Europe—instead of the worst, as it now is.

The second tenet was that the NHS was necessary to the undoubted improvement in the health of the population from the time of its foundation. It was as if this improvement happened nowhere else, when the improvement was in fact greater in many other countries. The health of populations can improve under even bad governments, for example those of Guatemalan military dictatorships. But the fact that other countries made greater progress without the same British system was virtually hidden from the population, or at least never referred to.

The third tenet was that the NHS was inherently egalitarian. No doubt it was egalitarian in intention, and it is a sign of indoctrination that intention is taken as more important than actual performance. In fact, inequality of health outcome between the richest and poorest actually increased after the establishment of the NHS, perhaps for reasons having nothing to do with the system, or because the richer (and on the whole more educated) part of the population was better able to take advantage of whatever was going. In a centralized system such as the NHS, the ability to demand or complain in a coherent fashion is a huge advantage. In addition, a good portion of the difference between the health chances of the rich and the poor in Britain is now accounted for by the difference in the rates of smoking by the rich and the poor.

For a time, the system appeared to work not too badly. This was for two reasons. There was what might be called the cultural capital of the previous health care system. As a religious morality may survive for a generation or two a decline of belief, so previous traditions of health care may survive a change in the system. Perhaps more important, there was much less information available to patients then than there is now. If patients were told that there was no treatment possible for whatever they had, they believed their informant and were therefore more stoical and resigned than they are now (I remember those days well, and very convenient for doctors they were too).

Not only has the number of treatments possible increased enormously, however, but the knowledge that they are technically possible has also increased enormously. Rationing and waiting lists cannot be hidden any longer by what were essentially lies.

The myth of equality was a highly convenient one also. People are often willing to put up with all kinds of inconveniences if they are convinced that everyone else in their situation has to endure them too. With a false leap of logic, people then took the inconveniences as evidence of the equality that justified them. The more unpleasant the service, or at least the more hoops that people were made to jump through in order to obtain it, the stronger the signal of political virtue (if equality is a virtue).

Of course, one must not exaggerate. Millions of people were and are treated, and treated well, under the NHS. But so they were under all other health care systems. The question, however, is whether they are better or worse treated under other systems, and the evidence suggests that they are worse treated.

To be genuinely ill is always unpleasant, but the NHS makes it worse than it need be because, in addition to the illness itself, the patient is often made only too well aware that he is a pauper in relation to the system, or at least a lowly petitioner to it. He has little choice but to accept what he is granted—or for that matter withheld. Other than to refuse treatment altogether, he must take what he is given; often, he must hurry up and wait, often for months or even years. There is no other European country at an equivalent level of economic development where to be ill is so unpleasant.

This has been so for many years. Every so often, newspapers and other media discover with horror in Britain what was there all the time, namely the cruelties inflicted upon patients not by intention of the staff to be cruel, but because of the way the system is organized. The penny seems never to drop that, notwithstanding all attempts at improvement, the system never does more than limp from crisis to crisis and has done so from its initiation. For the moment the ideology of the NHS prevents any real reform. People grumble, of course, but grumbling is to reform what a jacquerie is to revolution.

Thanks to the ideology, the British are in thrall to their own pauperdom—and not, incidentally, only in the matter of health care.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).