Greece is a small beautiful country in the southeastern part of Europe, a place of jasmine, bougainvillea, mimosa, cypresses, olive trees, pines, oregano, sage, and thyme; sand, rock, and the bluest and cleanest water on earth. It was the birthplace of (selective) democracy, philosophy, Attic tragedy, poetry, history, and, of course, tyranny. The most beautiful and symmetrical edifice ever constructed still stands in the sacred rock that is the Acropolis, and Greece is the country that first embraced the power of reason and persuasion and sought the embodiment of the “nous.” Ancient Athens, the capital of this small country, produced Pericles, the closest to a perfect leader any country has had since. Pericles believed in intelligence, reason, restraint, and peace. He was a soldier’s general who preferred to carry out his goals by diplomacy rather than war. He was an aristocrat, politician, imperialist, peacemaker, visionary, educator, private citizen, statesman, strategist, and hero. We know about him from sources such as Plutarch, Thucydides, and the comic poets. His death from the plague in 429 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, saw the end of Athens as a major power. And then there were the philosophers. Philosophy ended with the Greeks, no ifs or buts about it. The history of Greek philosophy is unlike anything else. One can understand the history of warfare without becoming Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon. But one cannot understand Aristotle unless one becomes in a small way a Greek thinker. Ancient Athens was full of people who were philosophers. Philosophy was as popular as, say, rap is among the ignorant today, but as the Oracle of Delphi pronounced, “Socrates was the wisest of them all because he alone knew that he was ignorant.”

Having said all this, I imagine some of you may have guessed that I am Greek, and I am, with a dose of blue Danube blood in me. And I do have a confession to make: We Greeks reached our peak 2,500 years ago, and it’s been downhill ever since. Never mind. Greece has enough other problems pending to worry about what happened to its greatness. Greece’s financial position is terminal. It cannot hope to save, invest, and grow its way out of trouble. Like Germany following World War I, Greece has been choked by its obligations to foreign creditors. The archvillains are the megacrooks of the E.U. Children go hungry so that banks can tell their investors they’ve refused to take a haircut. The situation is similar to that of a fighter who is a middleweight, is put on a strict, starvation-like diet, and is expected to grow and fight as a heavyweight. Mind you, the Greeks themselves were the ones who started it. Once Greece joined the dictatorship that the fourth estate dares not call by its real name, the E.U., in 1980, credit became the cocaine of both left- and right-wing governments. The more the E.U. lent, the more successive Greek governments wanted and received from the dealer, Brussels, that knew from day one what was going on and, like all good drug dealers, let the addict sniff to its heart’s content.

Despite the BS put out by the various E.U. lackeys, as well as the extreme-left Greek government in power the past two years, Greece is more dependent than ever on the Troika (the ECB, IMF, and European Commission). Seven years of severe austerity with 60% unemployment of the young and 25% general unemployment have accomplished absolutely nothing. The country runs on its black economy. People have simply stopped working in order not to have to pay taxes they cannot afford to pay. When the austerity began in 2010, the debt was 130% of the GDP. Now it stands at 180%. The crooks in Brussels call it progress. Talk about Orwellian newspeak.

And now we come to the 64-dollar question: What is to be done? In a Greek newspaper article I wrote seven years ago I demanded the then government—whose prime minister I had once beaten 6–0, 6–0 in a tennis match, but had allowed him to post a much closer score after he begged for mercy (it illustrates his false pride and basic dishonesty)—leave the E.U. and tell them to shove it. Juncker would have bent over backwards fearing others might follow. We would have gone back to the world’s oldest currency, the drachma, paid off our debts by devaluing it, drawn even more tourists because of it, and given a lesson to Italy, Spain, and Portugal, who are fighting for their economic lives under the E.U. dictatorship.

Alas, not many listened to poor little Taki. The moral midgets who rule us love the motorcycle outriders and the false pomp that Brussels offers every two weeks during their interminable meetings and congresses. Greece chose to remain a member of the E.U. and the people have suffered ever since. No, not the rich, nor the very poor. The true strength of a nation, the middle class, has disappeared. Bureaucracy has continued unabated, blocking business decisions and business growth. The present radical left-wing party in power resists all reforms that could boost competitiveness. But the prime minister flies to Brussels regularly and meets with Juncker and has drinks and dinner. Poor Greece. It’s the Haiti of Europe.

Much of the mania of the moment stems from a growing crisis of faith among elites over how much longer they can expect the ideological dogmas under which they have prospered so mightily to withstand the onrushing findings of genetic science.

No family illustrates this tension more ironically than the Wojcicki sisters, Susan (the former landlady of Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin) and Anne (the former wife of Sergey).

Susan Wojcicki (pronounced Wo-jit-skee) now heads Google’s subsidiary YouTube. This month she has taken the lead in corporate America’s march toward censorship of genetic explanations for sex and race differences, getting Google engineer James Damore fired and installing a system for neutering the impact of politically incorrect videos.

Meanwhile, Anne Wojcicki is the cofounder and CEO of 23andMe, a well-known genetic testing service for quantifying your racial past and what your genes might portend for your future.

The Wojcicki sisters enjoyed the ideal nature and nurture for fabulous Silicon Valley careers. Their father was chairman of the Stanford physics department, their mother an energetic teacher at Palo Alto High School, and they grew up in faculty housing on the Stanford campus, surrounded by brilliant scientists.

And the Wojcicki sisters were in the right place at the right time to meet the right people.

As you’ll recall, the Internet was initially hyped as a breakthrough that would eliminate the tyranny of location: You could work from anywhere in the world! But, it turned out, where you live matters not less but even more in the Internet Age.

After completing her UCLA M.B.A. in 1998, Susan and her husband bought a five-bedroom house (with help from her parents) in Menlo Park near Stanford for about $600,000. They rented the garage to grad students Larry and Sergey to use as an office. Soon the landlady was working for nascent Google as a marketer and introducing Sergey to her sister.

This month, Susan won the power struggle within Google over software engineer James Damore documenting some of the biological science behind Google’s hiring patterns. (Paradoxically, Damore was fired for defending the hiring practices of Google executives, such as Susan Wojcicki.)

And Susan has now had YouTube enforce, in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League, a policy of soft censorship of heterodox videos, such as journalist Jared Taylor’s “Race Differences in Intelligence.” Heretics are currently being allowed to keep their videos up on YouTube’s near-monopoly service to deny them martyrdom. But most functionality, such as comments, advertising, and sharing, is being stripped away.

As Susan asked in an op-ed condemning Damore’s impudence:

For instance, what if we replaced the word “women” in the memo with another group? What if the memo said that biological differences amongst Black, Hispanic, or LGBTQ employees explained their underrepresentation in tech and leadership roles? Would some people still be discussing the merit of the memo’s arguments or would there be a universal call for swift action against its author?

Of course, Susan has not used her power to get Google to actually hire a proportional number of blacks, Hispanics, or women. Google’s technical workforce remains only 1 percent black, 3 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent female.

(On the other hand, how much evidence is there for Susan’s contention that “LGBTQ” employees are underrepresented in Silicon Valley? For instance, the CEO of Apple, the only company richer than Google, is gay. And I suspect Google employs a disproportionate number of ex-men transgenders among its programmers.)

Susan’s not going to risk Google’s immense market capitalization by forcing radically different hiring patterns. But she doesn’t want anybody talking about even the possibility that there are genetic reasons behind why Google does what it does when it comes to hiring engineering talent.

In contrast, Susan’s younger sister Anne has been encouraging everybody to talk about genetics and race since she cofounded 23andMe in 2006.

It’s widely assumed in the conventional wisdom that race doesn’t exist or is just a social construct or is merely skin-deep or whatever. But if you send 23andMe a vial of your saliva and $199, they will tell you what your racial background is rather precisely.

For example, Anne has shared her ancestry. She is 100 percent European, with 50.2 percent being Ashkenazi Jewish (i.e., her mother, Esther) and the rest being 41.2 percent Eastern European, 2.7 percent Northwestern European, 0.4 percent Southern European, and 5.5 percent “Broadly European” (i.e., her father, Stanley, an anti-Communist refugee from Poland).

These kinds of racial estimates aren’t perfect, but they’ve improved dramatically since 2009 when one DNA service reported that Larry David was three-eighths American Indian. The price of genome testing is falling with remarkable speed, allowing more and more data to be analyzed at a moderate price.

Former Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy is literally Mr. Peace. He founded the Washington Peace Center in D.C., and he’s taught classes on peace and nonviolence at Georgetown University, American University, and the University of Maryland. After 9/11, he wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times in which he outlined the proper U.S. response to the unprecedented act of Islamic terror:

The nonviolent response to Sept. 11 is in the tradition of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Jeannette Rankin and groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi. It is saying to those behind the attack: We forgive you; we reject vengeance. And then, summoning still more moral courage, to ask them to forgive us for all of our violence…

What a saint! Except the thing about McCarthy is, it seems like he only takes that “forgive your attackers and ask them to forgive you” line when the attackers are nonwhite or non-Christian. Last week, I emailed McCarthy and his underlings at the Peace Center with a simple question about the recent violence in Charlottesville. Should the parents of Heather Heyer forgive her attacker? Wouldn’t that be the “morally courageous” thing to do? If McCarthy thinks the parents of slain WTC firefighters should say to the 9/11 terrorists, “We forgive you, oh noble Arab Muslims, now please forgive us,” shouldn’t Heather Heyer’s parents forgive and ask forgiveness from the fashy-boy who steamrolled their daughter?

I didn’t receive a reply from McCarthy and his disciples. Big surprise. That whole “forgive and ask for forgiveness” thing is reserved for whites who are attacked by “people of color.” I call it Amy Biehl syndrome. You remember her, right? She was the blond shiksa who traveled to Africa to help the poor downtrodden blacks, only to be severely trodden-down by the blacks she was trying to help, as a mob of enraged POCs (pummelers of color) pulled her from her car and stomped, stoned, and stabbed her to death merely for being white. Biehl’s family forgave the four men convicted of her murder and advocated for them to be pardoned and released. Her father shook the killers’ hands when they were freed. He linked arms with the men who butchered his daughter and launched a foundation through which the forgiven murderers were assured a steady paycheck.

Have any black victims of white hate crimes ever gone the Biehl route? It almost happened once, but the forgiveness was shut down immediately by (get ready for the irony) a black Christian minister and the civil rights organization he represents. In 2015, at the bond hearing for Little Dutch Boy mass murderer Dylann Roof, the daughter of one of the victims told the accused, “You took something very precious from me…. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.” That was a truly admirable thing to say, but the NAACP would have none of it. Following the hearing, North Carolina NAACP schizo-in-chief Rev. Curtis Gatewood (regular readers might remember this nutcase from a previous column) announced that blacks must never forgive whites like Roof. The loose-screwed, paranoid reverend went on a lengthy and bizarre videotaped rant, castigating the victims’ families for even entertaining the notion of forgiveness. He counseled the families not to forgive but rather to stay “angry.” Did I mention this clown is a Christian minister?

It’s a sad, simple truth of our times. Whites are expected to forgive and ask for forgiveness, while blacks are expected to stay angry. Which brings me to Winston Moseley. Moseley is the African-American gentleman who rather famously raped and murdered Kitty Genovese in Queens in 1964 while “38 witnesses” in her apartment building looked on and did nothing. As Kathy Shaidle pointed out last year, the “38 witnesses” story is complete bunk, an invention of The New York Times. But the actual details of Genovese’s encounter with Moseley are damn near too horrific to imagine. Winston Moseley was no ordinary monster; he had a fetish for stabbing or shooting women and then raping them as they died. Not after they died, but as they died. I don’t think that’s necrophilia per se, but I’m not going to waste time Googling “name of fetish for raping a dying woman.” Moseley was “life unworthy of life.” His first victim was shot, raped, and then burned alive because she was still breathing after he climaxed. His next victim was just 15 years old. And then there was Ms. Genovese, who endured an agonizing 35 minutes of sexual assault before finally bleeding out. Moseley, initially sentenced to death but given a life-with-the-possibility-of-parole reprieve because New York liberals believe in forgiving black erotophonophiles (okay, I fucking Googled it), escaped from prison in 1968 and raped yet another random woman. He died in prison last year at the ripe old age of 81. Whatever the cause, it couldn’t possibly have been as painful as the death he deserved.

Also last year, a documentary about the Genovese murder was released, titled The Witness. The film focuses on Kitty’s brother Bill, a Vietnam vet who lost his legs in the war, as he tries to uncover the truth behind the “38 witnesses” myth. A couple of friends recommended the film to me because I wrote about the Genovese case in a previous column, but I just couldn’t bring myself to watch it, because, from the promos I saw, it seemed as though the movie ends with Bill Genovese forgiving Moseley for his sister’s torture-murder. And frankly, seeing that sadistic, unrepentant freak receive forgiveness would have raised my blood pressure from slightly elevated to Kirk Douglas-level incipient-stroke territory.

Last week, I finally saw the film. The good news is that Bill Genovese doesn’t end up forgiving Winston Moseley. The bad news is, he interviews Moseley’s son Steven, who, like the NAACP’s Gatewood, is another supposed “reverend,” and what we see in the four-minute Moseley/Genovese exchange is a condensation of everything that is unhealthy, everything that is wrong, with black America today.

Genovese starts things off on a conciliatory note:

Genovese: I don’t hold the son responsible for the father’s deeds. Your dad wouldn’t talk to me, and I’m trying to find a way in my own heart to forgive him.

Moseley: Can I explain to you what forgiveness does? When you forgive people, it’s for yourself. It’s for you.

So far so good. Christian forgiveness and such.

Moseley: How would you feel about him getting paroled? Because, um, if it had not been for the, uh, notoriety of this story, he’d have probably been paroled by now.

Really? You have a chance to speak to the brother of one of the women your father raped, tortured, and murdered…and you not only suggest that he should be paroled, but you blame the “notoriety” of the crime, rather than the crime itself, for the fact that he hasn’t been?

Genovese: You see, my concern is that, there’s that part of him that seems to be a very good person, and there’s that part of him that maybe he has no control over that really is, for lack of a better term, a monster.

Moseley: Fifty years ago.

Genovese: Fifty years ago, but my concern is, where is he now?

Moseley: Only thing I know is from what he told me, you know? He said he just snapped out. ’Cause there was some racial tension going on back then. And your sister was using a lot of racial slurs at him and he just lost it. That’s what he told me.

I woke up this morning, sneezed, and then suddenly every white person in the world was a “white supremacist.”

And if they try to deny it, well, that only means they are white supremacists who lie about it.

Still flailing desperately like a half-crushed bug about its electoral defeat last November, the modern left is tossing the term “white supremacist” at any suspected counterrevolutionaries with the same zealous abandon that Antifa chucks urine-filled bottles at old white ladies who wave American flags.

We are led to believe that race doesn’t exist—which would imply that white people don’t exist, either—but that through some sort of socially righteous prestidigitation, white people are easy to spot and must be scapegoated for all human, animal, and plant suffering across the universe from the dawn of time. And if you think that’s a ridiculous burden to bear, that’s only because you’re a “white supremacist.”

For about a quarter-century, I’ve been accused of being a “white supremacist” for no other apparent reason than the fact that I don’t apologize for my skin color and don’t feel one sliver of guilt for history. I’ve never felt the need to say that white people are the best on Earth, but this isn’t what gets me labeled a white supremacist—it’s my refusal to say they’re the worst group on Earth.

I’ve often said I’ve never run across a true “Holocaust denier” in that sense that I’ve never seen anyone say Hitler loved Jews and that the Germans didn’t kill any Heebs in World War II. Every “denier” I’ve ever seen only quibbles about numbers and methods of killing and how the Holocaust is used as a political weapon. So in essence, I deny the existence of Holocaust denial.

In the same sense, I’m not sure in my long and arduous research that I’ve ever encountered a “white supremacist,” at least according to the official definition. According to Merriam-Webster, a white supremacist is:

a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races

Wikipedia defines “white supremacy” thusly:

a racist ideology based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and that therefore white people should be dominant over other races.

Of all the alleged “white supremacists” I’ve known—at that’s at least enough to fill a small dinner theater for a musical tribute to Al Jolson—I’d estimate that only a slim quotient has even gone so far as to say that whites are superior to all others. And I can’t recall a single one of them ever saying that “white people should have control over people of other races.” At most, they just want to get the hell away from other races. Those would accurately be termed “white separatists” or “white nationalists.” But the modern media/government/banking complex doesn’t seem to care about accuracy nearly as much as they enjoy hunting white witches. These days, being called a “white supremacist” is only different from being called a witch in that they don’t even bother dunking you in the river before declaring you guilty.

I covered this in my interview with Jared Taylor a couple weeks ago. Taylor identifies as a “race realist” and has been quite candid in saying that Asians are “objectively superior” to whites. Still, Wikipedia insists on calling him a “white supremacist”—on the same page that they note his comments about Asian superiority.

Exactly how much mental yoga does it take to call someone a white supremacist when they’ve clearly explained why they aren’t?

And why is the word “supremacist” used almost entirely to smear white-identity groups and no others? A quick Google search yielded the following:

“white supremacist”…9,680,000 results
“jewish supremacist”…192,000 results
“black supremacist”…110,000 results
“asian supremacist”…2,670 results

Pardon me for noticing, but the term “God’s chosen people” is one of the most baldly supremacist notions ever concocted. It takes supremacy all the way up to the cosmic plane. And at least over the past generation, I’ve witnessed far more Jewish, black, and Asian people than whites claiming to be members of the master race. For the most part, all these alleged “white supremacists” are simply sick of the constant defamation.

It’s almost as if the people who lob the term “white supremacist” with impunity are either painfully stupid or deeply malicious. And despite the relentless gaslighting, one needn’t be a paranoid schizophrenic to suspect there’s an explicitly anti-white agenda underlying it all. Then again, even insinuating that anything could possibly be “anti-white” automatically gets you labeled a white supremacist.

Reality TV star Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs notoriety was recently accused of supporting “white nationalism” because he didn’t explicitly condemn Donald Trump’s factually accurate comment that there was violence on “both sides” in Charlottesville. Rowe fired back that he felt no need to do the whole hairshirt-wearing “disavowal” tap dance because the very request to do so is “annoying.”

Despite taking great pains to distance himself from white identity movements, Charles Murray has been smeared by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “white nationalist.” Perhaps people should start suing anyone who makes such an accusation, because in this climate, it’s effectively an invitation to commit violence against someone. Such propaganda actually led to violence in Murray’s case earlier this year.

When organizers for a group called Patriot Prayer—a group that does not mention race at all—attempted to hold a rally in San Francisco recently, Nancy Pelosi defamed them as “white nationalists” and others called them “white supremacists.” Naturally, the rally was canceled as a result.

The Week’s Dippiest, Drippiest, and Yippiest Headlines

ANTIFA V. BLACKS
Antifa (pronounced “an-TEE-fa”) is a group of psychopathically self-righteous masked pussies who live with their parents and refer to all non-members as “fascists,” whereupon they proceed to club the accused Nazis’ skulls with nail-studded baseball bats to atone for perceived historical sins. They are at least partially financed by George Soros’s Open Society Institute yet remain blissfully unaware that they are the cowardly pawns of global power rather than its brave opponents.

Because intersectional pissing matches between the patchwork of deranged identity groups that form the modern left is one of the only forms of comedy remaining in this increasingly dramatic and even tragic world, we glean tremendous mirth from the fact that Antifa’s almost entirely white ranks are turning against black people who don’t submit to their every psychotic whim.

On August 19 in Dallas, throngs of historically illiterate cretins gathered together to work out their lifelong resentment against their parents by hootin’ and howlin’ in the streets about how all monuments to the Confederacy need to be SMASHED and CRUSHED.

In an amusing incident that recalls the severe dressing-down a black guy gave to a white Antifa geek in Auburn, AL earlier this year, an alleged Crip wearing a giant cowboy hat squared off with a fat white masked Antifa member, telling the group of neo-commie white-savior misfits to get the hell out of his town. In response, the masked chubster sucker-punched the black guy in the face. For some unknown reason, the American mainstream media was silent about this horrifying hate crime that was captured on video.

The next night, a young black Trump supporter named R. C. Maxwell was sucker-punched by an overweight, unmasked antifascist loser during an anti-illegal-immigration rally in Laguna Beach, CA. The alleged assailant, 20-year-old Richard Losey of Ohio, was arrested last Tuesday on suspicion of misdemeanor battery.

R. C. Maxwell wrote the following in a blog post:

I showed up in Orange County and got punched in the face by ANTIFA. My name is RC Maxwell and I am a victim of leftist violence. The media won’t show me because it will detract from their narrative….I knew that leftist groups were inspired to ramp up their violent attacks against Trump supporters after the mess that was Unite The Right in Charlottesville. What I didn’t expect was that I would become Antifa’s target so quickly….I took a punch for Trump in Laguna Beach. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to expose to the nation how violent leftist agitators are.

In order to fight “Nazis,” apparently you have to punch a few black people.

GOOD NIGHT, LEFT NUT
The funniest Benny Hill-styled slapstick of the week came last Tuesday night in Phoenix when riot police fired a tear-gas canister square into a gas-mask-wearing chubby Antifa protestor’s groin, sending him to the ground in pain. People online originally thought that 29-year-old Joshua Stuart Corbin, a worker for web giant GoDaddy, had been hit with a pepper ball, leading to several memes referring to Corbin as “Pepper Balls” and a parody of an Antifa slogan titled “GOOD NIGHT LEFT NUT.”

From a hospital bed with his face covered, Corbin made a video addressing his “brothers and sisters” in Antifa about how he was fighting “Nazis,” who in this case were supposedly the Phoenix police. His tone was much less defiant when he told a reporter, “I was out there just mindin’ my own business” and that he had a right to peaceably assemble and protest the Nazis he’s always hallucinating in his fever dreams.

However, Phoenix police arrested him and charged him with three felony counts of assault against a police officer and one misdemeanor count of unlawful assembly. A police report claims that surveillance footage shows Corbin threw two gas canisters at police and kicked another two canisters toward them.

Good luck in court, Pepper Balls!

MAN STABBED FOR “NEO-NAZI HAIRCUT”
In case you needed more evidence that the country has gone completely Nazi Crazy, a Colorado man was stabbed by a man who thought he had a Nazi haircut. According to Joshua Witt, he was getting out of his car in a Steak ’n Shake parking lot when a man ran up to him, said, “Are you one of them neo-Nazis?,” and began swinging a knife at him. Witt deflected the knife with his hand, suffering a slash wound that required stitches. “Apparently, my haircut is considered a neo-Nazi statement,” Witt told the New York Post. Witt says he is not a Nazi and is considering a new hairdo.

When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were springing on the human race. Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, a New Man, as the Bolshies called it, one that would overcome “the antinomies of subjective and objective, body and spirit, family and party.” Leave it to a horror like Lenin to design a new human being (although a certain Austrian tried to emulate him less than twenty years later). Yakov Sverdlov was such a man, having ordered the murder of the Tsar and all his family, plus having the family’s dogs hanged.

We hear a lot about Nazis nowadays, but very little about horrors like Lenin and Sverdlov and their enablers. But if anyone copied Lenin’s methods of winning big through terror and murder, it was Hitler and Goebbels. And let’s forget about the fierce persecution of the aristocracy by the Bolsheviks, the destruction of an entire class, the chilling tales of looted palaces and the murder of millions, and stick to the creation of New Man.

What was required was transparency between the individual and the collective. The bourgeois family had to be erased from one’s consciousness, as were family attachments and things like domesticity, wives, children, lovers, and whatever else pre-Lenin humans used to indulge in. Lefty intellectuals concurred, many of them British like the Webbs and Bertrand Russell, a stain whom present academics defend to this day—more vigorously than ever, come to think of it. When Robert Conquest first published his litany of the great terror and its close to 100 million dead, he was ignored by that very same academy, and instead of being awarded a dukedom for his work, he was more or less ostracized by lefty professors and the so-called elite. Ditto Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was booed during lectures at American universities for pointing out the vacuity of the consumer society.

That nice guy who succeeded Lenin once the latter croaked requisitioned grain from peasants, who starved in order to fund industry in the cities. Thirty million died from that alone. Still, true Bolsheviks remained loyal to the cause, fathers giving up daughters to the dreaded secret police, sons betraying mothers, and so on. Social engineering began with Bolshevism, and I must admit that it worked, at least where intellectuals are concerned. The Soviet project has successfully polluted the academy the world over, and continues to this day. Which brings me to what took place a couple of weeks ago at my old alma mater, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The brawl was between extremists on both sides, the difference being that among 350 million Americans, I’d say there are probably one, two, perhaps three thousand so-called neo-Nazis, and about the same number of white supremacists. In fact not even that, because the two groups overlap. But let’s not go on the other side, the “antifa” who oppose them. Every student I’ve ever met in America is antifa in spirit, to put it in plain English. They do not allow conservative speakers to address conservative groups on their campuses, interrupt any meeting that does not adhere to political correctness, and have gone so far as to demand that white students leave the campus for three days in order to cleanse it from past white crimes and thoughts. I am talking about Ivy League universities, including Berkeley, where the free-speech concept began in 1964. In other words, there is no free speech in American universities today, and the media and academia are complicit. What gets me is the amorality of the media and of academia, the deception, dishonesty, and race baiting against whites that passes as liberalism.

Freud said that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious—provided, of course, that the traffic was directed by him. His work has always seemed to me more like soothsaying than science, which perhaps explains its popularity in the 20th century, with its need for pagan mystics masquerading as rationalists. Neither the plausibility nor the persuasiveness of Freud’s speculations accounts for his influence on so many intelligent and well-educated people for so long; rather it was the convoluted implausibility of his speculations that attracted them. We all like to be in on a secret not comprehensible to others.

This is not to say that dreams tell us nothing. Often (especially these days) I am woken by a dream of needing to relieve myself, only to find that I do indeed need to relieve myself. My wife and I have reason, therefore, to be grateful to the faculty of dreaming.

But sometimes dreams reveal something deeper about ourselves to ourselves that we had previously failed to consider, or perhaps did not want to know. For example, the other night I woke in the course of an unpleasant dream that revealed to me the full extent of my adherence to convention and my insecure fear of social ridicule.

I was at a friend’s house (in my dream), a friend older and better connected than I. It wasn’t her real house, which is both grand and disorganized, strewn charmingly with antique furniture and artworks of many periods and lands, but a kind of modern suburban Versailles, decorated in the style that the late comedian Bob Hope called “early King Farouk.” I had already angered my friend by opening all the windows, to which she had responded by piling wood into the wood-burning stoves, although it was very hot weather. But far worse was the fact that there was soon to be a black-tie dinner given for eminent persons, for which I was now dressing. I discovered to my horror that, though I had brought my evening clothes, I had only a pair of brown shoes with me, the kind of rustic half-boots in which I walk round the garden when it is raining. Never elegant, they would look absurd with my evening clothes: The entire company would laugh at me.

A truly self-confident person would have been able to carry it off as a habitual slight eccentricity of his, or brazen it out as if it were the most natural thing in the world; but I woke in a cold sweat, my heart thumping, at the prospect of ridicule of my sartorial faux pas.

On the scale of human disasters, objectively considered, this was surely at the less serious end of the spectrum, yet I experienced it as an absolute horror, as bad as any I could imagine. I could have slept happily through an earthquake or massacre, but a few people laughing at my shoes was insupportable to me. An odd scale of values!

Having woken, and being unable to get back to sleep, I began to worry that my reluctance to offend people, in the flesh if not in print, was not a virtue, as I usually held it to be, but a manifestation of insecurity and pusillanimity, a cowardly avoidance of unpleasantness rather than a demonstration of thoughtfulness toward others.

A strange incident (this one real) came into my mind. I had flown to another country to give a talk, and was met at the airport by a member of the committee that had invited me. He was to drive me about a hundred miles to the venue of the talk.

I saw at once that he was a man of many large business lunches, and he was obviously the worse for wear. His breath smelled of alcohol and he swayed slightly as he stood waiting for me. He led me to the car park where his car was parked. I saw that it was a very powerful model, capable of nearly 200 miles an hour.

Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement.

Neocons claimed America was an “ideological nation” a “creedal nation,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

Expropriating the biblical mandate, “Go forth and teach all nations!” they divinized democracy and made the conversion of mankind to the democratic faith their mission here on earth.

With his global crusade for democracy, George W. Bush bought into all this. Result: Ashes in our mouths and a series of foreign policy disasters, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Behind the Trumpian slogan “America First” lay a conviction that, with the Cold War over and the real ideological nation, the USSR, shattered into pieces along ethnic lines, it was time for America to come home.

Contra the neocons, traditionalists argued that, while America was uniquely great, the nation was united by faith, culture, language, history, heroes, holidays, mores, manners, customs and traditions. A common feature of Americans, black and white, was pride in belonging to a people that had achieved so much.

The insight attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville—“America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great”—was a belief shared by almost all.

What makes our future appear problematic is that what once united us now divides us. While Presidents Wilson and Truman declared us to be a “Christian nation,” Christianity has been purged from our public life and sheds believers every decade. Atheism and agnosticism are growing rapidly, especially among the young.

Traditional morality, grounded in Christianity, is being discarded. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Four-in-10 children are born out of wedlock. Unrestricted abortion and same-sex marriage—once regarded as marks of decadence and decline—are now seen as human rights and the hallmarks of social progress.

Tens of millions of us do not speak English. Where most of our music used to be classic, popular, country and western, and jazz, much of it now contains rutting lyrics that used to be unprintable.

Where we used to have three national networks, we have three 24-hour cable news channels and a thousand websites that reinforce our clashing beliefs on morality, culture, politics and race.

Consider but a few events post-Charlottesville.

“Murderer” was painted on the San Fernando statue of Fr. Junipero Serra, the Franciscan who founded the missions that became San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan Capistrano and Santa Clara.

America’s oldest monument honoring Columbus, in Baltimore, was vandalized. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia called for Robert E. Lee’s statue to be removed from Capitol and replaced by—Pocahontas.

According to legend, this daughter of Chief Powhatan saved Captain John Smith from being beheaded by throwing herself across his neck. The Chief was a “person of interest” in the disappearance of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island, among whose missing was Virginia Dare, the first European baby born in British America.

Why did Kaine not call for John Smith himself, leader of the Jamestown Colony that fought off Indian attacks, to be so honored?

In New Orleans, “Tear It Down” was spray-painted on a statue of Joan of Arc, a gift from France in 1972. Besides being a canonized saint in the Catholic Church and a legendary heroine of France, what did the Maid of Orleans do to deserve this?

Taken together, we are seeing the discoverers, explorers and missionaries of North America demonized as genocidal racists all. The Founding Fathers are either slave owners or sanctioners of slavery.

Our nation-builders either collaborated in or condoned the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. Almost to the present, ours was a land where segregationists were honored leaders.

“History teaches us no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it.” That’s the first sentence of a Spectator review of John Bew’s admirable biography of Clement Attlee, Labour’s most successful prime minister.

It’s an extraordinary statement. Apply it to your own life. We all—almost all, anyway—have some successes and some failures. Don’t these offer opportunities to learn? Sometimes we take the opportunity, sometimes we don’t. Any sports coach will tell you that failure—defeat—can teach a valuable lesson that can make you perform better in the future. Or, to take a mundane example, suppose a crooked secondhand-car dealer sells you a dodgy car: Will you buy your next one from that man, or will history teach you to go somewhere else?

If we accept that we can, and often do, learn from experience—which is history—in our personal life, it’s surely absurd to argue that in public life, or affairs of state, history has no valuable lessons to teach us.

Field Marshal Montgomery had no doubt about it. What’s the first rule of war? “Don’t invade Russia,” he replied. If Hitler hadn’t been too conceited to learn lessons from history, he might have taken a close look at Napoleon’s 1812 campaign and canceled Operation Barbarossa. Napoleon’s “Grande Armée” was much stronger than any Russian army, but Russia defeated him. Hitler suffered the same experience because he thought there was no lesson to be learned from history.

So what might be another rule taught by history? I’d suggest “Keep out of Afghanistan.” We British eventually learned this, painfully and embarrassingly, in the days of our Indian Empire. Afghan wars were a bad mistake. The Soviet Union paid no heed to history and dispatched a large army, backed by tanks and planes, to prop up its Communist stooge. Big mistake. The Soviets’ Afghan War was a disaster, contributing to the demoralization and loss of nerve that led a few years later to the disintegration of the Soviet Empire and indeed of the Soviet Union itself. The Taliban, originally encouraged and armed by the USA and its Western allies to fight the Russians, took over and established an Islamic theocracy.

Then came 9/11. The Taliban had been hosting Osama bin Laden and his small al-Qaeda organization. 9/11 was planned there. Alarmed, the Taliban offered to send bin Laden to a neutral country. Not good enough. The Afghan War was launched. At first it went well, conforming to the pattern of invasions of the country. There’s always an easy victory at first. This time, in 2001, with the enthusiastic support of Afghan roughnecks—a.k.a. “warlords”—who had been given a hard time by the Taliban zealots, everything went swimmingly. The Taliban were routed. An elected Afghan government took their place. This was sixteen years ago; the Taliban recovered and regrouped, and the Afghan War drags on. The Taliban resemble the Hydra of Greek mythology; every time you cut a head off, another sprouts. Refusal to learn from history dooms you to repeating it.

President Trump may not read much history—the word is that he doesn’t read much of anything—but his instinct, he tells us, was to pull American troops out of Afghanistan and leave it to the Afghans to manage as best they can. But his instinct hasn’t, it seems, been a match for the Pentagon, still committed to a war that has now lasted more than twice as long as the wars against Nazi Germany and Japan. So more troops will be committed to Afghanistan yet again, treading the old vicious circle.

This will be my last column for Takimag. It’s been almost exactly ten years at about 1,000 words a week. That’s half a million words or the equivalent of half a dozen books. I’m so thankful to Taki and his daughter, Mandolyna, for giving me the opportunity to make better and better columns. The early ones are so bad, I’m glad they’re offline. Takimag has consistently been a place where you can say whatever you want. Many others have tried. Thought Catalog reprinted Taki columns for a minute but couldn’t take the millennial backlash and quickly capitulated. John Derbyshire was fired from National Review for a column he wrote here. There has been zero capitulation from the Theodoracopuloses and I’m eternally grateful to Takimag.

My only regret is I didn’t get to hang out with them more. Mandolyna is remarkably easy to work with. I think we had two fights and they lasted one email. Taki is a riot. From screaming, “Vous êtes nouveau riche!” at other boats from his yacht to pounding the table at a fancy restaurant and hollering, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if Liberace ate pussy, he’d still be with us,” the man is a human rock concert. Those Greek tycoons have been phenomenally generous to me over the years and I couldn’t be more thankful.

The articles I’ve written have been well received if you check the top 5 list and brutally resented if you check the comments. I avoid the latter but have to admit the top 5 ranking is pretty accurate. I’m sure the other columnists here notice that when you dial it in you don’t see an appearance, but when you work hard at telling a unique story in a palatable way, the meritocracy of numbers recognizes it. I used to compare myself to Jim Goad and compete with him for more than one spot at a time on that list (I don’t think I ever got the top two spots, but he did). It’s a dumb thing to do because the man is simply one of the greatest writers of our generation. Where most of us would spend all our chips creating an impenetrable attack that nobody’s ever thought of before, Jim will do all that but craft it in a way that sounds like he’s spitballing at a bar AND add cutting insults about each person’s looks. The secret to being a writer next to Goad is to accept that he’s in a league all his own and you can’t compete.

It was also an honor working with Steve Sailer, who has blown my mind so many times it looks like Detroit. The Derb is an inspiration too. Did any of you realize his columns always clocked in at exactly 1,000 words? David Cole is one of the most interesting Jews I’ve ever met, and I still find it hard to believe Kathy Shaidle’s acerbic vitriol comes from such a kind, petite woman. Mandolyna is a great curator who would bring in columnists from other sites and grace us with Pat Buchanan’s flawless history lessons, Conrad Black’s pithy evaluations, and Michelle Malkin’s bitter tenacity. It was an honor to be remotely associated with any and all of them.

In the beginning I regularly ripped off John Stossel, but later graduated to ripping off more complex thinkers such as Ann Coulter. I tried to keep it light in the summer, which I believe is a good lesson for the right. We need to include bubblegum culture in our rants. As Nick Gillespie once said, “Nobody can remember the speaker of the house back in 1935 but everyone knows who Shirley Temple is.”

My stories focused on debunking liberal myths. America is not a racist hellhole. Women are not second-class citizens here. Islam is not a religion of peace. Free speech does include hate speech. Men are not weak and dads are not useless. Making videos about all these things is often much easier than writing them out. I’ve heard Tucker Carlson say the same thing. Maybe the written word is being replaced. I don’t see that as a big deal as long as we don’t give up on our message, which is maximum liberty for maximum proud Westerners.

I’m rebooting my whole deal and going mainstream. I’ll announce the platform in about a month but it’s going to include TV, radio, the internet, and books. The deal is an exclusive, which means no more The Gavin McInnes Show on Compound Media, no more video commentary on Rebel Media, and no more column here. That doesn’t mean I’ll be any less prolific. I’m still determined to free us all from big government, but I also want to focus on the family. America needs more dads. The left’s obsession with shattering the family and the patriarchy all comes back to daddy issues, and I’m going to reverse that trend. When I first met my wife, I said I had no interest in kids. She convinced me otherwise and my only regret is it all didn’t happen sooner. I want to share that bliss. I want more young men proposing. I want less spinsters. The patriarchy isn’t a fun idea you oughtta try out; it’s the very foundation of our country. The left, along with their deep hatred for Judeo-Christian values, are determined to end the dad.

They don’t have a plan B. They just want to watch the world burn. The media has joined them on this voyage and pulled their radicals into the mainstream. All this has done has made them all more radical and further from the average American. The MSM is now a satellite floating 200 miles from Earth, and that has created a vacuum down here on the ground. I have been working with enormously powerful people and big names to fill that void. I’m very excited about it and feeling pretty fearless, although I’m not sure how I’m going to avoid swearing for the rest of my career. Like my dick if I were to nude-wrestle Eva Mendes, it’s going to be very rewarding but also incredibly hard.