I gather I was supposed to gasp when Michael Cohen said during his testimony before Congress on Wednesday, “The president of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws.”

If that’s the best he’s got, Trump should demand we hold the election this coming Tuesday.

Cohen was referring to Trump’s 2017 reimbursement of the $130,000 hush money he paid to porn star Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about her claim that she’d had sex with Trump, aka Cohen’s client — meaning much of Cohen’s testimony is barred by attorney-client privilege. But who cares about this sacred legal privilege? We’re trying to get Trump!

Neither the media nor Cohen seem to realize that Cohen wasn’t doing anything illegal when he paid the “hush money.” (Just because Trump thinks every Jewish lawyer is Roy Cohn doesn’t mean you have to, too, New York Times.)

Words like “hush money” and “porn star” make the payments sound unsavory — especially to The New York Times, known during the Clinton era as Defender of Inappropriate Presidential Sex — but there’s nothing criminal about paying money to suppress embarrassing information, even in the middle of a political campaign.

If it wasn’t illegal for Cohen to pay the hush money, it’s certainly not illegal for Trump to reimburse him for it. Cohen was, after all, Trump’s lawyer. He got reimbursed for a lot of things.

But we have to have days of hearings in hopes of establishing that Trump violated the campaign finance reporting requirements with these payments, in which case, OH MY GOSH, HE’D HAVE TO PAY A FINE.

I’d be more impressed if they got Trump on a jaywalking charge.

President Obama had to pay $375,000 in fines for actual campaign violations during his 2008 run, and I don’t think we needed 16 prosecutors, half of Congress and the entire media on the case.

The theory of Trump’s alleged campaign finance violation is that if you’re running for office, all normal life expenses suddenly become campaign-related. According to these neurotics, ANY money Trump or his companies spent during the campaign is a potential campaign finance expenditure.

Paying your gardeners is a campaign expense — because who would vote for a man who can’t even keep the hedges tidy at Mar-a-Lago? If Trump had gone to the hospital for an appendectomy — well, he got his appendix cut out because he feared that if he died of appendicitis, he wouldn’t get the nomination.

Luckily our laws aren’t as insane as our media. For the hush money payments to be campaign expenses, the government would have to prove:

1) Trump, with his fine legal mind, knew he was violating the law; and

2) He authorized the payments only because he was running for office.

So prosecutors have a fantastic case, provided they can get Trump to admit on the stand, Oh no, I wasn’t worried that these allegations would hurt my brand at all. I didn’t care about what my grandkids or Melania would think. I had Cohen pay off a porn star for the sole purpose of misleading the public into voting for me on the basis of my character.

Such an argument would be absurd with anyone, but we’re talking about Donald Trump. He didn’t exactly hold himself out to the voting public as a moral paragon.

As voters were well aware, Trump’s been married three times, has appeared in Playboy videos, and was a fixture on the Howard Stern show for years, discussing breast sizes and ranking women’s looks. In the very first GOP debate, Fox News reminded viewers that Trump had called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”

The reason the “Access Hollywood” tape failed so spectacularly was that Trump had never appealed to Americans based on his character.

To take a contrary example at random, off the top of my head: Sen. John Edwards’ presidential campaign was entirely premised on his boasting about how much he loved the poor and loved his cancer-stricken wife — and also loved his son, who died in a car accident and he’s never told anyone this story before …

About a year before Edwards was caught by a real newspaper, The National Enquirer, visiting his love child and mistress in the Beverly Hilton, Edwards droned on and on about the importance of marital fidelity to NBC’s Katie Couric. It was, he said, “fundamental to how you judge people and human character — whether you keep your word, whether you keep what is your ultimate word, which is that you love your spouse, and you’ll stay with them.”

In order to preserve this utterly false image, Edwards arranged for his campaign donors to fork over nearly a million dollars to keep his baby mama happy and quiet. These were donors — not Edwards’ personal lawyer — who ponied up because they wanted him in the White House, and the money was being spent to protect the candidate’s completely bogus public image.

But when federal prosecutors brought a case against Edwards for failing to report these rather more obvious campaign expenditures, the government was nearly laughed out of court. The media ridiculed the entire prosecution and the jury acquitted, presumably on the grounds that, however much Edwards didn’t want voters to know about the affair, he also didn’t want his wife to know.

Trump won the presidency not because he touted himself as a man of character, but because he said he was someone who could get things done. Like build the wall. If you’re going to impeach him, impeach him for that.

NEW YORK—Somebody finally found a decent explanation for why people under 30 are so goldurn grumpy.

They’re not having sex.

Kate Julian, a senior editor at The Atlantic, laid it all out in a December article called “The Sex Recession” that goes into great detail about the question: Why are young people having sex at a lower rate than…well…at any time since we started keeping track of young people having sex?

A great newspaper editor named Ron Smith, who had a long career in both Philadelphia and Dallas, actually predicted this sad state of affairs as early as 1986. Speaking of fresh-faced college graduates working as interns at the Dallas Times Herald, he said to me one day, “They’re not fucking, Joe Bob. They spend their weekends laying bathroom tile. What kind of world is this where newspaper people don’t fuck?”

Apparently it was the beginning of a world where they don’t drink, either, and they don’t date, and they definitely don’t toga. Animal House came out in 1977, but I’m afraid it was already a historical footnote just a decade later.

Kate runs down an amazing list of possible reasons that people give for the lack of nookie, but none of them ring true to me.

(1) The hookup culture: Wouldn’t that result in more sex, not less? What are they hooking up to do? Play board games?

(2) “Crushing economic pressures”: If you’re broke, wouldn’t a few hours of sweaty Aardvarkus Doublehumpus make the day go a little easier on your way to that 7-Eleven microwaved burrito for dinner?

(3) “Surging anxiety rates”: Again, nothing like making the Sign of the Triple-Gilled Anaconda to take your mind off the meteors about to crash into the planet.

(4) “Psychological frailty”: I’m not sure what this is, but if it means insecurity, then they haven’t reached that realization yet that, yes, somebody thinks your ugly face is attractive, God has scrambled our collective brains so that that miracle will occur.

So far, this is mostly a list of things that have afflicted all people in all eras for all of human history, so I don’t even consider these as addressing the issue. But…

(5) Widespread antidepressant use: Yep, I’ve heard from users of Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Paxil, and all the others that, once you start popping those babies to get rid of the down cycles, your genitals shrivel up like you’re using a cocklebur condom. But that still doesn’t explain why Millennials are depressed in the first place.

(6) Streaming television: Really? I mean, really? This is reminiscent of those family-values organizations in the ’80s that claimed television was causing rape and murder, only this time the small screen is being blamed for being a reverse Horny Goat Weed.

(7) Environmental estrogens leaked by plastics: Wait, let me put on my tinfoil hat before I address this one.

(8) Dropping testosterone levels: This is a problem all over the world—something in the water? who knows?—but not when you’re in your 20s. There’s plenty of fuel for the whangdoodle even if you live in a Goodwill box in East St. Louis.

(9) Digital porn: As opposed to what? Live porn? Theatrical porn? Thirty-five-millimeter porn? Nekkid performance art? The first motion picture was in 1892. The first porn motion picture might not have been until 1893, but it came pretty quickly in the form of stag reels and the like. This is not a new thing.

(10) “The vibrator’s golden age”: The idea here is that the vibrator, which could always do many things a penis cannot do, has entered such a technologically advanced state that male members, no matter how well manipulated, can never achieve anything approaching the spectacular orgasmic nirvana of a perfectly placed, perfectly operated, perfectly calibrated miniature sex machine. The male version of this is those Japanese sex dolls that are like supermodel androids—they don’t just get you off, they tell you the sex was the best they ever had. (Which, of course, it was, unless you bought a used one, and let’s not go there, okay?) My guess, in both cases, is that you get into a diminishing-returns situation where the first time is great, but eventually flesh desires other flesh. I may be wrong—Millennials have surprised me more than once—but I gotta believe this solution has a shelf life. Isn’t there an “Aha” Moment where you realize your most intimate friend is a four-inch mechanical midget or a five-foot Tesla with limbs?

(11) Dating apps: Again, wouldn’t this result in more sex, not less? Even if you have to swipe right 3,000 times to find one person who wants to have sex with you, it doesn’t take that long to swipe right 3,000 times.

(12) “Option paralysis”: No idea.

(13) “Helicopter parents”: You shouldn’t be living with your parents beyond the age of 18, so the road to sex is exactly what they’re already telling you: get a job.

(14) Careerism: Yes, there are people who say, “I don’t have time for sex because my job takes up all my time.” There have always been people who say this. They’re the same people who end up getting fired when they’re caught having co-worker sex in the break room.

(15) Smartphones: No, you shouldn’t text during sex, and if turning off your phone freaks you out, then yes, you need a little attitude adjustment before you can give yourself over to wild abandon, but this seems like an easy habit to break once you start making the Sign of the Burrowing Beaver with your stunningly attractive partner.

(16) “The news cycle”: What? I repeat, what?

(17) “Information overload”: About sex? About foreign policy? What sort of information can override an aroused limbic system?

(18) Sleep deprivation: The organizers of raves, all-night fetish balls, and swingers parties in Vegas would disagree.

(19) Obesity: Buy a copy of the Kama Sutra. Trust me, there’s a position in there that will work for you!

“Name a modern blight,” writes Kate Julian, “and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido.”

But several of the Millennial belief systems outlined in the article did strike me as borderline insane, assuming the goal is to meet someone you can have sex with:

(1) Most Millennials believe it’s creepy to hit on someone at a bar.

This is a fifty-year throwback to the idea that bars were places for men and that, when women are there, they should be treated like visitors to an opium den, walled off from reality lest they be mistaken for prostitutes. Of course, the Millennial definition of “hit on” might be something as simple as “Can I buy you a drink?”—the line that has been used for millions of years because it has two advantages: (a) It gives the woman an easy way out (write this down, Millennial Girls: “No thank you, I’m waiting on my boyfriend.”), and (b) it achieves a quick result for the male. Males in bars already know it’s a one-in-a-hundred shot, so they expect the rejection—they just want the whole exchange to be good-natured and quick. The “Can I buy you a drink?” conversation, after the shoot-down, sometimes results in friendships.

But it gets worse:

(2) “Seventeen percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink ‘always’ or ‘usually’ constitutes sexual harassment.” (The article didn’t offer any stats for women asking men, men asking men, or women asking women.)

This one truly endangers the future of civilization. Once these people are in charge, we’re not gonna be able to make enough babies.

Can we at least accept as a reasonable premise that someone, somewhere, at some time, has to say something to a relative stranger in order to start the dating process? If everything that can possibly be said in that department is defined as “hitting on,” or sexual harassment, then all you guys deserve whatever you get. Have fun shaming each other into middle age.

But it gets worse:

(3) When they go to the locker room at the gym, Millennials wear underwear under their towels.

In two generations, we’ve gone from Greek-style totally nekkid gyms to gyms where people wear $300 worth of Nike athleisure sportswear while showering. This doesn’t bode well for orgiastic aardvarking.

But then there’s the one that blows me away:

(4) Debby Herbenick, a leading sex researcher at the famous Kinsey Institute in Indiana, says that Millennial men piss off Millennial women the first time they have sex by (a) choking them, (b) ejaculating on their faces, and (c) trying to have anal sex.

So it turns out it’s not the lack of sex drive that’s the problem, it’s the lack of interest in anything resembling a naturally evolving sex life between two people figuring each other out. Notice that none of the above three things are conducive to pregnancy, but all of them are likely to be popular in porn. Making the prior assumption that women want those three things simply an indicator that the guy failed to learn how to converse.

Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want any of these people having babies. Let’s move on to the Post-Millennials and the Post-Post-Millennials. Someday someone will eventually discover good old-fashioned American sex again.

When the national press trumpets its tales of white hate crimes, are the underlying realities more likely to turn out to be genuine examples of white racist criminality, Jussie Smollett-like hate hoaxes, or something in between?

I’ve finally come up with a fair methodology for answering this question that’s at the heart of the National Conversation we are finally having on just how honest is the purported White Terror we’ve been hearing about since 2016.

The New York Times, for example, in a rare admission that fake hate even exists, recently reassured its shaken readers:

Despite the headlines that have dominated the news cycle since, fake hate crime reports are uncommon. Hoaxes are not tracked formally, but the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said that of an estimated 21,000 hate crime cases between 2016 and 2018, fewer than 50 reports were found to be false. The center believes that less than 1 percent of all reported hate crimes are false.

In other words, the Times assumes, the burden of proof should be on their skeptics, not on them.

On the other hand, those of us of a less credulous turn of mind long ago noticed that a striking percentage of the hate stories that the national media obsesses over don’t quite pan out. Many aren’t full-blown false-flag conspiracies like Jussie’s, but the facts, when finally revealed, often don’t support The Narrative of White Hate.

Hoaxes as elaborate as the Empire TV star’s are rare, but it’s hardly uncommon for, say, the perpetrator to turn out to be nonwhite, or the act, such as posting a flyer mentioning “It’s okay to be white,” to be not (yet, at least) a crime, or for the motives to be murkier than you’d imagine from reading Southern Poverty Law Center fund-raising junk mail.

Egged on by the moneyed SPLC (endowment recently up to $432.7 million), the prestige press in late 2016 launched a vast campaign of hate about how hateful straight white male Trump voters were carrying out countless hate crimes against minorities.

But what percentage of these press allegations have since been validated?

The methodological issue is, how do we keep advocates from memory-holing contrary data?

My solution is to use The New York Times’ own “This Week in Hate” columns. I let the pinnacle of Establishment respectability take their best shot, curating their own list of hate crimes from across the country. I then evaluate how The New York Times did.

On Nov. 29, 2016, the NYT began running “This Week in Hate” under the announcement:

This Week in Hate tracks hate crimes and harassment around the country since the election of Donald Trump. The Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups are keeping detailed counts of harassment and abuse. We will regularly present a selection of incidents to show the scope of the problem.

Keep in mind that The New York Times didn’t try to be fair in selecting items for its “This Week in Hate” column. For example, the mob of leftist ski-bum Middlebury students who attacked Charles Murray and put a woman professor in the hospital didn’t qualify. Nor did the Berkeley Antifa assault on a female fan of Milo Yiannopoulos. And philosophy instructor Eric Clanton banging seven Trump supporters on the noggin with his heavy bike lock never made “This Week in Hate.”

No, the contents of “This Week in Hate” were instead chosen to make it appear that pro-Trump whites were running amok.

With the advantage of hindsight, how well did the NYT do at its self-assigned task?

For the purposes of this essay, I analyzed all 21 incidents in the second (12/6/16) and third (12/13/16) weeks of “This Week in Hate,” looking for pro and con evidence that has accumulated in the 26 months since on the validity of the NYT’s accounts. (I skipped the first week, assuming it was better to let the NYT get into its stride. I encourage other researchers to check out the rest of “This Week in Hate,” which finally petered out in July 2017.)

How many of the 21 incidents have resulted in hate-crime convictions? How many have been shown to be a complete hoax? How many are unconfirmed by the justice system but seem plausible? How many unconfirmed occurrences are dubious?

I shall count through the 21 cases from the most valid to the most embarrassing for the NYT.

By early 2019, only two of the NYT’s 21 cases have so far worked out exactly as readers were led to expect. Here’s possibly their best example:

(1) When an interracial couple returned to their rental property in Cincinnati after Thanksgiving weekend, they found it badly damaged and defaced with swastikas, a racial slur and the words “white power.”

The white man responsible later pleaded guilty to a federal hate crime, so I count this one as correct for the NYT.

Nonetheless, the Times spun the story to make it sound like random white terrorism solely due to the perp being outraged by the victims’ interracial marriage.

In reality, the victims had been the criminal’s landlords. They had just evicted him for not paying his rent. He quickly came back to get classic Bad Tenant vengeance on his former place, pouring concrete down the toilet.

Perhaps this example suggests that we might distinguish between “hate crimes” motivated solely by demographic characteristics and “anger crimes” that start off in a personal beef and merely incidentally proceed on to disgraceful racist insults?

Also, the criminal had already been convicted for similar graffiti in 2013, so it’s hard to attribute his 2016 crimes to Trump.

Finally, it’s difficult to square this case with the fashionable doctrine of White Privilege. The bad guy here is not a Great White Defendant, such as a UVA fraternity leader or a Duke lacrosse player, he’s just some loser who can’t pay his rent.

A second crime of the NYT’s 21 was fairly similar:

(2) On Saturday, a Muslim police officer and her teenage son were accosted in Brooklyn by a man who yelled “go back to your country” and shoved the boy. The officer had received a medal in 2014 for saving a baby from a fire. A man has been charged with a hate crime in the case.

The arrested man was a blue-collar white neighbor walking his pit bull. (He was also charged with letting go of the leash and telling his beast to “sic ’em.”)

Unfortunately, I can’t find any accounts of the outcome of legal proceedings, nor of how the shoving match between the arrested man and the 16-year-old youth began.

Was this a true hate crime carried out at random against Muslims, or another anger crime that started out more personally?

The arrested man appears to have died at home recently.

While some mysteries remain, I will chalk it up as legit.

Another twelve of the NYT’s 21 cases do not appear to have led to arrests. I will list those in order of shrinking plausibility, with five striking me as likely supporting the NYT’s Narrative and seven likely undermining it. Your evaluations, however, may differ.

To begin with the most plausible-sounding unproven allegation:

(3) A dead pig was dumped in the parking lot of a mosque in Lawton, Okla., last Tuesday night. Islam prohibits pork consumption, and the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is asking the F.B.I. to investigate the incident as a hate crime.

As you may have noticed, purported hate crimes tend to be reported the most often in the most anti-Trump parts of the country. For example, Jussie is said to have instructed the Nigerian weightlifting bros to shout, “This is MAGA country,” even though Hillary beat Trump 84–13 in the Windy City.

Lawton, however, is a small city of about 100,000 in central Oklahoma. That really is MAGA country. Trump carried Lawton’s Comanche County 59–35 over Clinton.

Nobody has been arrested for this incident. But it was caught on grainy videotape. And it seems unlikely to have been a false flag because devout Muslims wouldn’t touch a pig carcass. More likely than a hoax, perhaps an anti-Muslim nonwhite carried it out, since 40 percent of Lawton’s population is nonwhite.

Overall, though, my best guess is that a white Trump supporter did it.

Here’s another red-state case that also doesn’t set off my plausibility alarms:

(4) A resident of Greenwood, Ind., notified police on Tuesday that a racial slur had been spray-painted on the side of his house. He had also received a note stating that his family were not welcome and that this was “Trump country.” The incident has been reported to the FBI as a possible hate crime.

A number of similar cases have turned out to be self-inflicted hoaxes, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them. I found online reports from local newspapers of similar-sounding cases of graffiti appearing on the homes of nonwhites in Greenwood, ranging from before the election through early 2018. Greenwood is 92 percent white and Trump won the county 68–28. So my assumption is that a few white vandals are picking on minorities in Greenwood.

(5) A uniformed MTA worker wearing a hijab was called a “terrorist” by a man while riding the 7 train in Manhattan. The man followed her into Grand Central Terminal and pushed her to the ground; she was treated for leg injuries.

The NYPD released a police sketch: It’s the usual picture of a hoodie-wearing youngish man with cruelly handsome high cheekbones who is not black. But whether he is white, Latino, Middle Eastern, or whatever is indeterminate.

There aren’t as many crazy people in Manhattan as there were in the late 20th century, but there are still some. I’d call this one a definite possibility for being valid, but we’ll likely never know for sure.

Then there are the two letters:

(6) Brandon Marshall, a Denver Broncos linebacker who had knelt during the national anthem at games this season, received a threatening letter full of racial slurs last week. “We are ‘channeling’ a devastating hard hit for you,” the sender wrote. “Something to make you an invalid in a wheel chair.” The security staff of the Broncos is investigating the letter.

Nothing more has come of this since.

As Jussie Smollett’s letter showed, it’s easy to fake a racist letter. On the other hand, the Colin Kaepernick kneeling stunt got all sorts of people all worked up, so I can easily believe this actually happened.

(7) A mosque in Providence and one in Wayland, Mass. received letters saying Donald Trump is “going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.” The same message was sent in November to several other mosques.

A local newspaper reported:

The letter is a photocopy of letters sent to mosques around the country, said Wayland Police Lt. Patrick Swanick. If the letter had been addressed to the mosque specifically, or if the person had made a direct threat, the letter would be more serious, he said. “There was no genuine threat, it wasn’t specific as to what the person planned to do,” he said. “It looks like the work of a crazy person.”

I find each of these first seven cases (two solved, five unsolved) more likely than not.

Next are seven unsolved cases that each seems more dubious than plausible. These include six swastika graffiti incidents, five in blue states and one on a college campus in a blue city.

First, graffiti is usually the product of low-IQ juvenile delinquents, so it’s questionable whether The New York Times should get itself worked up over examples from distant places.

Second, one problem is that if, say, the name “Trump” and a swastika are found together, it could be the work of:

—a pro-Trump neo-Nazi,

—or a false flag,

—or, perhaps most likely, the work of an anti-Trumpist accusing Trump of being Literally Hitler.

For example:

(8) A swastika and the word “Trump” were found on a blackboard in a middle school classroom at the William H. Lincoln School in Brookline, Mass. last Wednesday.

First, it’s a middle school, so the graffiti artist was likely about 13 years old. Is this truly national news?

Second, Brookline makes Chicago look like MAGA country. Hillary carried Brookline 88–12. The hometown of JFK, Brookline has always been wealthy, Jewish, and liberal. Wikipedia notes:

“Serving as a residential zone for nearby academic and medical institutes such as Harvard Medical School and Boston University, the town of Brookline was reported as the city with the most doctoral degree holders (14.0% of the total population) in the United States…. Brookline…is a cultural hub for the Jewish community of Greater Boston.

Another similar case in the NYT:

(9) Last Tuesday and Wednesday, the staff at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a public high school in Cambridge, Mass., found three swastikas drawn in boys’ bathrooms.

Hillary beat Trump 89–7 in Cambridge, home of Harvard and MIT. Famous graduates of this school include movie star Ben Affleck, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, and the Tsarnaev Bomb Brothers.

(10) A faculty member at the University of Nebraska at Omaha found a swastika, an anti-Semitic slur and the words “make America great again” carved into a bathroom wall on campus last Thursday.

Nebraska is a red state, but Omaha is the seat of Douglas County, which went narrowly for Clinton in 2016. Moreover, leftist hate hoaxes on college campuses have been fairly common over the past fifteen years.

(11) On Saturday morning, police were called to a Korean Presbyterian church in Buena Park, Calif., to investigate swastikas painted on a wall.

Orange County used to be Republican, but demographic change tipped it solidly for Hillary. Buena Park High School is only 8 percent white, so the odds are that graffiti in modern Buena Park is the hobby of Hispanic hooligans.

(12) Surveillance video captured in downtown Los Angeles last Tuesday shows a man spray-painting a swastika on a building. Residents of the area say they have found swastikas on multiple buildings nearby.

This is on a tenuously gentrifying street on the scruffy east side of downtown. The swastika was spray-painted on top of other gang graffiti.

Unlike the previous examples, I could imagine that this event could have modest news value. For instance, it might have been carried out by an adult political activist. But the notion that a white-power gang member would drive in eighty miles from, say, Hemet to spray-paint a swastika on a dead-end downtown street seems doubtful.

Instead, a few blocks to the east is Chicano Boyle Heights, where leftist Latino vigilantes have been carrying out a campaign of intimidation against hipster gentrifiers.

For example, last year, Mexican protesters tried to drive out of Boyle Heights a new kosher café opened by a Trump-supporting Israeli. So, the notion that local Chicanos might use Nazi symbols as part of their ongoing campaign against affluent gentrifiers (often Jewish) seems no more outlandish than the respectable implication that a Nazi gang stalks downtown L.A.

(13) On November 29, a visitor to Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, Md., found a swastika drawn on a bathroom wall. Local police are still investigating a previous incident at the school, in which the football field was vandalized with a swastika.

The school is half white, half minority in liberal Montgomery County, which went 75–19 for Hillary. A student was caught a half year later drawing a swastika on his desk with a pencil, but his name was not released. Once again, this doesn’t sound like national news.

And then there is this colorful anecdote:

(14) The home in Moonachie, N.J., of Nikita Whitlock, a fullback for the New York Giants, was vandalized last Tuesday night with swastikas, the phrase “KKK” and the word “Trump.” Police are investigating the vandalism as a hate crime.

The NYT leaves out the relevant detail that Whitlock, a scrappy undersized marginal player who filled in at special teams, fullback, and defensive tackle for the 2015 Giants, was serving his second suspension from the NFL for using Performance Enhancing Drugs. His ten-game layoff was costing him $205,000 in salary and he was headed toward the end of his NFL career.

I don’t know what the true story is (my commenters speculate extensively here), but I sure don’t believe Whitlock’s original claim. However, unlike Kaepernick, Whitlock clearly loves football, so he’s currently playing in the Canadian league, where he recently signed a contract through 2020. I kind of hope it works out for him.

And the last seven of the NYT’s 21 are complete disasters for the NYT’s Narrative.

In three, the victims were Trump supporters. In two cases, the NYT tried to obfuscate to confuse readers into assuming they were pro-Trump crimes.

(15) In Burtonsville, Md., three cars in a driveway were vandalized with swastikas and the words “Trump” and “racist.” Police, who were called to investigate last Wednesday, said the vandalism was probably motivated by the homeowner’s political beliefs.

A local newspaper reported, however:

The homeowner’s political affiliation may be the motive for the vandalism, officers said. “There was no Trump signs or paraphernalia prominently displayed in the yard, but detectives believe, based on their initial investigation, that the homeowner’s political affiliation was well known without the need for signs being posted,” Officer Rick Goodale with Montgomery County Police told WTOP.

Similarly, the NYT reported:

(16) In Pasco, Wa., last Wednesday, a man was stabbed in the throat after a conversation about Donald Trump turned violent. The victim had allegedly called the suspect a racial slur.

But the victim of the stabbing was the Trump supporter and the suspect was a Latino who was booked on first-degree assault.

In the third such case, the perp was so notoriously anti-Trump that even the NYT had to admit it:

(17) The actor T.J. Miller was arrested on Friday after allegedly hitting an Uber driver in an argument over Donald Trump. Mr. Miller has been critical of Mr. Trump in the past; during an October television appearance, he attempted to burn a Trump-brand tie.

Interestingly, the Trump-hating actor (formerly of Silicon Valley) is white, while the assaulted Trump-supporting driver, Wilson Deon Thomas III, sounds like he might be black. (Miller has since been arrested again, for allegedly phoning in a bomb threat against an Amtrak train.)

And then there were three cases in which the perps were nonwhite.

In one case of a nonwhite stabber, the initial reports were confused and the NYT shouldn’t be blamed too much for being misleading:

(18) A man was stabbed near a mosque in Simi Valley, Calif. on Saturday night. One man has been arrested on suspicion of a hate crime in the incident, and police are looking for another suspect. The victim was reportedly in stable condition on Monday.

Ultimately, a Latino ne’er-do-well was sentenced to sixteen years for the stabbing in a drunken brawl. His white running mate received a misdemeanor conviction. The Latino stabber was not convicted of a hate-crime charge because his attorney convinced the jury that his regrettable behavior was due to anger, not hate. The Ventura County Star reported in 2017:

But the jury exonerated De La Cruz of a hate crime….

Prosecutors said De La Cruz and a friend, John Matteson, 30, also of Simi Valley, began arguing with members of the mosque after Matteson was denied the use of a restroom inside the center.

In a second Wrong Race case, the NYT first confidently announced:

(19) Last Friday, a student at Nassau Community College on Long Island notified security of swastikas and the words “Germany” and “Heil Hitler” drawn in a men’s restroom. A security guard had found separate swastikas in a stairwell and on a wall last Wednesday, and three other incidents of anti-Semitic graffiti were reported in October.

But shortly afterward, a cretinous-looking Punjabi named Jasskirat Saini was arrested for the graffiti. The NYT grudgingly followed up in January 2017 with an uninformative admission:

On Dec. 20, This Week in Hate reported on swastikas found at Nassau Community College in Nassau County, N.Y. A 20-year-old man has been charged with aggravated harassment in connection with the swastikas and many other anti-Semitic drawings. Police said they caught the man drawing swastikas at the college.

The third example from late 2016 of a nonwhite malefactor involved future political star Ilhan Omar, the Somali Muslim Democrat who was later elected to the House in 2018:

(20) Ilhan Omar, a newly elected Minnesota state representative and the country’s first Somali-American legislator, was harassed last Tuesday by a cab driver in Washington, D.C. He called her “ISIS” and threatened to remove her hijab. Ms. Omar was in Washington to attend a planning session for Democrats at the White House.

True believers in the NYT’s Narrative can instantly picture some Archie Bunker-like straight white male cabbie swearing Fascist allegiance to Trump and viciously threatening the stunning and brave Muslim woman. Except…how many white Trump-voting cabdrivers are there in Washington, D.C., these days?

First, Hillary defeated Trump 91–4 in D.C. Second, I don’t recall ever having a white American cabdriver in D.C. Most seem to be African immigrants.

Indeed, as Omar later admitted, her angry cabbie was “East African with a thicker accent.” His not very Middle American name is Uka O. Onuma. Omar got her fellow East African’s license suspended for 45 days.

But, no doubt, in some higher moral sense, the fact that East African immigrants are carrying on their ancient sectarian and tribal vendettas in America has to be Trump’s fault. I mean, we can’t blame immigrants for anything, can we? After all, they are who we are.

Finally, one of the 21 was later admitted by the Times to be an utter hoax:

(21) Last Thursday, a Muslim woman was attacked on the 6 train in Manhattan by three men who called her a terrorist, mentioned Donald Trump and attempted to rip off her hijab. “No one said a thing,” she said of her fellow subway riders. “Everyone just looked away.”

Update: This story has been updated to include new information about a woman who said she was attacked on the 6 train in Manhattan.

According to police, the woman has since recanted her story and was charged with filing a false report.

As I count them, of the 21 incidents carefully curated by the NYT to demonstrate that white Trumpists are waging a war of hate on the true Americans:

Two are more or less proven.

Five are unproven but more likely than not.

Seven are unproven and more unlikely than not.

And seven are disproven.

So, the nation’s Newspaper of Record got at least an average of one out of three of its “This Week in Hate” stories right. On the other hand, the facts in another one out of three cases undermine the NYT’s Narrative.

For the Times to be right on merely a simple majority (11 of 21) of its handpicked stories of white Trump criminality, four of the seven unlikely incidents would have to turn out to be true.

Therefore, the Times probably failed to reach even 50 percent accuracy.

Doing this kind of research is slow. I spent close to an hour on each incident. So I stopped after two editions of “This Week in Hate.” But future researchers wishing to extend my work will have rich pickings, such as this jaw-dropping paragraph from the Jan. 11, 2017, “This Week in Hate”:

Four people have been charged with a hate crime, among other charges, in the beating in Chicago of a teenager with mental disabilities, which was broadcast on Facebook Live on January 3. The video shows one of the suspects shouting about Donald Trump and “white people.”

You know and I know that the NYT is referring misleadingly to the horrific Chicago torture video of four blacks tormenting a retarded white for racist reasons.

But The New York Times believes its subscribers should not have their delicate racial prejudices about who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys challenged by too much truth.

In retrospect, I should have stolen S.E. Cupp’s drink.

It was June 2010, and Friends of Abe, the Gary Sinise-led organization of Hollywood “conservatives,” was having its monthly beer blast in West L.A. A few nights earlier, we’d held our yearly big-ass celebration of neoconism with a 2,000-person-strong event at the Murdock Ranch (David Murdock, the Dole pineapple billionaire). Karl Rove was supposed to have been our keynote speaker, but he had to fly back to D.C. on short notice. A real shame, as his presentation was going to consist of a steady procession of mutilated soldiers whose extremities were left behind on the dusty battlefields of the pointless wars he helped initiate, paraded before us as we showed what amazing people we are by giving them standing ovations (and let’s be frank—if your legs have been blown off by shrapnel, what better compensation than knowing that TV’s Frasier clapped for you?).

With Rove gone, it was left to vodcaster extraordinaire Bill Whittle to improvise a speech in which he pointed out that Obama is bad. Fuckin’ blew our minds. I mean, who knew?

So there we were, a few nights later, drinking it up at Barney’s Beanery. I was going through a bad spot with my abominable girlfriend, and, worse still, I was in denial about my eyesight having deteriorated to the point of needing glasses. So I was drinking heavily in a dimly lit gastropub, and half blind to boot.

I was standing by the bar talking to a dwarfish bald conservative businessman from Vegas. As a short Jew with a full head of hair, I was getting an ego boost by hanging with an even shorter Jew who’s bald as a melon. And in the middle of my conversation with Mini Moishe, a woman shoved her way toward us and rudely thrust her drink in my face.

“Watch this,” she barked, “I’m going outside.” The pushy femme turned her back and took off for the front door, either to have a smoke or to hang with the smokers.

“That was rude,” I blurted out.

“Don’t you know who that was?” Cueball Dinklage asked.

“Dude, I don’t have my glasses on. Hell, for a moment there, looking at you, I thought I was talking to a giant sentient tit,” I replied.

“That was S.E. Cupp,” he breathlessly declared. “Boy, is she pretty! I wish she’d asked me to watch her drink!”

Okay, now it made sense. The entire Red Eye crew was there—Gutfeld, Levy, McCotter. Of course Cupp would be favoring us with her presence.

“Meh,” I said to Jewey DeVito. Frankly, that “semi-cute libertarian/conservative chick with giant glasses” look did nothing for me when Kennedy pioneered it in the ’90s, and it hadn’t grown on me since. “Hot or not, it doesn’t excuse her rudeness,” I told Kosher Curly. And right then and there, I had a thought—I ought to down her drink and split. That’d be funny, right? I’d get a free drink, and she’d learn a lesson in the value of politeness. A win-win!

But no, I didn’t. Not because I’m a gentleman, but because I was afraid that somebody in the bar might have roofied her booze (think I’m kidding? Standing right across from me was Bubba from Forrest Gump, who just a few years earlier had carved up a guy with a butcher knife. Conservative or not, this was not a room to turn your back on).

And now I’m filled with terrible, terrible regret for not having imbibed on her dime.

In the wake of the revelation (“revelation” defined here as something that was already known to everyone with a frontal lobe not crippled by anti-Trump insanity) that black gay fraudster Jussie Smollett faked his late-night “lynching” at the hands of nonexistent white MAGA Klansmen homophobes randomly carrying nooses and bleach while cruising the frigid streets of America’s black-on-black murder capital at 2:30 a.m., Cupp decided that the real villains in this story are not Smollett or the Nigerians who assisted him in the ruse, but (wait for it) Trump supporters!

The giddiness among Trumpsters over the Smollett news is gross. This story is awful. He allegedly abused police resources, exploited raw divisions in this country, and made it harder for every victim of a hate crime to report. This is sad no matter your politics.

Sad? Sad? A dog getting run over by a car is sad. A child with cancer is sad. What Smollett did was a crime, an atrocity, and the one group of people not to blame is the one Smollett tried to frame for his faux lynching. And yeah, they have every right to be giddy (and by the way, S.E., why aren’t you “giddy” that a black man was not assaulted? I mean, shouldn’t that make you happy, rather than sad?).

“Conservative” Cupp’s language was copied almost exactly by Kamala Harris (birds of a feather when it comes to race). This is why I don’t for a minute miss my five years with the now-defunct Friends of Abe. In those bad old days, we were forced to maintain a steadfastly neutral stance on matters involving race. There was a formula we had to follow when commenting on anything negative emanating from the black community or from a black individual: We’d say, “Oh, how sad,” and button it with “and the Democrats are the real racists.”

For the record, neutrality on race is fine with me; it’s how I conduct my personal life and business dealings. But neutrality doesn’t work when the other side is not neutral. Bias against whites is an actual thing, and Smollett’s hoax was a deliberate attempt to incriminate an entire group of people. And that group isn’t even allowed to celebrate when the truth comes out? Smollett’s fraudulent claims could have provoked reprisals (last week, a leftist pulled a gun on a white couple in Sam’s Club because the husband was wearing a MAGA hat), but hey, bow your collective heads, whites, and don’t dare crack a smile at the fact that a racist scammer has been exposed. Don’t be angry about how his lies may have put people in jeopardy (because certainly whites are never the victims of interracial crime). Rather, be sad for the next gay black actor who might not be believed when he claims to have been accosted by invisible Klansmen roaming a polar vortex at 2:30 a.m.

Jussie Smollett was aided and abetted by a slew of accessories-after-the-fact—black activists, and leftists of all colors in politics and entertainment, who helped spread his obviously phony tale while using it to attack whites and Trump supporters. The scumbags who aided Smollett deserve to be ridiculed mercilessly. Forget nooses; hang the memory of this fraud around their necks for the rest of their lives.

But no. According to Cupp, we must only speak of the Smollett incident in a hushed, solemn tone.

My time with Friends of Abe coincided with my work helping to organize Tea Party events. Upon reflection, I now realize how good we had it back then. Every big-money GOP donor and Fox News kingpin was on our side, because we stuck to their issues. Low taxes! Foreign wars! No socialized medicine! I don’t regret those years (as a Beverly Hills homeowner, low taxation is genuinely my No. 1 issue), but looking back, having the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and Murdoch and Ailes on our side made a huge difference. We weren’t “Astroturf,” as Nancy Pelosi once whined, but we were on the side of big money. And yeah, we did some fine things. We killed the “public option” in the first, failed iteration of Obamacare, and we delivered huge midterm wins in 2010. But how much of that was really us, and how much was the mega-donors who like their rightists the same way they like their coffee—filtered?

These big-business “conservative” kingmakers love mass illegal immigration, and they hate talk of race, because race is divisive, and one of the cardinal rules of business and politics is, never be divisive when you don’t have to. Back when Jesus huckster Pat Robertson was running for the GOP nomination in the 1988 presidential primary, I recall someone at a town-hall Q&A asking him if our dead pets will be waiting for us in heaven. Now, ol’ Pat, who claimed to converse with Jesus daily, could tell you Christ’s opinion on every bill before Congress. But when confronted with the pet question, Pat answered, “No one knows!” Wait, really? The guy had just related what Jesus told him about how to vote on House Bill 374. So while you’re on the phone with the Savior, why not ask him the pet question?

Pat was noncommittal because it’s a hugely divisive question among Christians, some of whom believe it’s blasphemy to suggest that animals have souls (and only those with souls get into heaven), while others hold that heaven wouldn’t be heaven without pets. Pat would have gained nothing by taking a stand on this one. Never divide the room if it doesn’t benefit you. That’s why the big-money GOP swamp creatures hate anything on the right that appears racially divisive, and the mouthpieces who spout the safe conservative line echo that way of thinking. Democrat bigwigs thrive on racial division—it’s their lifeblood. But on the GOP side, racial stuff gets in the way of the issues that matter to the machine and its moneymen. So, we must speak respectfully of brown-skinned illegals, lest we appear racist. And we must never push back against antiwhite bigotry. Trump broke those rules in 2016, and it worked. It’s the reason people like Cupp despise him so.

I agree with Ann Coulter that Trump is fast becoming a lost cause. But as an optimist who prefers to view the man’s cavernous cranium as half full instead of half empty, I will say this: Along with two (and perhaps one more to come) SCOTUS appointments, the other good thing Trump did was allow us our giddiness. Whether it was by calling Maxine Waters “low IQ,” or stating what most white Americans secretly believe even though they can’t say it—that it’s better to have immigrants from civilized European nations than shithole Third World dumps—Trump gave us a few years of feeling free from the pressure to treat all minorities with the respectful awe usually reserved for religious icons.

S.E. Cupp’s gonna have the last laugh—I have no doubt. Trump’s agenda is in shambles, and his grassroots base, which never enjoyed the perks of my beloved Tea Party, is fractured beyond repair. But let’s not lose the spirit just yet.

Allow yourself the freedom to be giddy at Jussie Smollett’s downfall.

And if you ever have the opportunity to swipe S.E. Cupp’s booze, please do so, for me. Don’t worry—she can well afford another drink.

Having embraced “Medicare-for-all,” free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coal-fired power plants, the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left rolls on.

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both called last week for race-based reparations for slavery.

“Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, legal discrimination and segregation, and discrimination that exist today have led to a systemic wealth gap between black and white Americans,” Harris told The New York Times. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”

Echoed Sen. Warren: “We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country.” This history has crippled “the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations.”

That black Americans are handicapped by their history in this country, and cannot accumulate wealth as easily, and require compensatory reparations for slavery and segregation, is more than a controversial assertion.

Are the Democrats going to say this in their national platform in 2020? And how much will the rest of America be forced to pay, and for how long?

Warren says Native Americans, too, must be “part of the conversation.” Apparently, they suffer from a similar handicap and need the same reparations.

How far and fast has the Democratic Party lunged leftward? In 2016, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all rejected reparations.

Have Warren and Harris thought this through?

The questions that instantly arise are: Who would qualify as a beneficiary of reparations, and who would pay the immense transfer sums involved?

In 1860, there were 4 million slaves in 15 states and D.C. There are 45 to 50 million African-Americans in the USA today.

Would all black Americans, even the middle class and affluent, be entitled to reparations? How would the government go about proving that folks living here today had ancestors in slavery before 1865?

Do we, as Warren did to prove her Native American ancestry, conduct a DNA test? Do we consult Ancestry.com for every applicant for reparations?

The last 50 years have seen many marriages between blacks and whites. Would the children of such marriages qualify for reparations?

Barack Obama, whose mother was a white teenager and father was a Kenyan, would not qualify. But would wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia?

Harris’s mother was from India, her father from Jamaica, where the British abolished slavery in the mid-1830s. But if the father had ancestors who were enslaved in Jamaica, would the senator qualify, or do reparations go only to the descendants of slaves within the USA?

While a higher percentage of African-Americans than whites are poor, there are more white poor than black poor in the USA. Does not endemic poverty produce the same negative consequence regardless of race?

What is the justice in excluding poor whites, or poor Asians and Hispanics, whose ancestors were not here in the USA when slavery existed before 1865?

From 1845 to 1849, the Irish fled a potato famine that persisted under the indifferent rule of the same British who introduced slavery into what became the United States.

As for the great migration of Eastern and Southern Europeans — Poles, Italians, Jews, Slavs, Slovaks — slavery was gone before they arrived. They had nothing to do with instituting Jim Crow. Why should they pay reparations?

Asians and Hispanics were a tiny fraction of the U.S. population as late as 1960, when segregation was being outlawed everywhere, but they are more than 75 million Americans today.

Should they be made to pay for sins their ancestors did not commit?

Warren took a DNA test to prove she was partly American Indian, as she put down on various legal forms. Would her less than 1 percent of Indian DNA be sufficient to provide her with reparations for America’s Indian wars?

If slavery and segregation explain the disparity in wealth between black and white in the U.S., what explains the equally wide disparity in wealth between Hispanics and Asians?

Politically, the party of slavery, secession and segregation was the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Wilson and FDR, who put a Klansman on the Supreme Court — the Democratic Party. It was the Republican Party that was formed to contain and end slavery, and did.

One need not be a cynic to suspect Warren’s motivation. Her claim to be an American Indian angered Native Americans, and she would like to mollify them, and ingratiate herself with African-Americans, who constitute more than 60 percent of all Democratic voters in the crucial South Carolina Primary.

By pushing for compensatory reparations, Warren and Harris may be helping themselves, but they are further splitting their party along the lines of ethnicity and race and elevating an issue certain to divide their country more than it already is.

I was born in 1961 and from my dim memories of TV fare in the 1960s, there were only two races in America: cowboys and Indians. Of the 30 top-rated TV shows in 1961 and 1962, a robust seven of them were westerns. The top three were all westerns: Wagon Train, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke. Not a single show back then featured black actors as regulars. It wouldn’t be until 1965 that a novelty coon named Bill Cosby became the first black featured actor on a TV show, starring as Robert Culp’s sidekick on I Spy. Otherwise, blacks were essentially nonexistent on TV—sort of how Hispanics are today.

America as portrayed in western films and TV shows was one of expansion, of conquering the frontier, of unapologetic pride and heroism. And no one epitomized the noble cowboy more than John Wayne.

America in 2019 is a place of concession, of erasing the borders, of unbridled apologies, and endless prostration. Naturally, this makes John Wayne a target.

Last Sunday, self-proclaimed screenwriter Matt Williams—a balding, bearded, bespectacled, smirking shlub that the 6’4” Duke would have been able to knock unconscious nearly by breathing on him—stubbed his chubby toe on John Wayne’s 1971 Playboy interview and tweeted in full swollen-clit estrogenic rage:

Jesus fuck, John Wayne was a straight up piece of shit

Watch your language there, Pilgrim, and show some respect. The only question about what would happen if you were placed in between cowboys and Comanches is which group would slay you first.

The usual suspects quickly gathered in formation and began squeaking and squalling and shrieking and bawling and self-mutilating and administering one another crack-laced enemas over the idea that anyone—even someone born in 1907—could utter such things without being lynched or necklaced or at least scalped until he either died or repented.

Here are some of the comments from their interview that their fragile hummingbird hearts aflutter. I’m quoting a lot simply because there was a lot of gold in them thar hills:

The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven’t passed the tests and don’t have the requisite background.

I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

“America in 2019 is a place of concession, of erasing the borders, of unbridled apologies, and endless prostration. Naturally, this makes John Wayne a target.”

Our so-called stealing of this country from them [Indians] was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

I don’t feel guilty about the fact that five or 10 generations ago these people were slaves….Now, I’m not condoning slavery. It’s just a fact of life, like the kid who gets infantile paralysis and has to wear braces so he can’t play football with the rest of us.

I will say this, though: I think any black who can compete with a white today can get a better break than a white man. I wish they’d tell me where in the world they have it better than right here in America.

I’d like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I’d like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can’t understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim.

Giddy-up! That’s quite a saddle bag to unpack, especially since it brings up ideas that I’ve been clobbering you over the head with for years:

• Blacks have it better in America than they do in any majority-black nation on this big blue marble. I’ve been urging people to contradict me on this point for a quarter-century and all anyone has done in response is call me bad names.

• Affirmative action favors academically qualified blacks over everyone else. For example, at Princeton as of 2015, blacks receive a 230-point handicap on the SATs compared to whites; compared to Asians, they get a 280-point bonus.

• Feeling guilt over anything that happened five or ten generations before you were born is a fool’s errand.

• Positions of authority should not be allotted to incompetent boobs merely because you pity their ancestors.

I challenge anyone to toss aside their silk slippers and silver tiara and attempt to explain what is factually or logically inconsistent about any of Wayne’s comments.

Then again, we aren’t dealing with rational people; we’re dealing with religious thinkers to whom whiteness and maleness are evil pestilences.

In Exodus 34:13, God instructs the Israelites, who were performing an ancient version of Manifest Destiny, to occupy the land of their natural enemies and demolish everything that’s sacred to the Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites:

But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves.

For all the flak that former American icons get about being colonists who destroyed culture, that’s exactly what’s happening to former American icons now under the smelly clenched fist of multicultural globalism. Every attempt to erase the memory of someone whose opinions were mainstream a mere 50 or 100 years ago simply because they had no problem being white or male is a method of destroying altars, breaking images, and cutting down groves.

It’s what’s happening with Confederate monuments all through the South, and now it’s happening with John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA, which features a nine-foot bronze statue of the Duke. The brouhaha over Wayne’s Playboy comments led Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Michael Hiltzik to solemnly declare:

It’s time to take John Wayne’s name off the Orange County airport….Orange County today is such an economically and ethnically diverse community that it’s hard to justify asking any member of that community to board planes at an airport named after an outspoken racist and homophobe, with his strutting statue occupying a central niche in front of the concourse.

Note that there are no similar movements to rename any streets or monuments to FDR, who once declared in a moment of race-realist candor:

You and I, Burt, are old English and Dutch stock. We know who our ancestors are. We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins, but a lot of these people do not know whether there is Jewish blood in their veins or not.

Nor is there any clarion call from major media to abolish the endlessly silly homage to Che Guevara, who uttered:

The first person we hit on was the mayor, someone called Cohen; we had heard a lot about him, that he was Jewish as far as money was concerned but a good sort….

The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.

Take a look at any picture of John Wayne and compare it to photos of any of his critics, and it will immediately be evident who was heroic and who is a mere submissive altar boy dutifully carrying water for modern pieties.

If there are any images to be destroyed, it should not be bronze statues of John Wayne or mountain carvings of Confederate heroes. It should be anything that’s sacred to the egalitotalitarian lunatics who think John Wayne did anything wrong

The troubles with the modern world are too numerous to list, technology being among the worst offenders. Just imagine how much better off we’d be if there were no plastic bags to pollute our oceans and rivers, no soulless supermarkets but proper butcher shops, no imported European foods but homegrown lettuce from local farmers, and so on.

Just imagine how much smarter we’d all be if television had never been invented. Books would be read at night and on weekend afternoons instead of us watching mentally retarded people asking moronic questions from even worse know-nothings than themselves for the amusement of the dumbest of them all, TV watchers. Better yet, what a wonderful world this would be without Facebook and Twitter, two inventions of crooks and liars who are probably doing more harm to the human race than cancer.

The worst of all inventions, however, has to be texting—how does one send a love letter to a girl by text? Personally I don’t text, tweet, or appear on Facebook, Instagram, or any other such self-promoting con job. The trouble is, most women would not understand a love letter nowadays, and most men would be unable to write one. And the loss of love letters is probably the biggest crime against civilized living that scum like Zuckerberg & Co. have committed.

One lady of my acquaintance once wrote that in a case of fire she would save her love letters and to hell with her jewelry. (You can always get new jewels.) She called love letters the campaign medals of youth, infinitely varied in design and execution. (She was obviously a hell of a writer, too.)

Personally, I have not received many love letters, but I have sure sent my share. All of them have been written at night, under the influence and dying from what I perceive to be unrequited love. In a love letter, punctuation and grammar don’t matter all that much; the tone is all. In fact, if the besotted one wrote a perfectly constructed epistle, he or she would not be as besotted as they think they are.

The effort required to convey one’s feelings with precision is what makes the love letter difficult to write. John Keats, that most tragic and greatest of poets, was as good in his love letters to Fanny Brawne as he was in his poems. Because the love letter is a poem of sorts, a fine madness that compels the writer to say things he or she would otherwise never say. Napoleon’s letters to Josephine were nonstop and whining, and as usual, Napoleon was right. While he was fighting in Italy and Egypt she was being unfaithful.

Because of modern technology, the love letter has now gone the way of good manners. Young people, or even old for that matter, on their mobiles simply cannot envision themselves writing a love letter. Everyone wants instant gratification, and the love letter takes time and effort. And it’s a great pity. Love letters stay forever; telephone calls are gone with the dawn and text messages also. Love letters in whatever form are still irresistible. I learned my lesson early on and began scribbling like mad.

My first successful letter was to Linda Christian, a great beauty who had just divorced the equally great-looking Tyrone Power. The year was 1956 and I was a freshman at the University of Virginia and had just pledged St. Elmo. It worked, turning me into a demon love-letter writer. I invented many lines throughout the past sixty years of chasing women, but I think the one that has served me best was one my father used all the time: “Heaven without you would be too much to bear, and hell would not be hell if you were there.”

So, if anyone under 99 years of age reads this and is still pursuing the opposite sex, go out and buy some fancy stationery, and use a pen and ink, no disposables, and let it all hang out…within reason. Not too much information; stay romantic—even corny, and apologize for it. Good luck. Oh yes, I almost forgot: Get off Facebook, don’t text, no Twitter, and if you really want to be happy, throw your TV set out the window, preferably while there’s a parade for equal rights taking place below.

The Week’s Most Surly, Squirrely, and Girly Headlines

COVINGTON KID SUES WASHINGTON POST FOR $250 MILLION
Until it was buried under the avalanche of publicity surrounding the fabulist gay black/Jewish actor Jessie Smollett, the Covington Kids story was the most publicized hate-crime hoax so far this year. The major media jumped on a false narrative about Trump-supporting high-school kids bullying a Native American man until the true story was revealed—namely, that some Black Hebrew Israelites and the Native American man were bullying the kids.

Now comes news that Nicholas Sandmann—into whose face the dishonest Injun Nathan Phillips banged a drum—is suing the Washington Post for $250 million—the exact sum that Jeff Bezos paid to purchase the paper.

The defamation lawsuit, which was filed in Kentucky last Tuesday, refers to Nathan Phillips as a “phony war hero” who was “too intimidated” by the Black Hebrew Israelites—who’d been lobbing slurs at the Native American group as well as calling the Covington Boys “future school shooters,” “incest babies,” and “dirty ass crackers”—so he targeted the boys instead:

Rather than focusing their attention on the Hebrew Israelites, who had been relentlessly insulting both the teenagers for almost an hour and the Native Americans attending the Indigenous Peoples March before that, Phillips and his activist companions approached the CovCath students from a distance while beating drums, singing, dancing, and carrying cameras to capture the confrontation on video….Apparently, Phillips, a phony war hero, was too intimidated by the unruly Hebrew Israelites to approach them, the true troublemakers, and instead chose to focus on a group of innocent children – a much safer endeavor for activist tactics of intimidation.

The suit goes into extensive detail chronicling exactly what happened, proving that the only people who weren’t aggressors in the debacle were the white Catholic teens that the media smeared. It alleges that the Post published seven “false and defamatory” articles about Sandmann from January 19 to 21 knowing that they were false.

It is our fondest wish that Nick Sandmann does to the Washington Post what Hulk Hogan did to Gawker.

STUDY: AMERICANS DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT AMERICA
A recent survey published by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation confirms that American voters may fall below the global average when it comes to being uninformed.

When administered, a “multiple-choice version of the test given to immigrants seeking citizenship,” only 38% of naturalized American citizens passed the exam. Under age 45, only 27% passed.

What’s worse, the only state where a majority of the citizens was the snow-white state of Vermont—and even then, they only squeaked by with 53%.

Other depressing findings from the study:

• A mere 15% of Americans knew what year the Constitution was written.

• A quarter of Americans were unaware that the First Amendment guarantees free speech.

• Fifty-seven percent of Americans did not know that Woodrow Wilson was president during World War I.

“The best argument against democracy,” Winston Churchill famously quipped, “is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” And this study confirms it.

LESBIAN TENNIS HERO SHUNNED FOR SAYING MEN AREN’T WOMEN
Martina Navratilova is the pelican-faced lesbian whom many consider to be the greatest female tennis player of all time. She has openly declared her lesbianity and has actively agitated for all manner of lesbianic causes.

Still, it’s not enough these days.

An LGBT—which stands for “lettuce, garlic, bacon, and tomatoes”—group called Athlete Ally has removed the tennis great from their advisory board after she made some comments alleging that it’s unfair to female athletes to have male-to-female trannies competing against them:

Martina Navratilova’s recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence.

Here is a sampling of the hateful and totally unacceptable comments in question:

You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women….There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard….The rules on trans athletes reward cheats and punish the innocent….Letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair — no matter how those athletes may throw their weight around….It’s insane and it’s cheating.

The only positive to come out of this involves speculating which identity-based group of freaks will start calling trannies hateful and out of touch. Pedophiles? Practitioners of bestiality? Otherkin? We can hardly wait.

HATE-CRIME HOAXER JUSSIE SMOLLETT ARRESTED
After weeks of unbridled public outrage from politicians, celebs, and media morons about the idea that a gay black actor was accosted in subzero temperatures by two rednecks who punched him, threw bleach on him, wrapped a noose around his neck, called him the “F” word and the “N” word, and then yelled “This is MAGA country!,” Chicago police finally arrested Jussie Smollett last week and charged him with felony disorderly conduct for filing a false police report.

If convicted, Smollett, who pled no contest to providing false information to police back in 2007, could face up to three years in prison.

The day after his arrest, Fox TV announced that they were dropping Smollett from the last two episodes of their hit show Empire.

And last Tuesday, a conservative student at UC Berkeley was punched in the face and threatened with being shot for daring to suggest that hate-crime hoaxes happen.

GIRL CHEATS ON BOYFRIEND, FEELS GUILTY, ACCUSES GUY SHE CHEATED WITH OF RAPE, HAS HIM BEATEN
As everyone is well aware, the idea that women falsely accuse men of rape is a discredited trope that only serves to fuel misogynist hatred in a culture that encourages rape at every turn.


That’s why it is with great skepticism that we approach a story in the Daily Mail which claims that a 24-year-old university student in China, stricken with guilt for cheating on her boyfriend, accused the man she cheated with of raping her and persuaded her boyfriend to throw chili pepper in his eyes, smash a jar over his head, and kick him in the testicles repeatedly. We also don’t believe that the girl demanded the boy she slept with to write an apology not only to her boyfriend, but to his girlfriend. Neither do we buy the idea that she tried to extort her one-time lover to the tune of $5,000 “in exchange for his future.”

Anyone who’s spent any time around women knows that women would never do that. And if you say that we’re lying, we have no other choice but to falsely accuse you of rape.

FRANCE SEEKS TO CRIMINALIZE ANTI-ZIONISM
French President Emmanuel Macron has made it quite clear that he opposes all forms of nationalism, calling it a “betrayal of patriotism.”

This is why we find it highly confusing that he is in favor of a new resolution being discussed in the French Parliament that would criminalize anti-Zionism by conflating it with anti-Semitism.

According to Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, criticizing Zionism is what cowards do when they really want to express all the irrational hatred they harbor toward innocent Jews:

[I] absolutely welcome this discussion and hope to see it leads to concrete action because it is clear that the overwhelming majority of those who claim to be anti-Zionist use it merely as a cover for their antisemitism…anti-Zionists never claim that any other nation on earth, apart from the Jewish state, should be dismantled or is illegitimate so it is clear that this meets any standard of delegitimization, demonization and double-standards.

That’s funny—the only double standard we see is the fact that Israel is an ethnostate with a border wall, and we can’t think of a single other nation of Earth that can claim that. Strike it up to our unconscious anti-Semitism.

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Every Monday, Jim Goad reads the previous day’s “Week That Perished” on his podcast.

I haven’t had a television for more than fifty years, and though some people tell me that I have missed much of value thereby, which I do not doubt because it would hardly be possible to produce so many tens of thousands (or is it millions?) of hours of television without producing at least something of value, I do not feel that my life has been very much impoverished by the absence of the screen that dominates many people’s living rooms and is as much the focus of their devotions as was the icon in the isbas of the Russian peasantry before Bolshevism got going.

My brief appearances on television have not induced me to change my mind about the desirability or otherwise of having one in my house. I have not mastered the art of the sound bite, and that, in general, is all that one is allowed to provide. The late Neil Postman wrote that television as a medium was intrinsically trivializing, and whether or not this is true in the abstract, it might as well be true if my experience of televisual appearances is anything to go by. They have all been intensely frustrating—for me, if not the viewer. There is no time on television to develop an argument, and while brevity may be the soul of wit, it can also be the soul of shallowness and superficiality.

My last two invitations to appear ended, thank goodness, in my failure to appear on either of the proposed programs. In the first, the producers were making a film about addiction to heroin, a subject in which (before my retirement) I was interested, and about which I wrote a short polemical book. It seemed to me that the modern orthodoxy, that heroin addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease pure and simple, and nothing else, is not only wrong but obviously wrong, and one moreover that had deleterious consequences. (Error is sometimes good for you, but not in this instance.)

Then I discovered that the program was to be fronted—I think that is the term—by a self-promoting celebrity, a young comedian who had once addicted himself to heroin, probably because he thought it was a chic or clever thing to do, and whose stock-in-trade was and is the cheapest crudity, which to me is not in the least bit funny (Lenny Bruce was Jane Austen by comparison). He is, in fact, the kind of militantly evangelical vulgarian that the British media moguls, even the higher-ups in the state-owned broadcasting system, have been promoting for years, in the hope perhaps of distracting attention from their enormous salaries by appearing as men (and women) of the people.

As soon as I heard that the celebrity was to front the program, I refused to appear on it. The subject, I said to the producer, was a serious one, worthy of the kind of serious discussion that was not possible with a vulgarian whose main purpose in life was to draw attention to himself by appearing constantly in the public eye. The producer, somewhat taken aback by the vehemence of my position, said that it was only by employing the celebrity that the public would take notice of the subject. If that were really the case, I replied, so much the worse for the public; but I added that I did not really believe that this was so.

More recently a television producer asked me whether I would appear in a live television discussion about another important subject, the sentencing of convicted criminals. It was to last thirty minutes, the next thing to eternity in television terms.

Not having watched television for a long time, I naively supposed that a discussion consisted of two or three people sitting round a table and discussing the matter in hand for the length of time allocated, in this case thirty minutes; not very long, perhaps, but long enough to make some serious contribution.

It was only after a little investigation that I came to understand what the “discussion” would consist of. There would be a studio audience of about fifty who would give their opinion, and then, as a supposed expert, I would have a microphone suddenly stuck under my nose and be asked to give an opinion on what the last speaker or speakers had said. The microphone would then be withdrawn as abruptly as it had been pushed in front of me, before I had even time to finish my sentence.

As it happened, a friend of mine had appeared on the program previously, and had vowed never to do so again. Not knowing this, the producer called him and asked him to appear on the same program. ‘“Will it be a bear pit?” he asked, and the producer giggled faintly. This was exactly what was wanted: high emotion, insult, possibly even threat. What was not wanted were logical arguments, statistics, nuance.

I decided not to appear, but before I could make known my decision the producer called me to say that the whole thing was off, and the question that only two days before had seemed imperatively necessary to discuss was no longer urgent or relevant.

I wanted to express my dismay at the way in which I had almost been misled into taking a six-hour journey each way, with an overnight stay, to speak for at most two minutes—not even consecutively. But even more did I want to protest at the condescending assumption that the public was uninterested in any subject unless it could be sufficiently trivialized into compatibility with the public’s supposedly minimal attention span and thirst for sensation. No doubt there is a proportion of the population that can attend to nothing for longer than a few seconds at a time, but surely (I would have added) that proportion of the population is already more than catered for in other ways. There is no excuse for turning every discussion, even on the most serious subjects, into a gladiatorial spectacle in which the viewers hope for a violent dispute as those who watch motor racing hope for a crash.

But what if the media companies are right, that there is no public taste for even minimally serious discussion? What follows from this?

The greatest value of democracy is negative, consisting in the fact that stupidity is less to be feared than evil. Or, to say it another way, though it can and often does make for much evil, stupidity is generally a lesser evil than evil itself. Democracy may be so much bungling and gridlock, but by dividing power among elected representatives, it does at least minimize the harm men can do more than nondemocratic forms of government.

To be sure, the Founders meant for this country to be not a democracy, but what is far better, a constitutional republic. Indeed, it is the wisdom of our Constitution that it is meant to prevent the historical fate of democracies: degeneration into mob rule and tyranny.

Yet whatever America now is, most of our politicians are not doing a good job, due to stupidity and other vices: ambition, greed, cowardice, conformity. The general incompetence is most evident in the immigration issue. Immigrants compose 13.5 percent of the U.S. population; 3.3 percent are illegal. A million immigrants enter the country each year, most of them legally. And, as Ron Unz notes at his webzine,

If we exclude a relatively small portion of the most highly-skilled legal immigrants, the remainder are probably not all that different in their characteristics from their undocumented [sic] counterparts, and indeed individuals may often shift back and forth between these two categories over time, as illegals gain green cards or legals remain here after their temporary visas expire. The ubiquitous rhetorical focus on illegal immigrants seems mostly due to a mixture of “political correctness” and political demagoguery, supplemented by sheer ignorance.

There are several reasons why we need to stop illegal immigration, and build a wall to that end, but the main issue, it is important to understand, is low-skilled immigration: Besides the loss of industry, that is what is keeping wages low for working-class Americans.

Both legal and illegal immigrants are much more likely to use welfare than the native-born. We now have a $22 trillion national debt. Social Security and Medicare, our primary entitlement programs, will soon be insolvent. Still, we continue to waste money on foreigners.

Does President Trump understand the immigration issue? If so, he evidently doesn’t care about it. During the recent State of the Union address, he said, “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”

That disturbing remark was followed by this exchange with a reporter the next day:

Reporter: Last night, you said in your SOTU address, “I want to come into this country in the largest numbers ever.” Is that a change in your policy?

Trump: Yes, because we need people in our country because our unemployment numbers are so low and we have massive numbers of companies coming back into our country—car companies, we have seven car companies coming back in right now and there’s going to be a lot more—we’ve done really well with this, and we need people.

Reporter: So, you’re changing your policy officially, then? You want more legal immigration?

Trump: I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in. We need people.

Suddenly it’s as if the president were a neocon. He seems about as sincere as Ben Shapiro hocking underwear during his podcasts. Perhaps he was trying to win over some Democrats in Congress and democrat and centrist voters. If so, that’s a very risky strategy, as it’s likely to alienate his white working-class voting base.

There are roughly 50 million working-age people—both native-born and foreign-born—who have dropped out of the workforce. Some are bums, but not all. And even some of the bums would surely fill the jobs in “the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in” if, America having less low-skilled labor, these companies were pressured to pay workers higher wages. The idea that we need immigrants to do those jobs is not only false; it’s a betrayal of Trump’s supporters.

The vast majority of workforce dropouts are men. For the sake of the debased American family, it’s absolutely essential that they, and working-class men in general, have access to better-paying jobs. Women rarely marry down; for sensible reasons, they want to marry up: ideally to high-status men, and failing that, to middle-class or respectable working-class men. Insofar as men decline in sexual market value, they will be undesirable to women. This has long produced, and shall continue to produce, many social problems, at the expense of taxpayers.

Although the president understandably wanted to avoid another government shutdown, and therefore compromise with the Democrats in hopes of getting his wall, the emergency funding bill represents a failure. Says John Derbyshire:

It contains some meager funding for border fences in crucial places on our southern border; but the local authorities in those places are given a veto on the actual building of the fences! Since all the jurisdictions concerned are, at best, deep-blue Democrat, and at worst, bought-and-paid-for by the Mexican smuggling gangs, there will be no fences.

Rachel Bovard is also worth quoting here. “Instead of being processed at the border,” she writes,

asylum seekers will be placed in an Alternatives to Detention program—funded at $40 million in the bill—where they are moved to the interior of the country, and usually let go, pending a court date. So much for ending “catch and release.”

Worse yet, the bill creates a pernicious new incentive for illegal immigration and child trafficking. Under section 224 of the bill, the federal government is now prohibited from detaining or deporting any current sponsor, potential sponsor, or anyone residing with, an unaccompanied minor (UAC).

All this when the border wall is not even the main issue regarding immigration! Nevertheless, expect a massive waste of time and energy. Expect the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives to claim the emergency is over, a belief that the Republican-controlled Senate may dispute. The matter may wind up at the Supreme Court. It will probably be years before the wall is built, if ever. It is all quite laughable. It is tragic above all.

Then there is Venezuela. Although there’s a compelling case to be made for giving humanitarian aid to that unhappy country, it’s not in our interest to intervene in its affairs, thereby coming into conflict with our most powerful geopolitical rivals in order to install “democracy” there. Trump’s supporters voted for him in part because they don’t want America to incessantly police the world. The involvement of John Bolton (now agitating for war with Iran) and Elliott Abrams—two typical warmongering neocons—in Venezuela suggests that here, too, Trump is selling out.

Not only that, the conduct of his administration in regard to Venezuela has been utterly immoral. The Trump administration put Juan Guaidó in control over government bank accounts based in the U.S. and imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sectors. In response, Nicolás Maduro, who refuses to give up power, has blocked our aid. Thus, as usually happens when we meddle in other nations, the poor are suffering, and will suffer more still. And for what? We don’t need Venezuela’s oil. Besides, the more misery we wreak in foreign lands, the more refugees we and other nations have to deal with.

Another problem is that the Trump administration is expending too much money on foreign aid around the world, as if America’s wealth were manna from heaven. What’s needed is massive government investment in high-tech jobs here on American soil. Without this, we will likely be surpassed by the ruthlessly efficient Chinese.

Another good idea is government-funded vocational schools, particularly in the struggling interior of the country. As I argued in last week’s column, it’s unrealistic, and harmful to the academy, to continue to expect everyone to go to college.

Finally, the government should devote resources to creating more colleges like Hillsdale and St. John’s. The leading brand names—Harvard, Swarthmore, Stanford, and the like—are past reform and immense liabilities. We need new institutions of higher learning simply to counter their awful anti-American and anti-Western influence, to say nothing of preserving intellectual standards and keeping the nation competitive internationally.

The failures of the Trump administration shouldn’t surprise anyone. They’re merely what is to be expected from a democracy, human nature being what it is. Although still vastly preferable to Hillary pay-to-play Clinton, Trump has shown that he’s inadequate. Only a Trump partisan, as opposed to a disinterested mind, could fail to see that. It is time to start thinking about a new Republican candidate for the 2020 presidency. In my dreams, Tucker Carlson would run, the man having aged into a kind of Buchananite nationalist.

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