The stifling conformity of the Great Awokening has now driven even Quentin Tarantino to the subversive right. His immensely enjoyable buddy comedy Once Upon in a Time…in Hollywood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt at their considerable best, has The New Yorker fulminating that it’s “obscenely regressive.” Critic Richard Brody complains, “Tarantino delivers a ridiculously white movie” that “celebrates white-male stardom (and behind-the-scenes command).”
Tarantino enjoyed box office hits with Inglourious Basterds, in which Jewish-American commandos roast Hitler in a movie theater, and Django Unchained, which did something similar for slavery. Once Upon a Time carries on Tarantino’s tradition of changing history to a more crowd-pleasing ending.
Once is essentially a former little boy’s reworking of the Manson Family murders. Rather than the damn dirty hippies butchering lovely starlet Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie of I, Tonya as the quintessence of blond beauty), what if 6-year-old Quentin’s favorite TV cowboy (DiCaprio, playing a fictionalized composite of various 1960s stars) and his stunt double and sidekick (Pitt) happened to be next door and heroically saved the damsel in distress?
Once is, for a Tarantino movie, remarkably wholesome. It has a soft R rating for bad language and a few minutes of comic mayhem at the end. But it endorses the straight-shooting values of old black-and-white TV Westerns.
Tarantino could have disappeared down any one of the endless rabbit holes offered by the Manson case.
For example, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was much appreciated within the entertainment industry for portraying Manson as an LSD-crazed apocalyptic avenger. Bugliosi’s masterful job of making Manson seem like the ultimate outsider sidetracked the question of why a lowlife jailbird like Manson had become something of an insider at the best parties in the Hollywood Hills.
Why exactly did Manson know so many important people in showbiz? The answer was the same as for why Jeffrey Epstein knew so many important people in politics: He had access to jailbait girls.
Without all the Helter Skelter stuff, Manson would seem less like the Antichrist and more like an ambitious pimp, an ex-con who was adept at chatting up runaway girls fresh off the Greyhound bus.
As Joan Didion pointed out in her clear-eyed report on San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the baby boom produced numerous broken families who generated many runaways. In turn, their favorite destination, California, attracted pimps and drug dealers from across America.
In Philip Marlowe detective novels, murder investigations tend to turn over a lot of rocks and shine embarrassing lights on what’s underneath. The Manson case could similarly have dented the reputations of numerous celebrities who had nothing to do with the killings, but who had plenty of other secrets they didn’t want exposed.
For example, Tate’s husband Roman Polanski, Hollywood’s hottest director, fingered John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas as a possible killer because Polanski, like much of the entertainment industry, had been sleeping with Phillips’ wife Michelle.
Polanski’s suspicions later turned toward his own kung fu instructor Bruce Lee. (Lee is portrayed in the film as a pompous cult leader whom Pitt easily outfights.)
Of course, Polanski himself remains on the lam in Europe today for his 1977 rape of a 13-year-old girl.
But instead, Tarantino just doesn’t go there. He avoids most of the squalid side stories of the case. Manson to him simply serves as a boy’s version of the Evil Bad Guy.
As a fellow Southern California baby boomer, I luxuriated throughout Tarantino’s lavish reconstruction of what a boy in 1969 would have considered neat. The $90 million budget is extravagant for a story that mostly consists of two guys driving around L.A. listening to the Real Don Steele spin Top 40 hits by Paul Revere and the Raiders. (Actual grown men in 1969 would have listened to country, Sinatra, or, at most recent, Elvis, but the film represents Tarantino’s boyish version of 1969.)
Tarantino doesn’t waste his money, abundant as it is. The movie’s cars, for example, are terrific, as if my 1969 Hot Wheels collection had come back, full-sized. And some of Tarantino’s reconstructions of lost locales of my childhood such as the Van Nuys drive-in are a joy.
Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer argued that in a movie intent on revivifying the past, a strong plot is a distraction because human motivations are too timeless.
Hoffer would have liked Once. Unlike Shane Black’s buddy comedy set in 1977 L.A., The Nice Guys, Tarantino doesn’t let a complex plot get in the way of his indulging in the 1969ishness of it all.
On the other hand, if you have less reason than I do to wax nostalgic over KHJ-AM Boss Radio or the Helm’s Bakery truck that Charles Manson is shown driving during his one cameo, well, you might wonder when Tarantino is finally going to get to the gore. The film is languidly paced and, while I found it hilarious, the rest of the audience only laughed occasionally.
Moreover, Tarantino, whose irresponsible 2012 hit Django Unchained espousing black gun violence likely contributed to the Great Awokening and the ensuing black-on-black murder binge, makes a 180-degree about-face in Once. Impressively, Tarantino’s new movie refuses to kowtow to any of today’s reigning dogmas about how awful white American men were in the bad old days of 1969.
My guess is that well-indoctrinated young people will find Once puzzling, if not unsettling. Why, they will wonder, are the heroes white men? Why don’t they at least have the basic decency to feel ashamed of their whiteness?
Twitter is currently mad that Margot Robbie doesn’t get many lines as starlet Sharon Tate. But the hoopla over the Bechdel Test overlooks that film is a visual medium. Robbie is memorable at being a young woman whose beauty and sweetness make life a little happier for everyone around her.
In contrast, the Manson girls, led by Dakota Fanning, Lena Dunham, and Andie MacDowell’s daughter Margaret Qualley, represent to Tarantino the sinister side of female susceptibility to propaganda.
The film, however, does indeed offer one strong female character: a slightly superhuman 8-year-old Method actress named Trudi Fraser (presumably modeled upon Jodie Foster, who demonstrated strong character to go along with her famous talents by standing up repeatedly for her friend Mel Gibson during his exile). She persuades a hung-over DiCaprio to give his all to his part as the villain on the obscure TV Western Lancer.
Most of Tarantino’s movies are, deep down, extended love letters to his favorite people on earth: middle-aged Hollywood tough guys. In Once he drops any attempt to come up with a fashionable political justification for his predilection, the way hating Nazis had served in Inglourious Basterds or hating white Southerners in Django.
Instead, Tarantino’s latest features two world-famous movie stars demonstrating why, indeed, they are famous. DiCaprio winningly portrays an insecure, voluble, emotionally needy actor who once starred as a taciturn cowboy on his own TV series but is now on a downward career arc. Pitt portrays his war-hero pal and stunt double, who is the world’s coolest guy, a Steve McQueen character come to life.
When he was 30, Pitt was a little too good-looking, but now he’s 55. Has anybody that age been as screen handsome since Cary Grant in North by Northwest?
In Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Tarantino argues that the highest duty of masculinity, as epitomized by Pitt’s character, is the defense of femininity, as epitomized by Robbie’s.
(On the other hand, in a less charitable mood I could also imagine that Once Upon a Time started out with Tarantino deciding, perversely, that he wanted to get audiences to cheer horrific violence against pretty young women. But there aren’t all that many times in history in which attractive girls did something so horrible that they deserved what Tarantino’s depraved imagination can dream up for them… But wait, what about Manson’s murderous hippie chicks? Nobody would mind if they got flamed. Plus…bare feet!)
To Tarantino, 1969 isn’t the year of the moon landing or Woodstock or Earth Day or Women’s Lib or Gay Lib, it’s the last year of the Cowboy Era, when Hollywood made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit, and The Wild Bunch. Soon after, though, America lost its ancient hunger for Westerns, which had stretched all the way back to the Edison firm’s 1903 Great Train Robbery.
Is the ensuing New Improved America all that much better? Like the Coen brothers in their 2018 cowboy anthology, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Tarantino doesn’t seem convinced.
Can you imagine if Donald Trump had done even half the things regarding immigration that he promised during the election? Imagine if he’d built a wall, or ended chain migration, or axed birthright citizenship, or if there’d been “deportations, day one,” or if there’d been “deportations, day 900.”
I mean, if Trump is Hitler now, can you imagine how Hitlery he’d be if he’d actually done more than merely continuing the policies of previous administrations (Kids in cages! Separation of families!)?
Last week, “historian” Jon Meacham, who is one prize putz (I mean, he won a Pulitzer Prize), declared that, based on his “research” (which probably included paint-huffing), Trump is now tied with Andrew Johnson for the title of “most racist president in American history.” Meacham bases this sound appraisal not on Trump’s actions, but on his “racist Twitter tirades” and “statements.”
In other words, words.
So, compared to presidents who owned slaves, beat slaves, traded slaves, championed the KKK, forcibly relocated Injuns, killed Injuns, encouraged others to kill Injuns, interned the Japanese, championed Jim Crow, outlawed interracial marriage, segregated the federal government, and segregated the armed forces, Trump is way worse because of…words.
Well, that’s not insane at all, Meacham! I’d totally trust you to guard the company bee.
But just how bad can a Hitler be if his crimes are merely rhetorical? I mean, if Trump’s evil consists entirely of words, he must be really bad at Hitlering.
Or maybe he’s, like, really good at it!
Bear with me on this one.
Unlike Johnny Meacham, Hans Mommsen was a bona fide, competent historian. Politically to the left, he was an exceptionally important and innovative voice in the field of World War II history from the 1960s onward, and his impact is measured not, as a fraud like Meacham would be content with, by kudos from the ideologically like-minded, but rather via the fact that, over the decades, he was lauded equally by those on the left and right, even to the point of actually winning over many of the historians who initially disagreed with his thesis.
He was an original thinker—a revisionist in the very best way—who buttressed his arguments with facts and logic instead of Meacham’s lazy brand of ideological morphine for true believers.
So what was Mommsen’s main thesis? That Hitler was a “weak dictator.” That Hitler (and please understand that I’m painting with a broad brush here for the sake of brevity) was all talk. Lots and lots of talk. Man, did that cat love to talk. But as much as he loved yapping, he hated doing the scut work. He was a dreamer, a bloviator who shunned micromanaging.
Meanwhile, as Dolfy dreamt, his loyal minions went about bringing his grandiose visions to life.
If there’d been a Twitter in the 1930s, Hitler would have been all over it. Considering his innovative use of then-cutting-edge mass media to communicate with the public, a 24-hour megaphone like Twitter would have been irresistible to the man.
Hitler’s chattiness was often his own undoing. When the Nazis began offing tards during the so-called “T4” euthanasia program of the late ’30s, his shameless braying (coupled with that of his deformed lapdog Goebbels) drew the attention of members of the German clergy, who pressured Hitler to end the unholy “aktion.” On the other hand, the Scandinavian nations, which undertook the same damn policies at the same damn time but quietly, continued sterilizing veggies straight into the 1970s. As a result, Denmark (which, back in the ’30s, had as its national motto “Like Germany, but with an indoor voice”) to this day has one of the lowest rates of tardism in the world, while Germany these days is, well, pretty top-heavy with tards.
Damn blabby Hitler. Indeed, his compulsive lip-flappery haunts him to this day. In the 1930s, Hitler had a bad habit of threatening to annihilate the Jews, most famously during a speech to the Reichstag in January ’39, in which he straight-out threatened the extermination (“vernichtung”) of Europe’s Jews should war break out. The thing is, though, he actually had no plans to do any Jew-exterminating at the time. In fact, he was still pursuing a policy of forced emigration and resettlement. And even when war did break out, Hitler still spent two years pursuing nonlethal “Final Solutions.”
That 1939 Reichstag speech was a Trump tweet: all bluster, with no solid plans to back it up.
As renowned Holocaust historian Christopher Browning points out in his excellent book Fateful Months, Hitler’s penchant for loud, obnoxious overstatement poses a problem for historians. Hitler was a “conscious political actor—one who could publicly threaten the Jews with destruction in 1939 and privately mention expulsion as late as January 1942.”
By the time the actual mass murder of Jews began, and Himmler, Globočnik, and the like slapped a gag order on the affair, the silence was fooling nobody. Hitler’s bombast when Jews were not being killed overshadowed the official silence when they were.
The late German historian Martin Broszat, another highly respected advocate of the “weak dictator” theory, went so far as to say that Hitler’s rhetoric inadvertently (that’s the key word there) caused the Holocaust. As summarized by Mommsen in a 1987 essay, Broszat’s thesis was that “utterances by Hitler that stood in a primarily propagandistic context were taken by the party radicals at face value. What was meant metaphorically thereby became actual policy.” In other words, Hitler tweeted out of his ass, and his loyal underlings took the mad tweets and made ’em real.
Seminal Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, initially a skeptic of, and then a convert to, Mommsen/Broszat “functionalism,” would eventually cede that, far from being the result of “central organization” by Hitler, the Holocaust developed because of “consensus mind reading” by bureaucrats trying to “comprehend” Hitler’s desires.
Now, I hate adding caveats to my essays, because I write for adults, and adults shouldn’t need to be spoon-fed, but for the record, no, I don’t equate Trump with Hitler, and no, I’m certainly not equating Trump’s election-year rhetoric regarding immigration (which was nothing more than a very blunt and inartful restating of commonsense policies even Democrats used to support) with killing Jews. I’m just sayin’, if you’re going to make a Trump/Hitler comparison (a cottage industry on the left these days), do it right. Both men loved bombastic oratory; both men preferred bombastic oratory to the boring, detail-oriented business of getting a job done; and both men have had their ships sunk by their own loose lips (in Trump’s case, note how the courts have used his own rhetoric against him in rulings that halted the “Muslim ban” and the census citizenship question).
If Mommsen and Broszat are correct, there’s one key difference between blabbermouth Trump and blabbermouth Hitler: the character of the people they surrounded themselves with. Hitler’s flunkies and bureaucrats took his rants and made them happen. Trump’s ignore his rants and pursue their own often contradictory agendas.
Hitler and Trump, two ass-talkers, one with fanatically loyal minions, and the other with minions who are at best self-serving and at worst saboteurs. It’s indeed too bad that the circumstances were not reversed. There might never have been a monstrosity called Treblinka, and today the U.S. would be several million illegals lighter.
Now, whereas the Holocaust did happen, and there’s proof of it beyond Hitler’s empty threats of the ’30s, Trump’s hurty words are the only proof of his “Holocaust,” because, let’s be honest, the man hasn’t really done shit in terms of carrying out his campaign promises regarding immigration. That’s why a dimwit like Meacham has to rely on Trump’s rhetoric to make his “most racist president” case. Words are all he has to work with! There are precious few actual actions to take into consideration. But Meacham, like Trump, is a man of the times. And in these times, words are seen as actions.
Social media is nothing but a war of words, yet how many of us feel like we’ve accomplished something concrete by “destroying” a foe on Twitter or Facebook? Leftists straight-out claim that “words equal violence” and “hate speech” equals “literal genocide.” And rightists are conditioned (because of leftist censorship) to see “power” in words beyond any power they actually possess. When the simple act of typing a “forbidden” word can get you banned, deplatformed, and fired, that simple act becomes a revolutionary accomplishment that transcends mere rhetoric.
Trump utters some forbidden words, the left screams in terror as though something “real” happened, the right cheers with glee as though something “real” happened, and Trump sleeps with the satisfaction of knowing he made something “real” happen.
When in fact absolutely nothing happened. Nothing but words. It’s a playacted Holocaust, a “the floor is lava” genocide that only exists because we’re all buying into the false reality of the game.
I used to laud Trump for his “brave” rhetoric. And yeah, telling a gaggle of Democrat harpies of color to “go back” to the “broken and crime infested places from which they came” is, without question, the “draw Muhammad” of present-day America (as is speaking disrespectfully to a tenured landfill custodian like Elijah Cummings). But that’s the problem. We’re so under the thumb of the left in terms of what we can or can’t say to or about “protected groups,” we’re forced to live vicariously through a president who is “allowed” to say things we can’t. But when Trump’s gone, we’ll have profited…how? We’re silenced now, we’ll still be silenced then.
So I don’t cheer Trump’s “audacious” words anymore. Put up or shut up, scare-quote “Hitler.” SCOTUS just freed up some border funds. Either start doing things or button it, Schicklgruber…I mean, Drumpf!
Unlike the VR cosplayers who get off on the Kabuki theater, I’ve grown bored by it. Plus, it’s way too predictable to hold my interest. There’s little mystery where this is heading. Long after Trump leaves office, his empty rhetoric will, like Hitler’s empty 1939 “extermination” pledge, live after him as “proof” of his (virtual) Holocaust. And the oppressed (but totally not oppressed) people of color who “lived through” the terror will consider themselves “survivors” (albeit ones who were never for a moment in physical jeopardy). Think I’m exaggerating? If AOC can claim to have battled Nazi rapist border guards in order to “force herself” into the cell of a woman being subjected to “psychological warfare” by being brutalized into drinking toilet water, and if she can spin that yarn and keep her job, mark my words: Within the next decade, we’ll get two dozen brown Democrat congressional candidates who claim to be “toilet water death camp” survivors.
If you think the virtual Holocaust is bad now as it’s (not) happening, wait until Trump’s out of office and the “never forget (what never happened)” phase begins.
Maybe I’ll live long enough to become a revisionist of the fake Holocaust, just as I made my bones as a revisionist of the real one.
Did President Donald Trump launch his Twitter barrage at Elijah Cummings simply because the Baltimore congressman was black?
Was it just a “racist” attack on a member of the Black Caucus?
Or did Trump go after Cummings after a Saturday Fox News report that his district was in far worse condition than the Mexican border area for which Cummings had demagogically berated Border Patrol agents?
Here are Trump’s crucial tweets:
“Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA…
“…the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. (Cummings’) District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
The Fox News report that triggered Trump’s tweets featured a Maryland Republican strategist, Kimberly Klacik, whose videos showed piles of trash and abandoned homes in Baltimore. “A lot of people said he (Cummings) hasn’t even been there in a while,” Klacik claimed.
And Trump, it appears, has more ammunition than that.
Baltimore in 2018 was the murder capital of America and ranked second among her most violent major cities. With St. Louis and Detroit, Baltimore is always at or near the top of the list of the most dangerous American cities.
And what has Cummings, in office 28 years, done to alter that awful reputation?
As for the presence of rats and rodents, Baltimore has competitors.
There have lately been news reports of the homeless in LA and San Francisco living on city sidewalks, defecating where they sleep, attracting rodents and vermin, with little or nothing done about it.
Is it racist to call attention to the decline of so many of America’s great cities that have long been under liberal Democratic rule?
Over this weekend, while Trump was tweeting, nine people were shot dead in Chicago and 39 wounded. Sounds like Baghdad or Kabul.
Is this the new normal that Americans must accept?
A prediction: The incidence of murders, rapes, robberies and assaults in urban America, which saw a steep decline in the last three decades, is about to rise again.
Why? Because the attitudes and policies that produced these sinking rates of crime and violence — especially the dramatic increase in the incarceration of criminals in America — are changing.
In 1980, some 500,000 criminals were in federal and state prisons and jails. By 2016, some 2.2 million inmates were in jails and prisons and another 4.5 million convicts were on parole or probation, being monitored.
As violent criminals were taken off the streets and put behind bars for years, crime fell, and most dramatically in cities like New York, where the backing of cops and intolerance of criminals by mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg was the most pronounced.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans were not victimized by crimes in the last three decades because their would-be perpetrators were behind bars.
But today, a campaign is afoot to reduce prison populations and use more progressive methods to deal with crime.
Ex-Vice President Joe Biden, who, as a senator and a chairman of the Judiciary Committee, played a role in taking criminals off the streets, seems almost apologetic about what he and the “law and order” Republicans of those decades accomplished.
And the mindset that put first the right of the innocent to be free from domestic violence is vanishing.
A recent video of NYPD cops being doused with pails of water as they made their rounds in Harlem has gone viral.
The number of applicants for police training programs is dropping. Verbal assaults on “white racist cops” have taken a toll on police morale.
We seem to be drifting back to the 1960s, when crime began to soar and “law and order” began to surge as a national issue.
That issue helped Barry Goldwater capture the nomination from a Republican establishment that had controlled his party for decades.
In 1966, Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan ran as a law and order candidate for governor and routed the liberal incumbent by a million votes.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran as the law and order candidate, which helped him to stave off George Wallace and defeat Hubert Humphrey, whose Democratic Party was almost twice the size as the GOP.
In 1988, Democratic nominee Gov. Michael Dukakis’ prospects for the presidency vanished when he indicated he would not impose capital punishment, even on a criminal who had raped and murdered his wife.
Calling out the urban liberals who run most of America’s cities, for their failure to make those cities more livable and safe, might be a winning issue for Trump in 2020.
Is this where Trump is headed? Is it a coincidence that Attorney General Bill Barr just said he will begin imposing the death penalty?
If there is a Next Wave of Transgenderism, Jonathan Yaniv is surfing its crest. He’s such an odd duck, even many trannies are distancing themselves from him.
Jonathan is his birth name, and as far as I’m aware it’s still his legal name, although he insists on being called “Jessica.” He also insists that he’s a woman, despite the fact that he still has a penis, testicles, and a deep voice. By his own admission, he has not undergone any sex-reassignment surgery…yet. To my knowledge, he only started calling himself a woman within the past few years, although he’s been fixated on very young girls and their tampons since at least 2013.
Oh, and is if all that wasn’t bad enough, he’s also Canadian.
As of July 17, Canadian reporters are no longer forbidden from publishing his name or writing about his history, although I believe they are still legally prevented from referring to him as “him.” You see, Yaniv is one of those aggressively litigious trannies who is always suing people and threatening to destroy their lives for daring to note that a person with a penis, testicles, and XY chromosomes is a man. Last year he successfully petitioned the psychotic witches’ coven known as the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal from printing his name in all news coverage of his fruity saga—instead, journalists were forced to refer to him merely as “JY.”
Oddly—well, in the current climate it’s predictable, but until very recently on this and any other planet it would have been considered way beyond odd—social-media outlets have allowed Yaniv to badger anyone his plaque-addled heart pleases while banning anyone who criticizes him.
Yaniv sought to have publication of his name banned when he made international headlines after filing 16 human-rights complaints with the Human Rights Tribunal alleging that 16 estheticians were guilty of transphobic discrimination because they refused to wax his balls. Not being the least bit familiar with genital waxing—I prefer my ladies to look like all three members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience combined down there—apparently waxing male genitals requires an entirely different process than depilatory processes for the ladies.
Because of the way this “Human Rights Tribunal” is configured, the legal complaints cost Yaniv nothing, but each of the 16 women he targeted were required to shell out around $20-$30K to retain a lawyer to defend them or else pay a penalty of around $35K—assuming there were any lawyers willing to defend them way up yonder in Canada, where accusations of “transphobia” are a modern scarlet letter.
Many of the women he shrieked about to the Tribunal were of foreign origin, where touching a man’s balls was considered inappropriate in almost every possible scenario, possibly even marriage—one may forgive me for being unaware of whether testicle-petting is considered haram in Islam.
This carcinogenically bizarre case has led to such unintentionally hilarious headlines as “It’s not a hate crime for a woman to feel uncomfortable waxing male genitalia” and “Scrotum waxing human rights complainant calls 911 on journalist,” the latter referring to a dustup last week outside a Vancouver courtroom between Yaniv, his hyper-enabling mother, and an independent journalist with the undeniably cisgender-male name of Dan Dicks. Although Yaniv complained on Twitter that Dicks was a member of a savage group of “violent protestors,” real-world video footage shows Dicks calmly attempting to ask Yaniv a few questions as Yaniv threatens to pepper-spray him and triggers an elevator alarm while his mother snatches Dicks’s phone right out of his hand.
Screen captures of live chats Yaniv is alleged to have engaged in over the years—which he dismisses as fabrications by anti-LGBTQ hatemongers—show a nauseating fixation on little girls, especially their tampons.
Here are the lowlights of a conversation between Yaniv and a self-identified adult woman:
Jessica Yaniv It sucks cause on Wednesday im travelling to the island on a ferry and usually they do field trips so that means tons of 10 year old girls in the bathroom when I need to change my pads ugh
Woman They’re young enough that it may not bother them. Kids are more receptive than adults.
Jessica Yaniv Maybe…. is it weird to ask a 10-12 year old girl for a pad? Or a tampon?
Woman A little, because kids look up to us for guidance and help. And not every girl may know what they are for….
Jessica Yaniv If she wants a tampon though, should i give her one and instruct her on how to use it?
Woman If she doesn’t know how to use it, I would find her mother. If her mother is not there then yes.
Jessica Yaniv And what would I tell her…like, would i go into the stall with her and help her? that sounds so weird.
You’re right about the “weird” part, Mr. Yaniv.
Other tampon-related messages involving young girls and weirdness:
Is it weird that it’s a fantasy of mine to go to the bathroom [with] a girl and change pads together?
Yes.
If I notice a girl that’s nude below and has a tampon string coming out when I’m changing and doing my stuff, is it weird to approach her to ask her for a tampon? or pad? Just to bond with her a bit over period stuff…
Yes, it’s weird. No need to keep asking, Jonny Boy.
Even weirder is when the fantasy translates into real-life action, as in Yaniv’s recent application for a permit to host a topless pool party with children aged 12 and over where parents are not permitted because Yaniv says he wishes to foster a “safe and inclusive” environment.
Weirder still is the story told by a certain Ashley Smith—now a 20-year-old woman—who was only 14 when Yaniv allegedly approached her online claiming to be a manager for a pop band that Smith loved. Smith claims that Yaniv told her that he accidentally clicked on a kiddie-porn link and then followed it up by asking her, “wanna see?” In another message, Yaniv tells Smith, “If you were two years older…I’d…you know…with you.”
Weirdest of all is the criminal complaint filed last week by 20-year-old Jessica Rumpel of Washington State, who was only 14—Yaniv was 27 and had yet to self-identify as a woman—alleging that he sent her sexually explicit voice messages in the voice of Sesame Street character Elmo of “Tickle Me Elmo” fame. The messages are hard to discern, but in the first few seconds it sounds to me as if Yaniv is saying, “Elmo loves to fuck!…Elmo loves some dickie!”
According to Ms. Rumpel:
Yaniv always told me he uses pads and wants to go into the ladies’ bathroom. He asked me how to go into the ladies’ bathroom without being caught, and then how to be in the bathroom if there’s a lot of women or girls.
Remember when trans activists and their enablers assured you that none of this would lead to perverts invading women’s bathrooms? They were gaslighting you.
And that’s the problem with the idiotic, purely emotional, and utterly unquantifiable notion of “justice”—men get sacrificed to the hysterical whims of women, who get sacrificed to the sick predilections of men who claim that they’re women. As illogical as it sounds, the logical end of “justice” is injustice.
The Week’s Most Addictive, Constrictive, and Vindictive Headlines
FEMALE POLITICIAN’S HATE-CRIME HOAX UNRAVELS QUICKER THAN SHE CAN SCREAM, “RACIST!!!”
Erica Thomas is an aggressively dumb and juvenile black woman in Georgia with peroxided hair that’s only a quarter of an inch long, so of course she’s a member of the State House of Representatives.
The 31-year-old mentally challenged Democrat, apparently seething with jealousy that Jussie Smollett has hogged most of this year’s hate-hoax headlines, staged her own fake racial victimization at a Publix supermarket in the Atlanta suburb of Mableton on July 20. After pretending to be racially victimized by a white man who is a full head shorter and likely 100 pounds lighter then she is, Thomas recorded a video that depicts her sobbing and gasping for breath at the fact that, despite this being 2019 and all, the KKK clearly still rules America:
I decided to go live because I’m upset that people are really getting out of control with this, with this white privilege. So, I’m at the grocery store, and I’m in the ten aisle, that aisle that says ten items or less, yes, I had fifteen items, but I’m nine months pregnant and I can’t stand up for long and this white man comes up to me and said, “You lazy son of a bitch.” He said, “You lazy son of a bitch, You need to go back where you came from.” And he says that, and I said, “Sir, you don’t even know me. I’m not lazy. I’m nine months pregnant.” He says, “You’re ignorant. You’re ignorant.” And it hurt me so bad….And I couldn’t get anything out, I could just tell him, “please leave me alone…”
As anyone who’s ever had an unpleasant encounter with a black woman in public knows, the LAST thing they do is say, “Please leave me alone.” Surveillance video from the supermarket shows the white man entering from stage left and pointing to a sign, then quickly retreating out of the frame as Thomas goes full water-buffalo on him, wagging her finger and swiveling her head in the inimitable way that loud and enraged women of color are wont to do.
But while black women were wantonly aborting their babies and black gangsters were slaughtering one another in the streets nationwide, no one paid attention to it: Instead, Thomas’s tale of woe was the one to gain traction on social media. Beto O’Rourke, who may be the dumbest person ever to think he has a chance at being president, tweeted thusly:
These are the consequences of a president who foments hate every day—and sees our diversity not as a strength but as a weakness. Erica, thank you for serving your state and thanks to your husband for serving our country. We are better than this, and together, we will prove it.
The next day, Ms. Thomas mustered the strength to stand up for a really long time outside the grocery store where the near-lynching occurred as bloodthirsty members of the press threw peanuts in her mouth. Unluckily for her narrative, the alleged white hatemonger showed up, too—a certain Eric Sparkes, who made a point that despite his obvious Caucasianity, he was not white but was instead Cuban. And not only that, he insisted that he was a Democrat who hates Donald Trump. Sparkes promptly set about accusing Thomas of being a big fat liar, although he admitted to calling her a bitch:
I did say that. That’s all I said after that, and I walked out of Publix. Her words stating on Twitter, and her video, stating I told her she needs to go back where she came from are untrue….Everyone that knows me knows that I am anti-hate, anti-bigot and anti-racism….Sadly, too much of media isn’t fact-checking items or they are just taking the word of a politician when they do a live Facebook or a Twitter post.
An employee at Publix then hammered another nail in the casket containing Thomas’s narrative, stating that they heard THOMAS “continuously tell Eric Sparkes to ‘Go back where you came from!’”
The prevaricating Negress later reneged—at least partially—when she told a TV reporter:
I don’t know if he said “go back,” or those types of words….I don’t know if he said “go back to your country” or “go back to where you came from,” but he was making those types of references is what I remember…. But I know it was “go back” because I know I told him to “go back.”
Aunt Jemima weeps. So does Mrs. Butterworth.
DID JEFFREY EPSTEIN TRY TO KILL HIMSELF?
Serial pervert Jeffrey Epstein—whose wealth and possible incriminating knowledge regarding pedophilia among the high and mighty enabled him to scoot away smoothly with a cushy 13-month jail sentence when the FBI had compiled evidence that he’d victimized at least three dozen girls—continued to openly parade his ephebophilic lifestyle after his release from confinement, according to a new Vanity Fair profile.
An unidentified employee at the airstrip on St. Thomas where Epstein would fly in underage girls on his “Lolita Express” for the purposes of defiling them on his privately owned “Pedophile Island” says that Epstein made no attempts to hide what he was doing, and it didn’t appear as if local authorities in the Virgin Island paid him any mind:
The fact that young girls were getting out of his helicopter and getting into his plane, it was like he was flaunting it. But it was said that he always tipped really well, so everyone overlooked it….My colleagues and I definitely talked about how we didn’t understand how this guy was still allowed to be around children.
According to an air traffic controller at the same airstrip:
On multiple occasions I saw Epstein exit his helicopter, stand on the tarmac in full view of my tower, and board his private jet with children—female children….One incident in particular really stands out in my mind, because the girls were just so young….I could see him with my own eyes. I compared it to seeing a serial killer in broad daylight. I called it the face of evil.
Epstein, who was arrested by federal authorities on July 6 as he returned to the USA on a flight from France and is facing a potential 45 years in prison, was found last week “injured and in a fetal position” on the floor of his New York jail cell. Marks were found on his neck, which suggests that he attempted to hang himself…
…or maybe it suggests that his cellmate, a 49-year-old former cop named Nicholas Tartaglione who is facing charges for killing four men and burying them in his yard, attempted to strangle him to death.
After Epstein’s recent arrest, representatives for Bill Clinton released a statement that Clinton had taken “a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane,” although flight records show that he flew on Epstein’s plane at least two dozen times.
What’s inarguable is that even if Jeffrey Epstein doesn’t want to die, several people would breathe more easily if he were to have a little accident in jail.
THOSE TEENS ARE AT IT AGAIN
Surveillance footage from outside the Washington, DC hotel where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 shows two paunchy white men being attacked by a group of about fifteen “teens,” which is a dog whistle for “youths,” which is coded racist speech for “youngsters.”
The attack occurred at about 1AM on July 14 right outside the hotel entrance as the teens swarm like African killer bees and punch one of the males while bum-rushing the other one into apparent unconsciousness, punching and punching and kicking and kicking and kicking him one last time just to make sure he’s out cold. The teens consisted of both males and females, and one female teen is shown returning to the immobile white male merely to spit on him.
One of the men was left with a swollen eye, while the other suffered injuries to his head and left eye socket.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser—who, despite rumors, has never been a member of 1950s nostalgia act Sha Na Na—warned that “this is not a game” and that the teens need to know that it wasn’t a “schoolyard prank,” either.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON GETS SOMETHING RIGHT
Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is a confirmed witch who is nuttier than a bucket of macadamias. She threatens to unseat Donald Trump by the sheer force of her all-swallowing, sharp-fanged yoni and the vague promise that “love” is all we need, although that notion didn’t do much for John Lennon in the long run, now, did it?
But in a recent interview with the esteemed journalists at Buzzfeed News, Williamson’s chakras perfectly aligned to deliver some wisdom that was so pure, we’re tempted to send her a crystal necklace via Amazon:
The twenties can be very hard. They’re not a mental illness. Divorce can be very difficult, losing a loved one, someone that you know died, someone left in a relationship and you’re heartbroken — that’s very painful, but it’s not a mental illness. You had a professional failure, you lost your job, you went bankrupt. Those things are very difficult, but they’re not a mental illness.
Instead, Williamson referred to what pill-pushers term “clinical depression” as “normal human despair.” She has also suggested that antidepressants may cause as many suicides as they prevent.
In the past, she has also suggested that sadness is a “spiritual disease” rather than a medical one, and this is where she starts to lose us. Sadness is a human problem. The belief that spirits exist is also a human problem.
STUDY: WHITE COPS NOT MORE LIKELY TO SHOOT MINORITIES THAN ARE NONWHITE COPS
Contradicting and undermining just about everything you’ve heard trumped and tuba-blasted from the media and academia for at least the past generation, a new study says that white police officers are not more likely to shoot nonwhites than are nonwhite cops.
Published last Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study examined over 900 fatal police-involved shootings and concluded:
We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.
It also found that in the overwhelming majority of fatal shootings, the victim had been armed.
But sure, burn another city or two to the ground anyway.
BLACK RAG DOLLS TARGETED FOR PHYSICAL ABUSE
Despite all the hate-crime hoaxes and fake racism that is constantly clogging our brain capillaries, it genuinely saddens us to announce that in this day and age, even after the Civil War and the assassination of MLK, three bargain-bin stores called the One Dollar Zone in the industrial wastelands of northern NJ thought it was OK to sell black rag dolls that carry the following message emblazoned on their chests:
Whenever things don’t go well/ and you want to hit the wall and yell, / here’s a little “feel better doll” / that you just will not do without./ Just grab it firmly by the legs and find a / wall to slam the doll, and as you wack / the “feel good doll” do not forget to yell / I FEEL GOOD, I FEEL GOOD
Bayonne, NJ Assemblywoman Angela McKnight—who sees nothing “racist” about shilling for a website called SHOPPE BLACK (“Your Trusted Source For All Things Black Owned, Globally”)—snorted her keening dismay at these dusky little punching bags:
This doll is offensive and disturbing on so many levels. It is clearly made in an inappropriate representation of a black person and instructs people to ‘slam’ and ‘whack’ her. Racism has no place in the world and I will not tolerate it, especially not in this district.
Can we have ONE WEEK where people don’t freak the hell out over racial issues, or is that asking too much?
Every Monday, Jim Goad reads the previous day’s “Week That Perished” on his podcast.
It has been very hot in my part of France lately. Not far away, the temperature in the shade has been as much as 45 degrees centigrade (113 Fahrenheit). No doubt it is often hotter in the Empty Quarter of Arabia or in the Mojave Desert, but for us poor Northern Europeans it seems pretty brutal. It’s even worse when you’re getting on in years.
My insurance company sent me an email. “Heat wave in your area,” it said. Then it gave a little advice:
Avoid going out in the hottest part of the day, select cool places and drink regularly.
Wear light clothes.
Avoid unventilated places and do not stay in a car or a closed space in the sun.
I imagine that few would quarrel with this advice. Who, for example, would advise people to walk about as much as possible in the heat of the sun, or not to seek out cool places? My late little dog knew better than this without being informed by any insurance company.
Is there anybody in the world who, reading the advice, would take off the heavy clothes he was wearing in the heat and don light clothes instead? Would anyone reading it depart the stifling room in which he was sitting and seek out somewhere cool? Would anyone say on reading it, “Aha, now I realize what had never previously occurred to me, that I ought not to sit in my car in the baking sun with the windows shut”?
Ours is an age of information, that is a cliché. But it is also the age of redundant advice and warning; for example, that on bottles of spirits that immoderate drinking can harm your health. Has anyone ever given up drinking, or avoided pouring himself another drink, because he has read this warning? Or has anyone ever reached the age when he can invest money who does not realize that the value of shares can fall as well as rise? Where would one had to have lived, what would have to be the depths of one’s ignorance, not to realize this?
Such redundant advice implies that the world is full of fools, that most adults are really children; and indeed there is no better way to infantilize people than to treat them as infants. It is true, of course, that people may not be aware of genuine hazards and need to be informed of them, but surely not that they should not put their fingers in the rolling mechanism of escalators (and should prevent their children from doing so), or that hot coffee spilt on your skin may scald.
In a recent case in England, a train company was heavily fined because a man of 24 was killed when he put his head out of the window of a train traveling at 60 miles an hour. The train passed a gantry and the man suffered a catastrophic and immediately fatal head injury.
The picture of the young man shows him to have been a very pleasant type. He was said to have been a train enthusiast, a person who loved everything connected with trains. I am not of that ilk myself, but my experience of such people is that they are usually rather shy and quiet but very decent, and generally quite without malice. When I saw the picture of the young man, I felt an enormous sorrow for him and for his family. Here was real tragedy. I am not a sentimentalist, but for some reason the story affected me deeply.
Nevertheless, one cannot (or should not) be guided by emotion alone. The coroner’s inquest was agnostic as to why the young man had stuck his head out of the window, even as to whether he had done so voluntarily or involuntarily. It is difficult to see how it could have been the latter, unless someone actually pushed him; there was no question of a vacuum having sucked him out. But the reason the coroner was agnostic on the question was itself very revealing of the modern world: There was no CCTV footage of the incident. In England, it is very rare that something happens in the public space that is not captured on CCTV camera, English society having the heaviest such surveillance in the world.
Surely a man of 24 is old enough to know that it is dangerous to put your head out of a train window while it is traveling at some speed. A fortiori would one expect a train enthusiast to know this. The window in question was for use by the train’s guard, though there wasn’t one on board. The company admitted that it “had failed to ensure that persons not in their employment were not exposed to risk to their health and safety.” The judge said that the company had failed to carry out a “risk assessment,” presumably the risk being that without a warning an adult might put his head out of the window.
The world, then, is to be divided into parents and children. Train companies are among the parents, passengers among the children. Just as no child is expected to behave with common sense, so no passenger is to be expected not to endanger himself in the most obvious ways. If he is not specifically warned of a danger, it cannot be assumed that he will know of its existence.
The growing nonacceptance of risk and the consequent rejection of personal responsibility in Western society are astonishing. The man who does the pest control in our house in France told me that he is repeatedly called out to the local school when wasps have built a little nest on a shutter. When he arrives, the whole area is cordoned off as at the scene of a serious crime, a murder, say. He points out that wasps have wings and are no respecters of cordons. He takes a broom and sweeps the nest out of the window. No one in the school is willing to do such a thing him- or herself. He will soon be called again. Each time, he charges the school 300 euros for his flick of the broom. But at least the money is not wasted on a vain attempt to teach the children something.
He went away to fight and the war lasted 10 years. He missed his wife, but he didn’t worry one bit. She was in love with him and she was known for her virtue. (Those were the days.) Sailing west, he stopped in Serifos, a beautiful but rugged island in the Cyclades. Soon he had a problem, a very serious one, and his name was Polyphemus. The Cyclops was a baddie and was about to slay the Greek crew and eat them when Odysseus speared him in the eye, the only eye the giant had, and that was that. The Cyclops’ throne is still here in the shape of a large wall high up in the upper Hora, as that part of Serifos is known. Although I was always on the side of my fellow Ionian—Odysseus was King of Ithaca, the Taki clan is from Zante—I did not climb up and inspect the throne. It has nothing to do with mythology and all to do with being magnanimous in victory. To lose one eye when one is all one’s got has to be a hell of a downer.
Never mind. Serifos is simply wonderful. No “cool” people here, no Hollywood garbage, no international trash, except for one horror boat whose construction was a major crime against the sea, its ugliness, however, mitigated as its occupants emerged late in the afternoon. At first I thought it must be an animal rescue boat transporting gorillas bred in Europe to Africa. No such luck. They were Saudis or perhaps Russian oligarchs, but they sure were ugly. I imagine someone told them about Cyclops and how ugly that poor monster happened to be, so they decided to come here and look good by comparison. Mind you, I’m just guessing.
Serifos has a mixed history. Although it has not produced any poets or writers, the first Greek industrial strike took place on this island back in 1916. A French company mined the iron ore deposits on the island, but the conditions were known as inhuman even back then. In August of that year the Greek miners had had enough. They went on strike and the fuzz was sent from the mainland to teach them a lesson they would not forget. Four miners were shot dead and two cops lynched in return by the enraged but starving miners. The mines were blown up and the frogs decided to go south—to South Africa, to be exact. The graves of the four miners under a monument commemorating their deaths are prominently displayed. I asked about the fuzz but was met with blank stares. Such are the joys of being in law enforcement. The only ones who miss them are their families.
Before I got on Puritan, the magnificent 1930 Alden-built schooner, I dined with three Greek journalists of Kathimerini’s supplement, Mancode. All three were confident that after four years of hard-left socialism, things are bound to improve. The socialists had overtaxed business, and that’s a no-no as far as growth and profits are concerned. Tell me a business that can survive value-added tax of 24 percent, social security contributions of 46 percent, and 29 percent tax from the very first euro of earnings, and I’ll tell you how to go bust in one easy lesson. The left also allowed crime to hinder businesses by keeping people from shopping except in the middle of the day. Mom-and-pop stores are the heart and soul of Greek trade, hence the high taxation and fear of violent crime turned the economy south in no time. Now the hope is that things will change.
No sooner had the new government been sworn in, than the media began to grumble. Only five female ministers were named to the 51-member cabinet, giving the opportunity to some shrill feminists to start screaming about a society still dominated by patriarchal values. Well, go to any island and you’ll see the men working and the women holding forth as mothers and housewives. On Puritan I have the mother of my children, my son and daughter, my son-in-law, and three grandchildren, Taki, Maria, and Antonius, aged eight months. For some strange reason I cannot breastfeed the baby, so my daughter’s doing it. The mother of my children looks after the other two because there was no room on board for a nanny. Does that make us male chauvinist pigs? I suppose so, but the crew of seven has promised to learn to breastfeed, and soon.
My idea of beauty under sail is sitting in a magnificent classic-styled boat extremely leaning to starboard or portside, slicing the waves and hearing the wind howling. We did just that for close to six hours under full sail and averaging 10 knots. The “meltemi,” the summer wind that never lets up and drives the hookers on board mega-monster yachts to miss their periods, has had quite a summer. It started early and promises to blow like hell until mid-September. Goody, goody gumdrops. The gynecologists back home will have a field day. As you read this, I shall be having a long weekend on a private island celebrating Pugs Club. We are going to be seven of us, drinking, swimming, listening to martial music, and missing our commodore Tim Hoare. Incidentally, Sir Bob Geldof was talked out of trying to swim to Greece to save trip money.
“With the ancients…it was all or nothing, with no fear of disaster. The fall of states, cities, and kings was considered glorious. That is something utterly alien to us.” —Jacob Burckhardt
I should have liked to have been present at the National Conservatism Conference in D.C. on July 15, where my blunt friend Amy Wax, in her talk on immigration, took on the wearisome conservative shibboleth that race is not a legitimate political value. For though I have no doubt that Amy offered her usual good sense, it must have been an amusingly awkward moment for many. At the beginning of the conference, the solemn figure David Brog, as if in self-parody, had declared that all racists should leave the room immediately. A Jewish Zionist, attorney, and activist, Brog unsurprisingly equates white ethnocentrism with “racism.” So does his fellow conference organizer and Jewish Zionist Yoram Hazony, who took care to emphasize his familiar white-nationalism-is-bad mantra. Nevertheless, compared to mainstream conservatives, Amy is like a figure out of a Larry David comedy. Having grown up in a lower-middle-class, and highly devout, Jewish community in Troy, New York, she is profoundly conservative, and has a funny candor that is common among Jewish women her age from the Northeast. Amy, whose sincerity nobody should doubt, thinks we need “the courage to moralize,” and yet it is that very courage that makes her such an unusual figure on the mainstream right.
For most mainstream conservative intellectuals are like animals on display at the zoo—ever eager to do the right tricks for the business class and the hegemonic cultural left, to earn some treats from the groups to which they provide functional opposition and, as if by divine providence, an endlessly delightful comedy that no living satirist can match. Consider Rich Lowry, for example. Having long peddled proposition nation cant—so dear to neocons and Jaffaite twaddlers—Lowry’s talk at the big nationalism conference was called “Why America Isn’t an Idea” (my emphasis). Of course, having smelled which way the wind is blowing, Lowry is now writing a book on nationalism, one that will doubtless be filled with his characteristic leftist idolatry concerning Saint Abraham Lincoln, Saint Martin Luther King Jr., the divine Civil Rights movement, and the like fashionable drivel that never stops flowing from his cliché-ridden mind.
It would be difficult to imagine a greater antithesis to the intellectual mediocrity and bland pretender Rich Lowry than Amy Wax, who not only has a first-rate mind, but is quite willing to take unpopular stances. Thus, this week Amy, once again, has been an object of controversy. The reason is that in her talk at the nationalism conference she argued, on cultural grounds, that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Naturally, this was rather offensive to Zack Beauchamp, Jeet Heer, Cathy Young, Berny Belvedere, and other sentimental soporifics. Race being an exceedingly sensitive subject, it is important not to misunderstand Amy’s position. In the first place, she values national sovereignty and thinks that a nation’s chief obligation is to its own citizens; and in these States, the majority of those citizens are white—for now, anyway. She knows that, as a consequence of too much immigration (the vast majority of which is legal), American workers have become economic losers. For Amy, a “cultural distance nationalist,” whites are generally more culturally compatible with what she calls “the bourgeois script” than nonwhites are. She also thinks that “we must ensure that bad habits from the Third World…are not allowed to infect and undermine the First.”
You needn’t agree with any of this, but plainly, there is nothing racist about it. Amy does not use race in a causal sense. She does not mean people who are black, female, Asian, or whatever necessarily vote for the left. She does not imply that there aren’t nonwhites who vote for the right. As befits a conservative who uses past experience as her prudent guide, Amy’s argument is based on close correlation. Who, she asks, is best suited for what the United States is for? Looking at history and the state of the world, her commonsense answer is, people like us.
About a year ago, in an essay for Jacobite, I wrote:
[C]ulture is far more important than ethnicity because it concerns how people live, and we have seen in America that many foreigners are able to assimilate to our way of life. Still, there is a deep historical connection between ethnicity and culture, and it is difficult to have cultural homogeneity without a fair amount of ethnic homogeneity—unless, that is, there is cultural assimilation, now, alas, widely believed to be “racist.” Nor should we believe that cultural assimilation, very valuable though it is, is some kind of magic formula: some values are just not assimilable, just as some are not compatible with each other. In such cases, it would be best for people to simply leave each other alone. And to call this belief racist or whatever is not only cheap; it is also lazy and ignores the intractable difficulty of the issue.
In “Prejudice Versus Diversity,” an essay that I wrote for New English Review, I try to make a connection between politics and how the mind works in regard to moral value. In sum, insofar as they have different experiences, histories, and traditions, individuals—and their groups—tend to perceive, evaluate, and judge one another in incompatible ways, having quite different internal beliefs about the same external phenomena. In such cases, reason is frequently a vehicle of unwitting confusion, pernicious manipulation, and intense conflict. Hence the value, whenever and wherever possible, of eliminating such intractable difficulties via a politics that presupposes cultural homogeneity. (Not that this politics couldn’t have problems of its own—it would be vital, for instance, to try to keep the dominant social group from exploiting minority ones.)
I would add to these considerations a strategic point. As groups go, only white people—more accurately, white men—tend to support the right, and while that could change, there is no sign, at present, that it will anytime soon. Hence the need for a white ethnocentric base. After all, whatever you think about the president, is there any doubt that he’d have saved us from the disaster of a Hillary Clinton presidency without a white demographic majority? Similarly, can any informed and honest person believe that if, in the coming decades, America loses its white demographic majority, there will be any right to speak of? Without a white majority, will America not likely become a Third World country? Must these momentous, empirical questions be dismissed as “racist”? How much longer can conservatives afford to play by the left’s terms, while yet hoping to defeat it?
Leftists and conservatives who reject the concept of cultural superiority would do well to take a closer look at their very lives. Are they not trying to be better at something than other people? If not, what are they achieving? Is the concept of value intelligible without competition and comparison? No. What’s so bad about making informed value judgments about other groups? The Russians and the Chinese laugh at our weak reluctance here.
No group today is more criticized or hated than white men. But notice: The leftists and the ungrateful women who are perpetually bashing white men reveal what deluded wretches they are by never packing up and moving to countries where white men are not running things, since such places, as the president might say, are generally shitholes.
Getting back to Amy Wax, we should ask: Why does it take a Jewish woman who is a distinguished law professor at an Ivy League university to make the case that whites should be numerically dominant in the country that their own ancestors founded and built? The answer is that mainstream conservatism is a kind of genteel country club, in which, like Republican politicians, intellectuals are effectively owned by donors, those largely middling but significant persons who fund the journals, websites, “nonprofits,” think tanks, and conferences. Nor is this degradation a problem for such intellectuals. For, like most intellectuals, and like most people, most conservative intellectuals care more about their own petty interests than saying difficult yet important truths. They are primarily concerned to make money, to appear distinguished, and to be accepted by other people. Weak, predictable, boring types! Accordingly, nearly all conservative writers avoid sensitive issues, lest they be ostracized like Joseph Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, and others.
It seems telling that, though Amy’s position on immigration is basically the same as Peter Brimelow’s and Jared Taylor’s, Hazony wouldn’t allow these men to attend his conference, even as, in response to the inevitable criticism, he defended Amy’s take on race and immigration. In an interview with Slate’s Osita Nwanevu at the 2018 CPAC, Brimelow said:
[M]y heart is with civic nationalism, but my head is with racial nationalism. Because I think that’s the way things are going—I think the country is precipitating out on racial lines…. That’s what the Trump voter seems to indicate. That’s an implicit white vote.
Though he has often been slandered as a “white supremacist,” Brimelow is nothing of the kind, and the words quoted above indicate that his is a strategic or practical position. Brimelow advocates “civic nationalism” because he knows there’s much more to a polity than race. Still, in the present context, “racial nationalism” is effective, for again, without a sufficient number of whites, how can we resist the antiwhite left and preserve a country worth having? Certainly these ends are not going to be accomplished by importing Mexicans and Somalis.
MONTREAL—So now San Francisco is banning e-cigarettes, because a City Council member discovered there are still people making personal decisions about what to do with their lives. They’ve been trying to eliminate these people for three decades now, but some individuals just refuse to learn.
It’s been a year or so since I wrote about San Francisco’s ban on the sale of fur in a move that does nothing for animals but destroys businesses that have been established there since the 19th century. Unfortunately I can’t really devote 52 columns a year to cataloguing products banned by San Francisco. In the past they’ve outlawed plastic bags, clove cigarettes, Coke machines, bottled-water machines, people playing stickball in the street, people playing chess in the street, pet stores, goldfish, masked balls, and the practice of letting your dog stick his head halfway out the window while you’re driving. Long ago they banned toys being given away with Happy Meals at McDonald’s. There are several states that have been under sanction by San Francisco at various times, with city employees forbidden from traveling on official business to Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, or my home state of Texas. (Which is fine with me—I don’t really want any bowdlerizing Californians accidentally attending a rodeo and deciding to file animal-cruelty charges at the United Nations.)
It’s illegal to ride a Segway in San Francisco, to package food with Styrofoam, to declaw a cat, or to serve chocolate milk in schools. No one in government is allowed to make any contract with any company that uses tropical hardwood—“Get the rugs out! The floor inspectors are coming over!”—and no school is allowed to offer Junior ROTC because young people who want to follow their families into military service are probably deranged. Don’t try to walk more than eight dogs at a time—even if they’re toy poodles and Chihuahuas—and don’t give your 5-year-old a slingshot for his birthday, because that’s an illegal weapon.
If you asked the high sheriffs of the city exactly what’s going on here, they would give you some version of San Francisco knows better.
I’m especially pained by San Francisco becoming an experiment in proto-communist lifestyle engineering, because my love for the city is based on its history of harboring fiercely independent iconoclasts. I consider Ambrose Bierce my mentor, and he flourished there from 1866 to 1899, fighting the corrupt railroad barons, always carrying his Civil War sidearm because his prose was so powerful it could cause lifetime grudges and feuds. (“San Francisco,” wrote Bierce, “is the place where most people were last seen.”) In the ’80s I performed at a punk club called Wolfgang’s owned by impresario Bill Graham, a rock & roll pioneer, and Graham was following in the footsteps of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, patron saint of the Beat movement, whose City Lights bookstore still stands but whose fellow who-gives-a-fuck writing buddies have long since passed on, unaware that their cigarette butts, open whiskey bottles, and crash pads would all violate various ordinances in today’s San Francisco. Carol Doda, another friend of mine from the Wolfgang’s days, was the first nude dancer in the days when it was called go-go dancing, and she survived multiple arrests for showing off what she called her “Twin 44s” before becoming such an icon that the cops backed off and pretty much left her alone at the famous Condor Club. That club was, in turn, a precursor of the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre, where modern pornography and the lap dance were born. There was a period in the late ’80s and early ’90s when I would guest deejay on KFOG, probably the greatest rock station ever, and one day Jerry Fucking Garcia called in on the request line.
In other words, San Francisco was always the place where people didn’t make rules, they broke them. They didn’t ask permission and they didn’t ask forgiveness. It was a safe haven for unconventional lifestyles, unconventional opinions, and unconventional behavior. I wonder what Hunter S. Thompson, a frequent resident, would think of the ordinance against stink bombs, since he loved every kind of explosive device but especially the ones that caused noise and mischief.
Hell, I know what he would think of it. It would inspire him to toss one into the City Council chambers. That would be the place where they sit around debating the effects of Juul electronic cigarettes. Juul is a San Francisco company, so once again the city is eating its young, trying to legislate out of existence a $2 billion local firm that employs 1,500 people. The argument is that young people shouldn’t be vaping, and the little bastards get away with it because Juul products so closely resemble flash drives that they can hide them from clueless teachers. Leave it to San Francisco to deal with an enforcement challenge with a blanket ban—but, of course, life is always more complicated than that, so these are the same faux cigarettes that millions of people use to stop smoking real cigarettes. Public scolds don’t care about collateral damage, they’re too busy telling the rest of the world how to behave.
In some ways San Francisco’s descent into madness is self-correcting, because eventually so many groups will be pointing fingers at so many other groups, demanding lifestyle alterations designed to create healthy specimens of Correct Living, that the whole peninsula will devolve into something resembling the Soviet Union in 1965, if they’re lucky, and Venezuela in 2019 if they’re not. Social engineers are an arrogant lot, and they’ll keep talking and legislating until the last iconoclast has been castrated and jailed. They can’t actually kill him because they outlawed cemeteries
It is apparently part of Robert Mueller’s contract with the media that he must always be described as “honorable” and a “lifelong Republican.” (After this week, we can add “dazed and confused” to his appellation.)
If it matters that Mueller is a “lifelong Republican,” then I guess it matters that he hired a team of left-wing zealots. Of the 17 lawyers in Mueller’s office, 14 are registered Democrats. Not one is a registered Republican. In total, they have donated more than $60,000 to Democratic candidates.
Congressman Steve Chabot listed the Democratic political activism of nine of Mueller’s staff attorneys at a December 2017 House hearing.
Here are a few from Chabot’s list:
— Kyle Freeny contributed to both Obama campaigns and to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
— Andrew Goldstein donated $3,300 to both Obama campaigns.
— Elizabeth Prelogar contributed to both the Obama and Clinton campaigns.
— Jeannie Rhee donated $16,000 to Democrats, contributed $5,400 to the Clinton campaign — and represented Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation in several lawsuits.
— Andrew Weissmann contributed $2,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $2,300 to the Obama campaign and $2,300 to the Clinton Campaign.
None had donated to the Trump campaign.
The media brushed off the conspicuous anti-Trump bias in Mueller’s office with platitudes about how prosecutors are, “allowed to have political opinions,” as Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein assured the public that their “views are not in any way a factor in how they conduct themselves in office.”
Obviously, no one believes this — otherwise “lifelong Republican” wouldn’t be spot-welded to Mueller’s name.
In a fiery rebuke at the hearings this week, Mueller denounced complaints about all the diehard Democrats on his legal team, saying, “I’ve been in this business for almost 25 years, and in those 25 years I have not had occasion once to ask somebody about their political affiliation. It is not done.”
No kidding. He’s been director of the FBI. He’s been acting U.S. deputy attorney general. He’s been a U.S. attorney. He’s never been an independent counsel investigating the president before.
An independent counsel investigation isn’t the kind of job where you want the hungriest prosecutors. You want drug enforcement agents who are hungry to bust up drug rings. You want organized crime prosecutors who are hungry to take down the mob.
But lawyers on a special counsel’s investigation of the president of the United States aren’t supposed to be hungry. They’re supposed to be fair.
As for Mueller being “honorable,” Steven Hatfill and the late Sen. Ted Stevens might beg to differ.
After the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI, under Director Mueller’s close supervision, spent SEVEN YEARS pursuing Hatfill, a U.S. Army biodefense researcher. Year after year, the real culprit went about his life undisturbed — until he committed suicide when, at last, the FBI zeroed in on him.
Mueller was deeply involved in the anthrax investigation, recruiting the lead investigator on the case and working “in lockstep” with him, according to a book on the case, The Mirage Man by David Willman.
During this multi-year investigation of the wrong man, Mueller assured Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as two U.S. senators that Hatfill was the anthrax mailer. Presciently, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz asked then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey if he was sure Hatfill wasn’t another Richard Jewell, an innocent man who, a few years earlier, had been publicly identified by the FBI as the main Olympic bombing suspect. Comey replied that he was “absolutely certain that it was Hatfill.”
The hounding of Steven Hatfill finally ended in 2008, with the bureau paying the poor man millions of dollars. In open court, a federal judge, Reggie B. Walton, assailed Mueller’s FBI for its handling of the case.
Far from apologizing, the director stoutly defended the bureau’s relentless pursuit of the blameless Hatfill, saying: “I do not apologize for any aspect of this investigation.” He said it would be incorrect “to say there were mistakes.”
Maybe he can use that line to defend the similarly monomaniacal zealots he put on the Russia investigation.
Eight days before the 2008 elections, the government convicted Sen. Stevens of failing to properly report gifts on his Senate financial forms. The longest-serving Republican in Senate history lost his re-election by less than 2 percent of the vote.
Months later — too late for Stevens’ political career — Obama Attorney General Eric Holder moved for a dismissal of all charges against Stevens after discovering that the government had failed to turn over crucial exculpatory evidence. The trial judge not only threw out the charges, but angrily ordered an independent counsel to investigate the investigators.
Unlike the disastrous Hatfill case, the extent of Mueller’s oversight of the Stevens investigation is less clear. Was he aware of the bureau’s malicious pursuit of a sitting U.S. senator on the eve of his re-election? Either he was, which is awful, or he wasn’t — which is worse.
In addition to “honorable,” another way of describing Mueller is: “Too Corrupt for Eric Holder.”
