Once upon a time the American Establishment enjoyed business paragons such as David Rockefeller, Daniel Ludwig, William Paley, Henry Ford II, not to mention Thomas Watson and his son Thomas Watson Jr. Toward the end of the 20th century, that old power elite had gone with the wind, replaced by people that Hilaire Belloc used to refer to as money shufflers, hustlers who never created anything, but employed a few secretaries while they bet on whether other people’s accomplishments would rise or fall in value. It was and is a hell of a game, mostly done with mirrors, as people who don”t like to be sued call the stock-market manipulations of today.
Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and their ilk were among the last to make big bucks through insider trading, but eventually they got caught and sent to the big house. The godfather of all crooks is, of course, Uncle Bernie Madoff, as his co-religionists and eventual victims used to call the scumbag.
The KO punch that took out the godfather of the crooks was the near implosion of the financial system and the Great Recession that followed. One “financier” who survived all of the above was one of the most disgusting people I have had the good luck never to have met, George Soros, a man whose vulgarity, venality, and loathsomeness deserve a Gogol or a Dostoyevsky for a biographer. (Having said that, I once had dinner with Soros” brother and sister-in-law, and found them both polite and congenial, as is his nephew Peter, a good sort I have known for a very long time.) A cocksure self-promoter like no other, Soros has been in the news lately because he was the star of the recent Brussels Economic Forum. Leave it to a Belgian bastard race to invite a man of Soros” character and past to address them. Soros spent his time on the podium criticizing Hungary’s right-wing government in general and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in particular.
The great irony was that Soros referred to his native land as a “Mafia state,” not unlike John Gotti calling David Rockefeller a gangster. Soros is alluded to as a philanthropist by newspapers like The New York Times because of his financing of extreme left-wing causes, and the shady currency speculator does give lots of money away, to subversive groups and individuals, as far as I”m concerned. Reputedly, he backed Ferguson rioters as well as Trump protesters, although he has denied both charges.
Soros made the big score betting against the British pound back in the early “90s. He made over one billion pounds in 24 hours. Ever since, his agenda has been one of promoting left-wing causes”anti-police, pro-rioters, you know the type. His latest attacks against Hungary’s right-wing government have the stooges of the E.U. in Brussels stamping their feet in unison, applauding the Hungarian-born money shuffler to the rafters. The fight with Viktor Orban is over a university that is financed and founded by Soros. The Hungarian government is threatening to shut it down on the grounds that the American university does not operate a campus in the United States, where it is registered. Soros calls it a crackdown on free expression.
Free expression is a double-edged sword. As long as it’s left-wing it should be free, at least according to Georgie Porgie. The Hungarian government doesn”t see it that way. It insists that organizations that receive foreign financing should identify themselves as such and disclose their donors. Here in the good old U.S. of A., foreign organizations need to register. This prevents money laundering and terrorist financing. Soros” financing in Hungary makes him a foreign agent, but try telling this to the Times or the crooks in Brussels. In fact, the Hungarian government calls the Soros network a Mafia-style operation. Be that as it may, any organization financed from abroad is a danger to the independence of the country involved.
Soros is too smart to be an insider trader; his weakness is that he’s a megalomaniac. He fled Hungary during the Nazi occupation, which has led to some very ugly rumors about how he escaped”rumors that I do not believe, incidentally. But his wealth, which is in the tens of billions, has fed his megalomania, and he now wants to run the whole show. But unlike a certain wavy-haired real estate tycoon in D.C., he likes to do it from behind the scenes. Hungary is a sovereign country that has resisted the E.U.’s orders for open borders for Middle East migrants and admits only Christians from that unhappy place. This apparently has outraged Soros, who is Jewish, and who would be among the first to be blown up if some of the Islamists he favors could get near him.
Such are the joys of liberals with billions made speculating on the markets. Belloc would have had a field day with Soros, especially his Hungarian background. As a great Romanian film director once said, “Both Hungarians and Romanians would sell their mother for a dollar, but at least we”d deliver.”
The word “sovereignty” was bandied about during our E.U. referendum last year, and there were many who said that Edward Heath, the prime minister who took us into what was then the European Economic Community, had lied when he said that this involved no loss of sovereignty. In fact he hadn”t. The referendum itself was proof that the United Kingdom remained a sovereign state. The U.K. government didn”t require the approval of the E.U. to hold the referendum, and the result, whether you liked it or not, gave the government the authority to begin the process of withdrawal.
It’s instructive to compare it with the Scottish referendum two years previously. The question put then was similar to the question in the E.U. referendum. The Scottish electorate was asked to vote on the proposition that Scotland should be an independent country”that is, whether it should leave the United Kingdom. But there was a significant difference. The devolved Scottish government had no legal authority to hold such a referendum, for the act of the U.K. Parliament that established devolved government in Scotland reserved constitutional questions for Westminster. Therefore the Scottish government had to get the approval of the U.K. government and Parliament in order to hold the referendum.
The difference is clear. The U.K., being a sovereign state, could hold a referendum on the question of leaving the E.U. without requesting permission to do so. Scotland, not being a sovereign state, required permission from the sovereign U.K. state that the Scottish government wanted to leave. The E.U. could not legally have prevented the U.K. government from holding an in-out referendum; the U.K. government could legally have prevented the devolved Scottish government and Parliament from staging such a referendum, though doubtless a decision to do so would have been politically unwise.
The ability to hold the in-out E.U. referendum demonstrated that membership in the E.U. didn”t compromise the U.K.’s sovereign status. Many other things obviously demonstrated this. Membership in the United Nations is open only to sovereign states. The E.U., not being sovereign, is therefore not a member of the U.N., but all the individual member states of the E.U. have a seat in the U.N. Assembly. They are there because they possess sovereignty. The United Kingdom and France are two of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council; they could not continue in that position if they had surrendered their sovereignty to the E.U.
A sovereign state can make war. In the almost forty years of British membership in what is now the European Union, the United Kingdom has engaged in war in the South Atlantic (the Falklands), Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Serbia, and Libya. In some of these wars it was joined by other member states of the E.U. (and, of course, the USA), in others not. In none, however, did it require the authority of the E.U. Actually there is no E.U. body that could have given such authority, none that could have denied the sovereign member states” entitlement to go to war, and of course, unlike sovereign states, the E.U. has no army, air force, or navy.
If the E.U. were indeed a sovereign state, it would be a very strange one, with a budget that depends on the approval of its constituent member states. That budget, incidentally, is tiny compared with the budget of individual member states. It would be a sovereign state that levies no direct taxation on its subjects, leaving that right or responsibility to the member states. The E.U. does make laws, and the number of these laws has been a cause for complaint. But few citizens of the E.U. can name many of these laws, which are indeed mostly administrative regulations concerning the working of the single market. In any case, most of the bad laws here in Britain are made by the sovereign U.K. Parliament in Westminster, not Brussels, or by the devolved Scottish Parliament or the Welsh or Northern Ireland Assembly.
“The North Korean regime is causing tremendous problems and is something that has to be dealt with, and probably dealt with rapidly.”
So President Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden this week.
But how this is to be done “rapidly” is not so easy to see.
North Korea has just returned to us Otto Warmbier, a student sentenced to 15 years hard labor for stealing a propaganda poster. Otto came home comatose, and died within days.
Trump’s conundrum: How to keep such a regime from acquiring an ICBM with a nuclear warhead, which Kim Jong Un is determined to do.
Having seen us attack Iraq and Libya, which had no nukes, Kim believes that only nuclear weapons that can hit America can deter America. He appears willing to risk war to achieve his goal.
Trump’s options as he meets South Korean President Moon Jae-in?
First, the decapitation of the Kim dynasty. But the U.S. has been unable to accomplish regime change for the 64 years following the Korean War. And killing Kim could ignite a war.
Then there is a U.S. pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear sites and missile arsenals. But this would surely mean a war in which Americans on the DMZ would be among the first to die, as thousands of North Korean artillery and mortar tubes fired into the suburbs and city of Seoul, which is as close as Dulles Airport is to the White House.
Asked by Congressman Tim Ryan why we don’t launch a war to end this threat, Defense Secretary James Mattis replied that, while we might “win … at great cost,” such a war would “involve the massive shelling of an ally’s capital … one of the most densely packed cities on earth.”
Seoul has a metro-area population of 25 million.
We are thus approaching a point where we accept North Korea having a nuclear weapon that can reach Seattle, or we attack its strategic arsenal and bring on a war in which millions could die.
What about sanctions?
The only nation that could impose sufficient hardships on North Korea to imperil the regime is China. But China refuses to impose the Draconian sanctions that might destabilize the regime, and might bring Korean refugees flooding into China. And Beijing has no desire to see Kim fall and Korea united under a regime aligned with the United States.
What FDR said of one Caribbean dictator, the Chinese are probably saying of Kim Jong Un, “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”
Early in his presidency, Trump gave the franchise for dealing with the North Korean threat to Beijing. But his friend Xi Jinping has either failed Trump or declined to deliver.
As for President Moon, he wants to negotiate, to engage the North economically, to invite its athletes to join South Koreans on joint teams for the Winter Olympics in 2018. Moreover, Moon is said to be willing to cut back on joint military exercises with the U.S. and regards the THAAD missile defense we introduced into South Korea as a negotiable item.
China, whose missile launches can be detected by THAAD radar, wants it removed and has so informed South Korea.
Where does this leave us?
Mark that one presidential promise unmet.
The much-celebrated deal hatched between the incoming Trump administration and air conditioner manufacturer Carrier has fallen through. Last December, Trump put his famed negotiating skills to work to forestall the laying off of hundreds of employees from an Indianapolis plant.
Starting next month, 730 plant positions will be shipped down to Mexico, the graveyard of American jobs. The tax incentives given to Carrier in exchange for maintaining native workers were used to cover the cost of automating the plant.
As many as a thousand employees will keep their job, but the damage, morale and otherwise, is done.
Unfortunately, despite President Trump’s best efforts, this practice”transferring low-skilled manual jobs to countries with cheaper labor, automating menial tasks”will continue unabated. Even if a company’s tax burden is reduced to zero, technological progress means a relentless race to raise the bottom line.
For free-market enthusiasts, this is all well and good. In a recent Washington Post column, august observer George Will spots the contradiction of a digitally dynamic America led by a man with a schmaltzy view of the country’s manufacturing past. Busybodies in the nation’s major business metropolises welcome the turmoil engendered by nonstop innovation. The middle and working class want a moment to catch their breath between capitalism’s grinding gears.
The problem with disruption is that it’s “never restful,” Will writes, “and the United States now faces a decision unique in its history: Is it tired”tired of the turmoil of creative destruction?”
Will, as a columnist situated comfortably on the shores of the Potomac, welcomes our “fast-unfolding future.” In his view, “America is too young to flinch from the frictions.”
It’s awfully easy for someone of Will’s stature to take such a position. The sesquipedalian scribbler’s life has been one of privilege, insulated from the vagaries of markets. His father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois. He has spent his career between university teaching posts and writing for major publications. If Will has ever had to pay bills with a check earned through exacting labor, he doesn”t make that fact widely known.
Will’s profession is protected from the technological revolution that threatens to overtake what we still consider “work.” In that sense, he is much like the proponents of mass immigration who demand diversity from behind homogeneous, closed-walled communities; his proposition would benefit him personally at very minimal cost.
George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen shares Will’s view, but is more sympathetic to the workers displaced by the unquenchable thirst for innovation. In a recent Bloomberg column, Cowen recognizes that the forces of displacement that whirled through the West during the Industrial Revolution were a boon to two things: economic growth and political disillusionment.
The great migration from a largely agrarian economy to one focused on manufacturing brought with it instability, wage fluctuation, and unpredictability. “Western economies later turned to variants of the social welfare state, but along the way the intellectual currents of the 19th century produced a lot of overreaction in other, more destructive directions,” Cowen explains. “The ideas of Marx fed into the movements behind the Soviet Union, Communist China and the Khmer Rouge.”
One hundred million deaths later, we know communism didn”t fulfill man’s innate desires. The promise of paradise always sounds nice until the guns and shock troops come out.
But had communism ushered in a post-scarcity world where labor was a thing of the past, the feeling of listlessness would remain. Work gives man purpose and identity. When a machine swallows up a person’s chance at crafting their own livelihood, something is lost in the process.
Writing on the rise of the Luddites, the 19th-century workers” movement that destroyed textile machinery in Britain to preserve needlework jobs, Thomas Pynchon described widespread technological anxiety as not just fear of “the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work” but really of a machine “to be “worth” that many human souls.”
Canada turns 150 this weekend, which is weird because it’s only 37. The left is trying to make this aboot “a celebration of indigenous genocide” because they”re party poopers, but the best way to deal with people like that is to party. I moved there from England in 1975 and left in 1999, but there isn”t a day goes by I don”t long for a beaver tail. Here are ten other things you won”t quite get about Santa’s homeland.
(1) IT’s BRAND-NEW
Canada began in 1980 when it chose “O Canada” as the national anthem and decided to ignore the fact that, technically, the Queen is still the head of state. Even though we declared independence in 1867 (hence the 150 years), we kept the Union Jack on the flag until 1965 when the last British person finally wandered home. America lost about 50,000 people kicking the British out. We just ignored the redcoats until they left on their own accord. That’s how you conduct a revolution”you bore them to death.
One of the advantages of being new is you”re not steeped in centuries of class where people are defined by their accents and aristocrats don”t understand what the working class are saying. Here in Canada we all speak hoser and we”re down for anything new, even metric, eh?
(2) WE”RE POLITE BUT WE FIGHT
Canadians are known for being overly polite. In fact, saying “sorry” is so common, we had to pass the Apology Act so the term couldn”t be used as an admission of guilt in court. However, being polite does not mean you are not willing to get into a flailing fistfight at the drop of a hat. “Goof” may be a go-word in juvie, but goon is something every young Canadian strives to be.
On the smash hit “Out for a Rip,” Rich B discusses the way Americans keep telling us we”re too nice and then he explains, “Yeah we got manners/But fuggin” buddies still fight/And fuggin” swear and fuggin” drink all night.” He then describes pounding the crap out of a buddy who wasn”t sorry after he burned a hole in his jacket with a dart (cigarette). This is the way all civilized Western males should behave. We don”t start fights, but we”re happy to finish them, eh?
(3) WE ARE ALL HOSERS
Rich B is not unusual. There are no nouveaux riches in Canada. There is no class system. It’s just the bureaucratic parasites in Ottawa and the rest of the country hating them for wasting our money. Britain has wine connoisseurs planning elaborate demographic pranks like flooding working-class neighborhoods with Muslims. We have hosers.
Toronto’s mayor had the exact same accent that the local plumber has and we loved him for it. He beat back the unions and preserved the city’s real estate when it was collapsing everywhere else in the Western world. Of course, to Hollywood liberals he will always be Canada’s crackhead, but what do they know? They give their kids speed. Besides, what kind of pussy hasn”t tried crack at least once?
Hosers are just cold rednecks, and outside of talking like curious leprechauns in a good mood, there are no differences between the far North and the deep South. Checking in on national treasure Puglife will confirm this. Check it out, buddy has a dart in his hand while he’s checking to see if the guy’s dead or just having a dirt nap, eh?
(4) THERE IS NO RACISM
Although there is still a place called “Nigger Rapids,” nobody would ever call a black person that. The name is actually a great example of Canadian naïveté when it comes to race. It’s named after a lovely black couple everyone liked. The Underground Railroad ended in Halifax, where the town Africville was built. In the “60s, black celebrities such as Miles Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. would come to Montreal to perform and be dumbfounded by how little their race mattered. It was like that Eddie Murphy sketch where he’s white for a day.
Unfortunately, the plague that is victim culture is seeping north, and Toronto has a Black Lives Matter that constantly complains about Canada’s racist history, which accidentally proves how totally irrational, insatiable, and inconsolable that entire movement is, eh?
(5) CANADIAN FOOD EXISTS
A beaver tail is just a wider, flatter version of Natives” fry bread but with brown sugar on it. When you”re skating on the canal and you need to warm up, nothing beats a hot cocoa with this sugary treat. It reboots your hard drive.
Similarly, poutine is hangover kryptonite. You can be at death’s door, but there’s something about hot gravy, fries, and cheese curds that fills in all the gaps a night of Molson Canadian creates.
Canada is basically Scottish and that means Irish and that means potatoes are heavily revered. You can”t drive more than a mile down the highway (a.k.a. the Queensway) without seeing a chip van making hand-cut fries from scratch. This extends into potato chips, which are adorned in all flavors, including “all dressed” and “ketchup.”
One little-known secret is Canada is also the home of anti-fry nightmare McCain Foods, which has brought frozen fries to America and Britain, and across the Western world. We”re really sorry about that, eh?
(6) THE GOVERNMENT RUNS POP MUSIC
I used to DJ at the college radio station CKCU and we were expected to play 60 percent Canadian content, a.k.a. Cancon. This meant if you were doing a punk/hardcore show, you were forced to play SNFU, No Means No, Death Sentence, and DOA on a loop before earning enough chips to play, say, Discharge.
This makes for a state-sponsored pop chart where meritocracy comes in way after mediocre Canadian acts have hogged the spotlight. Whenever my wife and I visit, I turn on the radio in the car and wait for her to say, “What the hell are we listening to?” I can then explain whether it’s “Strange Animal” by Gowan, “Crying Over You” by Platinum Blonde, or of course the megahit “Rise Up” by the unfathomably gay Parachute Club, eh?
What’s the worst college in America in terms of taking in kids from rich families and turning out young adults who, despite all their privileges, still won”t earn very much?
By one way of counting, the biggest loser is Middlebury College in the Vermont ski country, site of the recent Charles Murray riot. The median parents of Middlebury students earned $219,600 per year (in 2015 dollars), while ten to twelve years after college, the children (as 32- to 34-year-olds in 2014) earned $61,800.
Granted, $61,800 isn”t bad, but it’s still $157,800 less than their parents were earning while they paid their tuition, which is a lot.
In contrast, the biggest income gainer among over 2,000 American undergraduate colleges is the St. Louis College of Pharmacy, where parents had a median income of $92,500 and their early-30s children average $123,600. That’s also the highest income of any college in the country. (But it should be remembered that St. Louis” D. Pharm. degree is six years of study and one year of professional training, so it’s not exactly a fair comparison against typical undergraduate colleges.)
The highest-paid students from a general-purpose university are, unsurprisingly, those who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have a mean income in their early 30s of $98,500 (although the median MIT parents earn $141,000, so even MIT is a downward proposition in the short run).
Mean incomes are typically higher than median incomes due to small numbers of people with huge compensations skewing the mean. The highest mean income students are from Stanford, with $174,000. (Stanford parents earn a mean of $472,000.)
These numbers don”t mean that smart people don”t send their kids to Middlebury. (After all, one reason Charles Murray tried to give a talk there last winter was because his daughter is a Middlebury grad.) But they do add some perspective to the ongoing Bell Curve wars that the site of the most pitched battle was at the college (representative alumnus: Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues) with the second-highest median income parents in the country. Moreover, Middlebury has the highest mean income parents at $559,000, which is nice.
The one college with even loftier earning median income parents is conservative Washington and Lee University in Virginia. (A prototypical alumnus is Tom Wolfe.) Third place is, not surprisingly, Princeton (the alma mater of F. Scott Fitzgerald).
These data points gratifyingly fulfill stereotypes I”ve long harbored about rich-kid colleges. But how do we know these numbers about colleges?
Once again, we are indebted to Stanford economist Raj Chetty’s ability to talk his way into a trove of 1040 tax-return data that nobody previously seems to ever have had the gall to imagine they could get their hands on. Chetty has persuaded the IRS to pseudonymize for him the social security numbers on the tax returns of 11 million Americans born in 1980″82, plus their parents, which allows him to plumb the mysteries of economic mobility across two generations.
What are the government or educational policies that unlock upward mobility?
Unfortunately, after four years of Chetty’s research, there don”t seem to be many secrets of income mobility. His earlier work on hometown counties, for example, revealed such unsurprising results as that black children regress toward lower mean incomes than do white children as the fundamental logic of statistics would suggest. And you”d be better off being raised in white-bread Sioux County in Iowa than on a Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota.
That doesn”t mean, however, that there’s nothing of interest in Chetty’s vast databases, just that you likely won”t hear the fun stuff from him. After all, Chetty wants to be an important, respectable man”he counseled Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in their 2016 White House bids, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has taken to citing Chetty on his pre-campaign tour of Iowa. Being boring is the price of influence.
In Chetty’s own measures of income mobility, the most beneficial colleges are all public institutions in lucrative New York or Los Angeles, or in the impoverished Rio Grande Valley of Texas. For example, Cal State Los Angeles (median parents” income $37,000, median student’s income $43,000) is a great college according to Chetty’s calculations (but generally not according to people more familiar with CSLA than the economist). Yet Chetty himself recently relocated from Harvard (median parents” income $174,000) to Stanford ($173,000).
I suspect that Chetty is falling into his usual problem with failing to adjust for cost-of-living differences. New York and Los Angeles are expensive places to live, so graduates” salaries (his numerator) are fairly high. South Texas is close to the Third World, so parents” incomes (his denominator) are low.
Another issue is that all three regions have sizable gray-market cash economies and much tax evasion, which artificially reduces parents” reported incomes. Southern California, which was heavily settled a century ago by relatively honest folk from places like Iowa and Minnesota, used to be fairly law-abiding. But it’s now full of Iranians, Russians, Mexicans, Israelis, Chinese, and others who don”t really see the point in the American custom of telling the government exactly how much you are raking in.
Chetty likewise finds that Glendale Community College, a junior college north of downtown Los Angeles, is the fourth-best college in America for upward mobility.
Perhaps.
After all, my father graduated from the junior college next door in Pasadena eighty years ago with a degree in aeronautical engineering and was quickly hired by Lockheed to help design P-38s. But they don”t let you design airplanes anymore with just an AA degree.
Chetty is upset that the student body at Glendale CC has been getting more upscale. But looking at Chetty’s list of the colleges that have been growing more downscale, such as the Baltimore School of Massage, suggests that there are worse things than your college becoming more appealing to those with more choices in life.
I suspect that a lot of the Armenians in affluent Glendale send their kids to the local JC for two years so they can transfer to the more prestigious UCLA as juniors. UCLA has become extremely hard to get into as a freshman due to competition from Asian Tiger Cubs (number of applicants for UCLA’s freshman class: 102,000; average high school GPA among entering freshmen on a 0-to-4 scale: 4.2).
But UCLA accepts several thousand community-college graduates as transfers each year. White Americans, however, have largely forgotten about this path. Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic, who was once a college admissions adviser at L.A.’s top prep school, Harvard-Westlake, has recounted the curious fact that so many Beverly Hills zillionaires she counseled were desperate to send their kids to Eastern private colleges even though they typically had done very well for themselves with a local UCLA degree.
On the other hand, the well-to-do “new whites” of Glendale tend to be aware that they can get their kids a cheap UCLA degree through the community-college route. And why send your child across the country when they can simply commute to Westwood?
Life in these United States can be very difficult for an African-American cisgendered homosexual male rice-queen. Like I needed to tell any of you that. I”m sure we all sympathize with Donovan Trott, a gay black filmmaker with a sizable chip on his nicely toned shoulder. Last week, Trott penned a piece in the Huffington Post titled “An Open Letter To Gay, White Men: No, You”re Not Allowed To Have A Racial Preference” (you gotta admire an author who resists the urge to give away his entire thesis in the title). In the piece, Trott informs white gay men that when it comes to dating, they are not allowed to have a racial preference (didn”t see that coming, huh?). The piece plays out very much as you”d expect”racism, current year, Trump. “Broadcasting your distaste for an entire race, or multiple races, in the year 2017 is really dumb in addition to being racist as fuck,” Trott lectures. “Yes, people like what they like but sometimes the things people like are racist, like lawn jockeys or the current president of the United States. You can”t say you prefer one race of people as romantic partners, or anything really, to another because all of the people who belong to one race are not the same. No matter how you slice it, it’s racist.”
Black and Asian men get a pass from Trott, because they”re all (yes, all) victims of racism. “Every Black and Asian man who grew up on this planet grew up surrounded by positive images of whiteness and white men. Therefore, our desire to date within our own race, when we choose to, is not rooted in any assertion made by society that we”re better than anyone else.” Claiming that every black and Asian man “on this planet” grew up surrounded by positive images of whiteness and white men (I had no idea there were that many white men in China’s Hubei province) is stupid even by HuffPo standards, as is the claim that no Asians see themselves as superior to other races (Trott’s obviously never actually been to Asia. Get out da damn house once in a while, gurlfriend).
There is nothing unexpected or particularly newsworthy about the fact that a moron SJW wrote something stupid and the Huffington Post published it; that’s just business as usual. But Trott’s closing paragraph piqued my interest in a way that no previous HuffPost “damn you racist whitey” piece has ever been able to do. He closes his screed with an insistence that white males put themselves through “re-programming” therapy to change their aesthetic preferences:
“Fine, I”m a horrible racist asshole. What do I do about it? I can”t re-program myself to find men of color more attractive,” some of you might be saying. Actually, you can. As you know, the brain is the largest sexual organ in your body and it’s capable of amazing growth. Think of it like learning a new language, better still, think of it like unlearning a racist one.
Yes, after years of gay activists bitching and moaning about Christians pushing “gay conversion therapy,” a gay brutha, with the full support of Arianna Huffington & Co., is pushing a conversion therapy of his own. Remember how the loafer lighteners attacked Mike Pence last year over his supposed support for gay conversion therapy? “White Christian fascist! You can”t force someone to change their sexual preferences. We like who we like; no “therapy” can change that!” Yet now, after having made a massive stink last year over the fact that gays can”t “unlearn” their preferences through therapy, the HuffPost does an about-face and tells us that sure, they can unlearn “em just fine. Reconditioning is dandy as a daffodil as long as it’s in the service of the great holy jihad against racism!
Much the same way that my cat, when vomiting, will occasionally emit a noise that sounds vaguely human, so too has Trott, while expelling puke all over the already fetid pages of the HuffPost, accidentally managed to luck into a point that deserves further inquiry. To what extent are our racial sexual preferences hardwired into our brains? Much time and text has been devoted to the debate over whether gender preference is learned or inherent. But what about racial preference? Can you learn or unlearn being attracted to a certain racial aesthetic? And if such preferences are learned, can they be influenced, even surreptitiously?
To white nationalists and a sizable segment of the alt-right, this is no small point. A frequent accusation thrown at either “the Jews” or “the left” (or both) is that “they” encourage miscegenation via their diabolical mass-media control. Multiracial couples and families are now commonplace on TV, in commercials, sitcoms, etc. And while some might argue that this is simply good marketing (an actor of mixed or indeterminate race can appeal to a wider consumer demographic than one who is, how best to put it, a “purebred”), many on the right see a malevolent secret agenda at work. “The Jews are using Hollywood to make white girls race-mix! The media is corrupting our racial stock by encouraging interracial love!” This was the worldview of one of the most notorious racial serial killers of the past thirty years, Jonathan Haynes, the “Aryan Beauty Killer“ who stalked me for a spell in the early “90s (I first mentioned this charmer in a column back in 2015). In one of the rambling voicemail messages he left for me while in the middle of his killing spree, Haynes declared:
Let me get to the point. I see a lot of black men going out with white women. I see movies like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and I see who’s behind it, and it doesn”t make me comfortable. I look at the people who’s producing that type of movie in Hollywood. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Jungle Fever,” et cetera, ad nauseam, and I meditate on my own position. I think I”m a worthwhile person and I think I do deserve a wife! And if I can”t get a wife, I”m gonna get angry and I”m gonna look for the cause of why I can”t get a wife, why all these white women are going out with black men. I”m gonna look at the cause and I”m gonna try to eliminate them.
And eliminate them he did (you gotta admire a man with follow-through). But if we set aside the self-pity and scapegoating, is it really possible for the media to influence racial sexual preferences? There have been studies in mainstream academia suggesting that such preferences are evolutionarily hardwired into our DNA. So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there is indeed an aspect of racial sexual preference that is nature, not nurture. Can a bunch of invisible-handers, a shady collection of media-controlling cabalists, override that biology with TV commercials? A 2016 University of Nebraska study discovered that while a majority of young, media-saturated post-millennials approve of interracial relationships in theory, most of them still “register disgust” on a deep, unconscious level when faced with images of such couplings. A 2013 study of college students revealed that black students were even more disapproving of interracial relationships than their white counterparts. And an article this month in the Houston Chronicle reported that while a whopping 82 percent of Houston residents approve of the concept of interracial marriage, a mere 11 percent of nonblack Houston residents actually intermarry with blacks.
So much for the awesome power of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The media might be able to make people more comfortable with the idea of interracial relationships, but that doesn”t mean Hollywood has the power to override our individual preferences. Don”t get me wrong”leftists do indeed view race-mixing as yet another weapon to be wielded against their No. 1 bogeyman, “whiteness.” But there’s a limit to the effect a few TV commercials and Benetton ads can have on deeply ingrained aspects of our nature.
In case you weren”t aware because you”re some kind of bigoted and closeted asshole, this is Pride Month. Across our rainbow-colored planet, men who enjoy shoving other men’s penises in their anuses strut on city streets publicly declaring to the world that they”re proud of what they do. Joining them are women with a seasoned taste for halibut as well as men who say they”re women and women who say they”re men”what used to be known as “liars.”
They were all having a gay old time until the black people showed up. Complicating matters even more amusingly, many of the black people were themselves gay. But they were also proud of being black, and as we all know, that matters.
During the Capitol Pride parade in DC earlier this month, a group of organized black sodomites calling themselves No Justice No Pride blocked the parade route. In Columbus, OH, police made four arrests after black activists foiled yet another gay parade to draw attention to the acquittal of a Hispanic cop who shot and killed a black man named Philando Castile.
In Toronto last week”despite being personally invited as guests of honor”Black Lives Matter sourpusses entirely shut down a parade of hapless mustachioed white men in leather ass chaps and five-hundred-pound naked white lesbians painted like the planet Earth. Barking like a chocolate Rottweiler through a megaphone, Toronto BLM cofounder Alexandria Williams hectored the helpless homos about how they supposedly support and are enabled by a “historical and current culture of anti-blackness.” This past weekend, the same angry blacks descended like dark clouds over rainbow celebrations across the land.
Why in tarnation are these nutmegs so angry?
For one thing, they claim that gay clubs discriminate against them. Whether it’s through dress codes or carding them upon entry or even claiming that the club is packed when it’s obviously empty, gay blacks are shrieking to the high heavens that they can”t go in and have a nice drink and possibly contract an incurable STD just like privileged white gays can. In Philly’s gay ghetto”known as the “Gayborhood””black fury erupted at the release of a surreptitious recording of a local gay club owner saying the word “nigger“ and complaining that black patrons are the only ones who keep begging for free drink tickets. Based on nothing more than an ad for a Manhattan bar that featured white and Hispanic muscle fags, a recent article sincerely asked, “Is a NYC gay bar excluding black patrons“?
According to Isaiah Wilson, who apparently receives a paycheck from something called the National Black Justice Coalition, the LGBT movement has been “whitewashed” and the alleged “contributions” of black homosexuals and trannies have been “devalued.”
Exactly what were they contributing besides semen?
In an article for the increasingly ridiculous Huffington Post, a young black rump-wrangler named Donovan Trott chides white male cum-guzzlers for not engaging in interracial sex: “An Open Letter To Gay, White Men: No, You”re Not Allowed To Have A Racial Preference.” Yet at the same time, he bashes gay whites who actually have a sexual desire for Asian males as “rice queens” and slams whites who like black males as “chocolate chasers.” So you”re racist if you don”t want to fellate them and you”re racist if you do. These white fags can”t catch a break!
When gays started referring to their thrust for political power as “the new civil rights movement,” many blacks blanched at the notion. After all, when blacks were being denied restaurant tables and forced to drink from inferior water fountains, gay whites could just blend in and pretend they weren”t gay.
But da blacks can”t be blamed for disliking da gays. Despite the fact that homosexuality is illegal in 34 African countries, this is obviously the result of white colonialism, even though to my knowledge homosexuality is not illegal in any white countries.
The Week’s Most Delicious, Nutritious, and Seditious Headlines
ONWARD AND N-WORD: SUPREME COURT RULES THAT “HATE SPEECH” IS PROTECTED
Relax, America: It’s time to start hating again!
In a unanimous 8-0 ruling, the US Supreme Court affirmed that so-called “hate speech” is indeed protected by the First Amendment.
Even the court’s three Heebs, one coon, and lady beaner agreed on this.
The ruling involved whether an Asian rock band calling themselves The Slants had the right to trademark their name after the government initially denied them permission. The band’s name referred to the debunked and discredited stereotype that Asians have slanted eyes, a racist myth that social scientists and climatologists have proved is entirely untrue.
Writing on behalf of four judges, some oily Dago named Samuel Alito said:
[The idea that the government may restrict] speech expressing ideas that offend…strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”
Speaking for the other four judges, some stinking-drunk Mick named Anthony Kennedy opined:
A law found to discriminate based on viewpoint is an “egregious form of content discrimination,” which is “presumptively unconstitutional.”…A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all.
We sincerely hope and pray that the court reconsiders its decision, seeing as empirical evidence unequivocally proves that being called spearchuckers and junglebunnies causes black people to smoke cigarettes.
GERMAN OFFICIALS RAID HOMES OF THIRTY-SIX PEOPLE FOR “HATEFUL” POSTINGS
Because the Nazis ridiculed, belittled, joked about, and microwaved four hundred and thirty-seven billion Jews in World War II, everyone agrees that it is incumbent among the global community to continue beating indigenous Germans into the dirt and urging them to perform an auto-Holocaust upon themselves.
Last Tuesday, police across Germany busted into the homes of 36 people who were accused of saying mean things about non-Germans on social media.
Defending the raids, President of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office Holger Münch, who, if you want to be blunt, looks like he has a bit of sugar in his gas tank, burped up this little nugget of Newspeak:
The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action. Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.
It’s clear that Germans will never truly be free unless they live in constant fear of freely speaking their minds.
AMERICAN TOURIST ACCUSED OF DYING BECAUSE NORTH KOREA DOESN”T HONOR “WHITE PRIVILEGE”
Everyone knows that leftists embody all that is good and loving about the human spirit, which is why many of them celebrated the recent death of a white American tourist who was jailed in North Korea for allegedly stealing a poster.
In late 2015, a white American in his early 20s named Otto Warmbier visited North Korea with a China-based tour group. As he attempted to return home on January 2, 2016, authorities arrested him and accused him of nicking the poster from his hotel room. A tearful Warmbier confessed to the crime on-camera, but communist authorities are known for forcing confessions out of people. Either way, it’s a frickin” poster.
Why did this happen? Because North Korea doesn”t honor white privilege, and you”re stupid for even asking!
When the story became international news, Comedy Central’s alleged comedian Larry Wilmore slammed Warmbier for his “Frat Bro Privilege”:
North Korea isn’t a playground for college pranks, Kim Jong-un isn’t a fictional character from a Seth Rogen movie, and Pyongyang isn’t some game you play with Coors Light and Solo cups….It’s just tough for me to have much sympathy for this guy and his crocodile tears.
Taking it up a notch, a sassy Negress who calls herself LaSha bet three dollars that Warmbier stole the poster because he was high on his white privilege:
I’m willing to bet my last dollar that he was aware of the political climate in that country, but privilege is a hell of a drug. The high of privilege told him that North Korea’s history of making examples out of American citizens who dare challenge their rigid legal system in any way was no match for his alabaster American privilege.
Korean authorities sentenced Warmier to fifteen years of hard labor. Shortly after his arrest, he lapsed into a coma due to “extensive loss of brain tissue” and was finally returned to the USA this month, where he died days after his arrival.
Hearing the news of Warmier’s death, an absolutely beautiful anthropology professor at the University of Delaware declared that justice had been served:
Is it wrong of me to think that Otto Warmbier got exactly what he deserved?…These are the same kids who cry about their grades because they didn’t think they’d really have to read and study the material to get a good grade….His parents ultimately are to blame for his growing up thinking he could get away with whatever he wanted….Maybe in the US, where young, white, rich, clueless white males routinely get away with raping women. Not so much in North Korea.
Is it wrong of us to think that this professor should get exactly what she deserves?
The most famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel of a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes, and it is “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” I thought of the novel as I was driven up to Gstaad during last week’s heat wave. Disembarking in Geneva, I felt I was back in Nairobi circa 1970, on my way to Mombasa and a romantic interlude among the elephants and wildebeests. The Old Continent now looks like Africa, especially in airports and public spaces. But things will have to change if we want things to stay the same, I told myself again and again.
In the coolness and quiet of the mountains one can think clearly about important things, such as ambition and the lack of it, or the conundrum of declining to try out of a false sense of decorum, or just plain laziness. Personal doubts aside, right now the great question seems to be the economic inequality generated by capitalism and free enterprise, and the egalitarian drive bursting out in anticapitalist demonstrations and militant rage, as of that in London this week. Mind you, looking at British television, the impression I got was that Jeremy Corbyn had won the election, and that the Tories, in a pout, had allowed the fire at the Grenfell estate to get out of hand and burn Africans and Muslims alive. Talk about the power of the idiot box and the irresponsibility of lefty hacks.
Britain now resembles Central America, where the loser immediately after an election declares it null and void and demands a repeat performance. What is the difference between John McDonnell’s call for a million people to take to the streets and a banana republic’s electoral loser’s call for civil disobedience? I suppose the temperature. Never mind. My social schedule is rather full starting next week, and I thank the Almighty I no longer go to Ascot to keep company with glorified hairdressers and other such nice folk.
I know it sounds snobby as hell, but I’ve had it with this smoldering class resentment in Britain. We will always have differences in looks, intelligence, and bank accounts, and if that causes outraged shrieks among do-gooders and phonies, too bad. Such is life. Immediately after the last world war, with all the large pleasure boats having been requisitioned by the warring states, I walked about the various marinas in the south of France and saw only tiny sailing boats or fishing vessels. Shipyards didn’t start to build pleasure yachts until well into the ’50s. Hence all bathers looked the same, although I do remember King Farouk being held up because of his weight by two flunkies. Then the yachts began to appear, separating the men from the boys. And the men did get to pick up women while the boys kept to their swimming. Life, after all, is unfair, and a man with a yacht has a better chance of picking up a tart than a man whose only asset at sea is his bathing suit.
Am I going all Ayn Rand on you? God, I hope not—she was too awful a woman, an arch capitalist and a male-eating cougar if there ever was one, and not the most attractive of females. She did for selfishness what the saints did for altruism, and then some. But she had some very good points to her. When she was asked by her publisher to cut John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged—a long paean to runaway capitalism and individualism—she snapped, “Would you cut the Bible?”
Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism was the greatest social organization ever invented, having experienced hunger and oppression and loss of all her family wealth in St. Petersburg to the communists. Once in the land of opportunity, Rand changed her name from Rosenbaum and took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to make sure people knew of her love of capitalism. The one problem Rand had were the businessmen she met. They did not match up to the “Übermenschen” of her imagination, or those she created in her fiction. In fact, Rand had no more reverence for real capitalists than fellow intellectuals did. At the end, her individualism owed more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith, but never mind. We could use someone like her in the capital this week, especially when the “militants” rage up and down central London screaming “Tory scum!” and other such intellectual put-downs.
I suppose the best medicine for those consumed by rage against the system would be a bit of collectivism à la North Korea. The Corbynites have never seen collectivism up close. This is why Poles and Hungarians and others who suffered so from communism have such adamantine confidence in the free-enterprise system. This is why we would have the last laugh if God forbid people like Corbyn ever came to power and turned the green and pleasant land into one of misery and poverty. But enough of thinking seriously. Time for a drink and perhaps more than just the one.
