Redistribution of wealth is in full swing in the U.K. under Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, but a lesser-known project is the redistribution of organs.

I don’t mean church organs. I mean body parts. A change in the law on organ donation, quietly put through, is very much part of the agenda that has been gaining pace in Britain for years under the always socialist NHS, which has been pushing deep-state, leftist ideas for years irrespective of the flavor of the government.

Unless you opt out, the presumption is that you agree that your organs can be automatically taken from your body “when” you die. This law change was put through a few years ago, during the height of the pandemic lockdown, from the previous system where you had to sign a donor card if you wanted that to be the case.

Or as the NHS puts it: “On 20 May 2020, the law around organ donation in England was changed to allow more people to save more lives.” Lucky, lucky us, being given this opportunity.

“Now that the law has changed, it will be considered that you agree to become an organ donor when you die, if: you are over 18; you have not opted out.”

Note to Americans, please realize that this is what state health care gives the state the ability to do. You’re just spare parts to them.

In the U.S., presumed consent as a form of almost mandatory donation has rightly been rejected on the basis that it cannot possibly be determined that someone definitely knows that the government is presuming they agree.

In the U.K., it is not so much Invasion of the Body Snatchers, if you like references to cult horror films, as Presumption of the Body Snatchers.

A year after they presumed they could have your organs, incidentally, the U.K. law was changed in 2021 to presume they could share your private medical notes with companies for “research purposes” unless you opted out. Again, no very great public warning was given, so you would not realize. I have no doubt a similar trick will be used eventually to presume everything.

Maybe the state will start presuming you agree to be vaccinated unless you opt out and a vaccine hit squad will simply bang your door and stick the needle in. Well, you agreed, they will say. You didn’t go online and opt out.

But for now, it’s just “sharing” your medical notes with Big Pharma and snatching—sorry, harvesting—your body parts.

Since the law was changed to presume you agree with this, there has been a jump in organ donation unsurprisingly—only 2.5 million people (out of a 68 million population) registered an opt-out.

There has also been a reported rise in the number of people declared brain-dead and switched off in NHS hospitals.

Of course, that may be a coincidence. But we also have to consider the possibility, don’t we, that whether or not we ever get official figures to corroborate the rumors on social media, the organ donor change has had an effect on how doctors are viewing the seriously sick lying unconscious in hospital beds hooked up to machines? Could they be switching people off more quickly?

Or indeed, if you want to consider another horrifying scenario, more slowly. Because I believe I’m right in saying that in order to keep your organs fresh and usable, they have to keep them oxygenated by a live blood supply, so they have to keep you turned on when you’re really to all intents and purposes dead, until the new host body is ready to get your organs.

In any case, the presumption that a human body can be stripped for parts like an old car being plundered for tires, door panels, battery, starter motor, leather seats, is bound to have changed something.

If you are asking me why I think the British state wants to strip people for parts, then I would allow the state to point to the shortage of organ donors.

But I would also add that an idea is gaining hold, and we see it in the euthanasia bill going through the U.K. Parliament, that life with infirmity and pain is not worth hanging on to, and that youth and what we now call “beauty” is to be worshipped and promoted and prioritized above age and falling to bits, which used to be considered okay, and inevitable.

If you accept that we favor youth and “beauty” and increasingly marginalize age and infirmity—and Botox and Ozempic are certainly part of that—and that we want to hurry oldies and sick people off to the grave like so many oxygen thieves (or indeed carbon emitters), then you maybe accept or fear that organ donation has now become part of a wider agenda to prioritize youth over infirmity.

In other words, if there are good organs inside bodies that the state deems worthless, then those bodies are maybe going to be less strenuously attended to and saved, and their organs redistributed, much like wealth through the taxation system, to those who are considered by the socialist state as more deserving.

And as it always does, the socialist state will say, “It’s for the good of society.” Everything horrifying the big state does is done beneath this banner.

I first discovered by word of mouth that my organs would be taken unless I opted out, very much in the way I found out my medical notes would be “shared” with companies for “research purposes.”

I had to go onto the NHS website and fiddle around with an opt-out registration. They certainly did not go out of their way to tell anyone, announce it, or explain it.

If you heard about it, you could opt out. If you didn’t, tough luck. You’re now an old Ford Cortina. You’re no more than a Toyota pickup truck. If you break down by the side of the road they might give you a few goes with the jump leads, but if that doesn’t readily work, then maybe it’s off with all four tires and up with your bonnet and out with various bits of your engine.

The mangled remains are handed back to your relatives to be buried, so what are they to complain about?

I’m Roman Catholic, so I don’t want this to happen for spiritual and religious reasons. But I also don’t agree with it because I suspect the state would write me off quicker when I might have lived, or indeed keep me artificially alive once I’m gone in order to preserve my organs. I don’t like it either way.

I also suspect the state is saying my value once I’m an old or sick person on life support is less than a younger person who is suffering from cancer or a heart condition and, in their view, needs my heart, or my kidneys, or eyeballs.

No, I’m sorry, I don’t accept that. You can keep me hooked up and do your best to revive me and sod the other person you want to give my headlamps and starter motor to, no matter how much younger and shinier than me they are. As far as I am concerned, if they are dying and I am surviving, then that is the way the cookie is crumbling.

If I am about to come back from the brink, more of a burden to society, so be it. And even if I’m done for, it’s up to me if I want to go in that coffin in one piece. Bodily autonomy either means something or it does not. Unlike your money, you can take it with you, actually. Or you can at least stop the state from pilfering it.

I’ve been catching up on my reading of late, and here’s the one and only Papa Hemingway’s advice to writers: “Don’t let them suck you in to start writing about the proletariat, if you don’t come from the proletariat, just to please the recently politically enlightened critics.” Hear, hear! Leave it to Papa to tell unpalatable truths, especially true today with the proles all-conquering and the nobs in hasty retreat. Papa was right to warn us.

As it’s Christmas time, Hemingway’s advice on what we should be reading during the holiest of Christian dates is: “John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, because it’s by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well.” Papa was at times rough on O’Hara, another of my hero writers, stating in an interview that we should all chip in and send John to an Ivy League University. The rambunctious and heavy-drinking Irish-American was a terrific writer, and held Ivy Leaguers with impeccable backgrounds in high esteem, but so did the great Scott Fitzgerald, or did he?

I’ve just finished the umpteenth book on the tragic Scott, and will get back to his Princeton problem in a jiffy, but first some more about Papa. Hemingway reinvented modern American prose, and his best work is deeply moving and rich in meaning and psychological complexity. He also lived on an epic scale in fascinating times and in fascinating places. None of those grungy, dirty tenements and lowlifes for Papa to write about. He and F. Scott wrote about the upper classes and their salubrious whereabouts. Papa was mythologized by the masses for his bravado both in life and in his fiction. Fitzgerald was greatly misunderstood because of his drunken shenanigans early in his life. People forget that Scott hit the big time in his very early 20s, and was considered finished by the time he was 30. Both Papa and Scott were masters at their game, both turned their storytelling into melodies, and both knew that only bad novelists are editorialists for their own convictions. Both were later on betrayed by their bodies due to booze, and in Hemingway’s case terrible head injuries caused by not one but two airplane crashes in the same week.

Yep, neither Scott nor Papa editorialized, instead letting the reader make up his mind, the sign of a great writer. In Dick Diver, Jay Gatsby, and Monroe Stahr, the reader encountered a series of ill-fated characters unable to overcome personal weaknesses. Fitzgerald knew all about that. Papa had set the stage with lean, hard, athletic prose in The Sun Also Rises, where Jake Barnes had his manhood shot off during the war through no fault or weakness of his own. The rhythm, the idioms, the pauses of that first novel of his set the standard for living speech. Frederic and Catherine’s tragedy in A Farewell to Arms was again through no fault of their own, but the vicissitudes of life.

Scott blamed it on personal weaknesses, Papa on life; both were right, Scott being more critical, whereas Papa was more romantic. Fitzgerald’s characters were injured by wealth, Hemingway’s by fate. Neither writer liked the rich, and Scott got a raw deal because he wrote about them. In real life, Scott warned his daughter at Vassar “not to go Park Avenue,” as he saw the ruling WASPs of the time (and old Princeton classmates) as vulgar when compared with his Baltimore clan. He called the Tom Buchanan character in Gatsby “the one percent at its worst.” The growing power of industrialists and financiers (read the techies of today) offended Scott’s romantic sensibilities, and he wondered if this rising republic of consumers could ever recover its old idealism. He depicted those doubts so brilliantly in the shimmering green light that watches silently over Gatsby’s grand illusion.

Fitzgerald’s moral concern about corruptive wealth and a culture too impressed by fame and fortune would stand up today, in fact today more than ever. Papa also held the rich in contempt, and in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” calls the rich “dull and repetitious and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon.” Both men had some very rich and good friends like Winston Guest in Papa’s case, and Gerald and Sarah Murphy in Scott’s. Both writers died much too young, Papa at 60, Scott at 40. But even dead, both men have remained more alive than ever in their novels, especially because those who came after them were dead already.

Here’s my wish list for the incoming Trump administration to make America healthy and prosperous and great again in 2025.

1. Slash Job-Killing Regulations
The regulatory state is a $2 trillion tax on the American economy. We all want worker safety, a clean environment and consumer protections, but in too many cases the costs of regulations far outweigh the societal benefits. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to slash 10 rules for every new rule. Just do it, Mr. President.

2. Make the Trump Tax Cuts Permanent
As JFK, Ronald Reagan and others have proven throughout history, lower tax rates lead to more growth, more investment and more jobs. The Trump tax cuts meant that a typical family of four earning $75,000 a year saw their tax bill fall by half — a benefit valued at more than $2,000. And the corporate tax rate fell from 35% — the highest in the world — to 21%, bringing jobs and capital to America. Trump has promised to make all these tax cuts permanent. Why? Because they worked almost exactly as we anticipated they would.

3. Replace Welfare With Work
Growth will require more able-bodied Americans getting off welfare and into jobs. Welfare — which includes cash assistance, public housing, food stamps, disability payments, unemployment benefits and Medicaid — needs to be a hand up, not a handout.

4. Use America’s Abundant Natural Resources
America has well more than $50 trillion of natural resources that are accessible with existing drilling and mining technologies. This is a vast storehouse of wealth that far surpasses what any other nation is endowed with. We can use the royalty payments and leases to reduce our national debt while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

5. Cut Medical Costs by Demanding Health Care Price Transparency
One of many ways to bring health care costs down to consumers (and taxpayers, who pay half the costs) is to require hospitals, pharmacies, doctors and health clinics to list prices for what they are charging. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity estimates that $1 trillion to $2 trillion could be reduced from health care costs, with no reduction in the quality of care, by allowing consumers to shop around on the internet for the best price — just as we do when we buy groceries, a home or a car. This will foster free market competition and lower prices.

6. Allow School Choice for All Families
Test scores in America have been plummeting. Kids are graduating from high school — if at all — without even being able to read the diploma. America no longer ranks in the top 10 in many academic achievement ratings.

A child can get a better education at HALF the cost in the Catholic school system and in many charters.

Trump has endorsed universal school choice for ALL children regardless of income or ethnicity or race. This is the civil rights issue of our time.

7. Implement a Pro-America Immigration Policy
Trump’s committed to securing our border, but we also need legal immigrants through a merit-based immigration system. This visa system would select immigrants based on their skills, talents, investment capital, English language ability and education level. These characteristics all presage success in America.

8. Revive America’s Great Cities
Our once-great cities in America — from New York to Chicago to Detroit to San Francisco to Seattle — have come to look like war zones. Crime has run rampant. Businesses and people and capital are fleeing and leaving the poorest Americans — mostly minorities — stranded with tragically limited opportunities other than working at Walmart or McDonald’s for minimum wage. Since 2020, our major cities have lost nearly 1 million residents. And tens of thousands of businesses.

Trump wants to revitalize our cities and abandoned rural areas through deregulation, reduction in tax rates, changes in zoning policies and infrastructure investments.

9. Pull the U.S. Out of the Paris Climate Change Treaty and Other Anti-America Agreements

We must end American participation in globalist treaties that hurt America most. This includes the Paris Climate Accords — a treaty with which most other nations have failed to comply, yet which places huge burdens on American companies and workers. Trump also has pledged to end global taxation — such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s global minimum tax. Do we even need a United Nations?

10. Finally, Drain the Swamp
There is a reason why three of the five wealthiest counties in America are in or around Washington, D.C. Washington is getting rich at the expense of the rest of us. Fewer than 10% of overpaid federal workers (of which there are more than 2 million) are working full time in the office even though COVID-19 ended three years ago. These are swamp employees that often get paid $150,000 or more a year. Fire them if they don’t show up. And relocate federal agencies in other cities.

These are admittedly bold aspirations for an economic transformation toward freedom and free enterprise. But the one person who can get it done is Trump.

Ah, my annual Christmas column, where I get to write about anything that tickles my fancy.

So about the New Avengers “Angels of Death” episode…

Okay, okay, sorry. I’ve run that joke into the ground enough for one lifetime.

But here’s a story I don’t think I’ve ever shared…the time I saved Chynna Phillips’ life.

You know Chynna Phillips, right? “Daughter of the Mamas & the Papas band members John and Michelle Phillips.” That’s how Wikipedia phrases it. Me, I’d have said “Daughter of Incesty McFukkindaughter and the thin one who didn’t choke on a ham sandwich.”

But that’s just me. I’m a charmer.

As my regular readers know and are sick of hearing about, I went to majority black L.A. public schools in the early 1980s during the peak of the crack epidemic. And I loved it. I have nothing but great memories from those years.

I get so much pushback from readers about that. “There’s no way you were happy and popular at a black school! Recant your heresy, Jew!”

Over the years I’ve come to understand that some of you want to be lied to. In October some VDARE author wrote, “I darned near religiously read David Cole’s column. Then he got into a bad habit of hispandering. The blacks may be bad, but hispanics are fine and dandy.”

Well, murders are way down with blacks gone and replaced on the East/Southside by Mexicans. That’s just a fact. You want me to lie about it? You want a nursery rhyme, you big brave white retard who’s scared of data?

Murder rates aside, my junior high and high schools were just fine. I was happy and popular, voted “best actor” in both yearbooks, never hassled or harassed. I’ve tried to explain it in past columns, but maybe there is no explanation. Maybe my experience was anomalous.

I’ve lived here 56 years, and I loved my black schools. And—also—we’re better off now that blacks have skedaddled. See, life can be contradictory. Say what you will about American blacks, and Lord knows I do, because they’ll shoot you to death over a fender bender or a “hard stare” or cold fries and they’ll drown in a puddle when fleeing the cops, and yeah, L.A. County is better now that Mexicanization on the Eastside and white/Asian/Persian gentrification on the Westside have displaced them, but a scrawny white Joo like me could’ve only found the acceptance and popularity I did in a black school, a school full of verbal extroverts who love caustic insult humor (not that any of them knew what “caustic” means, but they understood it in spirit).

Had I gone to, say, Rudy “Butch” Stanko High in Shitkick, Wyoming, I’d have been surrounded by brutish car-repairing cattle-slaughtering blue-collar white boys who’d have made my life miserable by calling me faggot for my love of musical theater. But black kids? They worship entertainers. Being an entertainer gives one a place of honor in the black community. Can you sing? Dance? Tell “yo mamma” jokes? You’re accepted. And respected.

A black school might be a nightmare for some, but my nightmare would’ve been Stanko High, where I’d have been called queer just because I danced. At my school, that’s the exact thing that made me popular.

At Stanko High, the pretty white girls woulda had a hundred Brad Pitts to blow before they’d even cast a fleeting glance at me crotchwise. But at my black school, the pretty white girls had, well, me. Me and, like, forty other white/Jew boys. We were it; take us or leave us. I scored like a sonofabitch because if you were a white girl who went white, there were only forty of us in a sea of 2,100 Yaphet Kottos. It’s me or LaDante.

And this is something I never quite understood, and something I still don’t fully understand: Among the small collection of white chicks at my schools, some only dated white, while others only dated black. But there were no crossovers. Six years I never saw a single crossover, a white chick who dated white and black. Never happened. The girls made a racial choice, a commitment, and they stayed with it. White or black, but never both.

Damnedest thing. Maybe you can explain it to me. I’d ask Steve Sailer, but as it’s Christmas he’s at the North Pole running tests comparing the IQ of Heat Miser vs. Snow Miser (science demands answers).

My high school girlfriend, a preternaturally perfect blonde, wouldn’t have touched a black boy even if he were some Green Mile cancer-curing magical mega-negro. On the other hand, the stubby little blonde blue-eyed Irish transplant from Waukesha I was gaga over for some bizarre reason would only date blacks. She liked me, and we had many enjoyable nights together, but like a Birmingham water fountain she was coloreds only.

My ex-girlfriend is still one of my best friends, but Waukesha Wendy died of fatness ten years ago, because if there’s one thing black men don’t want their white women to do, it’s slim down.

Sometimes God gives you cold fries because you don’t need any more fries, you fat-ass bitch.

One of the realities of black schools during the early ’80s was that every semester there’d be an LAPD narc in the student body. It came with the territory. The narc would collect data on the dealers, and at semester’s end the cops would descend on the school in Wagner-esque Apocalypse Now style with Chief Daryl Gates riding a battering ram shouting about napalm, and all the kids who’d been ID’d by the narc would be scooped up, lined up, and hauled away.

To be clear, there was just as much drug use at Beverly Hills High, but the BHPD would never do a drug sweep…not with half the parents being attorneys.

In my sophomore year the narc was a black girl, and the arrest sweep happened the day before my theater class was to premiere our production of Dracula.

We lost ten cast members that day. And I, as Van Helsing, had to improvise around the arrested performers. I had lots of fun with that. If you’ve never seen Dracula as a comedy, you’ve missed out.

So the first semester of my senior year, the narc was an unimpressive blonde. She did everything wrong. She was way too obvious about asking Jamaal, “Where the drugs be at, homie?” She wouldn’t kiss any boys. Well, shit, that’s how you know someone’s a narc; they’re a cop, and an adult, so of course they can’t kiss or otherwise sexually interact with a minor.

Pretty girl who asks “where da drugs” but won’t kiss a boy? Might as well tattoo NARC on your forehead.

On the final day of the first semester, the blonde girl was conspicuously absent. And before the gangbangers could say, “Where she at?” the helicopters descended and the cruisers drove in and the LAPD did its sweep and picked up three dozen cracky blackies.

We all wondered, who’ll be the second-semester narc?

And then Chynna Phillips showed up.

I need to word this carefully as I don’t want any defamation claims. What I heard—and this doesn’t mean it happened, it just means it was the school scuttlebutt—was that Phillips had been booted from her ritzy white private school for drug abuse. Kicked out of blue heaven, she had no choice but to finish her senior year in black hell.

And what did she do the moment she arrived? She started asking about procuring drugs, of course.

At a school where several Crip leaders had just been imprisoned courtesy of a blonde narc.

So it’s lunchtime and I’m speaking with my friend Anthony, a Crip captain. A short kid like me, but good with a gun and violent when provoked. His nickname was “Microcrip,” and you’ll think that’s a joke but it’s 100 percent true. And he was my pal.

He tells me that Crip upper management is convinced that the new blonde girl, “Vachynna Phillips,” is another narc. She be askin’ too many questions about product. She be wantin’ to buy too much powder.

And he tells me that the Crips are thinking of “taking her out,” payback to the LAPD after years of humiliating gang sweeps thanks to their female narcs.

And I’m like, “Oh no, Anthony, she’s no narc. That’s Chynna Phillips. Her parents are big wealthy druggie pervert musicians. She’s not asking about drugs because she wants to arrest you. She’s asking about drugs because she wants drugs. Take her money, not her life.”

And what followed was ten minutes of me trying to explain the Mamas & the Papas to a Crip.

“You know, “California Dreamin’”? Call-and-response, “stopped into a choich”?

It took a while, but I finally convinced Anthony that she was on the level.

Funny enough, Anthony did remember “the fat ho that choked on the ham sandwich.” That’s literally the detail that brought him around (fat white women are forever seared into black consciousness). And being a punctilious dick even back then, I had to correct him that just because you die while eating a ham sandwich doesn’t mean the ham sandwich killed you.

It’s a principle I live by to this day.

Plus, I pointed out that the first-semester narc had been a blonde, and the LAPD never repeats the same trick two semesters in a row.

Anyway, I dispelled Anthony’s concerns, and the Crips embraced Phillips. They sold her whatever she wanted to snort up those cruelly flared nostrils of hers, and everyone came away happy.

So yeah, I saved her life. But where’s MY parade? Where’s MY medal? Thinking back, I don’t believe I said a single word to Phillips that entire semester, or she to me. But yeah, I persuaded the Crips to not kill her.

Venmo me $500, Chynna. I’m a banned author; I could use the dough. Or just go to BuyMeABeer.com. Five bucks would be fine too. After all, Christmas is a time of giving.

You’re married to Billy Baldwin, aren’t you?

Shit, maybe I should’ve let the Crips kill you. Woulda been doing you a favor.

Anyway, for the rest of you, as you listen to Wilson Phillips sing “Hey Santa!” on the radio, just remember that we wouldn’t have that coke-nosed incest baby had she been shot in the back of the head in a south-of-Venice-Boulevard crack house in March 1986 because a bunch of ignorant blacks thought she was a narc.

Wilson Phillips would just be the fat one.

Who, ironically, would’ve been feted rather than feared had she attended my high school. A school, perhaps a relic, in which white, black, Jew, and blondie lived in peace. A school in which ham sandwiches never blocked the epiglottides of our fatties and a wealthy cokehead could be saved by a tiny Jew speaking reason to a midget Crip.

May you all find such anomalous joy.

Takimag recently reported on a Bronx-based so-called “Racial Justice Center” that released a handy guide for how to racially ruin Christmas by going around asking intentionally stupid questions like “Why Is Santa Claus Always White?” Naturally, the center in question did not provide the obvious answer: “Because He’s a White Man.”

It can be a dangerous question to ask, though. Back in 2013, students at Indiana University drew festive flak after running a yuletide “Racial Justice” session of their own, creating a wall display, “CAN SANTA CLAUS BE A BLACK MAN?”

Alongside a “stereotypical” image of a black Santa playing a saxophone (not the first stereotype about black people that comes to mind, personally…) were a number of Christmas stockings asking pertinent questions like “If Santa Claus is a black man, wouldn’t all the presents be stolen?” and “If Santa Claus is a black man, would you let him come down your chimney?” Given certain controversial modern-day black-on-white crime patterns across the United States, he might force you to.

A Brown Charlie Christmas
By 2019, the true question had become not “Can Santa Be Black?” but “Can Santa Be White?” A panel discussion about “Decolonizing Pop Culture” at the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle featured a contribution from a black educator named James Miles, who told his audience as follows: “When I go to a mall and I see [a normal] Santa Claus, I say, ‘Hey, cool, look, there’s a white Santa Claus.’ If there’s a black Santa Claus, I just say, ‘Hey, there’s Santa Claus.’” Onlookers often challenge him on this, telling Miles that Santa is white. “No,” Miles then replies, espying a Valuable Opportunity For Public Education. “Santa Claus is whatever I say Santa Claus is.”

At least Miles deigns to recognize Santa as still being a humanoid. A bizarre escapade in 2013 saw an essay published on Slate.com by a coal-black soul named Aisha Harris, who complained that “a melanin-deficient Santa remains the default,” something that had alienated her from the figure since childhood. She proposed a new Christmas movie in which Santa magically race-shifted to match the skin color of every family whose home he entered—Robert De Niro would play white Santa, Eddie Murphy black Santa, and Jackie Chan yellow Santa. No Jewish Santa, of course; too much of an inherited ancestral aversion to chimneys.

Alternatively, “making Santa Claus an animal rather than an old white male could spare millions of non-white kids the insecurity and shame that I remember from childhood,” suggested Harris. Why not have a simultaneously white and black non–homo sapiens Santa called Penguin Claus?

“Being a penguin, Santa Claus can still reside in a snowy homeland—though for scientific accuracy we’ll need to move him from the North Pole to the South,” Harris further clarified. So great was Harris’ own commitment toward “scientific accuracy” that the currently published version of the article features the classic postscript correction that, in its initial publication, its author “originally identified penguins as mammals. They are birds.”

This essay produced a subsequent sudden bloody outburst from then Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who objected to such blatant attempts to skew the “historical” racial record of key festive figures. “Jesus was a white man too,” she said. Only when played by Robert Powell. “[Jesus is] a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa,” Kelly added, so as not to disillusion any watching toddlers, and each “historical figure” was definitely white. Not to everyone these days.

Absent Father Christmas
In 2020, a black Arkansas man named Chris Kennedy awoke appalled one bleak December morn to discover Father Christmas himself had left a “disturbing letter” of complaint in his mailbox after being disgusted by the sight of an eight-foot-tall inflatable Saint Nig outside Chris’ home.

“Please remove your negro Santa,” the “you’ve been naughty” note commanded. “You should not try to deceive children into believing that I am a negro. I am a Caucasian (white man to you) and have been for 600 years. You being jealous of my race is no excuse for your dishonesty.” The message concluded with Santa telling Kennedy’s family to move out of town “with the rest of your racist kind.”

Such plain statements of folkloric fact made Kennedy “extremely angry.” Making sure to address attendant media outlets whilst wearing a big T-shirt reading “BLACK FATHER” accompanied by a cartoon image of a trophy cup, as if black men somehow deserve a prize for looking after their own children, Kennedy refused to deflate his blow-up blackface doll.

Once news broke, final proof Kennedy lived in an evil, white supremacist neighborhood was provided by the fact that many of his white neighbors quickly and slavishly rallied round by running out and buying their own black Santas to pump up in their front yards too, in pure BLM-mandated solidarity. Remind me, who’s meant to be suffering endlessly in the position of severe racial oppression each Christmastime here again?

Insanity Claus
In 2016, Minnesota’s Mall of America decided to employ its first-ever black Santa to pander toward the formerly arch-Scandinavian state’s recently defiled demographics, in the shaded shape of a retired U.S. Army veteran named Larry Jefferson. He even grew a big beard for the occasion, rather than just strapping on a fake one—at least that particular part of his physiognomy was still white.

Speaking to the media, the admittedly highly avuncular-looking Larry was full of color-blind spiel about how “We want Santa to be for everyone, period,” as “kids don’t even notice” his race, and therefore “I’m still Santa, I just happen to be a Santa of color.” But if that’s really so, then why were the press making such a big thing about his chocolaty skin tone? If Santa’s race is a matter of absolutely zero importance, why not just leave him as being white, like he always has been?

So many white people made similar observations that the Mall of America had to temporarily close down their social media comments feed. “Santa is NOT black!! That is a nasty lie and a horrible thing to subject children to!” typed one. “I bet he climbs down chimneys and steals people’s presents,” said another, probably a recent graduate of Indiana University.

Another commenter called Larry’s hiring “an atrocity” as “blacks [ate] each other in Africa,” possibly even with sprouts for their Christmas dinner. A user named “Viper Duck” quacked out his rather extreme opinion that now that there was “nothing too sacred to muddy up” with negroid-ness, not even Santa Claus, only “Black genocide will fix the problem.” Don’t put that on your list to Santa, Viper, it could technically be considered a hate crime.

Even effete Japanese Star Trek actor George Takei got in on the act, tweeting out self-righteously that he was enjoying “Watching [white] people meltdown over a Black Santa in the Mall of America [screaming] “Santa is white!” Well, in our [WWII-era US] internment camp he was Asian. So there!”

What color was Santa in actual Imperial Japanese WWII-era internment camps, when he was busy handing out enslaved white inmates a single extra grain of rice in their Christmas Day rations, I wonder? As yellow as pissed-on snow.

Bing Crosby or Bill Cosby?
Black Santa dates back at least to the 1960s and ’70s, when U.S. black radical groups in places like Chicago held “Black Christmas” Kwanzaa-type parades in which a black Santa waved to kids in order to, as The Washington Post put it in BLM-crazy 2020, rally against “the specter of White Santa Claus…[who was] just another example of White cultural hegemony and the psychological harm inflicted upon Black people, and in particular Black children, in a society shaped by White social attitudes and expectations.”

Black children could not possibly experience any “psychological harm” from special 1960s Black Power Christmas card illustrations like this one depicting small negro kids killing a white “Pig Santa” coming down their chimney one December 24 by shooting, stabbing, and beating Porky to death with an actual dwarf Christmas tree, all accompanied by the very merry yuletide message “WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE [WHITE] CAPITALISTS OF OUR BLACK COMMUNITY.”

Nor could America’s impressionable black youth ever conceivably be groomed to grow up racially disturbed by being forced to attend events like the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s MLK-memorializing “Dr. King’s First Annual Black Xmas” parade held in Chicago in 1968. Here, local Afros were urged to “do their Christmas shopping with black businesses,” which is really just a polite way of avoiding openly saying “race-boycott all the thieving honkies, kikes, and slitty-eyes.”

Jackson denied the traditional term “White Christmas” had anything to do with snow at all. Jackson thought the song’s title was just a subliminal reference to the holiday secretly being a capitalism-led “white holy day set aside for whites” who “profit from it” by causing black customers to become “locked out of their mobility by being imprisoned with 11 months of debts” to pay for all their needlessly expensive presents. If that really is the case, then it implies Jackson patronizingly believes all blacks to be helpless infants with zero impulse control who shouldn’t be allowed any agency over their own bank accounts. Jackson’s son certainly shouldn’t, but that’s another matter.

The Reverend Jackson’s parade featured a candy-distributing black Santa dressed in a dashiki in the colors of the Ghanaian flag and a black glove in support of the Olympic “Black Power” Schwarze Heil saluters of earlier that same year. He was further carrying a sack bearing the Motown-style legend “Soul Power” and even a bunch of “love beads,” just to keep the local queer crowd happy, no doubt.

Rudolf the Brown-Hat Reindeer
Speaking of which, inevitably, there is now a gay black Santa available to corrupt little kids’ minds today too, in the shape of a 2017 children’s book, Santa’s Husband, by comedy writer (well, he pens material for Stephen Colbert, anyway) Daniel Kibblesmith. Here, Santa is a happy ho-ho-homo, married to a black male look-alike of himself who stands in for him at public events when he has to attend clinic for his latest dose of antiretrovirals.

The book started as a joke in response to the Mall of America controversy and Megyn Kelly’s open proclamation Santa was an Aryan just like Jesus, but then became real, published by no less than HarperCollins.

“We were very careful not to have anything offensive in the book,” Kibblesmith promised, following publication. “The only way you can find the book offensive is if you find the premise offensive.” I think that might be what you call a tautology.

If you saw any problem with a gay black Santa, added Kibblesmith, “we see [that] as maybe a problem with the reader,” not the book. Clearly, the true purpose of the text, besides introducing children into Queer Race Marxism, was just to troll white conservatives. Mission successful! My favorite outraged online response was as follows: “Two men fucking each other in the ass doesn’t make for a good Christmas story.” It might have improved Love Actually.

We shall continue this very theme next week, when we explore the sad, pink, chimney-pumping world of Queer Santa.

The Week’s Most Mingling, Singling, and Kris Kringling Headlines

A DINGBAT ATE ME BABY
Remember the good old days when Australians and New Zealanders were thought of as rugged individualists?

And then came Covid and we saw that those pathetic wimps were all flex and no muscle. Lockdowns, compliance, cops beating anyone who refused the vax, all under the watchful sunken eyes of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, a literal skeleton. Hunted mercilessly by He-Man, Ardern could never set foot in a university because she’d be forcibly returned to the anatomy lab.

So now, in an attempt to further humiliate itself on the world stage, NZ has decided to reverse its visa ban on Candace Owens, declaring that her warnings about Jews drinking the blood of Christian babies are “important to free speech.”

Australia’s Owens ban remains in place for the moment, but only because when Owens held up the bris knife she claims Jews use to exsanguinate children, Paul Hogan said, “That’s not a knife…THIS is a knife!”

A-list director Peter Jackson, born in Pukerua, New Zealand (yes, their main bay is called Puke-a-rua, and doesn’t that make you want to swim there?), agrees that it’s important to spread warnings about Jews eating babies. “When I started shooting Lord of the Rings, we were actually going to use children as hobbits,” Jackson told the Vegemite Daily (Australasia’s No. 1 newspaper), “but the Jewish studio execs kept eating them.”

“Runaway production” from Hollywood contributes several billion dollars a year to New Zealand’s economy. So it’s a really smart move to piss off Jews.

As for Owens, word is she might decide to permanently relocate to the region, where the prehistoric subhuman Papuans need someone even they can look down on as retarded.

LUIGI, LUIGI, YOU BREAK-A MY HEALTH CARE!
Long before the name Luigi became a laughingstock thanks to the Mario videogames, the 1978 Chevy Chase/Goldie Hawn movie Foul Play featured a scene in which the two leads, racing through San Francisco to stop an assassination, crash into a restaurant called Luigi’s Pizza Palace. As the building shatters and patrons run for safety, Luigi comes running from the kitchen screaming, “LUIGI! LUIGI! You break-a my ristorante! LUIGI! LUIGI!” Chase gives Luigi a phone to call the cops, and Luigi screams into the receiver, “LUIGI! LUIGI!”

It makes zero sense why Luigi is screaming his own name. In any other context, that scene wouldn’t be funny at all. Imagine Steve Sailer in a fender-bender getting out of his car yelling, “STEVE! STEVE! My car is damaged. STEVE! STEVE!”

Definitely not funny. Disturbing, actually. The Foul Play scene only works because Americans find the name Luigi hilarious. And if you’re an American and you name your child Luigi, people will find him hilarious. Even if he murders a health-care exec.

And in fact, Brian Thompson’s assassin Luigi Mangione was only caught because after the shooting he ran through Manhattan screaming, “LUIGI! LUIGI! I break-a Brian Thompson’s pulmonary trunk. LUIGI! LUIGI!”

Last week GoFundMe pulled a fundraiser for Luigi, as it violated the ToS regarding raising money for criminal acts. So of course MAGA crowdfunding site GiveSendGo stepped in, raising nearly $100,000 in one day to pay for the defense of an assassin, as every blue-collar white who voted for Trump last month in the hope that MAGA could curb its insanity at least until the inauguration bowed his head in defeat and silently murmured, “Oh, shit.”

Meanwhile, far-left pseudo-journalist Taylor Lorenz, who calls herself a millennial not because she’s part of that generation but because she’s roughly one thousand years old, is in hot water for expressing “joy” at Thompson’s killing. Lorenz, who lost out on the role of the old lady from Titanic because she was considered too aged for the part, is now using her allies at Wikipedia to keep any mention of the “joy” incident off her Wiki page (see the debate here).

Lorenz claims she was not actually cheering the execution but the “attention” it brought to the health-care system. And to her credit, she did quickly condemn President Garfield’s assassination, which she witnessed firsthand.

She was even more forgiving of the Ramesses III assassination, which she took part in while screaming, “LORENZI! LORENZI! You break-a my harem! LORENZI! LORENZI!”

RED STATE OF SHAME
With Disney conceding defeat in the culture war by removing a tranny subplot from an upcoming animated film while admitting that such issues are better left out of children’s movies, indicating that the bluest of blue corporations has finally gotten the message about “trans acceptance,” perhaps it’s time to look at how “red states” are handling the issue.

Remember when John Mellencamp declared himself a socialist and endorsed Obama?

Well, I was born in a small town,
Free-market scorn in a small town,
Your pay is shorn in a small town,
To fund LaQuesha’s next bay-beeee.

Mr. Mellonhead was speaking of Seymour, Indiana, where he was born and raised.

Yep, good ol’ RED Indiana! Voted GOP in every presidential election but one since 1968.

Indiana…redder than the Injuns it’s named after.

Indiana…using taxpayer dollars to give incarcerated murderers sex-change operations.

In 2002 Jonathan Richardson was sentenced to 55 years for strangling a baby (to be fair, he claimed the baby started it). Then he went trans and changed his name to “Autumn Cordellioné” (because Babestrangle McChokeychild was already taken), suing the state of Indiana to obtain a free dick-lopping. And a District Court judge has ruled that Indiana taxpayers must foot the bill.

Funny enough, Richardson is scheduled to be released in 2026 anyway…

Day off/day served in a small town,
Released with verve in a small town.
Recidivist perv in a small town!,
Hide yo’ kids from freed tra-neeeeee.

…so it’s not clear why he can’t wait twelve months and pay for it himself as a free man.

Oh, right—he gets the same joy making you pay as he did murdering that baby.

(Norm Macdonald voice) That guy’s a real jerk!

Anyway, stick this one in your “Red States will always be safe” file.

Was born a man in a small town,
Wasn’t God’s plan in a small town,
I’m goin’ tran in a small town,
Thanks to all your tax mon-neeeeee!

UFOs AND GUIDOS
UFOs are attacking New Jersey.

MARS NEEDS GABAGOOL!

Mysterious objects sighted in the skies over America’s trashiest state—some say it’s aliens, others say it’s drones. Tucker Carlson, still on the hunt for the demon that molested him, says it’s Satan himself.

And for the sake of accuracy, it should be pointed out that Tucker was likely attacked not by a demon but an owl, as his high-pitched laugh mirrors their mating call.

Still, even leftist newspapers agree that something weird is floating in the skies above the state that’s a boil on the ass of New York. Which itself is a boil on the ass of America. So N.J. is essentially a boil upon a boil.

Is that why aliens are scanning the area? Or could it have something to do with Chris Christie’s gravitational pull?

Some suggest that the objects are drones sent by enemy nations. Russia gathering intelligence by monitoring what the hairiest women on earth are saying about Zelensky.

That Putin…always got his finger on the furry pulse.

Or perhaps it’s China, spying on Italian men who wear gold chains while dressing like pimps, listening to rap, slapping women, and speaking in slang.

Secretary Xi, just because Uyghur is pronounced “weeger” doesn’t mean you have to pester wiggers.

We may never know the answer to the great New Jersey drone scare of 2024. But what we do know is that Candace Owens will blame the Jews.

LICENTIOUS PLATES
Vanity plates? More like “oh-the-humanity” plates.

California has the second-highest number of Jews of any state. New York is first, of course, but the Jewish population there declines daily by being beaten to death on the street by Daquans.

The problem with California is that the state’s government bureaucracy is run by mumbling Third Worlders. Recently a Tesla Cybertruck was seen driving through L.A. sporting the license plate LOLOCT7, which many Jews took to mean LOL (“laugh out loud”) October 7 (the date that, according to the L.A. Times, a bunch of Jewish women raped themselves and framed Hamas).

After photos of the LOLRAPE Cybertruck went viral, the L.A. DMV, aka “the last place where blacks outnumber beans” (“NEXT LINE! This ain’t the right line, suh”), apologized, promising to withdraw the plate.

But wait—turns out the Cybertruck’s owned by a Filipino, and, according to him, “LOLOCT7” has nothing to do with Israel or Hamas. Rather, it has to do with an imbecilic people who have Spanish names but don’t speak Spanish.

Literally, that’s like going to Italy and seeing a hundred morons screeching, “I’m-a Luigi,” but when you try to speak to them in Italian they claim to only speak Bantu.

Even though Filipinos have Spanish names, they speak a chicken-cluck called Tagalog (derived from the local sport of playing tag with pieces of wood. It’s dull to watch, but it still beats golf). Per local news station KTLA: “Lolo means grandfather in Tagalog, CT is short for Cybertruck, and the number 7 represents the owner’s seven children.”

Cased closed. Except that the plates on the Filipino owner’s other cars, “GASJEWS1488,” “KILL6MILKIKES,” and “HITLERROCKS1932,” are a bit harder to excuse.

Apparently, “extermination” is Tagalog for “candy and kittens.”

Thankfully, since nobody in California government speaks English anyway, and no L.A. public school grads know history, the matter was quickly laid to rest.

Flies are like sheep: They seem to follow their leader, without it being clear which of them is their leader. This was my conclusion from watching flies approaching the flypaper I hung in my bedroom recently.

Our house in the country is invaded by insects every year, a different species, or at most two species, taking it in turns, as if by rota. One year it was the turn of Cydalima perspectalis, the box tree moth, which covered the walls as graffiti artists cover concrete. This moth is a species that was introduced, like electric cars, into Europe from China, spread very rapidly, and wiped out Buxus shrubs more thoroughly even than electric cars are wiping out the European car industry.

There are several methods to control this moth, whose population tends to explode when conditions are right. There are chemical insecticides, moth sex hormones that confuse the adult moth worse than contemporary children’s books confuse children about their sexual identity, nematode worms that parasitize the moth, and bacteria that excrete a toxin specially toxic to caterpillars of the species. But as in politics, no victory over the moth is final, and like discredited ideas, it is bound to return in a few years’ time.

This year it has been the flies (again) and the stink bugs. The latter is the brown marmorated stink bug, the scientific name being Halyomorpha halys. This is another import from China, though I hesitate to allege any malicious intent on the part of the CCP. This slow-moving insect aggregates in houses by the hundreds or thousands to escape the winter cold. It flies blindly into things with a characteristic little smacking noise, and its flight emits a buzzing that irritates sensitive persons such as I. Worst, of course, is the smell it emits when frightened, annoyed, or inadvertently squashed. The unpleasant odor it emits can linger; it consists mainly of two aldehydes called trans-2-octenal and trans-2-decenal. These chemicals have been tested for their bactericidal properties, particularly on antibiotic-resistant Staphylococci (a menace in hospitals), so one day Halyomorpha halys may prove to have been a blessing to humanity. For the moment, though, it is a pest, which we control by the advised method, the vacuum cleaner. There are fewer of these insects now, but, like financial scandals, they continue to emerge.

As to the flies, I now understand why for many centuries, indeed for two millennia, people believed in the theory of spontaneous generation, that is to say the theory that life emerges spontaneously from nonliving matter (as, presumably, it must once have done).

However many times I thought that I had cleared the room of flies, they always returned, but I could never find the place from which they emerged. One minute they weren’t there, and the next they were. This was the kind of experience that led the great naturalist Aristotle to conclude that life was spontaneously generated, a belief that Louis Pasteur was concerned to refute more than 2,000 years later. It is salutary to remember that the endurance of a belief is not an infallible guide as to its truth.

I used an old-fashioned method of ridding the room of flies: flypapers. Gone are the days when flypapers containing arsenic were soaked by disgruntled spouses who disposed of their husbands or wives by feeding them the resultant tasteless, odorless solution. Nowadays, they, the flypapers, consist of rosin, the sticky residue of pine resin after evaporation of the resin’s water content, applied to tape. Flies are attracted to rosin, but once they land on it they are trapped physically.

The packaging told me that the flypapers contained no insecticide, and the website of the company that made them claimed that it was “ecoresponsible” and took into account all the environmental, social, economic, and ethical effects of its activities. Naturally, I am not in favor of companies behaving immorally, for example by unmercifully exploiting people or by carelessly polluting the area round their own factories, but I wish we could sometimes have a rest from the epidemic of high-mindedness that afflicts our times and which, by reaction, introduces wicked thoughts into our minds.

Actually, the new flypapers are rather cruel, to flies if not to spouses. They don’t kill the flies directly, but only by exhaustion and inanition. The flies are stuck on the paper until they expire, which as I have observed can take more than 24 hours, even more than 48. I touch their wings or their legs and see them move. I feel a certain pity for them.

I do not want to make myself out to be some kind of benevolent biophilic mystic, a sadhu. While I think that a fly considered individually and close-up is a creature of beauty, in any numbers, they are (to me, at least) repellent. But even when there are many dead flies trapped on the flypaper, I cannot help but think of William Blake’s poem when I focus on one of them:

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art thou not
A man like me?

This, of course, gives rise to an intimation of our mortality and tenuous hold on the thread of life:

For I dance
And drink and sing:
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

Or as the Duke of Gloucester in King Lear puts it, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

Can, or do, flies suffer? Certainly they struggle to free themselves from the flypapers, as if they valued their freedom and their lives, but such behavior could be, and presumably is, purely mechanical, that of mere automata. Curiously, though, when first I hang the flypaper in the room, the flies are wary of it. They approach it and then fly away, and approach it again, and fly away again. They seem to be attracted and wary at the same time. But once one of them is trapped, seemingly by chance, by flying too near the rosin or landing on it, a floodgate is opened, and the pioneer is soon followed by many more.

I suppose you could call the first fly an influencer.

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

If you wanted proof that men are now marginalized, look no further than a question tabled for discussion at next year’s annual U.K. conference of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Would the fellowship consider the creation of a video which is aimed at encouraging Men into AA? This would complement the suite of videos already available for Women, Armed Forces, People of Colour, Bluelight Services and LGBTQIA+.”

When a friend emailed me that, I had to do a double take. How we encourage more men into AA should be a bit like asking how we encourage more men to take an interest in porn, or cars.

Are men now so unmanly they’ve given up on drinking themselves to death, or are a lot of men, while perfectly hard-drinking, now unable to go to AA because AA is so feminine, so woke, and so LGBT-hoo-ha-plus they can’t face it? Or, even worse, are they getting thrown out for upsetting women? Because I certainly have recent experience of witnessing that happening.

It’s interesting that they are capping up the word “Men,” a daring move in itself. I don’t even know if many men with a capital M exist anymore. I think there are a few, but they have to be very careful, as we know, not to go around triggering women by being too Men-like by insinuating they might fancy women or by making a comment to a woman such as “Good morning” or “I like your handbag, my wife has one the same,” as in the case of a recent harassment case in the British fire brigade.

This is not to mention any of the big male music stars in the States right now who are fighting off properly lurid allegations. These A-listers are accused of all sorts of dramatic alleged crimes, whereas in Britain men are now so tame the sexual harassment cases require forensic reading to work out what they might have done to even vaguely upset a woman.

In Britain, it’s gotten to the stage whereby any one-night stand between two randoms, never mind one random and one D-list celebrity, is liable to one day become a front-page harassment case causing shock and awe on social media.

So first off, I’m amazed AA GB has the gall to speak about Men using a capital M, even though it describes women with a capital W and People of Colour all capped up, because that is what you would expect. Women deserve a big W and People of Colour deserve a big P and a big C. Obviously. But do men deserve a big M? I can’t see why, given the alleged horrors they are routinely accused of.

Men, one would assume, ought to be lowercase in order not to upset any female victims (that should probably be Victims) who happen to be reading the question, and who might faint or need a personal injury lawyer if they see the word “Men” written out blatantly proud of itself, just like that, with no regard for all the wonderful brave Survivors out there who can tell a story or two about what Men have done to them. And so on.

But anyway, here we are with this question tabled for discussion at the next AA conference, where there will also be plentiful discussion, I’m assured by my friends in the fellowship, about such things as safeguarding and making everyone feel included and equal, and all that.

Of course, the tabler of the question might be being sarcastic, to make a point. But I’m assured by someone who ought to know that the question is serious and is being taken seriously by the conference organizers.

Men are now so marginalized in our society that it no longer goes without saying that men might be in the majority, numbers-wise, in a self-help group for drunks and dropouts.

Men are now so underrepresented everywhere that they have to be encouraged to come forward to talk about guzzling booze and being a fuck-up.

They now need special measures to make them feel welcome in a grimy old back room of a church serving stewed coffee and stale biscuits where they can go to share about spending all their money on gambling, prostitutes, and whiskey, and the fact their wife has left them.

And I suspect that they need reassurance they are still welcome in these grimy old rooms for good reason.

I first noticed AA was rather full of women of a certain kind about ten years ago when I moved from London to Surrey and came across a genteel sort of AA meeting where the ladies who lunch were more than well represented.

You had to mind your p’s and q’s at those meetings—a memo went out asking people not to use bad language—and it was not long before I noticed that they really didn’t like men. They especially disliked rough, working-class men, and those who had been criminals, which was unfortunate because AA traditionally helped quite a lot of those, and indeed it goes into prisons to encourage inmates to go to meetings when they are released.

I wrote a lot of articles about the AA ladies who lunch banning one convicted felon they took a particular dislike to, even though I witnessed him doing not much in meetings he was excluded from, along with much hysteria about what a man of his type might do if left unchallenged. It was all very Minority Report, crossed with that armchair social media sleuth spirit that pervades our society now whereby a load of busybodies with nothing better to do decide to investigate, try, and convict someone they don’t like the look of—usually a man—instead of calling the police to report their barking mad suspicions.

I felt at the time, as I do now, that the feminization of recovery was not going to be a good thing for low-bottom drunks for whom AA meetings are arguably the last-chance saloon. The men who need help most, it seems to me, might not be welcome there for much longer if many more ladies come to talk about having one too many glasses of sparkling wine and, usually, their daddy issues.

This situation is very unfair, because these ladies don’t really need AA. A book club would do as well. They need somewhere to have a chin-wag and a good old gossip, is all.

They can probably survive if they don’t go to AA meetings because they’re not drinking themselves to death anytime soon.

The low-bottom male drunks (together with a more desperate class of female drunk who is not picky about whom she sits next to) really are going to drink themselves to death without intervention.

And added to that, they’re probably at some risk of harming someone, not least a woman, if they don’t stay sober.

So the stakes are much higher if you throw those men out, than if you risk losing a few female wine guzzlers who want to talk about how their father never really loved them, or how their mother annoys them, or how their kids aren’t doing so well at school, or how their husband keeps leaving the loo seat up, and so on.

Let them walk out if they don’t like sitting next to a convicted felon, I say, because they’re not the ones who really need this. And they’re not the ones who are going to harm society if they don’t get with the program.

But this isn’t the view of the AA top brass, and whenever I write to complain about the issue of banning male former criminals they always emphasize their commitment to safeguarding women, even at the expense of being unfair to desperately unwell men.

Naturally they take this view. Every area of our society has become more and more feminized, from schools to the jobs market to sports, with the impact on men and boys well-documented.

But what happens when women even invade the spaces where desperate men go once they’ve hit bottom, ironically to get help with the very issues this new feminine society of ours is demanding they stop having?

When even AA meetings become places where men can’t swear, where they can’t speak openly about crime or drug use, or about the very behavior they want to address by getting sober, lest they upset women by describing it, then we are at risk of depriving men of the one last place they can vocalize what’s eating them and where they can attempt to become the better version of themselves that our intolerant society demands.

I’ve seen men criticized in AA rooms for rude and risqué jokes. I’ve seen them admonished for triggering women by talking openly about their anger issues.

At one meeting in South London, I heard a guy share, figuratively speaking, about feeling like he wanted to kill his brother’s wife because she had ruined him, but he quickly concluded that he would not harm her, of course, because he was now on the straight and narrow, and he said he was glad to be sober so he didn’t hurt people anymore.

This used to be a fairly standard sort of AA share. But a young girl with a punk hairdo shared after him that she now felt triggered by listening to a man voicing violent intent toward women. And she asked the secretary to do something about it.

Thankfully on that occasion the secretary decided to ignore the woman’s complaint. But this is not the trend.

The trend goes relentlessly all the way down the same route it always goes: Men get hounded for being men. Men get hounded for even vocalizing what it sometimes means to be a man, and to try to be a better man.

And so there are more and more examples coming to light of men being banned from AA groups in Britain.

This AA conference can ask the question about male representation all it wants, and it can approve the production of a special video aimed at encouraging men to go to meetings. Or even Men.

But what will the video show, exactly? Perhaps a man sitting mute and compliant, neutered as a dog in his seat, listening patiently and nodding sympathetically while the women share about their daddy issues and how much they hate men, before standing up and saying, “My name’s Steve and I’m an alcoholic, and I’m also a man, for which I unreservedly apologize.”

It was nice to see Crystal Mangum, victim of the nonexistent gang rape by Duke lacrosse players in 2006, admit last week that it was all a fake-out. Many of you were happy, though bored, and moved on. But cruel people like me aren’t ready to move on.

The Duke lacrosse case was the ne plus ultra of the media’s anti-white hate. Lacrosse is the oldest team sport in America (apart from scalping and human sacrifice) now played by mostly white, preppie, upper-middle-class kids. So when Mangum claimed she’d been gang-raped, beaten, kicked and strangled by members of the Duke lacrosse team after being hired as a stripper, the media thought it was Christmas Day.

In lieu of reporting, news reports were bristling with references to “frat boys,” “entitled,” someone’s “daddy,” “white male privilege,” “the patriarchy” and — of course — “slave masters.” (“The tangled American opera of race, sex and privilege” — in the deathless prose of New York Times reporter Duff Wilson.)

Mangum’s credibility was not exactly bulletproof. A year earlier, she’d been hospitalized for psychiatric problems; she was on antidepressants, in addition to having a serious drinking problem; and she once pleaded guilty after trying to run over a police officer with a taxicab she’d just stolen. This also wasn’t the first time she’d claimed to have been gang-raped by three men. Even her father said the previous allegation was false.

Moreover, her claims about the lacrosse players were really a kaleidoscope of stories. First, she insisted she hadn’t been raped at all, and then she said she’d been raped, but the number of rapists kept changing (20, five, four, three or two, before she finally settled on three), as did the number of orifices that had been raped.

None of the doctors and nurses who examined Mangum found any physical evidence that she’d been raped, much less violently gang-raped in a small bathroom. Even when given an absurd and unconstitutional photo “lineup” of only team members (no wrong answers!), her description of the rapists was so at variance with the actual players that some speculate she was trying to hit the eject button on the whole case. But District Attorney Mike Nifong wouldn’t let her.

After a year of Nifong torturing the “suspects” (with the enthusiastic participation of Duke University) — putting them in handcuffs for the cameras, lying about their cooperation, hiding the DNA evidence clearing them — then-North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper took over the case, dismissed all charges, and took the highly unusual step of declaring the players, “innocent.” DA Nifong was removed, disbarred and jailed.

Why would any prosecutor so maniacally pursue trumped up charges, in open defiance of the evidence? It seems that Nifong was up for reelection and was trying to impress his black constituents. As Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson put it in their excellent book on the case, “Until Proven Innocent”: “Black leaders and voters made it clear that his only chance of winning the primary was … by indicting lacrosse players for a rape that he must have known they did not commit.”

I note at this juncture that there is no jurisdiction in the country where a prosecutor could impress white constituents by railroading innocent black men.

In a surprise development, The New York Times reported the case honestly at first, with Joe Drape talking to both sides, the prosecution AND the defense. Unfortunately, any actual reporting inevitably cast doubt on the state’s case. So Drape was promptly yanked off the story, and it was handed to writers who could be counted on to talk only to Nifong.

Times sportswriter Selena Roberts wrote an entire column premised on Nifong’s easily disproved claim that the athletes had refused to cooperate. In her first column on the case on March 31, 2006, Roberts wrote: “Players have been forced to give up their DNA, but to the dismay of investigators, none have come forward to reveal an eyewitness account.”

In fact, the accused immediately gave statements to the police of their own free will — without counsel present — and eagerly provided their DNA, blood and saliva samples, knowing it would prove them innocent (which it did … to no effect).

The Times had to issue a correction to Roberts’ claim.

But Roberts burbled on, comparing the lacrosse team to “drug dealers and gang members engaged in an anti-snitch campaign,” accusing them of being “roped off from the norms of decent behavior,” and abiding by “the Vegas rule of ‘what goes on here, stays here.'”

Appalled by the players’ supposed lack of cooperation, Roberts turned, naturally, to a women’s study professor, Katie Gentile at John Jay College. Based on her extensive research, Gentile explained to Times readers that, for male athletes, “your self-esteem is more valuable to you than someone else’s life.”

Someone else’s life?

The only lives that were nearly destroyed here were those of the accused lacrosse players. Give me any reason why — it doesn’t even have to be true, just a reason — other than that they were white men.

This is my last week in the Bagel and things are looking up. For some of us, that is; for others it’s despair time. No use beating around the bush: Israel has won big-time, Iran has lost big, and the Palestinians are back to ground zero, with nothing to look forward to except more deaths, more land grabs by Israeli settlers, and more crushing and brutal retaliation by Israel at the slightest indication of civil disobedience. A two-state solution is now a mirage of a Thousand and One Nights.

Let’s take it one at a time: Tehran gambled and lost. Its proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah have been downgraded to zero, while its ally Syria is now a country about to disappear as the ancient nation it once was. It will most likely break up into three parts, the Kurds hopefully holding their own against the powerful Turks who control the northern part.

Israel now owns Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. It has totally downgraded any Syrian weapons the rebel groups that overthrew Assad might have inherited and used against the state of Israel. The only danger to Israel now is the vacuum created by the Assad fall, one that Netanyahu will play to the hilt. Over 350 air attacks on Syrian sites by the Israelis have taken place since the departure of Assad.

Iran is now the next Israeli enemy to probably go down the so-called Swanee. As a friendly to Israel, Trump is not getting involved. Turkey is poised to see its influence expand, and Tehran is Netanyahu’s next natural target. The Gulf monarchies will turn a blind eye if Israel decides to turn Syria into another Gaza, making Alawite and Christian minorities in Syria an endangered species. Wealthy Gulf monarchies stand to gain a lot as Sunni power is on the rise, while Shiite strength is at an all-time low. Israel is now all-conquering. If Israel had the man power, it would take over Syria, but it does not. The Golan Heights will suffice.

Who would have thought that while the genocide—there is no other word to describe the 50,000 deaths of innocent Palestinian women, children, and old people (not including 17,000 or so Hamas fighters)—was going on that Iran would be turned into a pathetic third-rate mini-power overnight by Israeli bombs? Tehran’s missiles and offensive capabilities no longer exist, and the mullahs could be next. This is the $64,000 question. Where and when will it stop?

Since I began my journalistic career in the Middle East, mainly reporting from Jordan and Israel, I have fervently believed that one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies, which continues well into the 21st century, is that of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, I cannot put all the blame on Israeli hard-liners. In the late ’90s Prime Minister and General Rabin had offered Palestinian leader Arafat—this you won’t believe, but it is 100 percent true—a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem, 96 percent of the West Bank, and 4 percent of Israel, to make up for the 4 percent that the settlers had occupied beyond the borders in the ’67 war. And guess what? Arafat turned it down, confirming what ex–Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban had said long ago, that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Just think where the Palestinians would be today—they are the smartest and most secular of Arabs—if Rabin had not been assassinated by an Israeli right-wing settler, and if Arafat had not been so mind-bogglingly obtuse. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to solve the great tragedy of Palestine, and the Palestinian leader walked away. Twenty-five years later the Palestinian cause is lost. Netanyahu is a brutal Zionist who sees the Palestinians not unlike the way Hitler viewed the Jews. Anyone who doesn’t agree with him is an anti-Semite, and his Jewish followers in America have made that clear: You’re either on Israel’s side or you’re Hitler. I should know. Ever since my youth, and because of my pro-Palestinian stance, I’ve been slandered as an anti-Semite. I have always refused to explain or complain about this lie, in fact my standard answer to the vile accusation is that some of my richest friends are Jews. So you can imagine what the haters do with that response. Ironically, my closest friend is half-Jewish and he’s poor. This week a pro-Palestine demonstration by students in the Bagel was headlined as a “Festival of Jew Hatred.” It was nothing of the sort, but Bagel Jews have been known to cry wolf at times.

The coming Trump administration will now try to bring Saudi Arabia around to adopting Bibi as a close ally and friend. Words uttered by Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi ruler, about the kingdom never ceasing its tireless efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state should be taken at face value—the last time a Saudi told the truth was when Faisal as king admitted parts of his kingdom were sandy. I say good luck to those that believe the Saudis will stand tall for the Palestinians. The Saudi-Gulf-Israel alliance is only a matter of time. What is not a matter of time is the permanence of land theft, the mass expulsions, the imprisonments, and the occupation of Palestine by brutal Jewish settlers.

Having said all that, the only thing left to do is wish all Takimag readers the happiest of Christmases, and a very long and happy life. And thank you for reading us.

---