Normally I wouldn”t subject you to two columns in a row about Canadian goings-on, but I see my new topic has already been deemed worthy of attention here, at “The Week That Perished.”
“Canada Proposes Imprisonment for Anti-Tranny “Hate Speech”” topped the list:
Trudeau is pushing a bill that would protect Canada’s eternally vulnerable transgender community by sending offenders to prison for up to two years if they dare commit the unpardonable sin of uttering “anti-transgender speech.”
(And before you scroll down to the comments to lecture me on your clearly overrated First Amendment, American readers should bear in mind that New York state, for one, already has similar laws on the books, and they carry fines of up to $250,000. And this Oregon “transmasculine” teacher got $60,000 because her colleagues wouldn”t refer to “it” as “they.”)
No, the Canadian law hasn”t been passed yet, but Trudeau’s Liberals have a majority in Parliament, so they can theoretically shove through any law they want to. The Grits” priorities are weed, “green” bullshit, assisted suicide, and, well, another kind of “assisted suicide”: fighting on the “Allies“ side in “World War T.” When it comes to chicks with dicks, the Libs are determined to dress on the right (that is, left) side of history.
(Then again, so are the Conservatives. At their convention last weekend, the party voted overwhelmingly to drop their official opposition to gay “marriage,” quoting”apparently without irony”their former nemesis PM Pierre Trudeau’s maxim that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”)
More proof that we normals are losing this fight? Trannies are rewriting not just the laws of the nation(s) but of politics and other facets of society. You know the old saw about “a dead girl or a live boy”? Well, as Gavin McInnes reported here, the guy behind the North Carolina bathroom bill is a registered sex offender who “fondled a 15-year-old boy when he was 20.” And…Bruce Springsteen and his fellow state-boycotters either haven”t heard or don”t care.
A few leftists break rank and declare their exasperation with all things “trans.” Articles like “My Dad Was Transgender. Why I Still Think Gender Can”t Be Changed” appear with semi-regularity. Activists admit they”ve been pulling our every remaining dangling appendage this whole time:
“We know trans people are one of the most targeted groups. And they experience violence at a much higher rate than other people,” he said.
“But because we don”t collect data, we don”t collect information on these circumstances, it makes it difficult to put in place any programming or training for police or communities that address these crimes.”
None of that matters.
Instead, Canada’s largest newspaper, and one major private broadcaster, have recently been celebrating this “transgendered dad” (and longtime human toothache) who “breastfeeds.” If you”ve got a dodgy gag reflex, you”d best skip over the “how,” although listening to the anchor declare, “It’s a wonderful story and I appreciate you coming on and telling us about it,” is just about as puke-inducing.
Soon we”ll all be obligated by law to say and think the same thing”or else. I choose door No. 2.
I”ve said for years that transsexuals are delusional amputation fetishists, and way too many are manipulative narcissistic bullies and liars, and often prone to violence.
That if they really do commit suicide in epidemic numbers, that’s because, well, they”re clearly insane.
Trannies were cute and funny when they were in movies once in a while”hell, I actually watch The Prancing Elites sometimes, because (I dare you) it’s kind of hard not to”but now they”re everywhere, and I”m sick of them.
I”d compare trannies to kudzu, but kudzu turns out to be mostly a rural legend, whereas trannies are a for-real creeping menace, spreading mendacity and extortion across the land and costing taxpayers untold millions.
In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union—in terms Americans can understand.
Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in Panama, with power to impose laws on the United States, and a high court whose decisions overruled those of the U.S. Supreme Court?
Would you accept an American Union that granted all the peoples of Central and South America and Mexico the right to move to, work in, and live in any U.S. state or city, and receive all the taxpayer-provided benefits that U.S. citizens receive?
This is what we are subjected to under the EU, said Grayling.
And as you Americans would never cede your sovereignty or independence to such an overlord regime, why should we?
Downing Street’s reply: Prime Minister David Cameron says leaving the EU could cost Britain a lot of money and a loss of influence in Brussels.
The heart versus the wallet. Freedom versus security.
While Barack Obama, Cameron and Angela Merkel are pulling for Britain to vote to remain in the EU, across Europe, transnationalism is in retreat, and tribalism is rising.
As Britain’s Independence Party and half the Tory Party seek to secede from the EU, the Scottish National Party is preparing a new referendum to bring about Scotland’s secession.
The strongest party in France is the National Front of Marine Le Pen. In Austria’s presidential election, Norbert Hofer of Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party came within an eyelash of becoming the first European nationalist head of state since World War II.
The Euroskeptic Law and Justice Party is in power in Warsaw, as is the Fidesz Party of Viktor Orban in Budapest, and the Swiss People’s Party in Bern. The right-wing Sweden Democrats and Danish People’s Party are growing stronger.
In 2015, Merkel, Time’s Person of the Year, admitted a million Middle East refugees. This year, Merkel flipped and paid a huge bribe to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to keep Syrian refugees from crossing the Aegean to the Greek islands and thence into Europe.
In Germany, too, nationalism is resurgent as opposition grows to any new bailouts of the La Dolce Vita nations of Club Med. The populist AfD party has made major strides in German state elections.
While the rightist parties in power and reaching for power are anti-EU, anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant, the secessionist movements roiling Scotland, Spain, Belgium and Italy seek rather the breakup of the old nations of Europe along ethnonational lines.
By enlisting in these parties of the right, what are the peoples of Europe recoiling from and rebelling against? Answer: The beau ideal of progressives—societies and nations that are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual.
Across Europe, the tribalists are rejecting, in a word, diversity.
And what are they seeking?
God-and-country, blood-and-soil people, they want to live with their own kinfolk, their own kind. They do not believe in economics uber alles. And if democracy will not deliver the kind of country and society they wish to live in, then democracy must be trumped by direct action, by secession.
This is the spirit behind Brexit.
The is the spirit that drove the Irish patriots of 1919, who rose against British rule, though they were departing the greatest empire on earth in its moment of supreme glory after the Great War, to begin life among the smallest and poorest countries in all of Europe.
What is happening in Europe today was predictable and predicted.
A horrifyingly racist Chinese detergent commercial threatens to drive even deeper wedges between the black and Asian communities, further impeding their righteous mission of uniting as people of color toward their natural common enemy”namely, the white community.
In what is being billed as “The most racist Chinese laundry detergent commercial you’ll see all year,” a black man toting a paintbrush and paint bucket with his face and shirt smeared with fresh paint wanders into a room to discover a sultry Chinese woman motioning for him to come hither. As he leans in for a kiss, she jams a detergent packet in his mouth, shoves him into the washing machine, and sits atop it gleefully while he screams in pain. She then appears spellbound as a gleamingly light-skinned Asian male emerges from the washing machine, cleansed of all his blackness.
CNN called the commercial “staggeringly offensive.” You should watch it. It’s pretty cool.
It is also an obvious inverted parody of a notorious Italian detergent cuckmercial from about a decade ago in which a white woman shoves her scrawny, tighty-whitey-wearing would-be Italian suitor into a washing machine, which magically transforms him into a grinning black male who flexes his muscles alongside the tagline “Coloured is better.”
But since white people are by definition in a position of power, it is impossible for laundry detergent commercials to be racist against them. Instead we must focus on this Chinese commercial and its unfortunate, troubling, problematic, and unacceptable equation of blackness with dirt and filth and ca-ca and huge, obvious, unavoidable skid marks.
The sad and sobering truth is that the Asian community and the black community have a long and nauseating history of being racist toward one another”which, as I’ve noted, impedes their ability to unite and be racist toward white people.
In the 1980s, the suicidally infertile island nation of Japan was rocked by a pair of scandals in which senior officials said hurtful things about American blacks that seemed designed to damage their self-esteem, cause them to score lower on IQ tests, and then get sucked up in the toxic undertow of the school-to-prison pipeline. In one case, a leader of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party said that American blacks intentionally go bankrupt in order to avoid paying their debts.
And Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone wound up apologizing profusely for the following comments he’d made in a televised speech:
The level of Japanese society far surpasses that of the United States. There are many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in the United States whose average level is extremely low.
Due to difficulties in translating Nakasone’s comments directly into English, he could have either been saying that blacks and browns have “extremely low” intelligence levels or literacy levels, not that it matters too much. And even though blacks and browns do have lower average literacy rates and lower average scores on standardized intelligence tests than whites and yellows, Mr. Nakasone was right to apologize for his hurtful comments because, it cannot be stressed enough, it causes the sort of resentment between Asians and blacks that will eventually serve as an obstacle toward their greater mission of resenting whites together.
Last year, a member of the Pakistani parliament helped further damage Asian/black relations when he uttered the following unforgivable statements after visiting the Congo:
Our army has gone there (Africa) to civilize those black people. I am sure they will accomplish the task….People there are yet to become civilized. They take bath [sic] every 15 days. After applying soaps before bath, they do not even use water in a bid to retain the aroma.
As if that’s not sufficiently horrifying and terrifying, there’s “Darkie Toothpaste,” which dominated the Chinese dental-hygiene market for half a century. Originally packaged with a caricature of a bug-eyed Louis Armstrong-looking servile “coon” character wearing a top hat, Darkie was sold for decades until someone complained, whereupon the manufacturers changed the brand name to “Darlie” and replaced the coon logo with what appears to be a white vaudevillian in blackface, as if that’s supposed to be better. (In Japan, Darkie was briefly marketed as “Mouth Jazz.”) Because of its scope and duration, Darkie Toothpaste represents a historical anti-black macroaggression of the highest order”it would not be unfair to refer to it as the Holocaust of Dental Hygiene Marketing.
The Week’s Most Agitated, Denigrated, and Constipated Headlines
CANADA PROPOSES IMPRISONMENT FOR ANTI-TRANNY “HATE SPEECH”
Canada is a giant nation just north of the USA that sprawls the North American continent east-to-west. But very few people pay attention to Canada, largely because it is bland and uninteresting. Most of what passes for “public discourse” in that frozen, barren cultural wasteland consists of barely concealed rage and jealousy that the USA gets all the attention.
At any given moment, Canada is also about 15 years ahead of the USA down the murderous path of instituting Cultural Marxism as a state religion that must not be transgressed under penalty of death. White Canucks are leaping and galloping their way toward being the most genetically constipated and proudly ethnomasochistic white liberals on God’s green earth.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mother had sex with members of The Rolling Stones, most likely without condoms. In his quest to be even cooler than his mom, Trudeau is pushing a bill that would protect Canada’s eternally vulnerable transgender community by sending offenders to prison for up to two years if they dare commit the unpardonable sin of uttering “anti-transgender speech.”
In a gesture of solidarity with homos, trannies, and bisexual weirdo perverts, Trudeau recently issued a statement to commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia:
As a society, we have taken many important steps toward recognizing and protecting the legal rights for the LGBTQ2 community….There remains much to be done, though. Far too many people still face harassment, discrimination, and violence for being who they are. This is unacceptable….To do its part, the Government of Canada today will introduce legislation that will help ensure transgender and other gender-diverse people can live according to their gender identity, free from discrimination, and protected from hate propaganda and hate crimes.
“LGBTQ2”? What is that, a sequel? Or is that some new gay molecule or something? Under this new law, will you go to prison for referring to your car’s transmission as a “tranny”? And why would any man in his right mind want to wear a dress in Canada? It’s way too cold!
Way down South, those wascally wabbits in the Ku Klux Klan stand accused of spreading anti-tranny fliers in bathrooms throughout Alabama and Mississippi.
Here is the text of the flier, reprinted unchanged:
TRANSGENDER
is an abomination according to the Kings James BibleDeuteronomy 22:5
“A woman shall not wear that pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: For all that do are an abomination unto the Lord Thy God.These freaks are jeopardizing the safety of bathrooms all across the nation for our women and children. This needs to STOP
There is no confusion
If you have a PENIS “ Use the MENS ROOM
If you have a VAGINA “ Use the LADIES ROOMif your confused and don”t know what sex you are today
USE A TREE OUT IN THE BACK YARD
In a nation torn asunder by this seemingly trivial issue, leave it to the Klan to offer the reasonable solution.
In an incident that manages to be both comical and poetic, a butch Connecticut woman claims she was “a victim of transphobia” after another woman in a Walmart restroom mistook her for being a male-to-female tranny. According to the square-jawed and wide-shouldered Naugatuck resident Aimee Toms, she was washing her hands in the ladies’ bathroom when another woman approached her shouting, “You’re disgusting!” and “You don’t belong here!”
Because she is clearly not a lonely and attention-seeking narcissist, Toms uploaded a video of herself sharing her traumatic story with the world:
I was a victim of transphobia today as a cisgender female because my hair is short….She thought I was someone who was transgender. She thought I was a dude who was hiding in the women’s bathroom….I”ve had people call me all sorts of names for having short hair. I”ve had people call me a boy, I”ve had people call me a dyke, I”ve had people call me gay….I”m grateful that that woman only called me disgusting and didn”t physically attack me….
You are lucky indeed, Aimee. By the way, have you ever had anyone call you boring?
ADORABLE LESBIAN GORILLAS AND WHY THEY MATTER
“Adorable lesbian gorillas prove that homosexuality is not unnatural,” chirps a dutiful and, like, totally scientific headline in Raw Story. Envisioning a future world in which trans-species acceptance of alternative lifestyles is not only tolerated but celebrated, the article maligns “Anti-LGBT groups and Bible-thumping conservatives” for not realizing that animals engage in same-sex activity throughout all of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The article features a candid photo of two female gorillas who, to be quite frank, aren’t all that adorable. The caption describes the two hairy girls as “engaging in ventro-ventral homosexual mounting” and explains that the “mountee is uttering copulatory vocalizations.”
But this misses a huge point”lesbian gorillas, no matter how loudly they utter copulatory vocalizations, have no concept of being “gay.” They follow no historical narrative that depicts them as an oppressed group that needs to rise up and receive full governmental protections, freedom from persecution, and taxpayer-sponsored condoms for when they choose to engage in ventro-ventral homosexual mounting. When lesbian gorillas have sex, they do it on their own dime.
Our interview with Jesse Hughes from Eagles of Death Metal blew up the Internet this week. I”ve appeared on Greg Gutfeld’s show as well as Red Eye, Dana, The Buck Sexton Show, and even Alex Jones” Infowars. Virtually every major news source has written about it and the American press seems to get it right the most. The New York Post called the PC police “cowards” and asked “who wants to listen only to music that has been OK”d by a bunch of spineless liberals and their culture of censorship?” At the other end of the spectrum we have U.K.’s The Guardian publishing a letter to Jesse from an Arab claiming, “All you fucking bigots and your fairytale shit stories are the problem.” I”ve noticed the Muslims have a very condescending tone when it comes to their religion and usually approach the problem with instructions such as “educate yourself” and “get to know a Muslim.” I”d like to return the favor with a homework assignment for them and insist they look up how many Muslims think suicide bombing is “sometimes or often justified.” You can”t really fault the Muslims for pushing tolerance after an attack like this. Lying is a basic tenet of their religion. What makes my skin crawl is the ethnomasochism of the West.
Jesse Hughes had 89 of his fans murdered by Muslims. Nine were shot right in front of him, including one he was screaming at to get out of the way. A woman’s face was blown off inches from where he was standing and human shrapnel shot into his cheek. He has a scar on his face where a woman’s tooth pierced it. She is now dead and he can say whatever the hell he wants. I don”t care if he thinks Jews are lizard people and the terrorists were actors hired by the Amish Mafia. You get a pass when you”ve been through something like that. Fortunately, the conclusions he’s drawn are not even remotely crazy. Steve Sailer once said, “Political correctness is a war on noticing,” and that’s all Jesse did. He never said anything bad about Muslims. He said he suspects these guys had someone on the inside helping them. He came to this conclusion from some pretty irrefutable truths. First, he recognized one of the shooters from earlier in the day. Anyone who’s been on tour knows how regimented venues are about people being in the club early. Ticket sales are how they make their money and they can”t afford to let people drift in and out without paying. They also have to worry about sound ordinances, so bouncers are Nazis when it comes to keeping the back door closed. On the night of the shooting, the staff couldn”t care less about the door. He also noticed it had been propped open during the shooting. Since our interview, I”ve heard that several bouncers didn”t show up that day and none were killed in the attack. I have no doubt we are about to see arrests involving the staff and Jesse will be vindicated.
He doesn”t seem to want to wait, however, and texted me angrily after the shit hit the fan. He claimed he didn”t know I was recording him. His girlfriend tweeted out a similar sentiment claiming I”m a “douche” who tricked Jesse so I could capitalize on his story. It’s not the first time he’s backtracked on the accusation that some staff were involved. In Rolling Stone he apologized and called his own accusations “baseless.” People who haven”t been through anything close to what Hughes has been through fault him for this and are disappointed he didn”t stick to his guns. I”m not. As I said earlier, he gets a pass. Also, I”ve been through this a hundred times and the PC mob is a very disorienting melee. It’s like the first time you accidentally set off your home alarm and have to try to remember the code while a series of screaming sirens in various patterns shatters your eardrums. Hughes is likely backtracking because the entire band and everyone else who relies on them to pay their bills are being punished monetarily for straying from the narrative. Rock en Seine is a festival just outside of Paris and they canceled their gig with Eagles of Death Metal, claiming they “disagreed” with some of his statements. How the hell do you disagree with observations? Do they disagree that he saw Muslims dancing in the street during the attack? Are they prepared to explain how the gunmen got in the venue? What about when these employees are arrested later? Will we get an apology from the promoters of Rock en Seine? Of course not. Europe is so far gone, men who get raped by refugees are worried about the rapist’s feelings.
I went to France right after the Bataclan attack and spoke to Parisians on the street. Virtually everyone I spoke to was totally oblivious to the threat of Islam and treated the whole thing like it was some random train crash. They”ve gone from tolerance and multiculturalism to self-hatred, and today they would literally rather die than offend anyone, especially Muslims.
I”m confident we can avoid that fate. Yesterday college students carried Milo Yiannopoulos to the stage while chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” Concert promoters in Europe cancel gigs in order to satiate politically correct millennials, but things are changing here. Where offended students used to get safe rooms and sympathy, they are now being derided. When they said seeing “Trump” written in chalk on their school made them feel “traumatized,” we had #TheChalkening where students all over the country wrote “Trump” in chalk all over schools. I don”t even think they were necessarily Trump supporters. They”d just had enough of whiny liberals and their culture of fear. We lost France a long time ago. Britain is on its deathbed. But Eagles of Death Metal are an American band and we don”t tolerate terror over here. We”ve let the multicult run the show for seven years and they failed. It’s time to take our country back and the first step is to stop apologizing.
Let’s face it, sleaze is to professional party-givers what jail is to burglars: an occupational hazard. I’ve been reading about parties in Cannes, described in glowing terms by stars-in-their-eyes hacks who should, but do not, know better. Well, dear readers of Taki’s Magazine, I’m afraid I’ve been there and done it all, and believe you me, “squalor” is the operative word. Obscene publicity-seekers posing as role models, sartorial decay, and a chronic inability to keep their clothes on is the order of the day.
Cannes used to be fun, during the ’50s. Eden Roc, the restaurant and swimming pool of the Hotel du Cap, was terra incognita to the Hollywood crowd. Monsieur Sella, the owner, was an old-fashioned gentleman who disliked actors but allowed Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck to keep a cabana on the premises. After his death and the inevitable sale, the new owners opened the gates to the flamboyant crowd of Cannes, but with caution. Now the place makes Rodeo Drive look like Harold Vanderbilt’s yacht.
The trouble, as always, is money. The Croisette in Cannes during the film-festival fortnight was festooned with studio posters of up-and-coming movies. Now it looks like a catwalk. Luxury houses and megabrands rule the roost—and call the shots. The major studios came to Cannes for international gravitas, spending money to show the world that they produced serious films along with singing cowboys and talking horses. Now Dior and Chopard, Vuitton and Jaeger-LeCoultre are the stars. Branding has become more important than the insatiable hunger for fame and celebrity. A gold Rolex watch is now ubiquitous among the fans crowding the boardwalk in front of the Carlton and Martinez hotels—in fact it has replaced the beret, once the trademark of the French working classes.
Actors have now been turned into pitchmen for high-end products, and everyone’s a salesperson. And the parties, written about in glowing terms by the hacks who know which side their bread is buttered on, are no better. Last time I was there was three years ago, and all I can say is I went to the two that are supposed to be the most exclusive, but I’ve met a better type of person in certain Parisian brothels of the time than in the so-called fabled Hotel du Cap. Sleazy agents and brand salesmen were everywhere, and every single person there was selling something, yours truly being an exception. I didn’t even mention the greatest movie of all time—Seduced and Abandoned, in which I had a tiny part—such was my embarrassment being there.
Never mind. Cannes and the ensuing parties are showplaces for publicity seekers such as Lapo Elkann, or very aging groupies like Jean Pigozzi, to rub elbows with their idols. Most of my idols being soldiers and no longer with us, I have decided to no longer accept invitations to the annual bash, even if my new best friend Harvey Weinstein asks me. The place reeks of squalor and lukatmi, the latter a terminal disease that afflicts millions and can only be cured by nonstop selfies.
Drenched in nostalgia for what films used to be, I nevertheless made an effort on a weekday afternoon to see a movie during the Cannes festival, and chose to attend one accompanied by a priest, Father Innocent Smith. Like the good boys that we are, we chose a friend’s period piece, Love & Friendship, directed by the great Whit Stillman of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and Last Days of Disco fame. This one was up to Whit’s usual standards. Based on an epistolary novella by Jane Austen, and starring Kate Beckinsale and numerous other truly good Brit actors such as Jemma Redgrave and James Fleet, the film was a delight. Actually, it is the start, methinks, of Sense and Sensibility, but I am no Jane expert.
Afterwards Stillman gave a brief speech followed by a question-and-answer period. When I went up to him, he greeted me with delight and mentioned how happy he was to see me in the company of a priest. “The company you keep has improved,” or words to that effect. In this he was right. I used to go out every night. Dinner, clubs, then after-hours places. One could get through dinner in the company of nice people, even intelligent ones, but soon after the caliber and quality plunged. With drink and drugs, nightclub habitués bristled, like sharks on a moonlit sea. The boring sounded interesting, the ugly looked glamorous, and so on. By 5 a.m. drugged-out faces turned into plaster masks looked beautiful. You can guess the rest. Clubs fit for troglodytes with odors fit for outhouses didn’t seem to bother me. I am now past all that, but at times I still miss it. Not the odors, nor the shabbiness of the people, just the downtown feeling one got. It’s called slumming, and I need it once in a while. That’s why I read my friend and colleague at The Spectator, Jeremy Clarke. It makes me feel young again.
It is curious that we are never more than a slight physiological or anatomical derangement away from paranoia. An alteration of blood chemistry is often sufficient to make us believe that they are after us, and to act upon the supposition. No doubt evolutionary psychologists would explain this by the fact that on the savannahs of Africa, where Man first evolved, it paid to be a little mistrustful; indeed, the penalties for not being a little mistrustful were considerable. A lifelong city-dweller, I once took a walk in the Botswanan bundu as if I were going for a stroll in a suburban park and stumbled across a lion. Fortunately for me it was old and scraggy, a bit like a stuffed lion in a municipal museum, half-devoured by moths; but I became more careful afterwards. Paranoia is never far below the surface.
My Internet server recently carried a story about the EgyptAir flight that crashed into the Mediterranean on its way from Paris to Cairo. The headline of the story was “Cleaning crew faces questions.” The actual story did not contain a single word to substantiate this headline, though of course it would be only natural for the staff that had had access to the plane before it took off in Paris to be questioned. Nevertheless, it wasn”t difficult to read the subtext, as literary theorists call it, or the imputation, as we simple folk call it, of the headline: The cleaning staff at the Paris airport, many of whom are Muslim, could have put a bomb on board while they were cleaning the aircraft, and therefore they did so.
The spokesman for the French agency that investigates air crashes was considerably more circumspect with regard to reports that smoke had been detected in the aircraft shortly before it disappeared from the radar screen. “We are drawing no conclusions from this. Everything else [i.e., everything other than there was smoke] is pure conjecture.” Here, at least, was a man with a sense of what constitutes evidence. Whatever his beliefs in the privacy of his skull, he was not going beyond what he could substantiate.
No such scruples inhibited the commentators. For one, the smoke proved that the crash was caused by an incendiary bomb. Another had a degree of certainty that suggested contacts in high places:
The plane was taken down with an Electronic Pulse weapon and Israel did it…. A French satellite picked up the shoot down.
Just imagine for a moment trying to discuss the matter with the author of this opinion. It would be like trying to argue a man out of a deep-seated delusion. Before long you would have entered a mental labyrinth from which there was no exit. Any evidence you adduced would be discounted as having been manufactured by the very conspirators who brought the aircraft down. His conclusion would be irrefutable in the worst possible sense: The very attempt to refute it would prove to him just how far the conspirators had succeeded in covering their tracks.
There followed another theory by a man whose first language was not English:
We can blame the nonsense UK legal system for encouraging and motivate terrorism.
One imagines that the evidently enraged writer had had some slight legal problem in Britain and that he did not fully understand the arcane process by which it was resolved, probably not in his favor. Even native speakers of English sometimes have similar problems of comprehension, though I suspect that no system of law of any sophistication or complexity is entirely transparent to the laity.
Be that as it may, it is not easy to see why or how deficiencies of the law in Britain (I leave aside the fact that Scottish law is different from English) should have encouraged or motivated someone to blow up an aircraft going from Paris to Cairo. If it did, the terrorist, like the writer, was in the grip of an inchoate but paranoid theory.
That native command of the English language is no guarantee of coherent thought is proved by the next response to the article:
It is up to the authorities to get this sorted out, it seems to me they are turning a blind eye to it. After all this is not the first time. Corruption and back-handers come to mind.
Muirfield, a few miles out of Edinburgh on the East Lothian coast, is one of the world’s great golf courses. Indeed the magazine Golf Monthly has rated it the best of all. Jack Nicklaus won the first of his three Open Championships there in 1966, and when he designed his own course in Dublin, Ohio, he named it Muirfield Village. Other winners there include Harry Vardon and James Braid (two of the pre-1914 Triumvirate), Walter Hagen, Henry Cotton, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson, Nick Faldo, Ernie Els, and Phil Mickelson. The Open has been held there fourteen times, and, as you can see, it has almost always produced a great champion. But there will be no more Opens at Muirfield, for some time at least. The Championship Committee of the R&A has just removed the course from its rota of Open venues.
The reason? Muirfield”more properly the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers”is a men-only club, and the members have just rejected a proposal to open the membership to ladies. There was actually a majority in favor of the motion, but the rules of the club require a two-thirds majority for change, and the vote fell just short of this.
The rejection of the proposal has stirred up what in Scotland we call a fine stushie. “Antediluvian” is perhaps the least uncomplimentary term of abuse directed at the Honourable Company. They would, it seems, be dinosaurs if they weren”t still alive. The expression of outrage isn”t surprising. Sexism is one of today’s Deadly Sins, nowhere more so than in Scotland. We”ve come a long way since John Knox, the leader of the 16th-century Scottish Reformation, inveighed against what he described as “The Monstrous Regiment of Women.” By “regiment” he meant “rule,” and doubtless if he were still with us, he would look at Scotland today with horror. The First Minister of Scotland is a woman, Nicola Sturgeon, and the leaders of the two main opposition parties are also women. There are female Senators of the College of Justice (as senior judges are called here), but, though the Honourable Company is seen as a pillar of the legal establishment, these judges can”t be members of Muirfield. Contrary to common belief, they can play golf there as guests of members, and even as visitors, but they can”t join the Honourable Company. Other bastions of male privilege or exclusivity may have been breached, but not Muirfield. A club that still requires members, guests, and visitors to wear a jacket and tie at lunch isn”t in any hurry to embrace the 21st century. (Some of its critics would say it has scarcely emerged from the 19th.)
It’s a place where tradition rules. This isn”t surprising. The Honourable Company dates from 1744, when it was known as “The Gentlemen Golfers” and played on a five-hole course on Leith Links. It drew up the first rules of golf, and more than a century passed before it handed over responsibility for the rules to the Royal and Ancient at St. Andrews, which, by the way, itself consented to admit lady members only some three years ago.
Even the golf played by the members is old-fashioned. The club secretary quite recently said that a Muirfield day lasts seven and a half hours: two and a half for the morning round, two and a half for lunch, then two and a half for the afternoon one. Only two and a half hours for a round of golf? How come? Well, at Muirfield four balls are frowned on, severely. You play either singles or foursomes, the two-ball four-player format that professionals play only in the Ryder Cup. This is admirable. I was always a golfing rabbit myself, one who would never have dared to play a course as demanding as Muirfield. But I always found foursomes the best form of the game, and the most enjoyable golf I had was playing foursomes with another rabbit and two friends with respectable handicaps. This gave me and my fellow rabbit the unusual opportunity to play a second shot into the green, while our partners might have the equally unusual experience (for them) of either exploring parts of the rough they didn”t know existed or playing their second after one of us rabbits had topped a drive and sent it scuttling a mere sixty yards along the fairway. So I think the old boys at Muirfield have the right view of how the game should be played, just as I approve of their two-and-a-half-hour lunches. Indeed old boys or, if you prefer, old buffers are just what many of those who voted against the admission of lady members undoubtedly are. Some are very old indeed. One of those who signed a letter urging fellow members to vote against the motion to admit ladies to membership of the Honourable Company is so venerable that I remember seeing him play rugby for Scotland way back in the early 1950s when I was a schoolboy in short trousers.
Actually I have a good deal of sympathy and some admiration for the old buffers. I like to see people remaining true to their principles, even their prejudices, and sticking up for them, defending them in the last ditch. Even losing battles, even doomed ones, are sometimes worth fighting”for the sake of honor, if for no other reason. So I feel for those members of the Honourable Company who voted no and set their face against the world of today, just as I feel for those in the Southern states who are determined to maintain their right to fly the Confederate flag.
Moreover there is some merit in their argument. Muirfield is a private club. It receives no public money. So its affairs are properly no concern of politicians. In any case the essence of a club is that its members decide who should, and who should not, be invited or permitted to join. If charged with discrimination, the Honourable Company might say this works both ways. There are, after all, ladies” golf clubs, and there are women-only gyms that would deny them entry in the admittedly unlikely event of one of the old buffers wishing to don a leotard and lift weights. Joking aside, you might even argue that the freedom to decide who joins your club is guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, which says everyone is entitled to privacy.
To put a new spin on the old put-down of vegans, how do you know if you”re a member of the alt-right? Don”t worry”if you”re not, someone will tell you in the comments section. Alt-rightists love being able to cry “he’s not one of us!” Milo Yiannopoulos? He thinks he’s one of us, but he ain”t. Ann Coulter? Nah, I hear she likes black guys. Jared Taylor? On blacks and browns he’s great, but he’s too soft on Jews. David Cole? He was a hero with his Holocaust revisionism, but I read he’s a Zionist!
Alt-rightists remind me of the old story about the blind men describing the elephant, except in this case, each sight-impaired narrator is obsessed with proclaiming what the elephant is not.
Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari did their best to define the alt-right several months ago in a lengthy essay on Breitbart.com, but needless to say, alt-rightists lined up to explain how they got it wrong. As Tory Scot at The Right Stuff noted in a piece titled “Milo Isn”t One of Us,” “The Right Stuff has a nonnegotiable objective: the establishment of a White country in North America that will advance our interests,” adding, “This is a goal shared to a large degree by Counter-Currents, Radix Journal, and the Alternative Right blog.”
Yiannopoulos” take on the alt-right was equally unpopular with Rare’s Jack Hunter, a former paleoconservative who lambasted poor Milo for soft-pedaling the whole “white homeland” thing. Hunter is a man whose political career was nearly ruined when his racially inflammatory past was exposed, so, like the recovering alcoholic who visits bars just to verbally abuse drunks, he goes after right-wing “racists” with the self-righteous fanaticism unique to converts (as someone who also had his political career derailed by revelations of a controversial past, I can only say that Hunter’s response could not be more different than mine).
Hunter’s rebuttal to Yiannopoulos is 2,750 words long, but reading it, I couldn”t help but fixate on one 32-word paragraph. This one small section of text speaks volumes regarding Trump’s appeal, why “respectable” conservatives (and libertarian-conservatives like Hunter) don”t get it, and why, my differences with alt-rightists (who don”t like me anyway) aside, I could never bring myself to throw in with people like Jack Hunter (not that they”d have me if I tried).
Hunter writes: “Today’s “newsletters” would be blogs and Twitter accounts, where alt-righters try to feel better about themselves at the expense of some of the most historically powerless people in our society, racial minorities.
Forgive my Yiannopoulian French, but what the fuck does it matter who’s been “historically powerless”? Ooh, ooh, “racial minorities” suffered in the past. So what? Everyone’s here in the present now, and nobody gets any extra points for ancestral pain. What possible bearing does it have on anything to bring up “historical powerlessness”? Should we base hiring practices on “historical powerlessness”? Should we watch our words because of “historical powerlessness”? Should we elect presidents, admit people to college, grade papers, cast films and TV shows, give bank loans, write public policy, green-light immigration, and make all manner of special accommodations to people based on “historical powerlessness”?
A leftist would answer “yes” to every one of those questions. But a supposed conservative? That one small paragraph by Hunter is, for me”and for quite a few other Americans, I”d wager”a deal breaker. People in very large numbers are sick of this “historical powerlessness” bullshit. Americans are sick of “victim groups” demanding special favors, and white people are sick of the implication that nobody with fair skin has ancestors who suffered oppression.
The very idea that “alt-righters try to feel better about themselves at the expense of racial minorities” implies that alt-rightists are in some way doing harm to minorities via their “blogs and Twitter accounts.” How? By expressing opinions? By advocating policies with which minorities disagree? By tweeting offensive images? By using the dreaded “n-word”? Words and images cause no real harm beyond what the person on the receiving end assumes upon himself. Claiming that words and images hurt like sticks and stones is a foundational belief of SJW leftism. By the age of 23, because of my Holocaust revisionism (i.e., because of nothing but words), I was dubbed “as bad as Hitler, Hussein, and Arafat” by the Detroit Jewish News (at the time, the nation’s largest-circulation Jewish weekly). I think I long ago proved I”m not a hypocrite. As a Jew, Jewish demands for special treatment due to past persecution never moved me, regardless of the “hurty words” that were thrown my way, and I”ll be damned if, at age 47, I”ll make any special accommodations for any other group.
Responsible adults who claim to be conservative and who supposedly care about the direction of this country should be telling minorities to grow up and learn to live with dissent, rather than furthering the leftist dogma that “historical powerlessness” is an exclusive nonwhite-only club and an “aren”t I special” badge entitling the wearer to preferential treatment and hushed, deferential awe.
Which brings me to Ronald Reagan, and a little-known, rarely recalled incident from 1980 in which he lost his temper on camera and yelled at black people.
August 5th, 1980. It was supposed to be a simple campaign photo op intended to illustrate one of Jimmy Carter’s many broken promises. Three years earlier, Carter had posed in the middle of a South Bronx city block that was mostly rubble”one of those do-it-yourself Dresdens that New Yorkers of color were so skilled at creating in the 1970s”and promised the enraptured debris-dwellers that his administration would usher in a new era of renewal and prosperity in the region. Take a guess what that rat-infested, decaying city block looked like in 1980? Yep, still rubble. The residents had grown older, but only the rats had grown wiser, as the people were still solidly Democrat. So Reagan decided to visit that same trash-littered lot to illustrate “an example of the federal government making promises that the federal government can”t keep.”
It probably seemed like a good idea on paper.
Reagan’s arrival was met by throngs of loud, angry black protesters, yelling, cursing, and (of course) chanting. Reagan tried to give a speech, but the crowd drowned him out. Did I mention it was August? In the Bronx? In other words, it was scorching hot, and after a few minutes of the Bronx version of open mic at the Apollo, Reagan had had enough.
He lost his temper, and he began to shout. “I”m trying to tell you…” he started, but the crowd only got louder. So Reagan took a deep breath and put into action those “project from the diaphragm” lessons that all actors learn in their youth: “I”M TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT I KNOW NOW, THERE IS NO PROGRAM OR PROMISE THAT A PRESIDENT CAN MAKE, THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CAN COME IN, AND WAVE A WAND AND DO THIS.”
Displaying some good old-fashioned South Bronx moxie and mental retardation, a do-rag-wearing reject from Good Times yelled back, practically in Reagan’s face, “Push! Why don”t you push?!” Still flustered, Reagan reminded Starkeisha that he was not, at the moment, an actual elected official: “I can”t do a damn thing for you if I don”t get elected,” he shot back.
Why does Donald Trump dumb down his speeches?
For a clue, consider how badly the elite media continues to miss the point of the most notorious thing he ever said, this infinitely denounced passage in his June 16, 2015, speech announcing his candidacy:
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They”re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they”re killing us economically. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…. When Mexico sends its people, they”re not sending their best. They”re not sending you. They”re not sending you. They”re sending people that have lots of problems, and they”re bringing those problems with us. They”re bringing drugs. They”re bringing crime. They”re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Obviously from context, Trump’s “They”re rapists” does not mean, as often alleged, “They”re all rapists.” Instead, he’s raising the apparently excessively subtle question: “Why, with all the world to choose from, do we let immigrate any rapists?”
After all, the Harvard admissions office doesn”t feel satisfied if they hold their rapist admission rate down to the national average. America is the Harvard of immigrant destination countries, so why should it import problem people?
But, to the press, that question seems inappropriate to ask. America isn”t worthy of high standards like Harvard is. Instead, the 7 billion citizens of foreign countries should be assumed to have a civil right, under the Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution, to move to America whenever they feel like it”especially if a majority of Americans don”t want them here.
Moreover, it’s striking how few in the press demonstrated any understanding of Trump’s statement “When Mexico sends its people, they”re not sending their best.”
The obvious question ought to be: Who is the “they” in that sentence?
Clearly, Trump is accusing the Mexican ruling class”the politicians and billionaires like Carlos Slim, the largest single shareholder of The New York Times“of dumping their surplus population on the United States.
That Mexico’s elites are outmaneuvering America’s leaders strikes Trump as a bad thing. Yet, to the American media, the very existence of a Mexican ruling caste with interests different from those of American citizens doesn”t seem to register as a concept with which they are able to deal. Sure, Mexico is a country of over 120 million people that shares a 1,950-mile border with the U.S., but it’s not, you know, Israel when it comes to being important to American interests.
Slim is intermittently the richest man in the world, which could be thought an intriguingly curious phenomenon in a country that is supposed to be so poor that it would be a war crime to tell their illegal aliens to go home.
And Slim has close ties of blood and marriage to the fascist warlord clans of Lebanon that carried out some of the most notorious atrocities in recent Middle Eastern history. Yet that human-interest story never came up in the American press.
The New York Times, though, has been covering the Mexican ruling class” objections to Trump. For example:
President Enrique Peña Nieto likened the candidate’s language to that of Hitler and Mussolini in an interview with Mexico’s Excelsior newspaper.
But it hasn”t mentioned the dirty little secret of this whole contretemps. As one of the rare Mexican-American pundits, Ruben Navarette Jr., pointed out last summer:
Mexican Elites Secretly Agree With Donald Trump
They”re all hating on him now, but the fact is, when they”re just among themselves, Mexico’s elites roundly agree with The Donald on Mexican immigrants.
Of the many different reactions to Donald Trump’s inaccurate and insulting comments about how Mexican migrants to the United States come from the bottom of the barrel, one of the most interesting has been that of wealthy and powerful Mexican elites who are suddenly long on indignation and outrage but short on memory and self-awareness. That’s because Trump’s dismissive comments about how the United States has become a “dumping ground” for castaways from Mexico sound like something you”d hear bandied about at a Guadalajara country club or a fancy banquet in Mexico City.
This should not be a surprise to anybody who pays attention to Mexico even casually. As the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt pointed out in 1802: “Mexico is the country of inequality.”
A 1995 article in The Atlantic by Jorge G. Castañeda, who went on to become foreign minister in the early 2000s under Vicente Fox, warned Americans that illegal immigration is the Mexican ruling class” safety valve:
Any attempt to clamp down on immigration from the south”by sealing the border militarily, by forcing Mexico to deter its citizens from emigrating, or through some federal version of California’s Proposition 187″will make social peace in the barrios and pueblos of Mexico untenable.
Just as the Saudi royal family protects itself by dispatching its young Muslim fanatics to preach jihad in Europe, Castañeda asserted that Mexico’s ferocious inequality is made tolerable only by illegal emigration to the U.S. Without the open border, Mexico would dissolve into another revolution as vicious as the one a century ago that killed at least a million and sent refugees pouring into Texas.
You may wonder: Was Castañeda’s scenario ever really a risk? Is it still a concern? Or is it all a bluff by Mexico’s rich to avoid paying taxes? Trump, who has sold many a luxury condo to Mexican moguls and bureaucrats, doesn”t seem impressed. Even Castañeda couldn”t appear definitive, admitting in 1995:
And Mexico is unpredictable. Reportedly, the dictator Porfirio Diaz remarked, as he sailed for exile in France in 1911, “In Mexico nothing ever happens until it happens.” The country erupts sporadically and regionally because the inequities from which it suffers become at some point intolerable…. But the very inequality and segregation from which those eruptions spring make it impossible to foresee them.
