The Week’s Most Foolish, Ghoulish, and Mulish Headlines

PUTIN SAYS LIBERALISM IS OBSOLETE
There is absolutely no debate that Vladimir Putin is one of the world’s sexiest men, with not only a net worth that dwarfs that of Donald Trump but also the raw physical fighting acumen that would permit him to tear Trump to pieces should the two world leaders ever decide to go mano a mano.

Proof that he may be the coolest guy on Earth is the fact that when topless female protesters attempt to shock him, he merely flashes a look that says, “Whoa—nice cans, babe!”

In an interview with Financial Times in the Kremlin shortly before the G20 summit, Putin revealed yet again why 100 million replicas of him should be cloned and shipped promptly to the USA:

[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades….This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected. Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population….I am not trying to insult anyone because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia. But we have no problem with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish. But some things do appear excessive to us. They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.

All we can say to that is ,“Da, da, and a thousand times, da!”

AUTHOR: FEWER THAN ONE IN THREE “HATE CRIME” ACCUSATIONS IS GENUINE
Wilfred Reilly is a black professor of political science who has published a book called Hate Crime Hoax which purportedly details around 400 hate-crime allegations between 2010 and 2017 that were confirmed to be false.

According to his research, he has concluded that fewer than one in every three such accusations is legitimate.

Regarding the eternally unspooling Jussie Smollett debacle, Reilly refers to it as

…the archetype of a hate crime hoax. It’s one of the most flamboyant examples of the genre. It was a situation so extreme and bizarre that I think we would have had to look at how much racial progress the U.S. had actually made had it really occurred…but will we see the same amount of coverage when the hoax involves a less famous person?…In the mainstream media we hear almost constant talk about scary new forms of racism: “white privilege,” “cultural appropriation,” and “subtle bigotry”…[yet] a huge percentage of the horrific hate crimes cited as evidence of contemporary bigotry are fakes.

Mr. Reilly, thanks for being black and brave at the same time. It’s not like you could help being black, but thanks, anyway.

ANTIDEPRESSANTS INCREASE SUICIDE RISK 2.5X MORE THAN PLACEBO DOES
Although he is generally considered insane for his unkempt appearance, reclusive lifestyle, and the fact that he blew up a few people, Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczysnki remains the sanest voice of all regarding why the mass dosing of the public with antidepressants is insane:

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

A new study of nearly 32,000 people conducted by Dr. Michael Hengartner of Zurich University in Switzerland examined the use of antidepressants in England—where Prozac use was so rampant that in 2004 traces of the SSRI drug were found in the nation’s drinking water—revealed that compared to a control group of depressed patients who were administered a placebo, patients taking a variety of antidepressants were 2.5 times more likely to commit suicide.

According to Hengartner:

Our study signals a rare but serious risk that needs to be brought to the attention of practitioners, particularly when starting or stopping antidepressants….It is known that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide among young people and adolescents, and for this reason their use is restricted among these patient groups….We can be confident that these drugs are producing an excess rate of suicides, beyond the depression itself. There is no doubt that this must be a response to the pharmacological effect of the drugs themselves. I’m not saying no one should be given antidepressants, but doctors should be much more conservative about how they use them. One in six adults being given antidepressants like in the UK—that is alarming.

Antidepressants are poison, and “depression” is a mood rather than a medical condition. If you’re depressed, the cure is to either adapt to or fix the situation that is making you sad.

DALAI LAMA: SEND MIGRANTS BACK, OR EUROPE BECOMES “MUSLIM OR AFRICAN”
Although to our knowledge, the Dalai Lama has never said, “Grab ‘em by the pussy,” he did utter the unforgivably sexist comment in 2015 that if there were ever a female Dalai Lama, she would need to be sexually attractive.

But his recent comments about immigration and Europe’s right to be European go much further than anything we’ve ever heard Donald Trump say.

In an interview with the BBC regarding Europe’s entirely manufactured refugee crisis, he opined:

European countries should take these refugees and give them education and training, and the aim is—return to their own land with certain skills.…A limited number is OK. But the whole of Europe [will] eventually become Muslim country—impossible. Or African country, also impossible….For example, we Tibetans took shelter in India, but most Tibetans want to return to Tibet when the situation there has changed. Each country has its own culture, language, way of life, and it is better for people to live in their own country. That is my view….They themselves, I think [are] better in their own land. Better [to] keep Europe for Europeans.

As long as the Dalai Lama stays the HELL out of Europe, he’s A-OK with us.

WOMAN SAYS HER PERFECT “FEMINIST” HUSBAND IS BORING, WISHES HE WOULD CHEAT
On a scale of 1 to 10, Clare O’Reilly is, to be quite generous, a 5, but she was fortunate enough to marry a 4 who is also a dutiful male feminist. Clare now finds herself so bored by her “good guy,” she is publicly wishing that he would cheat on her.

Writing for The Sun in England, O’Reilly whinges:

Simply put, I’m bored of being married to a paragon of virtue….

Don’t get me wrong, I love him and this year we celebrated 17 years together — 13 of them married — but I wish he’d lie, cheat, defame or slander just once, so that I could feel better about my own less-than-perfect character….

But it is not just his general decency that’s hard to stomach….He is selfless to the same degree I’m selfish, which according to the research, can sometimes work. The worst part is that I’m constantly around a level of virtue that is completely unattainable in my own life.

By doing absolutely nothing other than being himself, Jon constantly makes me look at where I’m falling short and what I’m doing wrong without so much of an utterance. It is infuriating.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who understands rudimentary female psychology. A 2018 study found that women prefer sexist males, “especially in mating contexts,” and a 2012 study revealed that men who help around the house get laid less often than their sexist pig counterparts. The cold, hard truth is that Mother Nature loves bad boys.

FEWER THAN HALF OF CHILDREN UNDER 15 IN USA ARE WHITE
In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been noticing it on your behalf daily: We currently groan under the lash of a media/financial/educational complex which on one hand says that “white genocide” is merely a paranoid myth while on the other hand celebrating white demographic decline as if it was the best thing since Mike and Carol Brady got married and ensured that their six children (and their presumably lesbian maid Alice) would not live a life of penury, opiate addiction, and bus-station prostitution with all of its attendant diseases and skin disorders.

Juggling data from the U.S. Census Bureau, it has become apparent that 2018 marked the first time in the history of this sad, dying republic that the majority of children under 15 are not honkies.

In 2017, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, mulattos, and “misc.” accounted for 49.8% of America’s under-15 population. There was a slight chance that year that if members of the Van Patten theatrical family began prodigiously breeding again, we may have staved off minority status for at least another generation. But no—in 2018, the nonwhite quotient of under-15 Americans reached 50.1%, and we might as well all pack our bags and take the next bus to the reservations they are undoubtedly preparing for us.

AMERICANS VASTLY OVERESTIMATE THE QUOTIENT OF FUDGE-PACKERS AND CLAM-DIGGERS IN POPULATION
In the past, polls of Europeans have revealed that due to their exposure to American media, they believe the USA is roughly 50% black, when the truth is that the nappy-headed, blue-gummed, banjo-pluckin’ coon-doggies comprise a mere 13% of the population.

Now a recent poll of Americans shows that they overestimate the percentage of this nation’s gay population by a factor greater than five: Whereas most polls show that sodomites and sodomettes comprise about 4.5% of our country’s total, Americans believe they account for 23.6% of us, which is far gayer than we are willing to swallow.

Women estimated that 29.7% of Americans are gay, whereas men pegged it at only 17.4%, most likely because men are terrified of being called fags and want it made clear that they are in NO WAY homosexuals and wish that nobody else was, either, because it would make it far less tempting. Similar disparities were noted among those over 65 (who estimated that 17.5% of Americans are gay) and those from ages 18-29, who peg American life to be as fruity as Carmen Miranda’s headdress at a robustly faggy 28.5%.

In news that will stoke the embers of the flamers’ persecution complexes, a study from GLAAD shows that in the past year alone, the percentage of Americans aged 18-34 who said they were “very” or “somewhat” comfortable with rump-wranglers and carpet-munchers plummeted from 53% to 45%.

This shouldn’t come as bad news, though, because it has always been our suspicion that a primary thrill of being gay was the possibility of being fag-bashed at any moment.

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: ASIANS OUTPERFORM WHITES DUE TO “WHITE PRIVILEGE”
A panel composed of members of some unnecessary thing called the Center for Racial Justice Education, which bleeds tax money out of your hard-working and underappreciated arteries via the Department of Education, is claiming, against all that is decent, good, and logical, that the reason Asian students consistently outperform white students on SAT tests and Asian adults average over $13,000 more than white adults in per-capita income is because Asian students “benefit from white supremacy…[and] proximity to white privilege.”

Got that? If someone performs in a superior manner to whites, it is only due to the evil demon virus known as white supremacy. Clearly, the only sane and humane thing to do is eliminate white supremacy, and whites will finally be superior again.

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

Pedants delight in error, not in truth, and fall upon it like scavengers on a carcass. I have books, pre-owned—or even pre-loved, as dealers in secondhand objects are now inclined to call them—in which pedants have underlined or scored out words containing misprints, as if the search for such misprints had been their main reason for reading them in the first place. A missing apostrophe may drive a pedant into a paroxysm of pleasurable fury. With what righteous indignation may he (I imagine pedants to be mainly male) mark the page to alert future readers to this disgraceful error!

Inclined to the pleasures of pedantry myself, I have to control myself, and put error into perspective. Recently reading a book about Sendero Luminoso, the Peruvian guerrilla movement of the Pol Pot tendency, The Shining Path by Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna, I came across an error to warm the cockles of any pedant’s heart. It called an epidemic of cholera that struck Peru during the guerrilla insurgency a “medieval plague.”

Cholera was not medieval. It spread from Bengal to Europe in the first quarter of the 19th century. Its first appearance in Haiti, a country one might have thought propitious for its ravages, was as late as 2010, brought by the Nepali peacekeeping troops of the United Nations, who dumped their sewage directly into the water supply of a large part of the Haitian population. Unfortunately Nepal had been suffering from cholera at the time the Nepali troops were sent to Haiti.

The world has by now largely forgotten Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path, but at the time (between 1980 and the capture of its leader, Abimael Guzmán, in 1992), it was the most sinister revolutionary movement in the world, as fanatical as the Islamists today. I went to the highland city of Ayacucho, where the movement started, at a time when it seemed far from impossible that Sendero would overthrow the odiously demagogic and contemptibly corrupt government of Alan García. If it did so, I had little doubt that the world would soon see a reenactment of the days of the Khmer Rouge, but on a much larger scale. It was a perfect lesson in politics: that the choice is not usually between the good and the bad, but the bad and the worse, in this case the far, far worse.

I witnessed terrible things in Ayacucho, among the least terrible the camp brothel set up by the army outside the city for the soldiers. There they waited in line for their turn that lasted about five minutes. They would unbutton themselves as they went in and button themselves up as they came out. This was sex reduced to its most basic elements. How the sex workers, as we must now call them, felt about it, I do not know.

I spoke to the relatives of young men disappeared by the army on suspicion of having been sympathizers with, or active members of, Sendero. An army office had been set up to assist them in their inquiries, but of course none of the disappeared were ever found.

By far the worst atrocities I witnessed were committed by Sendero, whose savagery was by now legendary. When two years later I heard that Sendero’s founder and leader, Guzmán, had been captured, I felt a great relief for Peru, even though the president, Alberto Fujimori, turned out to have been grossly corrupt. He was only ordinarily bad, however; Guzmán was Pol Pot bad. I remember what one Peruvian peasant said when asked why he had voted for Fujimori: “I voted for Fujimori because I didn’t know anything about him.” There are probably many worse reasons for voting for someone.

On my flight back from Peru, I happened to sit in the row in front of a man from Amnesty International. This organization was set up to aid nonviolent political prisoners and was at first admirable; then, as is often the way, it spreads its wings and, if I may be allowed a mixed metaphor, diluted its message.

The Amnesty man was very pleasant and we started talking. I described what I had discovered of the Peruvian army and he almost purred with pleasure. Then I told him what I had seen of Sendero and suddenly he became frosty. He did not want to hear it: In his worldview, only defenders of the status quo, not revolutionary movements, could commit atrocity. He ceased talking to me, and I ceased to believe in the impartiality of Amnesty.

Of all revolutionary guerrilla leaders, Guzmán was perhaps the unlikeliest. A fat bore, his prose could put you to sleep within a couple of sentences. A discontented product of the bourgeoisie, he somehow convinced even a few intellectuals that he alone possessed the key not only to Peruvian but to world history. While he sent thousands to their deaths, he remained hidden in Lima in relative comfort, and never displayed the slightest inclination to personal bravery.

He was, if you like, the forerunner of an increasingly important type: the ambitious mediocrity. His movement erected a preposterous personality cult around him without much evidence of personality. There is a mystery about his disastrous ascendancy over so many people.

His launchpad, so to speak, was the university in which he was professor of philosophy. The university in Ayacucho had been in abeyance since the 17th century, but the Peruvian government decided to reinstitute it as a means to reviving the local impoverished economy. Guzmán preached to the first generation of the local peasantry to receive tertiary education. They were perfect ideology-fodder. They were ready and willing to believe Guzmán’s Maoist-type theory that Ayacucho was the center from which revolutionary shock waves would eventually spread and engulf the world.

Until I went to Ayacucho, I had naively supposed that the spread of tertiary education was always and everywhere a sign of social progress: the more, the better. For the first time, I began to see that this was not necessarily the case. There is no class more dangerous than the tertiary-educated with no prospects that they consider worthy of themselves.

The Duke of Marlborough gave a toast last week that brought the house down during a Turning Point dinner for those of us resolved to end the threat of cultural Marxism once and for all. (Much easier said than done—the “crapitalists” of the entertainment industry control the culture.) The hosts were John Mappin and Charlie Kirk, a rising star in America, and Nigel Farage was the main attraction. (Outside, the usual rent-a-crowd of lefty mob agitators were screaming quaint and original insults such as “scum” and “fascists.”) Jamie Marlborough is living up to his name and rank. He exhibits none of that Rory Stewart bullshit (when asked what his greatest weakness is, Rory answered where he went to school). Jamie is proud of his heritage, his country’s history and institutions, and—these are my words, not his—probably thinks all Belgians have ever done is fuck and eat French fries. (That is all they have done.)

A disdain for patriotism goes hand in hand with those angry, twisted faces the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation nowadays accords unlimited access to, while it mounts nonstop negative coverage against Conservatives and Brexiters. Among the most undignified of professions are acting and politics, and yet very good people enter both. Not for the poor little Greek boy. The idea that I would have to sit on a stool and be interrogated by a woman loathsomely eager to score points, and have to answer politely, is anathema to me, but then I’m proud and don’t take crap from hacks. Instead, here’s my fail-safe plan for Tories and Brexiters to win and win big, come what may: Boris sticks Nigel in the House of Lords and names him chief negotiator with Barnier. Better yet, Boris or Hunt offer Nigel a major cabinet post, thus ensuring a victory for the good guys if it comes down to elections. And this should take place sooner rather than later. No more fears over a general election. A massive victory for those who have respected the people’s 2016 vote will follow. Boris and Nigel, Nigel and Boris, they go together like a horse and carriage.

Once Boris went ahead in the voting I noticed the media began to concentrate on character issues. (They would, wouldn’t they?) Character, of course, is very important, but brains and strength of will are even more so. Churchill had more of the latter, Chamberlain more of the former. Jimmy Carter, the nicest of men and a husband who never cheated on his wife but sinned in his mind, was among the worst presidents ever. Ditto George W. Bush, the architect of the Middle East mess of today. Ted Heath never cheated because he never had anyone to cheat on; still he was among the weakest leaders ever, handing over the nation to the unions and spending a lifetime in Parliament hating the greatest premier ever.

Needless to say, the greatest foreign minister of any country at any time, Talleyrand, seduced more women than his boss Napoleon ennobled faithful soldiers—close to 500—and he even managed to sleep with three generations of the Duchess of Dino: Grandma, Mama, and daughter. It takes character to do it, and it took character to save France in the Congress of Vienna while playing with the weakest of hands. His rival, Prince Metternich, was also no slouch. He missed an opportunity to incorporate a vast region into the Austrian empire while busy elsewhere making love to Princess Bagration, only four years after Katya’s brave hubby, the prince Bagration, had been killed in the Battle of Borodino. When informed by aides, Metternich thought it over and announced, “She was worth it.”

Now, that’s what I call character! Let’s have more erotomaniacs and fewer hypocrites. Boris’ detractors fear that his no-deal policy will lead to an election they are bound to lose, but with Nigel in camp he can tell the Fifth Columnists and the poison dwarf, “Molon labe.” They are the two sacred words of Leonidas of Sparta answering the Persians at Thermopylae who had demanded the 300 to lay down their arms. Come and get them, assholes. (The last word is mine, not the king’s.)

Holding people hostage is as old as the oldest war, and what the Brussels baboons are doing is nothing new. The Soviets held their satellites hostage with tanks. The baboons are doing it with bureaucratic Fifth Columnists after having Calypso’d nation after nation into the Franco-German trap. Britain was a mess when it joined, a country led by weaklings with illusions about a united continent. The great Lady T smelled the rat late, but nevertheless smelled it and was going to do something about it when stabbed in the back. (Hey you, with the recently acquired furniture, take a bow!) Whitehall mandarins have been working to keep Britain in ever since.

Lastly, what would happen if TV license payers who see the left-wing anti-Tory and anti-Brexit coverage of the BBC suddenly stopped paying? What would happen if half the country said, “No more moola.” I don’t know how it works, but something has to be done. The Tories have been in power for ten years and the BBC is more outrageously left-wing than ever. I’m back in London going to a great Rupert Hambro lunch and then to the summer party at the house of the man who started it all, Sir Jimmy Goldsmith. Up yours, Barnier!

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land. —Pope

We value rights because, as the terrible old proverb says, man is a wolf to man. Knowing only too well that other people can harm us, we affirm our inviolable rights, our human dignity, and so forth. But, as I remarked in a recent column, although there is a lot to be said for the personal autonomy rights allow for, this modern concept is also a very mixed good.

For what it leads to is people constantly asserting (for they rarely argue) what they think is good for them, usually without considering what that ostensible good would entail for society as a whole. Weighing conflicting values, trying to achieve some workable compromise with others, sacrificing for the whole and the long-term good—how difficult it is even to get these things on the table when the perspective is that of a person who thinks the good, as he understands it, is self-evidently inviolable, so that merely to ask him to ponder a contrary view is perceived as an affront. Which his in-group, whatever it may be, supports with all the intelligence and rationality of high school cheerleaders.

Hence, then, the many conflicts these days—so amusing to watch—among various left-wing groups: trans persons, gays, feminists, blacks, and others. For all their talk about advancing what they call equality, the left’s uncompromising subjectivism concerning truth and morality makes for a kind of intersectional cannibalism. And so, where leftists would join forces to overcome “white male patriarchal oppression”—or in other words, to take your stuff, white guy—they end up bitterly divided, spending more and more of their time in unfruitful squabbles. Well, the gods, said an ancient philosopher, made man in jest, in order to laugh at him.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether enough Americans can get behind some notion of the common good, or whether our current factions, so many of them founded on personal autonomy alone, are just a sign of greater and more difficult ones to come. As in lefty intellectual contexts, so in the Democratic Party, where the candidates for the 2020 presidential election represent a progressively shameless plunge into an ocean of wretchedness. Having their rights, and being taxpayers besides, the American public, always virtuous and tractable, is eager to see which would-be leader of the land boasts the best victimhood credentials, and who will offer them the best goodies. Poor creatures! For though they are filled with the deepest enthusiasm by the pronouncements of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, and other national sages, once they begin to talk among themselves about the forthcoming new equalities, they soon get sidetracked by all manner of unresolvable quarrels! And woe unto him who would tell Bonita that Becky is not a stupid white bitch who thinks she’s so cute.

Lately I have observed with bemusement the trans crowd claiming to be victimized in academic philosophy. One of their newest complaints concerns Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. A second-wave feminist and, it goes without saying, a leftist, Stock recently presented a paper on sex and gender to the Aristotelian Society, which, to its credit, defended her right to do so. Although, as her writing shows, Stock is quite sympathetic to the unhappy state of trans persons, she believes that “subjective ‘gender identity’ doesn’t determine womanhood or manhood.” Nor, despite her sympathy for them, does she think that trans persons should be permitted to just decree how we all conceive of sex and gender, or to set the terms of debate about sex and gender issues, since, after all, these issues do not only affect trans persons. Many trans persons are fiercely averse to sex-separated spaces, finding them discriminatory, but for Stock this simplistic belief is a serious problem:

Sex-separated spaces are an imperfect but useful form of protection for females in places where they are vulnerable to sexual aggression and invasions of privacy, such as bathrooms, changing rooms, dormitories, refuges and prisons. Recent Freedom of Information requests reveal that in the UK, two-thirds of sexual assaults in public pools and leisure centers took place in mixed-sex or “unisex” facilities. A pre-operative trans woman prisoner, Karen White, sexually assaulted two female inmates recently whilst on remand in a British women’s prison. Critics argue from such evidence that making self-ID the legitimate means of accessing women-only spaces puts females in those spaces at risk—occasionally from trans women, but also from predatory males who are not trans, but who now cannot be confidently challenged in such spaces.

The passions are the enemy of nuance, alas, and so a group of academic twaddlers called Minorities and Philosophy UK and Minorities and Philosophy International saw fit to issue a joint statement in response to Stock’s talk. Their “logic” is reducible to the simple but loony proposition—you disagree with me; therefore, you’re bad—but nevertheless, I will quote from this strange document a little since my readers may find it perversely entertaining:

The presence of these voices [i.e., LGBTQXYZ rabble] in academic philosophy improves academic philosophy for everyone. Not only do members of these communities make our discipline fairer, but their contributions also make ongoing conversations richer and better.

“The sad irony, for trans people themselves, is that their unwillingness to consider contrary beliefs does them a lot of harm.”

The discipline of philosophy, as it stands, has much work to do for each of these groups. But one particular area that we must focus on is the increasing professional hostility towards trans people, with trans women and trans feminine philosophers regularly experiencing intensified and aggravated forms of hostility and abuse. In recent years and months, attacks on the trans community have been led by a number of prominent philosophers and are made to seem legitimate due to the unwillingness of the wider community to speak up and protect its most vulnerable members….

In continuation of such harmful trends, today (3rd June 2019) the Aristotelian Society hosted a talk by Professor Kathleen Stock, entitled ‘What is Sexual Orientation?’… [We] are disappointed that a prominent philosophical organisation has hosted a talk by someone who has so aggressively and routinely spoken out against the trans community…. [We] are deeply concerned by the fact that the Aristotelian Society is offering its valued intellectual platform to a paper that, itself, targets the trans community. We believe this talk brings into stark relief the current situation for trans and non-binary people in philosophy.

They go on, in effect, to condemn academic freedom and to demand moral support from the Aristotelian Society, as if it were a therapy group for tenth-rate philosophers. Predictably, a number of trans resentment-pipers have tried to run Stock out of the academy. A familiar ploy, that. Behind the tears, there are whips.

Having followed the decline of higher education closely, and having read some of the ever more robust literature on sex differences, I was by no means surprised to learn that six of the eight signees are women. For, in academe, as in politics, women, as a group, are lefty liabilities, and accordingly, being female has been found to be a predictor of political correctness, as being male has not. There are also large sex differences in regard to free speech, a value of which women are far less supportive than men.

Here in the U.S., as in the U.K., trans people compose a tiny fraction of the population. And yet they exert an outsize influence. Trans people, with their obdurate demands, are a problem in the American academy as they are in universities in England. To say nothing of the increasing problem of trans men in women’s sports. How is all this possible? There seem to be two reasons, independent of the views of trans persons themselves: blind pity for their condition that serves to simplify and shut down discussion of trans issues; and the weakness of character that enables people to yield to trans interests. You will notice, perhaps, that each problem is rife in non-trans issues.

“It is head-scratchingly bizarre,” says Stock, “how so many public organisations, many of them ostensibly progressive, have capitulated to passive-aggressive, emotionally blackmailing, and sometimes even outright threatening behaviour from trans activists, often online.” Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, notes at his popular blog:

Last month Brown University, the Ivy League institution in Rhode Island, was accused of cowardice by leading academics in the US after it caved into pressure on social media to pull a piece of research from its website that had concluded that social contagion could be a reason why clusters of young people were identifying as trans.

But then, why expect anything else from “public organisations” or vast collective endeavors generally? In these there is generally a regression to the mean stupidity, conformity, and cowardice of human nature. What bad news, this, for liberals, neocons, West Coast Straussians, and other partisans of equality! Such persons may wish to get up a committee meeting, pray to their God, or read that great political philosopher Abraham Lincoln.

The sad irony, for trans people themselves, is that their unwillingness to consider contrary beliefs does them a lot of harm. Contra social constructionists, sex (a biological concept) is not irrelevant to ideas of gender (a concept that, for me and many others, is intrinsically and deeply related to sex, albeit partially socially constructed). Research by Lawrence Mayer, Paul McHugh, and other scholars indicates that confusion about “gender identity” is a normal and common aspect of human development, one through which most people emerge perfectly fine. So, sex-change operations as a matter of course, however recommended by leftist “experts,” are not a wise response to confusion about “gender identity,” particularly since trans people often end up rather worse afterward. Nor is it evident that that difference is due to “discrimination.” But just as virtue is its own reward, so vice is its own punishment, and as in Dante’s hell, trans people, like the rest of us, testify to the grave consequences of their willful errors.

PHOENIX—The last time I saw Don Graham, we were talking about all the Canadian students at the University of Texas who come down to Austin and “don’t know who Dobie is—I have to tell ’em who Dobie is.”

He was speaking, of course, of J. Frank Dobie, the father of Texas letters, the creator of the famous Life and Literature of the Southwest course at the university, a course inherited by Don sometime in the ’70s and taught right up until his death last week. They’re burying Don in the Texas State Cemetery tomorrow alongside 14 governors, 15 signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, 28 veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto, Republic of Texas founder Stephen F. Austin, one member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, one astronaut—and J. Frank Dobie.

I would have expected Don’s body to be carried back to the deep black soil of Collin County where he picked cotton as a boy—except the deep black soil of Collin County has been paved over with condos and housing developments and corporate campuses as part of the endless urban sprawl north from Dallas. Don belongs in the State Cemetery—our little hardscrabble version of Westminster Abbey—because he was the latest, and possibly last, avatar of a literary tradition found only on frontiers and in wide-open spaces. J. Frank Dobie had been a cattle rancher and outdoorsman who was also an Ivy League-trained writer, giving a literary voice to people from the early days of the Southwest who were mostly illiterate. Don was a brilliant professor with a pop culture sensibility, able to bring references from Yeats and García Márquez into a discussion of the Western novels of Zane Grey. Perhaps that’s why he was the perfect occupant of what was called “the Dobie chair” at the University of Texas English Department. He was undoubtedly the last member of that department to wear cowboy boots to work every day. Post-structuralists don’t wear ostrich-skin.

The reason I associate Zane Grey with Don is that he was the subject of one of several idiosyncratic conversations the two of us had over the years—sometimes in person, more often via email—because we both enjoyed going into politically incorrect minefields.

“Why did Zane Grey hate the Mormons so much?” I had asked.

“Well, look at what they did,” answered Don, succinctly reducing the debate over Mormon atrocities to a matter of mere degree.

At one point Don and I staged a fairly elaborate multimedia presentation together at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. The subject was “Texas in the Movies,” and we had dueling podiums and kind of went back and forth about grindhouse fare vs. “elevated” films in the state’s history. It was Don who got me to go back and watch Lonesome Dove after he made the fairly astonishing assertion that the greatest adaptation of a Larry McMurtry work was not Hud or The Last Picture Show or Terms of Endearment, but the CBS miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. We both agreed that the most iconic Texas film was George Stevens’ adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Giant in 1956, and Don’s final work, released last year, was the definitive history of the making of Giant. (I reviewed the book in these pages.) We disagreed about the greatest Texas Western—I voted for Red River, Don favored The Searchers—but we both agreed that John Wayne was only at his best when playing an asshole. The presentation was so well received that we planned to do it at other universities—but never did. Years later I reminded Don that we never followed up with our Texas Movie Tour and he said, “Yeah, and why did we do it at Tarleton State?”

“Because you can major in rodeo at Tarleton State. Those are your people.”

Which was true. The reason Don resented those Canadian students coming down to Texas without any J. Frank Dobie background was that anyone who grew up on a prairie should have read Dobie’s essays on rattlesnakes and cowboy poets. (For those of you not familiar with a cowboy poet, that’s a ranch hand able to rhyme more or less spontaneously like a rapper. My grandmother was eulogized by her cowboy-poet brother, who was in his 90s at the time, but when the attendees at the funeral asked him for a copy of the poem later, he said, “Nope. That was a one-time deal. That was for Thelma.”) Besides being an authority on Texas literature, Don knew more about Australian literature than most Australians—he obviously found a symbiosis between the Outback and the Staked Plains.

Specializing in the literature of a forsaken place like the American Southwest can be a lonely pursuit akin to becoming an expert on the wines of Latvia, but Don not only knew all the players in English, he knew all the players in Spanish. I don’t think his own Spanish was very sharp, but he had a keen awareness of the role Spain and Mexico played in the makeup of the Texas worldview as defined by Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Frontier. There was a time not long ago when the word “frontier” had the universal meaning of “a place where one culture ends and the next begins.” It’s still used this way in, say, Switzerland. It took a handful of literary scholars at the University of Texas in the early part of the 20th century to change that perception to the way we see the frontier today, as the blank slate where cultures collide, commingle, and coexist. Don edited more anthologies and wrote more introductions than any man I know, and he loved to say, “Now, here is something you would never expect to see coming out of Texas,” whether that’s the middle years of Cormac McCarthy, the feminist criticism of Gloria Anzaldúa, or Thomas Thompson’s Blood and Money. In a place founded mostly by people fleeing the institutions of Europe and the eastern seaboard of America, you end up with a fluid definition of what “literature” is—fiction or nonfiction, poetry or bilingual essays, postmodern novels alongside newspaper columns. In order to understand it, though, you have to know all the literary traditions in the rest of the world, to show how the Southwestern writers have twisted genres to fit their own needs. Accordingly, Don was the best-read man I ever knew. A couple of decades ago he put out an anthology of Texas writing, and he called me up to ask if he could use a chapter from one of my books—a chapter I don’t really like in a book that nobody read. I asked him, first of all, how he found it—surely he had more important stuff to spend his time on—and, secondly, why that of all things. He gave me some enthusiastic praise and I said, “Yeah, okay, I trust that you have a good reason,” but I think mainly he just wanted to find the piece you would least expect to see reprinted. He wanted every book to be a journey into the twisted counterintuitive eccentricities of the state.

I remember other conversations as well, like the one about why the cattle industry is always good in Texas fiction but the oil business is always bad, and why there’s never been a good movie about the Alamo. (Don’s theory: The story has no third act and you already know everybody is gonna die. I agree, but the story of the Titanic also has no third act and you already know everybody is gonna die, yet it was shaped into the third-highest-grossing film in history. The difference, I think, is that people telling the Alamo story insist on being somewhat faithful to real events, meaning Travis has to draw the line in the sand, Bowie has to club Mexican soldiers with his rifle, and Crockett’s body has to be found under a pile of enemy corpses. If someone were to tell the story through a fictional third-person narrator, as in Titanic, there might be a chance at narrative suspense.)

But the main things I remember about Don are his unfailing good humor, his intense curiosity, his delight in being on the unpopular side of an issue, and that rarest of academic traits, a plain-sense no-bullshit writing style. I hope they lay him to rest next to some pathetically untalented Confederate general—he would appreciate the irony and laugh about it—or, better yet, next to that baseball player in the Hall of Fame. There have been a lot of great baseball players from Texas—Rogers Hornsby, Nolan Ryan, Tris Speaker—but the one they honored with a burial plot is Willie Wells, “The Devil,” who played in the Negro Leagues. Don, who wrote a biography of the most decorated soldier in World War II, a Texan named Audie Murphy who became an actor in Westerns, would appreciate the “hidden gem” factoid. The main thing we lost when we lost Don was all that deep reading that resided in his memory. He spent his life making other people famous and bringing forgotten artists and forgotten works back from the mausoleums of literary history. He not only told us who Frank Dobie was, he told us what he stood for. It’s gonna be hard to find the good stuff without Don around to tell us where it is.

Everyone else wants the names of the FBI officials who approved the unprecedented law enforcement dragnet against low-level Trump aides in the middle of a presidential campaign.

I want the names of the staffers at the Republican National Committee who prepared Trump’s “backgrounders” on potential hires for the new administration. (I’m not interested in finding out who leaked them because I assume it was the Russians.)

When America is no more, future generations are going to want to know who murdered our country.

Below is a random selection of the idiotic quotes from the RNC’s vetting document on Kris Kobach, when President Trump was considering him for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Instead of Kobach, who could have saved the country, Trump appointed a series of imbeciles, who managed to engineer the worst immigration crisis in the nation’s history.

If this cretinous document had anything to do with Kobach being passed over, then there are specific people whose names we’re going to need.

QUOTE:
“Immigration Hardliner”

The RNC seems to think “hardliner” means: “supports current federal law, on the books, passed over generations by Republicans and Democrats, negotiating compromises and getting their bills signed into law by a series of presidents in both political parties.”

QUOTE:
“Would you ever allow your support of policies that ‘strengthen’ immigration enforcement (to) conflict with bipartisan compromise legislation negotiated by a Trump administration?”

Who wrote this question? John McCain? Jeb!?

Even after Trump won, the RNC proceeded as if nothing had happened and their goal was to pass a new Gang of Eight “Comprehensive Immigration” bill. They wanted Kobach to swear fidelity to a policy that had just been soundly rejected by the voters and their own party.

QUOTE:
“Given your history of campaigning on immigration politics, do you believe you have an ability to strike the appropriate tone …?”

Tone! Democrats routinely call Republicans racists, liars, warmongers, homophobes, haters, rapists, etc., but somehow only conservatives are ever accused of having a “tone” problem.

Again, the RNC seems sublimely unaware of the entire 2016 election.

Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and won. But the RNC is worried about an erudite Midwesterner’s “tone.”

How’s this tone? F— you, RNC.

QUOTE:
“Kobach is credited with helping draft the controversial immigration law allowing Arizona state and local officials to check the immigration status of individuals they stopped …”

“Controversial” is what idiots say when they don’t have a real complaint.

I can’t be sure about all of them, but by my count, at least 300 of the 400 members of the current Democratic presidential field support slavery reparations, Medicare for all, free college tuition, eliminating I.C.E., transgenders in women’s bathrooms, abortion at 8.9 months, flinging open our borders and providing free dental care to illegals.

But according to the RNC, supporting immigration laws currently on the books is “controversial.”

I note that it wasn’t “controversial” at the Supreme Court.

QUOTE:
“… (much of the law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012).”

The morons at the RNC aren’t even familiar with the landmark Supreme Court ruling they’re citing to bash Kobach.

Dear Useless, Incompetent Twits: The law — I mean, the “controversial” law — “allowing Arizona state and local officials to check the immigration status of individuals they stopped” … was UPHELD BY A UNANIMOUS SUPREME COURT. (Other parts of the law, not mentioned by the RNC or anyone else, were struck down by a divided court with dissents from Trump’s favorite justices: Scalia, Alito and Thomas.)

The RNC: “Much of the law Was Struck Down by the Supreme Court in 2012.”

The New York Times: “Court Splits Immigration Law Verdicts; Upholds Hotly Debated Centerpiece, 8-0.”

I’m sure any person of reasonable intelligence could confuse “unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court” with “struck down by the Supreme Court.”

QUOTE:
“Background: Kobach has advocated for use of a technicality within the Patriot Act, that would potentially force Mexico to ‘pay for the wall’ by holding hostage the millions of dollars that Mexican nationals in the U.S. send home to family each year.”

Holding hostage? It’s known as the Treasury Department’s taxing authority.

Idea for the RNC’s next policy paper: “The Trump administration advocates for use of a technicality within the law that would potentially force taxpayers to pay for government services by holding hostage trillions of dollars that Americans spend on their families each year.”

The Kobach “backgrounder” is the equivalent of me writing the vetting documents for the Obama administration.

QUOTE:
“CONTROVERSIES: Kobach Faced Criticism for Speaking at What Some Called a ‘White Nationalist’ Conference.”

Holy moly! That’s a blockbuster! I’ve followed Kobach’s career for years, and I’m floored that the Harvard/Yale/Oxford graduate is consorting with “white supremacists.”

Oh wait, I see. Here’s the RNC’s evidence:

QUOTE:
“Kobach was a presenter at a writers workshop last week for The Social Contract Press, a publishing house that the Southern Poverty Law Center includes on its list of hate groups under the category ‘anti-immigrant.'”

Anyone — in media, in politics, in casual conversation around the water cooler, certainly anyone at the RNC! — who cites the SPLC as anything other than “America’s Leading Hate Group” needs to have his head examined. This is on the order of the NAACP using KKK literature to evaluate job applicants.

The RNC vetters are too stupid not to bury the SPLC’s specific claim: that The Social Contract Press is guilty of being “anti-immigrant.” I know the RNC hated Trump, but the only reason the RNC even has a Republican president right now is that a plurality of Americans want less immigration, too.

QUOTE:
“During the Campaign, Kobach’s Opponent Tied Him to White Supremacists Groups.”

Again with the “white supremacist groups”!

Guess who this time? Guess! FAIR — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group concerned with … yes, that would be the principal assignment of department for which Kobach was being considered: IMMIGRATION.

In fact, FAIR is a little namby-pamby on immigration, certainly compared to, for example, the Angel Moms, Bernie Sanders circa 2016, or — I don’t know — THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. If FAIR is a “white supremacist group,” then Trump is the Grand Wizard of the KKK.

Who at the RNC wrote this document? I want their names and I want them killed. (Or forced to watch the Democratic debates — their choice.)

More likely, the nitwit responsible for this Swamp Manifesto will be appointed Trump’s new DHS Secretary.

A new study from Georgetown University reveals that if the student bodies of the 200 most selective American colleges were enrolled solely on objective SAT or ACT aptitude test scores, their student bodies would increase from 66 percent white under the current subjective system to 75 percent white.

Ironically, this study was supposed to prove, in the wake of the entertaining and immensely popular Varsity Blues scandal in which TV actresses bribed their lowbrow kids into USC instead of Arizona State, that affluent white people have unfair advantages in college admissions. The authors at the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce state:

The recent college admissions scandal has reinforced a sense that social status, affluence, and contacts allow special access to selective colleges. Our data confirms that the affluent have extraordinary advantages in college admissions.

But instead, their numbers turned out backwards from their desired results.

The black/Latino percentage under a test-only system would fall from the current 19 percent of the student bodies of the top 200 colleges to 11 percent. (Unfortunately, the authors don’t break out blacks and Latinos separately, dubiously asserting, “We combined data for Blacks and Latinos due to small sample sizes,” although my suspicion is that they did it to cover up just how small the black share would be without quotas.)

More surprisingly, the Asian percentage would drop from 11 percent to 10 percent, even though Asian test scores have been climbing throughout this century.

Under a test-only recruitment system, kids from the top 25 percent of family income ($122,000 or higher) would increase from 60 percent to 63 percent of selective student bodies.

And boys would do better than under the present arrangement, increasing from 50 percent of the current student body to 54 percent.

In other words, under a less subjective system of college admissions, the big winners would be the Current Year’s designated losers: white boys.

Amusingly, the researchers tried to assert that, because we all know a priori that white males are bad, their data demonstrates that standardized testing must be bad too. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, sums up the report:

The most prestigious U.S. campuses would be wealthier, whiter and more male—leading researchers to question the role standardized testing plays in a fair, comprehensive admissions process.

But to those of us who have been paying careful attention to college admissions in this century, this new report is just more evidence that smart white males have become the most overlooked demographic.

What explains these results?

Some fraction of the gaps between the existing scheme and the theoretical alternative are of course due to today’s overt affirmative action, especially for blacks and Hispanics.

And another proportion is caused by choices in the contemporary “holistic” admissions system. For example, colleges weigh grade point average highly, which girls tend to do better at than boys when test scores are equal. Of course, high school GPA is a decent predictor of college GPA, yet it does have disparate impact on males. But because our society doesn’t worry about discrimination against males, that’s not seen as a problem, as it would be if girls were hurt.

And there’s an important but subtle third factor that was glossed over in the report and in most of the initial media coverage: In present-day America, white males tend to be less narcissistic and ambitious about getting into prestige colleges than are other groups. So they apply to fancy colleges less often relative to their test scores.

This last point ties into the arcane details of the methodology of the study. These numbers do not, as many have assumed, represent what the outcomes would be if the current applicants to the top 200 schools were evaluated solely on their test scores.

Instead, this study assumes a system more like a sports draft in which the top prospects are assigned to teams in rank order, whether they want to go to them or not. In the Georgetown model, the 300,000 slots at the top 200 colleges are filled by the top 300,000 scorers (a 1250 or above on the 400 to 1600 SAT, or a 26 or above on the 12 to 36 ACT).

This methodology clarifies otherwise surprising results, such as the Asian share dropping by 10 percent. It’s not that prestige colleges are hungry for more Asians, it’s that Asians are addicted to applying to prestige colleges.

We live in an era in which we are constantly lectured that white males are always ruining everything for everybody else by their feelings of entitlement and privilege. But when it comes to fancy colleges, the opposite is true. At any above-average test score, 18-year-old white guys are less likely to attend a prestige college and more likely to enlist in the military, enter a trade, or go to a local non-elite Directional State college.

It used to be that even in California, white gentiles weren’t that ambitious for college glory. For example, when I went to a Catholic high school in the middle-class San Fernando Valley in the mid-1970s, only two or three students in my graduating class of 180 bothered to apply to Stanford.

In contrast, at the largely Ashkenazi public Beverly Hills High School on the ritzier side of the Hollywood Hills, 180 seniors applied to Stanford.

Over the decades, Beverly Hills-levels of academic ambitiousness have radiated outward to much of coastal California, but less so to inland states.

A study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard found that the students scoring at the 90th percentile who are least likely to apply to elite colleges are red-state white males. If our nations’ rich colleges wanted to search out potential high achievers who are most marginalized under the present system, high-scoring white guys in flyover America are the main source of untapped talent.

But nobody is interested in hearing that message these days.

Should smart white kids upgrade their college ambitions?

Many would say no, offering clever explanations for why worse is better.

But the older I get, the more counter-contrarian I become. As Kingsley Amis observed in Lucky Jim, “There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” The nice things that rich and powerful people choose for their own families tend to be nicer than the things that not rich and not powerful people get stuck with.

One concern is that a more selective college would be harder, thus increasing one’s chance of flunking out. This is notoriously true at Caltech, but in general, the opposite seems to be the case: Richer colleges, private and public, have more resources with which to coddle their students, while humbler public colleges tend toward sink or swim. The Georgetown study reports:

…a Black or Latino student with a score above 1000 on the SAT has an 81 percent chance of graduating at a selective college, but only a 46 percent chance of graduating at an open-access college.

I suspect a roughly similar disparity holds for white students as well, although, as so often, nobody cared enough about whites to print their numbers.

Private colleges, of course, tend to cost more than in-state public colleges. On the other hand, families with five-figure incomes shouldn’t let themselves be intimidated by the absurd list-price tuitions advertised by private colleges, since they discount heavily, calling it “financial aid.”

A curious feature is that the nicer the college, the less nasty the actual tuition can be due to the staggering endowments that the superelite schools possess. For example, Yale is a famously nice place to go to college, and it is free for students from families making below $65,000. A family making $150,000 annually could perhaps expect a discount of about $125,000 off the four-year list price of $270,000. Thus, in Yale’s 2018 class, 86 percent graduated debt-free.

Another fear of smart young whites might be that antiwhite wokeness would be worse at elite colleges. That’s a possibility, but I’m not sure if the data supports it. Unlike in the 1960s, when leftism was a top-down phenomenon starting among bright kids at Berkeley, today’s wokeism is embarrassingly low in IQ. For example, the two colleges that have done the most serious damage to themselves, U. of Missouri and Evergreen State, were only middling in reputation before their meltdowns.

Another question is how to improve college admissions tests.

The SAT folks recently announced an “Adversity Score” intended to put a thumb on the scale in favor of students at slum high schools. Their own presentation, however, documents that it would make the SAT worse at predicting college grade point average. And it appears it would benefit Latinos at the expense of blacks and Asians by hurting whites. Just what Americans need: more Immigrant Privilege.

Because the SAT and ACT compete for business, they’ve both been making their scoring easier, which pleases applicants and colleges wanting to advertise higher-scoring students.

Unfortunately, combined with the growth of test prepping, score inflation means that ever more students are beginning to bang up against the tests’ maximum (1600 on the SAT and 36 on the ACT), with scores being determined less by long-term differences in intelligence and more by random variations in the number of mistakes made.

Fortunately, it’s about time for the SAT and ACT to follow the Graduate Record Exam into computerized adaptive testing, in which the difficulty of the next question changes in response to whether you got the last one right or wrong.

The testing services could then keep their scoring the same as today, so that a 1250 is still a 1250 and a 26 a 26, but also increase the maximum score one standard deviation from 1600 to 1800 on the SAT and from 36 to 40 on the ACT. This would allow the truly bright to stand out better from the crowd.

Of course, in the long run, the influx of Tiger Mothers reduces the utility of the SAT and ACT as tests of intelligence, due to their obsession with test prepping for their kids.

The college admissions tests were invented long ago for a culturally WASP America where trying to outsmart an intelligence test was considered unsporting. Then Stanley Kaplan, with the assistance of the 14-year-old future senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), invented test prep. Later, immigrants from Asian cultures that had been test prepping for centuries introduced undreamt-of new levels of grinding.

One problem is that endless prepping to beat an aptitude test tends to be a huge waste of time. Learning how to outsmart intelligence tests doesn’t seem to actually make you smarter.

Perhaps the best that can be done under the circumstances is to replace as college admissions exams the current aptitude tests with subject tests, such as Advanced Placement exams. If Tiger Mothers are going to subject their scions to hundreds of hours of test prep, at least have them test-prep on actual subjects such as chemistry and American history, where they might learn something.

In 1986, my high school drama teacher decided to give me a lesson in humility following a series of outbursts on my part challenging his authority (as arrogant as I may be now, I was way worse back then). He “sentenced” me to a week of working stage crew. In my majority black school, the theater class was a haven for the white and Jewish kids, but stage crew was all black. It was basically woodshop, but in the service of building faggoty backdrops for fruity actors.

And as the school’s top (non-fruity) actor, crew was beneath me.

On my first day of “forced labor,” I gathered up the other crew members and we headed downstairs to the costume storage room. I dressed the black kids in the tattered outfits of the dockworkers from Show Boat, and I donned a slave-driver costume. We were all cracking up. That’s the important thing; we were all in on the joke. The black kids found it as hilarious as I did.

In ’86, racial humor was not yet a death sentence.

As my teacher was giving one of his typically dull lectures with his back to the stage, out from the wings emerged the black “slaves” carrying huge piles of lumber and feigning discomfort as I whipped them from behind. “Haul that wood, ya darkies,” I bellowed. The class exploded with laughter. It took ten minutes to restore order, and I never had to work crew again.

Man, was I lucky that cell phones and social media didn’t exist back then to preserve a permanent record of that gag.

Kyle Kashuv is not so fortunate. Kashuv was one of the students at Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018 when ex-student Nikolas Cruz opened fire, killing seventeen people. While most of the “survivors” went on to fame and fortune as gun-control zealots, Kashuv pursued a different path. He dared to actually blame the gunman for the shooting, as opposed to the NRA, Donald Trump, and all gun owners in America. As his classmates used their newfound fame to push all manner of firearms restrictions, Kashuv preached the value of gun rights. He became a thorn in the side of the left, because no one could deny his privileged position. If wild-eyed maniac David Hogg was untouchable because of his survivor cred, Kashuv had to be too.

I followed Kashuv on Twitter last year, and I have to admit, despite my pathological hatred of the young, I found him surprisingly erudite and measured. He became a featured speaker at large-scale conservative events, and he reached an audience of millions on Fox News and elsewhere. And as his gun-grabbing classmates had to rely on ideological affirmative action to force prestigious universities to admit them, Kashuv got into Harvard with ease.

And then…well, it turned out that when he was 16 years old, he wrote the word “nigger.” Not as a threat to a fellow classmate (i.e., not like the fake hate crimes in which a black student writes “nigger” on a bathroom wall and claims the Klan put it there to intimidate him from pooping), but as part of a stupid, jokey back-and-forth with friends.

And now Kashuv is ruined. Destroyed. He’s apologized profusely for the youthful indiscretion of writing a bad word. He’s pointed out that he has matured since the mass shooting, and that he’s not the same smart-ass he was when he was younger. No matter. He’s done, he’s toast. Harvard rescinded his admission, and the media is taking great pleasure in crucifying the kid for…uh…what exactly did he do? Oh, right. He wrote a word.

Even some conservatives and former fans have turned on Kashuv. And what better proof is there of the hypocritical emptiness of conservative outrage over the whole “you must not draw Muhammad” thing? Were I a Muzzie, I’d use this as an opportunity to say, “Ha, it is ‘Islamophobia’ after all! If your concern was truly ‘free speech’ and ‘free expression,’ surely you wouldn’t be so quick to support the destruction of a teenager’s life over the fact that he typed a forbidden word in a private back-and-forth with friends. Why do blacks have the right to say ‘We demand that this word never be written,’ but Muslims can’t say ‘We demand that this image never be drawn’?”

I’m no fan of Muslims, but that would be a fair question (sadly, most Muslim activists have been too busy building bombs to think of this talking point themselves). How can anyone who attacks Muslims for their outsize reactions when someone draws an image of their prophet join the pile-on when a 16-year-old kid writes a “forbidden” word in a private exchange? Imagine if a major U.S. university had rescinded a student’s admission because it was discovered he’d drawn Muhammad two years earlier. That kid would be crowned King of CPAC. He’d get his own segment on Hannity.

The drubbing Kashuv is receiving is hideously out of proportion to his “crime.” An MSNBC “analyst” and former GOP congressman likened Kashuv to a school shooter (yes, writing words is the same as gunning down children). The Root, a site incapable of not upping the ante in any championship tournament of insanity poker, stated that Kashuv must not be forgiven because “forgiveness is a white privilege” (wait, don’t those same tards believe that Jesus was black?). A half-wit at Slate claimed that a white man jokingly writing “nigger” to his friends in a private communication should matter as much to colleges as an academic history of straight Fs. That same Slate simpleton described the writing of the forbidden word as a “serious wrongdoing,” and she thanked Harvard for not “subjecting” its black students to the “hostility” of having to be in the same school as a white man who wrote “nigger” as a teen (so if it can be shown that a black applicant once said something mean about whites, should Harvard’s white students be protected from having to go to school with him?).

One of the WaPo’s resident anencephalics, Monica Hesse, proudly announced that it’s better for 16-year-old white kids to drink alcohol than write “nigger” (the fact that the former is illegal and the latter isn’t was lost on this Rain Woman). Hesse called Kashuv’s “act” (typing a word) “hurtful” (who was injured? Who even knew about it until the snitch exposed the private messages?). She compared him to a molester of women (again, Simple Monica, that’s an illegal act. Typing a word isn’t), and she suggested that no student at any college “should have to attend classes with someone who has used racist terminology” (so why not apply that to all nonwhite applicants who wrote something mean about whites when they were 16?). Finally, she lamented that no matter what unending punishment this bad seed faces, tragically for society, he’s “still going to live somewhere,” and “someone is going to have to be the one who decides where that should be.”

If you can’t see the batshit crazy in that sentence, you’re too far gone. She’s saying that because a kid wrote “nigger,” we must lament the fact that he “still has to live,” and it’s up to society to determine the Babylon to which the beast is exiled.

A kid wrote “nigger,” and now he has no right to live among us. Every week I think I’ve reached the Mariana Trench of leftist insanity, and every week I realize that there are deeper depths to plumb.

Harvard has its standards, and it’s welcome to them. In my humble opinion, everyone on earth is better not going to Harvard than going there. When I finished high school in 1986, I chose going to Auschwitz over going to college. To be honest, I probably would have chosen 1944 Auschwitz over college. Kashuv is better off without that Ivy League stink tank. Harvard should be left to indulge its fetish of shutting out high-IQ Asians. Because this isn’t about Harvard. Or even Kyle Kashuv. It’s about the irrationality of the present day. If a 16-year-old white boy writes “nigger,” he’s worse than a rapist and as bad as a mass shooter.

Chronic unreason and loss of perspective…the signs of a society in the death grip of dementia.

Were we really worse off when words were not seen as the equivalent of rape and murder? When Eric Clapton could lecture a 1976 concert audience about how “England is for white people, man. We are a white country. This is Great Britain, a white country. What is happening to us, for fuck’s sake?” and be forgiven after apologizing? When Elvis Costello, drunk off his ass after a gig in 1979, could call Ray Charles a “blind, ignorant nigger” and be forgiven after apologizing? Indeed, Ray Charles himself, displaying a dignity too many of today’s black celebrities lack, responded to those comments by simply stating, “Drunken talk isn’t meant to be printed in the paper.” A guy said bad words, a guy was forgiven. That was the norm back then. And were those really the plague years?

Were those really the worst of times?

If Kyle Kashuv is the equivalent of a rapist for something he wrote at 16, then Clapton and anti-Trump leftist Costello (arguably the most overrated musician since the first caveman who learned to clap along to his farts) should be banished for life for what they said as adults.

“Word crimes” have no victim. Because they’re not real crimes.If offense is given through the careless or stupid use of a word, an apology should always suffice. Especially in Kashuv’s case, because he never directed his words at black people. He just wrote them privately among friends. No feelings were hurt, no souls were put on ice, no masks were worn, no monkeys signified, and no dreams dried up like a raisin. The hatred directed at Kashuv is the only atrocity here.

A modest proposal: There should be an amnesty for all “word crimes” committed by minors. Making word mistakes is part of growing up. Thank God the Constitution prohibits us from criminalizing word offenses, but society shouldn’t be so damn bloodthirsty about imposing extrajudicial penalties.

In fact, I’d give amnesty to everyone, even adults, for their first word crime. Humans are imperfect, and imperfect things come out of our mouths, often assisted by drugs, booze, or anger. Personally, I’m against the entire concept of word crimes, but perhaps we can compromise and give every human one freebie, one chance to say something and then apologize and take it back.

Allow humans one word mistake. That’s an amnesty I can get behind.

It’s also one with a Chinaaman’s chance in hell of every actually happening.

Yeah, that’s right, I said Chinaman. Chinky chinky Chinaman. Whatcha gonna do about it?

In a society as unforgiving of word crimes as ours, I’ve forged my own amnesty by just not giving a damn.

It’s an approach I wholeheartedly recommend, and one that young Kyle should seriously consider exploring.

I always liked the idea of Texas—a massive, arrogant, sun-scorched, red-blooded homeland for impenitent cattle rustlers who provided a cultural counterpoint to the sniffly, snobby classes of the Eastern seaboard. Back when America was all about expansion rather than retreat, Texas was far more American than anything you could scrape up from either coastline.

The only glimpse I ever had of this forgotten Texas was in the early 70s while my family was on a road trip from Philly to Phoenix, and all I remember is blazing heat, hundreds of bugs squashed on our car window, and my dad gleefully singing along to Jerry Reed’s “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” on the car radio. I hardly remember anything else about Texas back then—it didn’t seem like the scenery started catching my eye until we were already halfway through New Mexico—but the heat and the bugs and the raucous country music seemed quintessentially Texan.

My subsequent trips through Texas—and they’re almost always through, never with the intent of staying an hour longer than I needed to—give me the impression it’s the world’s most overdeveloped shopping mall. The endless parking lot that is Dallas-Fort Worth is possibly the nation’s ugliest metro area, maybe even worse than Phoenix. Texas these days seems uniquely devoid of culture in only the way that a place which is the process of shifting permanently from one culture to another can seem. Then again, the Texas that seemed alluring and iconic and more truly American than the rest of America combined—at least in films such as The Searchers and The Last Picture Show —was already dead by the time each of those films was released.

In the early 1970s, Texas was around 70% non-Hispanic white and roughly 20% Hispanic. If current trends continue, within the next ten years it will be about 35% white and 40% Hispanic. Texans used to brag that “everything is bigger in Texas,” but if current demographic trends continue, the state is getting shorter and shorter.

As the Texas Tribune headline announced last week, “Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident last year”:

…According to an analysis of recent U.S. Census Bureau data by the Texas Tribune, At the time of the 2010 census, Hispanic residents accounted for around 38.2 percent of Texas’ total population, while white residents made up 46.2 percent. As of 2018, the former had increased to 40.4 percent while the latter dropped to 42.3 percent….At the current growth rate, Hispanic residents could lead the Texas population by 2022, the report stated.

Shortly after the article appeared, Texas Senator John Cornyn retweeted a link to the Texas Tribune article along with its headline and no comment whatsoever. One would assume that of Cornyn’s 200K+ followers, at least a few of them would be his supporters, but judging from the responses, he might as well have been calling for the extermination of all the state’s nonwhites:

And #OldWhiteMen are terrified of becoming irrelevant and losing the grip on power they’ve had for centuries. #MaybeIfYoudDoneABetterJob

Oh but it’s coming and it’ll be great when it does #yeswewillreplaceyou

here’s how we have “progressed” as a country since the 1950s: when I was a kid, racists had to hide under white hoods. nowadays they tweet from the Senate floor

And a WHITE GOP Senator is sending this out because he wants to simply share stats? Nah, this is a warning to white voters in Texas. Once again the GOP uses fears of demographic changes to animate white voters

Hispanics to Senator Corny: Orale [pray], homes. We’re taking over!

Can’t wait until they outnumber you and vote blue en masse!

Food’s gonna get better.

get that racist foghorn out of my ear, senator, you’re giving me noise cancer

What’s your point, Senator? Are you attempting to justify the concentration camps in your state where children are left filthy and malnourished? Or are you making a white supremacist argument that Texas is for whites only?

Alternatively: Hispanic residents return to land stolen from them & Indigenous First Nation people

Dude, white people are the illegal immigrants in Texas. Recall that Spanish settlers came first? Indeed, our entire SW was swiped from Spain/Mexico.

Wearin the pointy sheet John? Maybe it’s going back to it’s [sic] true self. Before it was stolen. Let the mayocide begin!!!

I’m assuming that “mayocide” means genocide of whites, seeing as how “mayo” has gained traction as a racial slur against whites due to their reputed fondness for mayonnaise.

Sighing deeply, I will now take my butcher’s cleaver and chop through all the nonsense surrounding this “stolen land” trope.

Just like many black Americans who embrace Islam are obstinately ignorant of history because the primary enslavers of black Africans were Arab Muslims rather than European Christians, those who believe that merely speaking Spanish is a blow against colonialism ignore the fact that the Americas’ primary colonists were Spaniards. They carved up North, Central, and South America long before the Anglos dared venture here.

So unless you accept the standard historical definitions that land ownership is primarily defined by success in war, you’d have to believe that indigenous Aztecs “stole” Texas from the Comanches and other American Injuns, then the Spaniards “stole” it from the descendants of Aztecs, then the Anglos “stole” it from the Spaniards.

But in the real world as recently as 1825, there were only about 3,500 humans living in all of Texas, and 3,000 of them were Mexican—about one Mexican per 90 square miles. Nine years later—as a direct result of Mexico inviting European immigrants to populate that vast, dusty wasteland, the demographics had tilted—by 1834, what is now the State of Texas housed 37,800 people, with only 7,800 of them of Mexican descent.

It’s funny what such a massive demographic shift will do. Within a dozen years after that, Anglo troops were technologically and numerically formidable enough to thump Mexican forces back beyond the Mexican border. As recently as 1940, Anglos outnumbered Hispanics in Texas by almost 7 to 1.

Back in those golden days when “Democrats were the real racists,” Texas was solidly Democratic, and it actively disenfranchised black, Hispanic, and poor white voters. In 1912, even the Socialist Party counted more Texans among its voter rolls than the Republican Party did. But as the Democrats got wackier with the social-justice virus at the end of the last century, Texas flipped back into the GOP fold to the point that the state has not elected a Democratic Senator since 1994. The last time Texas voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was when it chose Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Texas has 38 electoral votes, second only to California’s 55. And although Ted Cruz is a doughy idiot, he is nowhere near the same level of idiot as Beto O’Rourke, a spindly, ethnomasochistic Howdy Doody puppet who nearly took Cruz’s seat last year.

If Texas should “go blue,” as it likely will, America will be doomed to a string of presidents who, whether or not they’re white, will be aggressively hostile to the very idea of white people.

Democrats may not be the “real racists”—frankly, they’d be much cooler if they were—but they seem to be the only party that realizes demographics are destiny.

The Week’s Faggiest, Saggiest, and Naggiest Headlines

OH, PLEASE, NOT THIS “REPARATIONS” NONSENSE AGAIN!
Since the word “reparations” is derived from the word “repair”—which basically means “to return to the state of affairs prior to the alleged damage”— a truly sensible reparations plan would either involve one-way tickets back to western Africa or a severe downgrade of black Americans’ income and life expectancy, seeing as how they weren’t living very long or making very much money in their rich and fulsome homeland.

Many black Americans see fit to get all sourpussed about the fact that they don’t make as much money as white Americans do—ignore the fact, if you find it at all possible, that white Americans don’t make nearly as much money as Indian, Asian, and Jewish Americans do—and insist that even though welfare payouts since the 1950s have exceeded even the most lavish estimates for how much money was supposedly “stolen” from them for picking cotton, there won’t be justice until they all make at least as much money as white Americans do, and if justice doesn’t come, they just may have to burn cities and rape your daughters, and no one except lonely, fat white women wants that to happen.

Last Wednesday, a nearly all-black panel—the lone exception was white filmmaker Katrina Browne, who is apparently guilt-ridden that her ancestors traded slaves, but not so guilt-ridden that she seems willing to give all of her wealth away, because clearly this is someone else’s fault—attended a Judiciary Committee hearing in D.C. to discuss Resolution 40, a pro-reparations bill that would allocate $12 million to study exactly how to bleed more money from white taxpayers in order to prevent black people from rioting again.

Resolution 40 is named in honor of the failed post-Civil War promise to provide freed slaves with “40 acres and a mule.” A little-known fact is that the mule in question was black academic Cornel West.

Since there are apparently no white Republicans who are brave enough to “go there” and say they oppose reparations, two token Negroes took up the fight before being given cookies and warm milk by their masters.

Senator Cory Booker, a black Democratic presidential candidate who is rumored to engage in carnal relations with men, proposed issuing “baby bonds” whereby $1,000 would be placed in a special account for every baby born in America, with additional deposits until they reach 18. Naturally, poor black children would receive larger deposits.

Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee—who infamously claimed that the US Constitution is 400 years old, that Neil Armstrong planted a flag on Mars, and complained that hurricane names are too “lily-white”—added her two cents worth of brain cells by commenting that “the percentage of black children living in poverty is more than 150%.”

Despite her egregious dunderheadedness and savage ingratitude, Ms. Jackson-Lee has an estimated net worth of anywhere from $1 million to $3.5 million. If there were ever a persuasive argument against reparations, it is that Sheila Jackson-Lee is a millionaire.

Then again, if we don’t hurry up and pay them whatever they demand, they may keep raping women and blaming it on slavery. A black parolee was arrested last week and is charged with a brutal rooftop rape in the Bronx of a 20-year-old white woman that he left with a broken nose, broken teeth, and vomiting blood.

According to a witness, 23-year-old rape suspect Temar Bishop justified the rape thusly:

She was a white girl. She deserved it because us minorities have been through slavery.…This is what they used to do to us. This is what they did to us during slavery. They used to beat us and whip us.

Did anyone ever consider that maybe the Emancipation Proclamation wouldn’t end well?

CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR PREDICTS G.O.P. IS HEADED TO THE “WASTE BIN OF HISTORY”
Although California Governor Gavin Newsom isn’t officially gay, he sure looks and acts that way.

Newsom, like so many others who simultaneously deny that white genocide is occurring while cheering it along with all his might, recently gloated that the utter collapse of the GOP in California over the past few decades.will be writ large across the nation in the coming years. Acting really gay, he said:

America in 2019 is California in the 1990s. The xenophobia, the nativism, the fear of ‘the other.’ Scapegoating. Talking down or past people. The hysteria. And so, we’re not going to put up with that. We are going to push back….What we’re doing is working … I think Democrats are winning right now….[the GOP is headed] into the waste bin of history.

We wonder if Newsom would have said the same thing to the Cherokee in the early 1800s. Probably not, unless he was a Cherokee.

Newsom is wrong that it has anything to do with irrational phobias, though—it’s the demographics, baby. In 1970, California was nearly 80% white. Now it’s hovering at around a third of the total state population and teetering badly.

TRUMP ACCUSES NEW YORK TIMES OF TREASON, THREATENS REPORTER, ALMOST BOMBS IRAN
For our ultra-Zionist president, it was a chaotic week even by his own standards. After The New York Times printed an article quoting government sources who allege that the US is launching cyberattacks on Russia’s power grid, he said the paper had committed “virtual treason”:

Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia. This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country…Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today…They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

Using The Wall Street Journal as his sounding board, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzburger called Trump’s comments “irresponsible and wrong,” alleging that he had crossed that “line” we keep hearing about.

Writing for The Daily Beast in a vituperatively unhinged and foul-mouthed manner, elephant-eared serial dweeb Rick Wilson accused every member of Trump’s team of treason. That’ll show them!

Also last week, Trump allegedly threatened a reporter with prison time for attempting to snap a photograph of a letter that North Korean tinpot dictator and international sex symbol Kim Jong Un had sent him.

Late last week, Trump canceled an airstrike against Iran at the last minute, forestalling the ultimate destruction of the USA for a least a little while.

DEFACING CONFEDERATE STATUES, CONT.
In their ongoing quest to destroy every last remnant of white people acting whitely, disgruntled and presumably smelly activists have been vandalizing Confederate statues throughout the American South.

The year is not yet half-over, yet over a dozen Confederate statues have been vandalized so far. These incidents include:

• Last Monday, “THEY WERE RACISTS” was smeared in red paint on a Confederate monument in Nashville.

• A “red paint-like substance” was splattered on the Confederate Defenders of Charleston Monument in South Carolina.

• The words “murderer” and “coward” were spray-painted in pink on a monument outside North Carolina’s Rutherford County Courthouse.

• Paint was thrown in May on the statue of a Confederate soldier in Louisville, KY—the fifth time in two years the monument has been defaced.

Although the South was burned to the ground and beaten into submission over 150 years ago, it will apparently never be forgiven.

QUOTE MISATTRIBUTED TO HITLER USED IN GRADE 8 GRADUATION DISPLAY
Graduation is supposed to be a time of happiness, of wistful remembrance, of shared aspirations and bright futures. The LAST person you want at your graduation is Adolf Hitler.

Sadly—no, make that tragically—Hitler refuses to die, as is evidenced by his appearance on a quote in a Grade 8 graduation picture display at Holy Rosary Catholic School in Toronto.

A group of basketball players saw the quote, were triggered, and reported it. The quote read:

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened. (Adolf Hitler)

The student who posted the quote was unaware that the quote did not originate from Hitler. Its true source remains unknown, but it has more feasibly been attributed in the past to Dr. Seuss.

The Toronto Catholic District School Board apologized profusely, but for a certain Avi Benlolo, president and CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, it wasn’t enough. He said it shows that people still need even more education in the Holocaust.

Boy, when they said “never forget,” they weren’t kiddin’!

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

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