There’s a certain type of black public intellectual who is becoming increasingly common. A leftist identitarian, as it were, his constant subject is racism—namely, what he believes to be the ongoing systemic white oppression of blacks.
His justification for this belief, however, is quite facile. He references group differences (or inequalities) and the past slavery and other past mistreatments of blacks, as if these things by themselves suffice to prove his case. They don’t—not even close.
What is more, for all his indignation and high-toned words, in many instances, it’s plainly he himself who is the racist. What really bothers this hypocrite, his reasoning reveals, is not racial injustice, but lack of black dominance. He is motivated by envy, not righteousness. He wants power, not equality.
So it is with the black writer Mychal Denzel Smith. In his essay “The Gatekeepers” in the current issue of Harper’s, Smith writes:
Each time there was a killing or a violent arrest [of a black man] caught on video, or a new report on police violence, white editors asked if I would be interested in writing about it for their publications with majority-white audiences. They offered to pay me—a young, broke writer—a higher fee than I had received at the black-run websites. And I said yes.
As I found during that time, the black public intellectual, so defined, is largely responsible for defenses and explanations of black culture, or for arguing in favor of black people’s humanity and right to life, for a white audience. This necessarily constricts the questions we are able to ask and degrades the level of discourse. Consider the amount of energy expended by black writers and pundits defending the character of victims of police violence. To participate in this dialogue requires an excavation of black pain for the consumption of a white public; it takes up space that could otherwise be used to consider the function of policing or the root causes of racist violence. It leaves no room for new ideas or even real debate.
Like many conservatives, Smith doesn’t trust the white liberal intellectual class, and for good reason. For whether it’s commissioning an article “on police violence” or teaching A People’s History of the United States, the white liberal intellectual is usually self-serving. He doesn’t really care much about blacks or other victim groups, but is like a big child playing ping-pong. Today he bats around race, tomorrow it’s class, next week it’s feminism, and on and on. Fundamentally, the game doesn’t vary, and as with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and other Democrat politicians, he isn’t serious about changing the status quo. On the contrary, in effect if not in intent, he uses pseudo-moral manipulation to preserve it, so that he himself continues to benefit. Smith and other black public intellectuals see through this pretense, and it’s to their credit that they frankly say so.
And yet, there are profound problems with this passage, which ought to embarrass the magazine’s unexacting editors. Does “a white audience” really need anyone to argue “in favor of black people’s humanity and right to life”? No. It’s 2018, not 1818. The trouble is that Smith has evidently given no thought to the context in which police violence against blacks occurs. Although they constitute only 13 percent of the population, blacks commit 53 percent of all homicides and are disproportionately represented in violent crimes generally. Most violent black crimes are committed by black men under 40; that is, about 4 percent of the population. Disproportionately represented in violent situations, this group seems disproportionately shot and killed by police. But once you account for the criminal disparities—something few people want to do—the notion of an epidemic of police violence against young black men becomes untenable.
Of course, there are instances in which police unjustly commit violence against and kill young black men, and needless to say, each is a great evil. But again, the data don’t bear out the common belief that there’s an epidemic of police violence against this group. In fact, a police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a black man than vice versa. Though they’re only 6 percent of the population, black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers in the past decade. The actual epidemic in this country is young black men killing young black men. In her Sept. 3, 2016, article “The Lies Told by the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Heather Mac Donald observed:
Last year, the police shot 990 people, the vast majority armed or violently resisting arrest, according to the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings. Whites made up 49.9 percent of those victims, blacks, 26 percent. That proportion of black victims is lower than what the black violent crime rate would predict.
Similar statistics are found year after year. That police, like those who serve in the military, have an exceedingly difficult job—in which violence and death are sometimes unavoidable—never occurs to writers like Smith. He asks us to “consider the amount of energy expended by black writers and pundits defending the character of victims of police violence.” Yet he doesn’t mention that violent thugs like Michael Brown don’t merit such defense.
Not that we should be surprised by these omissions, for the problem here is the irrational nature of human morality itself, which produces endless confusion that people take for wisdom and virtue. Much of morality consists of trying to apply certain a priori intuitions—values we have because of the sort of person we are—to matters wherein they may or may not be applicable. Thus, in their pity, or resentment, or in some complex of both, and with the frequently unjust American history of black and white relations in mind, people are motivated to believe in a terribly simplistic story: the bad white cops versus the innocent young black male victims. This falsehood the media, whose god is lucre, propagates incessantly. Meanwhile, the truth is far more complicated.
Writing about police violence against blacks, according to Smith, “takes up space that could otherwise be used to consider the function of policing or the root causes of racist violence. It leaves no room for new ideas or even real debate.” It “necessarily constricts the questions we are able to ask and degrades the level of discourse.” Finally, in the language of the purest academic cant, Smith despairs: “To participate in this dialogue requires an excavation of black pain for the consumption of a white public.” Cheap and implausible, this series of mere assertions suggests that Smith’s underlying intent is to make blacks seem like endless victims who never do any wrong. If an editor asks you to write about a certain subject, then you can take on the assignment if you wish. If you do, that will mean you write about that subject, as opposed to countless other possible ones. But it doesn’t follow that you can’t write about other subjects (“the questions we are able to ask”), or about ones that you think are more important, elsewhere. Nor is it true that by writing about a certain subject you leave “no room for new ideas or even real debate.” Utterly devoid of substantive support, Smith’s thought is incoherent, paranoid, and melodramatic.
Smith continues:
Perhaps it is ironic that I am writing this for Harper’s Magazine, which has a white editor, a nearly all-white masthead, and a largely white subscriber base. Most essays of this genre…appear in such publications. There are a number of reasons for this, resources chief among them. So the work of black public intellectuals is often shaped by white gatekeepers. White people assign the stories, produce the television segments, and book the radio guests, and they seek out narrative structures they understand….
There is power lost when the oppressor serves as interlocutor…. As a writer, I have spent more time asking white people to see me as human than I have thinking about the world I would like to live in.
This passage is even worse than the previous one. Smith takes it for granted that a mostly white staff and readership are moral evils. But America itself is majority white. Whites have significantly higher mean IQs than blacks, and at the far-right side of the bell curve—that is, the domain of genius—the gap is even greater. It’s largely white people who have founded magazines (I’m currently doing so myself, for example). And as Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, and other black conservatives have often lamented, black culture is proudly anti-intellectual. Harper’s readers are mostly white, but then so is the readership of Mind, The Hudson Review, Dissent, and of countless other magazines. Nor are white people to blame for black people’s relative lack of interest in these.
Smith’s shoddy way of thinking could be applied to virtually any context, and the result would be equally absurd. To take just one example, both Asians and men are disproportionately represented at Google. Does that mean these groups are “gatekeepers” in some exclusionary sense? No.
Smith lumps his white editors and white readers into the same category that he appears to put all white people, “the oppressor.” This is so ridiculous that one may feel sorry for the man. And yet, how much pity can one have for someone whose self-pity knows no bounds, and who is so contemptible besides?
With his reflexive, unargued-for belief that white editors and white readers constitute moral evils, Smith reveals that it’s he himself who is the racist. Notice the deranged logic of the sentence: “There is power lost when the oppressor serves as interlocutor.” For Smith, engagement with whites, be they editors or readers, is ipso facto a loss of power. What really bothers him, Smith’s reasoning suggests, is not lack of “racial equality,” but lack of black dominance. What he in his status envy takes to be white dominance inspires his resentment, and his response to that feeling is the usual pseudo-moral game: He affects to be righteous, though what he really wants is revenge. Hear him, dear reader, in his principled opposition—how noble and heroic! And indeed, the cheap trick works. After all, why else would anyone read Smith, who is a copy of a copy?
Good writing is not a matter of waxing idealistic, let alone utopian, so a writer who wants to spend time thinking about the world he would like to live in is probably a standard resentment-piper who is simply not worth reading. A writer who, in 21st-century America, spends time asking white people to see him as human is so trite and wrongheaded that he’s lucky to have any readers at all.
“The role of the public intellectual,” says Smith, “is to proffer new ideas, encourage deep thinking, challenge norms, and model forms of debate that enrich our discourse.” It’s a shame he doesn’t practice this belief himself, because Smith’s mind is a bundle of clichés. It’s hardly a surprise when he tells us that “[James] Baldwin…was guilty of centering the narrative of black America around a masculinist idea of freedom.” If he hasn’t yet written a similar sentence about gays and trans people, we may rest assured that this inclusive writer will. One is rather tired of such writing from black male writers, who more and more resemble the hysterical bluestockings who have ruined the humanities and social sciences. A derivative type, Smith merely repeats the rotted ideas of other trendy moralizers. Like Kiese Laymon and Casey Gerald, two writers about whom I wrote last week, Smith’s perpetual subject is race, or rather, himself—for there’s no difference in these cases. Like them, he’s written a memoir. And again like them, his mind was ruined by the dreadful academy.
One sees this at the end of his essay, when Smith quotes an exchange between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde at length. “It is precisely these kinds of dialogues,” he writes, “that white people would rather we did not have.” Such resentment and jargon are quite amusing since today you can open Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the like leading liberal magazines almost at random and find “precisely these kinds of dialogues.” Many of the people who edit these magazines, and who write for them, are generic ignoramuses, boring idolaters who cannot think without reference to Foucault and Derrida, Said, Butler, and other celebrated windbags and charlatans. They’re forever emphasizing the need to have “a dialogue,” and the many important subjects that, we’re supposed to believe, they aren’t permitted to discuss. It’s all so much posturing. These persons have nothing new or interesting to say. Although not indeed constrained, they dare not write anything their former graduate advisers wouldn’t approve of. If anything, they should pay people to slodge through their dreary works. Theirs is a studied dullness and folly, for Nature herself doesn’t provide such defects. For those, Smith and the canters must thank the expert debasement of the academy.
For those of us who were ecstatic the night Donald Trump was elected president, who watch election night videos over and over again, it used to be easy to defend him against the charge that he is just a BS-ing con man who would say anything to get elected.
It’s getting harder.
Trump was our last chance. But he’s spent two years not building the wall, not deporting illegals — “INCREDIBLE KIDS!” — and not ending the anchor baby scam.
Within 10 seconds of Trump’s leaving office, there will be no evidence that he was ever president. Laws will be changed, executive orders rescinded, treaties re-written and courts packed.
Trump will leave no legacy at all. Only a wall is forever.
We had no choice. No one else was promising to save America.
“On day one, we will begin working on an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall. We will use the best technology, including above- and below-ground sensors, that’s the tunnels. Remember that: above and below. Towers, aerial surveillance and manpower to supplement the wall, find and dislocate tunnels and keep out criminal cartels …”
— Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump
But then he signed a spending bill expressly prohibiting him from building any part of the wall.
“I will never sign another bill like this again. I’m not going to do it again.”
— President Trump, after signing a spending bill that blocked any funding for a wall.
Today, eight months later, Trump is about to sign another spending bill that will give him no money for the wall.
Anyone want to bet me that he won’t?
So much for the world’s greatest negotiator.
Donald Trump is the commander in chief. He doesn’t need Congress’ approval to defend the nation’s borders.
But as long as his excuse for not building the wall is that Congress hasn’t appropriated money for it, why on earth would he sign a spending bill that doesn’t give it to him?
There is no tomorrow on this. Republicans are about to lose the House. It’s now or never.
We didn’t need someone to tell us how hard it is to get anything done in Washington. We knew that.
That’s why we hired a builder. We didn’t care what Trump’s position on the lira was. We didn’t care about Syria. We were just looking for the best contractor we could find so we would finally get a wall.
If we were talking about a golf course in Scotland, I think Trump could figure out how to get it done.
But instead of winning, we’re getting whining. We’re told it’s Congress’ fault for not giving Trump money to build the wall! The ACLU will sue! A judge will stop him! Blame Paul Ryan! (Possible Trump epitaph: Chuck wouldn’t let me!)
President Reagan bombed Libya in retaliation for two U.S. serviceman being killed by a bomb in a West Berlin discotheque — TWO!
But Trump thinks he needs the preapproval of Congress, the ACLU and a district court judge in Hawaii to do something about tens of thousands of Americans being killed every year by illegal alien heroin dealers, drunk drivers and straight-up murderers.
Reagan invaded Grenada because the country was becoming a Soviet client state. No Grenadian threatened to touch a hair on any American’s head. One wonders what Reagan’s reaction would have been to someone telling him, YOU CAN’T DO THAT! THE ACLU WILL SUE!
If Reagan had Trump’s advisers, we’d be speaking Russian.
The ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the other anti-American groups opposing Trump on immigration were the very same groups that opposed Reagan. They would have been happy if the U.S.S.R. had nuked this country.
Sadly for them, Reagan kept his promises, and we won the Cold War. So now the back-up plan is to destroy our country by flooding it with the Third World.
We needed Reagan and got P.T. Barnum instead.
Evidently, Trump knew he could bomb an innocent country based on false information about the Syrian government using nerve gas in April 2018. (Actual reason: Ivanka cried.) No less than the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons spent months testing the bodies allegedly killed by nerve gas. Conclusion: No nerve gas.
But we’re supposed to believe that Trump doesn’t realize that he’s also allowed to defend the citizens of this country. Does he know he’s president?
Even if noted constitutional law scholar Jared Kushner has convinced Trump that he needs congressional approval before he’s allowed to repel invaders at our border — but doesn’t need Congress to bomb an innocent country because Ivanka cried — the president could order the troops to invade Mexico and build the wall 10 yards in.
But all we get are bombastic tweets and useless half-measures. The conservative media have been excitedly reporting that Obama put illegal alien kids in cages too! Obama used tear gas on the invaders too!
Yes, exactly — and none of that worked. That’s why we voted for the guy who promised to build a wall.
Unlike the president, we knew that the deluge of poor people flooding our country would never stop until we had an impenetrable border.
And whatever happened to that executive order on anchor babies? Is Trump “trying” to sign that, too? Maybe he got writer’s cramp.
Trump also promised to deport illegals — even the ones Democrats have given cute names to.
“We’re always talking about ‘Dreamers’ for other people. I want the children that are growing up in the United States to be dreamers also. They’re not dreaming right now.”
— Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump
“The executive order (on “Dreamers”) gets rescinded.”
— Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump
Is it Paul Ryan’s fault that Trump did a 180 on “Dreamers,” called them “INCREDIBLE KIDS” and tried to give them amnesty?
Every day that Trump does not keep his promises on immigration, thousands of immigrants turn 18 and start block voting for the Democrats, while thousands of traditional Americans die off.
Florida and Texas are about five years away from turning solid blue. Trump was our last chance. After this, the country is never going to elect a Republican president again.
So the next time you watch one of those election night videos, remember: If Trump doesn’t keep his immigration promises, Hillary might as well have won.
Trump will leave no legacy whatsoever. Without a wall, he will only be remembered as a small cartoon figure who briefly inflamed and amused the rabble.
PHILADELPHIA—Lately I’ve been performing in the state that went to war over whiskey—the Whiskey Rebellion lasted longer than World War II and had several Barley Malt Martyrs—and frankly I don’t like the way they’re honoring their heritage.
In Philadelphia I was offered a local rye called New Liberty, distilled in a “historic building” in a “vibrant neighborhood” called “Olde Kensington”—in other words, North Philly—and it came in a bottle that looked like a calligrapher had thrown up on it and the art director for Mutiny on the Bounty had spent several years designing a cork that looks like you’re about to toss the whole thing into the Sargasso Sea with a message inside that says “Shipwrecked. Send Robert Louis Stevenson.”
In Pittsburgh I’ve had similar experiences. They have a Wigle Whiskey that’s distilled seven blocks from that famous diner where they make the sandwiches with the french fries inside the bread, and you would think they know what they’re doing since Wigle refers to Philip Wigle, the whiskey patriot sentenced to death by hanging in the actual Whiskey Rebellion. Unfortunately, Wigle Whiskey dates not to 1791, the year the war broke out, but to 2012, the year they also designed a what-the-fuck bottle, but in Pittsburgh’s case it looks like a fruity protein drink that’s been fattened up with pastel steroids.
This kind of whiskey-bottle performance art is apparently thriving all over the country, including Tennessee, home of the sacred drink of Texas—Jack Daniel’s—an aqua vitae so enshrined in lore and legend that there are actual rules for what qualifies as “Tennessee water.” Every year I go to Tennessee for the Chattanooga Film Festival, and every year somebody will rave about the Chattanooga Whiskey Co. (they don’t spell out “company” lest they be contemporary), whose products are “1816 Reserve” and “1816 Cask,” sold in squat 375-milliliter bottles (in other words, half the size of the divine standard for whiskey) so that you won’t realize that the $47 charge on your Discover card means the whiskey would actually cost $94 if they were giving you a fair pour. Once again there’s a faux connection to nonexistent history, with the “1816” implying that the contents of the bottle have some relation to the trading post on the Tennessee River established in the year of Chattanooga’s founding. The distillery actually dates from 2015.
Okay, I’m not quite ready to use the H-word, but let me make a few observations.
Numero Uno: Even though all these distilleries are proud of “going local,” none of them use the water that’s just a few feet away from their gift shops and tasting rooms. This is probably because making whiskey out of the water in the Schuylkill or the Allegheny River would test the gag reflexes of fancy bottle collectors throughout the Midwest. But isn’t the whole point of making good whiskey to put your still as close to the best water as possible, even if that water is 6,000 feet up in the Smokies? There’s a reason there are 17,000 distilleries in Speyside, and they all involve the quality of the extremely cold fast-running water in the River Spey, which gushes out of the Scottish Highlands and flows north into the Moray Firth. Glenfiddich didn’t position its distillery to maximize walk-in customers in Dufftown, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
Numero Two-o: Where’s the barrelhouse?
They don’t have barrelhouses in “Olde Kensington” or the downtown Pittsburgh arts district.
Why does this matter? Because, to use one example, it’s said that Jimmy Russell, the master distiller for the past sixty years at Wild Turkey, can walk into any one of those rickhouses up on the hills beside the Kentucky River in Lawrenceburg, point at a particular barrel on any given rack level, and say, “You need to do a half turn on this one every six months because it gets morning sun and has slightly higher humidity than the ones at ground level.”
Yes, I get it. Artisanal craft bourbon, or whatever the heck they’re making in these Riverplace Courtyard-on-the-Square tourism centers, is all about “small batches” and “local sourcing” and “experimental distilling,” but isn’t that something you should spend, oh, thirty years on before you start selling to the public? The reason it’s called moonshine is that some guy in the Lowlands of Scotland, 300 years ago, was working all through the night, every night of his life, trying to figure out where the best water was, whether it was better to triple-distill or quintuple-distill, which grains to blend with the barley, how fast to convert the barley into malt, and all the other 9,000 decisions involved in perfecting the mash. There are aspects to this process that can’t be gleaned from a course at Chico State, a YouTube video, an internet “Introduction to Distilling” class, or advice from a consultant from the Wharton School telling you what colors to put on the label.
Now. I can hear the howls of anguished post-millennial protest rising up out of the bodegas of Brooklyn and the fern bars of West Hollywood:
What about Japanese whisky? Huh? What about that? What about Suntory? What about Nikka? Didn’t they do the same thing?
No, they did not do the same thing.
Yes, it’s true that the Scots have had their panties in a bunch for the past fifteen years, ever since the Japanese started winning all the blind-taste international competitions for Scotch. In fact, they got so upset that in 2009 they passed actual laws stating that Scotch can only be made in Scotland. All the craft-whiskey guys in the United States use this as evidence that all you have to do is order some copper tubing from Amazon and find some warehouse space down by the old factory, and next year you’ll be pumping out “Olde Akron Master Blend” and shipping it to discos in Vancouver.
But what happened in Japan is the opposite of that. Masataka Taketsuru moved to Scotland a hundred years ago, took a degree in organic chemistry at the University of Glasgow, and spent several years as an apprentice at a distillery in Campbeltown—about as old-school as you can get—before going back to Japan and helping Suntory distill the first Japanese whisky in 1924. The Suntory distillery was built in Yamazaki, a suburb of Kyoto, for only one reason: the quality of the water, previously established by a tea master who built his tearoom there.
A decade later Taketsuru built the Nikka distillery on Hokkaido, the coldest part of Japan, in an effort to perfectly reproduce the conditions in Scotland. And for the rest of the 20th century, Suntory and Nikka perfected whiskies for the Japanese—Bill Murray is filming a Suntory commercial in Lost in Translation—until somehow the word got out. It’s Suntory that has won most of the international awards, but it was Nikka that started it all in 2001 when its 10-year single malt won “Best of the Best” from Whisky magazine. Then it all came full circle in 1989 when Nikka saved the legendary Ben Nevis distillery from bankruptcy. The overnight miracle of Japanese whisky required a full century of monkeying around with the malt and the still.
By the way, both the Scots and the Japanese are ridiculous when it comes to the two most prized Japanese whiskies, Yamazaki and Yoichi. Scots refuse to drink it, or even taste it. And 90 percent of the Japanese public waters it down by mixing it into fruity highballs. The great single malts and blends from Japan are mostly appreciated by Americans.
But not the Americans down at the Riverplace Courtyard-on-the-Square “craft bourbon” gift shop.
No, as you can see—need I say it?—those are out-of-control navel-gazing hipsters who apparently found out last year about this cool thing called whiskey. Suntory, on the other hand, celebrated its recent successes by traveling to the banks of Long Lick Creek, in Clermont, Kentucky, to buy all the assets of Jim Beam, which uses a recipe originating in 1795.
And that’s fine with me. May the Whiskey Weenies forever enjoy their pastel bottles and their T-shirts. Just don’t make me deal with it. When I come to your city, please just pour me a Macallan 15. Neat.
Shortly after this month’s election, an Antifa mob descended upon the Washington, D.C., home of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, his wife, and their four children, chanting, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night.”
Why all the hate for Carlson? For example, Matthew Yglesias of Vox endorsed the intentions of the leftist goon squad who terrorized Mrs. Carlson into locking herself in the pantry.
One reason is because Carlson, who has bumped around conservative journalism and cable news since the previous century, has hit his stride since taking over a nightly prime-time hour on Fox in November 2016. Carlson regularly contends with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC for the second-best ratings in all of cable news, behind only Sean Hannity.
At age 49, Carlson is in his prime and is likely to stay there for quite a while. Like Pat Buchanan, he’s genial off camera and a tiger when the red light turns on. He’s starting to run into the Ali G problem that top PR advisers have now heard he’s trouble for their clients, so he’s getting sent mostly second stringers to thrash.
Moreover, he’s brought to the often ossified world of cable news a relatively fresh perspective that had previously largely been kept out of the mainstream media, if I say so myself.
Carlson, a rich kid from La Jolla, isn’t a populist outsider by upbringing or personality. His father was a Republican ambassador and his stepmother was an heiress and a niece of Sen. William J. Fulbright (D-AR), a leading insider opponent of the Vietnam War. A witty man, Carlson seldom pretends to be anything other than a member of the elite he insightfully criticizes.
The funny thing is that Carlson, a lifelong Republican, has drifted leftward on economics and foreign policy in recent years, as seen in his new best-seller, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution.
Carlson, who voted for Ron Paul in 1988, has largely left behind his youthful economic libertarianism. For example, he now asks:
Why do we tax capital at half the rate of labor?
The central theme of Ship of Fools is that the convergence toward the reigning elite consensus of economic conservatism and social progressivism is better for the people at the top of society than for maintaining a stable middle-class democracy:
The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak.
Today, though:
Companies can openly mistreat their employees (or “contractors”), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages.
Carlson supported the Iraq War in 2003, but by 2004 was apologizing, saying, “I think the war in Iraq was a major mistake.”
Carlson’s book is particularly derisive of neoconservatives who didn’t learn from that disaster, such as Max Boot, Robert Kagan (who “seemed like an aging linebacker with a history of concussions”), and his old boss at The Weekly Standard, William Kristol (who has just now called for America to plot “regime change in China”).
The signature characteristic of America’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem.
Carlson lists all the countries Boot has called for the United States to attack: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya. Still, Boot continues to fail upward.
Ship of Fools is full of appreciations of liberal heroes of the 20th century, such as Ralph Nader, Frank Church (the Democratic senator who helped bring the American deep state under some degree of legislative control in 1975), and farm labor leader Cesar Chavez (a fervent opponent of illegal immigration).
FDR receives a tribute for his Civilian Conservation Corps, which provided healthy, prideful hard work to many unmarried young men. Carlson then acidly observes: “It would be denounced as irredeemably sexist today.”
A fly fisherman, Carlson is happy to admit that 1970s environmentalists did wonders for cleaning up polluted rivers. And, he points out, the famous 1971 “crying Indian” TV commercial persuaded Americans to be ashamed of littering.
Today, however, environmentalists have lost interest in down-to-earth issues like littering and would never dream of being so racist as to try to shame picnicking illegal immigrants into picking up their used disposable diapers. Now when Carlson goes fishing in the Potomac, the water is clean but the banks are filthy.
Carlson is struck by how many 20th-century progressive shibboleths have been forgotten as the long march through the institutions has triumphed:
The majority of journalists and intellectuals in 1975 would never have accepted the lame excuse that silencing, firing, and ruining people for holding an opinion was fine, as long as it wasn’t specifically the government doing it. They would have declared that a free society depends above all on free minds.
He’s likewise old enough to notice how humiliating it ought to be to contemporary intellectuals that they feel obligated to praise the intelligence of Ta-Nehisi Coates:
‘Between the World and Me’ is an unusually bad book: poorly written, intellectually flabby, relentlessly shallow, and bigoted. No honest reader with an IQ over 100 could be impressed by it. One presumes that the moment America wakes up from its current fever, Coates’s memoir will be forgotten immediately, an embarrassing relic from an embarrassing time.
I have no idea how Carlson creates five hours of television per week and writes a book at the same time, but Ship of Fools is quite good. It’s currently No. 3 on the nonfiction best-seller list, behind Michelle Obama and Bill O’Reilly. His prose style is simple and clear, which is helpful because the density of his ideas is rather high. It’s not a large book at 244 pages, but it might take longer to read than you expect.
Interestingly, despite his clarity of expression, almost nobody has noticed Carlson’s growing ideological centrism. But that’s because what matters most to contemporary intellectuals is not policy but keeping the alliance of the margins together by blaming straight white males. And Carlson is the exemplification of straight white maleness.
Yet, as he writes:
At the moment, the coalition of identity groups has held together because it is united in a single purpose against white male power. But rapid demographic change makes this unsustainable. When the traditional scapegoat becomes insufficient, various factions will turn on one another.
Chaos will ensue.
Still, Tucker Carlson will likely be around for quite some time to drive mobs into further rages with his honesty and wit.
By now you’ve probably heard the knee-slapper about the millennial missionary who sneaked onto a forbidden island inhabited by the earth’s last uncontacted, pre-neolithic tribe of humans in order to convert them to Christianity. To John Chau, proselytizing was an extreme sport, something to be done while wearing expensive North Face gear and live-blogging with your GoPro for your monetized YouTube channel (“Don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ after you accept Jesus as your lord and savior!”).
Sadly, Mr. Chau was slaughtered by the xenophobic, bare-assed, red-tribal-paint-covered savages he came to convert. Major fail video, dude.
Today’s live-blog of the conversion of the Sentinelese troglodytes has been canceled on account of an arrow in the face. Please follow John Chau’s funeral on Instagram.
I’ve long questioned the ethics of keeping primitive tribes cordoned off and isolated. Yes, I get it, we’re making up for past excesses, when civilized Westerners forced developmentally arrested protohumans out of their trees and into fine suits and stuffy, soul-killing schools and churches. But people love replacing one extreme with another. So now we fence the poor bastards off, forever preventing the “mixing” and “diversity” that are supposedly the essential elements of any great society.
I wonder about that Sentinelese tribe. Could they ever actually “assimilate” even if they had to? I mean, in the earliest days of human existence we were all that primitive, and it took many, many millennia for us to reach the evolutionary high point where we could wear skinny jeans, master the vape stick, and appreciate Hall and Oates ironically. Have the Sentinelese remained primitive for too long? Are they permanently stunted? And to what extent can any genetically related group of humans become so locked into a way of thinking, and a way of living, passed down from one generation to another, that traits that are not per se immutable become immutable?
At a holiday party last week, a high-profile rightist thanked me for opening his eyes to the “JQ” back in the ’90s, which is as nutty as anything anyone has ever said to me, as I never spoke of the “JQ” back then, and I never speak of it now, other than mockingly. Isolating the “JQ” from the “W (white) Q” or the “B (black) Q” is ridiculous. All races, religions, and ethnicities have the potential to develop pathologies that spread like virulent strains of syphilis throughout the group. I’ve devoted many words to the current Muslim pathology of violent religious intolerance, and I’ve written a good deal about white pathologies, too. For centuries, whites were obsessed with the notion that, being superior as they felt they were, it was their divine right to conquer and enslave the “inferior” races. In yet another example of replacing one extreme with another, many whites now act as though it’s their sacred duty to atone for past sins by allowing nonwhites to reconquista the shit out of the West.
The right or wrong of it doesn’t interest me. What does is the ability of the white Christian West to emerge from one pathology and dissolve into another, to go from “We will conquer you” to “Please conquer us.” Of course, white nationalists will claim that the white West was coerced, “tricked” into such a reversal by outside forces. Which brings us to the “J” in the “Q.”
When one considers the Jewish experience in Europe over the past thousand years, what stands out to me is the fact that even in the face of countless expulsions—expulsions from England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, and, well, you name the European country and it’s likely to have expelled the Jews at some point in its history—by the time Hitler came to power in the 1930s, there were still damn near 10 million Jews on the continent. That’s truly astounding. No matter the forced expulsions or the forced conversions (i.e., the influence of “outside forces”), the Jews held on to their identity, and to their desire to remain in Europe. Sure, it can be argued that for centuries they had nowhere else to go, but a weaker group would have just converted en masse.
Think of what it took to keep coming back. Not just the will, but the smarts to persuade the people who just kicked you out to let you back in again. And to pull that stunt multiple times! That’s impressive. Again, the right or wrong doesn’t matter to me. It’s just damn impressive. But what kind of a stamp did centuries of living that way, surviving that way, leave on the psyche of European Jews?
I thought about that a few weeks ago, when I was unfortunate enough to encounter an L.A. Times op-ed about the mass shooting of Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue last month. The author, Rob Eshman, former publisher and editor of L.A.’s Jewish Journal, found a silver lining in the massacre of nearly a dozen elderly Jews. “The Tree of Life Synagogue victims died so that refugees could live,” Eshman declared. Those Jews died so that Honduran and other Third World immigrants could flood the U.S. illegally. “The Jews gunned down in the Tree of Life Synagogue died for a cause. Whether they knew it or not.”
I’m guessing they didn’t know it. I seriously doubt that the last thought to course through the mind of 87-year-old Melvin Wax as his body was being riddled with bullets was “Well, at least now some Honduran gang members will get to be on welfare in East L.A.”
One might consider it crass to exploit such a horrific crime to advance a completely unconnected political goal, but I consider it a prototypically Jewish move. A neo-Nazi savage guns down defenseless octogenarians, but hey—we can use that to advance an agenda to flood the U.S. with Democrat-voting illegal immigrants to further erode the traditional West. And Eshman was hardly the only Jewish journalist or spokesperson to see political advantage in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Just as in the case of the Holocaust, Jews more often than not view murdered Jews not as tragedies but as opportunities. Lemons to lemonade? More like cadavers to Camay.
Strategize, overthink, overintellectualize. It’s all so very Jewish. When white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine black worshippers in Charleston in 2015, black spokespeople and religious leaders responded with anger toward whitey. “Crush whitey, never forgive whitey, fight whitey.” It was a brutal response to a brutal act, but damned if it wasn’t honest. Blacks were killed, blacks saw the crime as a black tragedy, and blacks wanted vengeance. Jews can’t be that straightforward. We seek advantage through our dead. We make our dead your problem. The meaning we find in our deceased we find as a courtesy to you, to help you, to change your societies for the “better.” At a memorial service for his parents, the son of two of the Pittsburgh shooting victims urged the mourners to use his parents’ murder to “promote a positive outcome and meaning for society.” Not for Jews, but for society. We’re not thinking of ourselves, we’re thinking of you. Would any writer for The Root or Very Smart Brothas be so generous, so “internationalist,” in their grief? Of course not. “Niggaz was killed, and now we gotta do something to help niggaz. Fuck the rest of y’all.”
But with Jews, although the concept of self-preservation is every bit as important as it is to blacks, we just can’t bring ourselves to present it that bluntly, because too many of us act like it’s still 1290 and we’re this close to yet another expulsion. Think I’m exaggerating? Writing in The Jerusalem Post last week, veteran journalist Elli Wohlgelernter (of Haaretz and the JTA) drew a straight line between the Pittsburgh shooting, the expulsions of old, and the ones to come: “Pittsburgh was not an anomaly. It is consistent with every pogrom, every massacre, every holocaust that has befallen most every Jewish community over the span of 2,000 years.” Think you’re safe in America, fellow Jews? Think again. “There is little guarantee that even such a welcoming state as America can live on in perpetuity. Based on history, odds are it won’t.”
Yep, the pogroms are coming, so (as always) we strategize. And Wohlgelernter is no wacky leftist. We know the anti-Western agenda of lefty Jews, but some conservative Jews are, in a way, even worse. They bitch about the fact that black Americans still obsess over slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK, yet they themselves cannot stop whining about centuries-old pogroms and expulsions. They tell blacks, “Stop dwelling on the past! Stop looking for racism that no longer exists! Stop inventing Klansmen where there are none,” even as they hypocritically rant about the throngs of modern-day Nazis only they can see. Word to the wise: If you’re a Jew and you want to hunt phantom Nazis, you can’t tell black folks to stop hunting phantom Klansmen.
Here’s where we circle back to those pre-neolithic red-painted bare-assed island tribesmen. They’ve been living a certain way for so long, I truly doubt they could ever change. For them, death would be preferable to abandoning the traditional lifestyle of their ancestors. I’m sure the tribe has developed a dense mythology, a worldview, that it has passed down through the centuries, and any threat to that schema would break those fragile little caveman minds. Western Jews, who are somewhat the polar opposite of cavemen in terms of society-building (finesse over brute force), appear to share that problem. We’ve been living with the “pogrom mindset” for so many centuries, can we ever lose it? Or would our psyches crumble without it?
And perhaps most important, can we ever stop manufacturing new threats to justify that outdated mindset? A man like Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers is representative of nothing more than human evil. He doesn’t represent a “movement” or a national threat. He’s a monster who deserves nothing more than a needle in his arm. But for the past two years, American Jews (left and right) have been wailing about how “the Nazis are back,” how they’re in our government, on the internet, spray-painting our sidewalks, defacing our synagogues and memorials (except, no and no), and threatening our lives (except, again, no). If I were an irrelevant basement-dwelling crank like Robert Bowers, I’d take all that “the Nazis are back and they’re everywhere” bullshit as an excuse to step out of the shadows and make a move. I mean, if, as the Jews say, Bowers has so many comrades in society and government, hell, he might as well fire the first shots and rally the troops!
To what extent was the Pittsburgh shooting a self-fulfilling prophecy for pogrom-minded Jews? To what extent does repeating the mantra that America is flooded with Nazis embolden actual Nazi crackpots to take action by giving them the illusion of safety in numbers?
Ah, hell, look at me, overthinking and overintellectualizing. As a Jew, that’s my red tribal paint, and I feel absolutely bare-assed without it.
Mass migration “lit the flame” of the right-wing populism that is burning up the Old Continent, she said. Europe must “get a handle on it.”
“Europe must send a very clear message — ‘we are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support.'” Should Europe fail to toughen up, illegal migration will never cease to “roil the body politic.”
And who is the lady who issued the dire warning and dispensed the tough-love advice to Europe? Marine Le Pen?
No. It is Hillary Clinton, spouse of the Great Triangulator.
Democrats may have piled on Clinton for selling out progressivism, but her political instincts here are dead on. She has grasped something her party willfully refuses to recognize — the growing salience of the issue of mass illegal migration into Western societies.
According to a new Gallup Poll, concern over immigration and illegal aliens soared from 13 to 21 percent of the public in November, as the No. 1 problem on the minds of the American people.
And this was before Sunday’s violent collision at San Ysidro where the Border Patrol fired rubber bullets and used tear gas to stop a mob of hundreds — out of the thousands of migrants housed in a stadium in Tijuana — from breaching our border and pouring into our country.
TV footage of the attempted breach, and photos and stories that major newspapers are putting on Page One, will sustain the national focus on what, since the election, has re-emerged as the nation’s primary concern.
With Mexico about to install a leftist government and new caravans forming in Central America to move through Mexico to the U.S. border, this issue is not going away before the 2020 election.
And with nearly 10,000 migrants being held in Tijuana for more than a week, in what the city’s mayor calls a humanitarian crisis, new and more desperate attempts to breach our border can be expected.
Rocks and bottles were hurled at the men and women of the Border Patrol Sunday, which brought the tear gas and temporary closing of the San Ysidro crossing. New, more serious, casualties cannot be ruled out.
Monday, Trump called on Mexico City to deal with the migrants seeking to breach our border, and threatened that if Mexico does not act, he could close one of the world’s busiest crossings, and for good:
“Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries. Do it by plane, do it by bus, do it anyway you want, but they are NOT coming into the U.S.A.,” Trump tweeted, “We will close the Border permanently if need be. Congress, fund the WALL!”
Trump thus laid down a marker for himself. Either he halts the caravans, or he will be seen as the failed enforcer of America’s border.
In that Gallup Poll there is other major news.
Among the problems facing America, in the eyes of her people in November, not one of the top 10 involved a foreign threat. In the following order, all involve the troubled state of our splintered nation: immigration/illegal aliens; dissatisfaction with government/poor leadership; health care; unifying the country; race relations/racism; lack of respect for each other; ethics/moral/religious/family decline; economy in general; unemployment/jobs; and education.
Immigration, race, culture, the economy and education appear to be the agenda Americans want addressed in 2020.
What does this portend?
While progressives may have piled on Clinton for her comments, and she may have “clarified” what she said, she has hit on something. Mass migration from the Third World has not only been the major progenitor and propellant of the right-wing populism that is raging across Europe, it also played an indispensable role in defeating her and electing Donald Trump.
And if the Democratic Party and its presidential candidates in 2020 are seen as abolish-ICE, pro-amnesty, open borders liberals, they will pull their party out of the mainstream of this nation on the most divisive issue of our time — the Third World invasion of the West.
For Trump, the die is cast. Not only are border security, the wall, and his pledge to halt the illegal invasion of his country what got him elected, they appear to be a primary argument for his re-election.
Washington’s think tank and media elites may be focused on other issues — Brexit, the Russia-Ukraine naval clash in the Kerch Strait, Kim Jong Un’s nukes, the South China Sea, Syria, Iran, the Saudi crown prince’s role in the grisly murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.
But according to Gallup, none of these issues is a top concern or problem for the American people.
Progressives fail to understand that what they describe as greater and ever more desirable diversity, millions of Americans see as the conquest of their country by an endless flood of uninvited strangers.
If—like me—you were alarmed and horrified over the Thanksgiving holiday to hear that cartoonist Charles M. Schulz of Peanuts fame was an unrepentant racist, you will be relieved—like I was—to learn that this is the furthest thing from the truth.
The truth is that Charles M. Schulz was, is, and always will be a friend of the Negro.
This story will sound alarming at first, but rest assured that it quickly becomes so endearing it could give you a toothache.
Social media erupted in another bloody fistula of outrage when observers noted that in one frame from 1973’s animated TV special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, young Franklin Armstrong—AKA “the token black kid”—was pictured seated all alone on one side of the kids’ slapdash Thanksgiving dinner table.
It is a sobering and, at first, terrifying image. One immediately thinks of hooded horsemen, snarling German shepherds, fire hoses, and nooses hanging from trees. After all we’ve been through as a country, do we still need to see a young, well-mannered black child segregated from the white kids as if this were Alabama in the 1940s or South Africa under apartheid’s evil death grip?
If you want to be all fair and non-hysterical about it, Linus is also seated all by himself, as is suspected lesbian Marcie. In fact, solo diners inhabit three of the table’s four sides. What’s extremely fishy is that four characters—Sally, Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, and the adorable big-nosed dog Snoopy—are clustered together on one side of the table.
If I wanted to get all insane and witch-hunty about it, I might aver that cramming this quartet together on one side of the table, while the three other sides provide ample space for the three other diners to wave their elbows and flap their gums unhindered, is reminiscent of the cramped and often fatal conditions that African slaves endured on the infamous “middle passage” to the New World, but I’m not going to do that.
Much was also made of the fact that Franklin, the soft-spoken Negro of the Peanuts gang, was forced to sit on a folding lawn chair while the others sat on what appear to be hardwood chairs. If you ask me—which you didn’t but I’ll answer, anyway—Franklin received the only comfortable chair of the bunch.
And let’s not mention the fact that Franklin has more desserts than anyone else at the table, but maybe that’s some sort of racist dog whistle about how black people don’t eat healthy food.
As a strong, confident, proud black woman named Ariel so eloquently put it on Twitter:
Watching Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving is hard knowing they put my nigga Franklin at the end of the table by himself
I feel it is my duty to point out a technical inaccuracy in Ariel’s tweet. Franklin actually had an entire side of the table to himself. It was Linus and Marcie—both Caucasians, mind you, not that it matters—who were quarantined on separate ends of the table.
Former rapper Willie D of the Geto Boys, who once recorded a song called “Fuck Rodney King” because he didn’t think the 1992 LA riots went far enough, addressed the Franklin Armstrong racism controversy on his YouTube channel. You can see the pain and heartache in Willie’s barely awake eyes as he realizes that his beloved Peanuts comic strip was also tainted with the bigotry and racism that has prevented him from becoming a nuclear physicist his entire life. (An added treat is hearing Willie pronounce the cartoonist’s name as “Sharles Schulz.”)
Sadly for some but happily for others, I’m here to inform you that the Franklin Armstrong story is one of racial healing and redemption rather than the same old rancid KKK/Nazi propaganda that the cartoon industry routinely serves us as if there’s nothing wrong with it.
The year was 1968 and cartoons were still largely segregated. Charlie Brown and Snoopy were two of the most famous fictional personages in the world.
And then a man named Martin Luther King was shot dead in cold blood.
That sucked, of course, but the story gets better from there.
A retired Los Angeles schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman—not profiling here, just giving you her name—felt it incumbent upon herself to write a letter to Charles M. Schulz urging him to introduce a young Negro boy to the stable of Peanuts characters:
Since the death of Martin Luther King, I’ve been asking myself what I can do to help change those conditions in our society which led to the assassination and which contribute to the vast sea of misunderstanding, fear, hate and violence.…[T]he introduction of Negro children into the group of Schulz characters could happen with the minimum of impact….[I] hope that the result will be more than one black child….Let them be as adorable as the others…but please…allow them a Lucy!
Schulz wrote back saying he liked the idea but wanted to introduce new Negro characters in a way that it didn’t appear that he was “patronizing our Negro friends.”
The artist said he initially met some resistance from newspaper editors in the south who objected to the idea of Franklin attending school with white children. He also claims that his editor told him to ditch the whole Franklin project but relented when Schulz, in the name of racial justice for African American cartoon characters, threatened to quit.
By the summer of 1968, Charlie Brown met a new friend—a dark-skinned and dusky boy named Franklin—who helped him find his lost beach ball as they cavorted together in the sand.
Upon hearing of a new black Peanuts character, a certain Bishop James P. Shannon, who had marched with MLK in Selma, was quoted wondering whether it would be “a believable human being who has some evident personal failing” or “a perfect little black man.”
It would be the latter. Schulz took great pains not to give Franklin any wisp of a personality and especially none of the character flaws displayed by that evil witch Lucy or that disgusting slob Pigpen. Franklin Armstrong would become the most placid and agreeable Negro boy in the comic-book world. When the Peanuts crew needed a rapper, Franklin was their boy—sorry, their young man.
Fifty years later, Harriet Glickman’s bold suggestion has resulted in a world that has flipped so far to the other side of racial sensitivity that minor crises emerge at the sight of a black boy with plenty of room at the table and more desserts than he can possibly eat—a luxury unheard of in, say, oh, Africa.
Franklin Armstrong has helped create a world where black people are not only welcome at the table, their unsuspecting hosts may mistakenly view them as far more agreeable and far less potentially violent than they may be outside of the cartoon realm.
The Week’s Most Defective, Subjective, and Corrective Headlines
DOG ACCUSED OF RACIST HATE CRIME
Since “hate” is an entirely subjective term, it should never be used in legal proceedings. However, since most people are so stupid and emotional that they can’t tell the difference between feelings and facts, we live in a world where many once-great nations have abased themselves by acting as if “hate” is a crime—and in England, all that’s necessary is for a victim to have perceived hateful intent directed against them, and BAM!—you’ve got yourself a hate crime! Everyone should know by this juncture that hate-crime victims know what you meant, even—or especially—if you don’t.
London’s Metropolitan Police were too busy chasing hate crimes in 2015 and 2016 to put much of a dent in the Muslim Rape Crisis or other such trifles. They recently released a 118-page report detailing 2,507 “hate incidents” over those two years, and holy smokes, are there some doozies:
• “An unknown dog has fouled outside of victim address and victim perceived this to be a racial incident.”
• “Witness has had parking issues with her next-door neighbour, their children apparently throw stones and balls over the garden fence. Witness has recently found a dead rat in garden and perceives this to be racist.”
• “Informant feels his daughter was subjected to racial discrimination at a tennis match where line calls went against her.”
Other incidents alleged to be spurred by searing racial hatred included a letter that had allegedly been sealed and resealed at the post office; heavy smoking; a dog barking at the perceived victim; and an aggressively drunk woman being tossed out of a bar not because she was aggressively drunk, but because she perceived the barkeeps didn’t like Polacks.
We had hoped we’d never have to say this, but there seems to be no hope for England. They ruled the world 100 years ago and then went bad.
SPREADING HATRED THROUGH YOGURT AND BURRITOS
Pity anyone in any service job anywhere in the United States who has to deal with black customers—not because so many of them are charismatic and funny and outgoing, but because many others among them are intransigently unpleasant customers who have apparently signed a blood oath to make every last white worker wish they’d picked their own cotton.
Earlier this year, Starbucks essentially signed its own death warrant by capitulating to a pair of angry black customers in Philadelphia who insisted on the right to loiter and use the bathroom without buying anything. Expect these sort of juvenile shakedown tactics to be the leading growth industry in the black employment demimonde.
In Washington State—a place that is extremely white and has been taught to hate itself for it—a black man named Byron Ragland is being depicted as a “victim” because he’d been asked to leave after sitting around in a yogurt shop for a half hour without ordering anything, when everyone and their mother knows that black people simply don’t eat yogurt.
Reps for the local NAACP returned to the yogurt shop to raise a big black stink with Ragland, claiming that being kicked out of yogurt shops is “the black community’s story.”
It wasn’t enough that the yogurt shop’s owners as well as the freakin’ local police apologized for kicking a skinflint loiterer out of what we’re sure was an otherwise tasteful and clean yogurt shop. No, Ragland says he wants heads to roll—in fact, he used terminology that was downright genocidal and violent merely for being asked to leave a yogurt shop, which makes one wonder if all those things they say about the African American community and poor impulse control were correct all along:
I think we need to make sure [store owner] Ramon Cruz is unable to renew his business license here. And when the lease for this store is up, we need to make sure that Byron Ragland has the capital and resources to purchase this Menchie’s and the two other restaurants he owns in this community. That would be a good place to start. That would make me feel a little bit better….I say you cannot allow white supremacy to scurry away in the corner and lick its wounds and regroup. You got to keep your foot on white supremacy’s neck. You got to grind your boot into white supremacy’s throat until you hear it stop breathing. And when it’s looking up at you begging for mercy, you show it none. Because over the last 400 years, it hasn’t shown you any.
Would it be out of line to suggest that someone might need to break his crack rocks in half next time?
In St. Paul, MN, a manager of a Chipotle’s has been rehired after it emerged that she had not engaged in racial profiling of a group of young Arab males. She is shown on video telling the group that “you gotta pay because you never have money when you come in here,” which would suggest to someone who wasn’t a raving ideologue that she’d had prior experience with this crew, and that they in fact had bragged publicly before of dining and dashing.
Instead, these young Ay-rabs twisted her honorable intention in protecting her store’s bottom line into a racist hate crime, and they made themselves black in the process:
can a group of young well established African American [sic] get a bite to eat after a long workout session?
Of course you can—but you have to pay, just like she said and just like everyone else has to pay.
Sometimes it seems like they were happier when they were starving.
FBI: PROUD BOYS ARE AN “EXTREMIST GROUP”
Even though former Taki’s Magazine contributor Gavin McInnes has bent around backwards to the point of giving himself a reacharound to insist that his Proud Boys fraternal organization is multicultural and aggressively Jew-friendly, nuance is a word unknown to the modern left—a group which apparently now includes the FBI, which has reportedly classified the Proud Boys as a group “with ties to white nationalism.”
The news emerged after an FBI document was publicly read at a police precinct in Clark County, WA. Despite the fact that Gavin basically screamed himself blue in the face distancing himself from the disastrous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, the FBI sheet allegedly reads, “Proud Boys members have contributed to the recent escalation of violence at political rallies held on college campuses, and in cities like Charlottesville…”
Apparently it’s to the point where you can give a rabbi a handjob and still get called a Nazi provided it takes you too long to finish. And apparently being in favor of already existing immigration laws makes one an “extremist” these days.
Last week Gavin publicly stepped down from his role as founder of the Proud Boys in a move that some see as a legal maneuver to protect members of the group that were arrested in Manhattan late in October.
FORCING AUTISTIC KIDS TO CHANGE THEIR GENDER
A whopping grand total of seventeen children are reportedly in the process of changing their gender at a single British school, and critics say a culture of censorship surrounding “transphobia” as well as a cult of popularity surrounding transgender children at school—they seem to get bullied if they’re gay, whereas they get party invitations if they’re transgender—enables the whole daffy mess. According to authorities, the official policy is that if a student wants to magically transform into the opposite sex, teachers are instructed to hide this fact from the child’s parents. According to Conservative MP David Davies:
Parents are not told about this and there is no way of challenging these pupils who are convinced by others that they have a problem they almost certainly do not have. Tragically the end result could be irreversible surgical procedures. This is scandalous.
According to one teacher, autistic children are particularly vulnerable to being “groomed” into the transgender lifestyle—a lifestyle that we are encouraged to celebrate despite the fact that post-transition trannies experience stratospheric suicide rates.
In tranny-related news on the west side of the Atlantic, the US Department of Health and Human Services has proposed something revolutionary—defining someone’s sex based on their genitals. We know it sounds weird, but they’re actually going to try to push this through. However, a writer for Nature says that this is “a terrible idea that should be killed off.”
We propose a saner solution: Let’s kill off this idea that men can become women and vice-versa.
ANTI-SEMITIC TRIGGER WARNINGS URGED FOR BIBLE AND QURAN
We hear a lot about America’s Judeo-Christian heritage despite the fact that none of the Founding Fathers were Judeos, but this term is not only inaccurate, it is also implicitly hostile and unwelcoming toward Islam. Together the three faiths are properly known as the “Abrahamic” religions.
Of the three Abrahamic religions, you get no prizes for guessing which one has leaders that want to tell the other two religions to insert trigger warnings in their holy books.
Jewish leaders, upset that the Holy Bible and Quran say some not-so-very-nice things about the Tribe, are sounding their Shofars of Outrage and demanding that these books containing warnings about when the reader is coming up on a particularly Jew-hostile passage.
The recommendations are made in a document called “An End to Antisemitism! A Catalogue of Policies to Combat Antisemitism”:
Translations of the New Testament, the Qur’an and other Christian or Muslim literatures need marginal glosses, and introductions that emphasize continuity with Jewish heritage of both Christianity and Islam and warn readers about antisemitic passages in them….While some efforts have been made in this direction in the case of Christianity, these efforts need to be extended and made consistent in both religions.
Pardon us ever so much for thinking this sounds just a wee bit pushy. And maybe you wouldn’t all be going to hell if you hadn’t rejected the Messiah. Just a thought. Don’t get upset. Like you’re always telling us, there’s already far too much hate in the world.
Every Monday, Jim Goad reads the previous day’s “Week That Perished” on his podcast.
With that almost infallible instinct for making the wrong decision possessed by the British government, headed by nullity-made-flesh Theresa May, Britain has refused the request of Asia Bibi for asylum. If ever there were a person who needed and deserved asylum, it was she. Having spent eight years in prison in Pakistan under sentence of death for supposed blasphemy, her sentence was overturned by that country’s highest court; but howling mobs of thousands of nasty bearded fools have demanded that she should be hanged nonetheless because she is a Christian who refuses to convert. The threats of the bearded fools are obviously to be taken seriously: They do not recognize any legal authority but their own.
The reason given for Britain’s pusillanimous refusal is that granting asylum to her might have offended the sensibilities of the Muslims in Britain and caused unrest among them. This is far from certain, in fact it is an implicit insult to those Muslims; but if it were to occur, it should have been faced down. There is an important matter of principle at stake, which is precisely why the British government has failed the test with such spectacular cowardice. Its conduct in this matter has been far, far worse than was Chamberlain’s at Munich. Chamberlain was a decent man who was trying to avert a war, whose horrors he understood, for which his country was unprepared; the current British government has proved decisively once again that it will not lift a finger to defend any freedom and is willing to surrender to violence even before it is offered. The decision fills me with disgust and a feeling of impotent rage.
But of course it is only yet another example of the deep moral cowardice that infects many countries in the Western world—although Britain is in the vanguard of the rush to surrender. There, a prisoner guilty of a murder of uncommon depravity and viciousness has decided that he would like to change sex, and—although he has already assaulted women in the women’s prison to which he has been removed—he is to receive expensive surgery at taxpayers’ expense to enable him to fulfill his dream. In addition to the medical costs will be added those of security. The only escapes from imprisonment that I observed during fifteen years as a prison doctor were from hospital.
At one time, prisoners used to change religion, sometimes with accompanying changes of diet, as a means of occupying their time and irritating or embarrassing the prison authorities, which much preferred stability to any kind of change. But increasingly prisoners are changing sex to achieve the same ends. No one in authority has sufficient courage to say no to them.
What is the immediate cause of this cowardice? It is fear of a small but vocal and monomaniacal lobby. Rather than having to think and then face it down with arguments, surrender has been immediate and unconditional. What argument can now be advanced against a prisoner to have his leg amputated who suffers from the strange sexual condition in which he can achieve sexual satisfaction only if he has less than the normal complement of limbs? Why should he be discriminated against just because he is a vicious murderer? The reason is that (as yet) there is no vocal lobby agitating in his “favor,” though there might soon be.
In fact, I am quite liberal in these matters; if people desire to mutilate themselves in these distasteful ways, I would let them—provided that they did so at their own expense. If the murderer I have mentioned were able to gather the funds either from his own resources or from those of his sympathizers, I would let him go ahead, with the proviso that the financial liability would last for the duration of his sentence so that any costs arising would accrue to him or to his supporters. But who nowadays would dare to offer such a “discriminatory” solution? No one in authority, evidently.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a man in Quebec is suing the McDonald’s chain because he claims that it advertised to his children illegally when he took them to one of its canteens (I cannot bring myself to call them restaurants). I hold no brief for McDonald’s: I deplore their disgusting products and despise the childish and garish decor of their canteens. They detract from the quality of our civilization. But the man in question did not have to take his children to any of the chain’s establishments, and there has been a strange and sinister reversal of authority if it is claimed (as, in fact, this man has claimed) that parents cannot resist their children’s pressure to go where they desire to be taken.
Indeed, the very fact that children are so strongly attracted to somewhere in such appallingly bad taste as a McDonald’s canteen is one of the strongest reasons for not taking them to one; for how are they to develop the habits of discrimination if their immediate desires are to be fulfilled at every turn? How are they to be taught to eat in an adult and civilized way? It is therefore the bounden duty of a parent to deny his child the cheap plastic rubbish on offer in McDonald’s canteens, and rather than being allowed to sue the company, he should be in the dock—at least morally—for corrupting his own children through his own cowardice, weakness, and inability to say no to them.
I recall a prisoner who asked me whether he could have more Valium (which is hard currency in prison). When I said no, he said, “No? What to do mean, no?” “I’m very sorry,” I said, “but I’m not sure that I can put it any simpler.” Of course, I then explained the reasons for my decision, but my decision stood.
No? What do you mean, no? These were the words of a man who had intimidated his way through life to obtain small immediate advantages to the detriment of his own long-term prospects. And in a culture in which denial of desires is increasingly rare, it is no surprise that politicians should be spineless (except in the pursuit of office) and Asia Bibi should find no asylum.
What I should have done is gone out and bought a lottery ticket. I’ll explain: The snow suddenly came down in buckets, icing the city and bringing gridlock like I’ve never seen before. The traffic cops in the Bagel are all Hispanics, to a man and to a woman around four feet tall, and all weigh over 250 pounds. The moment the white stuff started coming down they left their posts and headed for their casas. Bagelites went through red lights, honked their horns, some even abandoned their vehicles and went for a coffee break.
I was on my way to a premiere of a documentary that I won’t name because (a) it was total crap, and (b) it was an anti–Rupert Murdoch diatribe that was as predictable as it was badly presented. I had dressed to the nines in order to stand out among the left-wing beards I was certain would be attending. My destination was the Paley Center, on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. I was in a taxi whose driver hardly spoke English but was polite, like the good Bengali very few of them are. I had been in the cab for about ten minutes without moving when someone began knocking on the window.
When it finally slid down, spilling the white stuff inside, a woman whose lips had turned blue and who was not bad-looking—but no beauty—asked me in a tremulous voice if she could share the cab with me going down Park Avenue. “I’ll share the cost,” she said. “You don’t need to, do come inside,” said I, ever the shining knight. “Are you English?” she asked. “Not exactly,” I answered. “You sound foreign, are you a diplomat?” “Nah, just a struggling writer,” said I, beginning to regret my having rescued a lady in distress. “Oh, my father was a writer. He owned Grand Street, but he died some time ago.”
After a second went by, I said: “I knew your father and I was in school with him seventy years ago, he had the cube next to me in Thomas House, Lower School at Lawrenceville.” (We had cubes, not rooms, in a long narrow dormitory.) Lots of OMGs followed. Her name was Emma Sonnenberg and her father was Ben Sonnenberg, whose father started a thing called Public Relations long ago when no one had ever heard of such a thing. He obviously made a bundle, but having read Ben’s memoir of Lawrenceville, I knew he hated the place. “They hated him because he was Jewish,” said my passenger. “That’s a lot of BS,” I told her in no uncertain terms. “The reason everyone hated Ben was simple. We all went out for Lower School tackle football, even I, who weighed 100 pounds and was five feet tall and did not know the rules or had ever seen a football game in my short life. Ben weighed 200 pounds and was almost six feet tall but refused to try. So we called him yellow and beat the shit out of him the way 12-year-olds tend to do. We, at least I, didn’t even know what a Jew was.”
That calmed her down a bit. “He went to seven schools after Lawrenceville,” she told me. So I asked her, “Were they all anti-Semitic?” And it got better. It turned out that Emma had gone out with Steven Mailer, Michael Mailer’s brother, whom I was going to my premiere with. More Oh my Gods, followed by How can this be happening?, and so on and so on. As she was leaving the taxi on 58th Street she asked for my name. “Taki,” I told her. “Like Tacky?” she asked.
The documentary was so bad and the audience so full of hate for Fox News and anyone not very left-wing, I brushed my knee against the back of the head of some jerk cheering and laughing in the row in front of me. I walked out, went next door to 21 Club, had two bottles of red and a great big steak, and then walked home while the blizzard was still blazing. Then I figured out the odds of having someone ask for a ride whose father I had lived next to seventy years ago, and thought for a second of buying a lottery ticket. But of course I didn’t, and then the snow melted and it’s all slush now.
