ORLANDO—They’re calling it the Getty Fire, because it started up by Mulholland Drive just north of the Getty Museum, which sits on a precipice overlooking the San Diego Freeway, better known as the Four-Oh-Five. It instantly engulfed 600 acres and destroyed a half-dozen homes and by the third day containment still stood at 5 percent despite having 1,100 firefighters in battle gear, unable to cope with Santa Ana winds gusting up to 80 miles an hour. The whole side of the mountain was evacuated. Thousands of people, hundreds of homes, and these weren’t just any homes—LeBron James ended up driving around El-Lay with his family packed into a vehicle, presumably an Escalade, looking for a place to stay.
But it was art enthusiasts all over the planet who were most horrified by the news. In North America, the J. Paul Getty Museum is probably second only to the Metropolitan in New York on the Treasures-of-Art-History scale, and the fire was raging just a half mile away, with a good likelihood it would travel on down the slopes and start incinerating more buildings. What would happen to the illuminated medieval manuscripts from Aachen, the Rembrandts, the Titians, the Manets, all those masterpieces that Getty brought back from Nazi Germany, Russia, Italy, and Greece?
The answer, apparently, is that nothing would happen to any of them. “The safest place for the Getty treasures,” said the museum director, “is inside the Getty.”
The walls are fire-resistant travertine, reinforced by concrete and steel. The roof is made of crushed stone, so wind-borne embers have no chance of igniting. Even the landscaping on the grounds of the museum is fire-resistant, with a million-gallon water tank ready to be activated anytime heat touches the ground.
But what about the smoke?
No problem, say the Getty engineers. The museum is actually a building-within-a-building, with air systems between the two outer walls that allow the whole complex to be hermetically sealed and for air to be recirculated the same way it’s done on aircraft.
So the Neolithic clay figurines are safe. The Ottonian illuminations are safe. Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier is secure.
What’s not safe are all the homes of the millionaires and billionaires scattered across Mandeville Canyon. Leading to the question: If it’s possible to fireproof your home, and you have millions of dollars, and you live in one of the most fire-prone regions in the world, why wouldn’t you go Getty with your architecture and seal that baby up?
Pets don’t have to worry. Within an hour of the fire breaking out, there were animal shelters in place, and they were subdivided into shelters for different sizes of animals. After all, you don’t want the Tibetan mastiffs chewing on the toy poodles during the many days of forced evacuation. And you certainly don’t want the polo ponies removed to the same shelter as the Shar-Peis, Chow Chows, Akitas, Salukis, and Irish wolfhounds. There are so many Labrador retrievers in the Santa Monica Mountains that you probably need a shelter just for them and them alone.
So the animals are safe. The art treasures are safe. Unfortunately, the landscapers and housekeepers kept showing up for work after the mountain was sealed off, thinking, “Better have the place looking great on the day before it burns up.” There were also misguided evacuees lined up in their Porsches and Lexuses outside the roadblocks, requesting permission to go back into their homes “just for an hour” to retrieve wills, stock certificates, divorce decrees, and sex toys.
Like everything in El-Lay, there was an air of unreality about the fire. It won’t affect me. I’ll be in and out so fast no one will notice. And I’ll send in Regina from East El-Lay to see if she can find that last Persian kitten in the next-door neighbor’s yard. All the rooms are taken at the Beverly Wilshire, the Bel-Air, the Viceroy L’Ermitage, the Peninsula, and the Mondrian, but I just heard about some suites coming open at the InterContinental and, if we have to rough it for a couple nights, the Hollywood Roosevelt. If all else fails, we can get a car service to take us to Pasadena and check in at the Langham Huntington. Tell the kids it’ll be just like camping out!
In other words, it was once again California’s answer to the periodic message from God: “Don’t live here. This is an unnatural environment prone to catastrophe.”
But there’s a great party going on tonight at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I guarantee it. Maybe LeBron will drop in.
I have a confession. I behaved badly recently, and I’m just going to admit it.
As a guest at a dinner party in Georgetown, I stormed in and started bossing everyone around. First, I demanded that the foyer be painted a different color and wainscoting be added to the dining room. Then I had my hosts assemble their children so I could give them all different names. Before making my exit, I grabbed two legs of turkey off the entree platter and stuffed them in my purse.
I have a second confession. None of that happened. But if it had, I would be exactly like Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman.
He was born in Ukraine and raised there until age 3 1/2, when he was invited to our country. As you’ve no doubt heard, he served in our military. Thank you for your service, Colonel!
Now he is the top Ukrainian adviser on the National Security Council. Of all the people who could look out for the U.S.’s interests vis-a-vis Ukraine, we got someone who was born there.
As such, Vindman was permitted to listen to a phone call the president of the United States made to the president of Ukraine — a completely unnecessary, pro forma task.
So, naturally, when he had a policy disagreement with President Trump pertaining to the country he was born in, he thought he had a responsibility to agitate for removal proceedings against the duly elected U.S. president, just as I might have taken issue with the carpets in the Georgetown townhouse.
For some reason, we keep hearing about Col. Vindman’s valor and patriotism. I don’t doubt that he’s a super swell guy. But unless I missed it in the newspapers at the time, I don’t believe he was elected president in 2016. In fact, there’s a specific constitutional provision that prevents Col. Vindman from ever being president: He wasn’t born here.
Study question: Why might the framers have added that clause?
It would be bad enough if Col. Vindman’s policy disagreement with the president had to do with U.S. policy on Mexico or North Korea. But it was about the country where Col. Vindman was born.
We’re always told that Democrats don’t have to prove wrongdoing by Trump — for example, under the emoluments clause, in his foreign policy negotiations or when he fired his FBI director. Rather, it’s claimed that Trump’s conduct creates the appearance of impropriety.
Well, having a Ukrainian-born analyst butt in to ensure U.S. foreign aid flows effortlessly to the country of his birth gives the appearance that he’s concerned about fairness to Ukraine. That’s not what this is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be about what’s in the best interests of the United States.
Worse, Vindman was dealing with the U.S.’s Ukrainian policy versus Russia, which Ukrainians hate because Stalin murdered millions of them. It’s like having an Armenian advise on whether we should be hostile to Turkey.
This is not the usual dual loyalty claim insultingly attributed to Irish or Jewish Americans who were born in this country. Lots of us have admixtures of other nationalities.
But when you were actually born in another country and that’s the precise policy matter you’re sticking your nose into, people are going to wonder if it’s really our national interests you’re looking out for.
Proposed Constitutional Amendment No. 1: Immigrants are required to wait a minimum of two (2) generations before bossing around the most successful, prosperous, free country on Earth, and fully three (3) generations before advising on our government’s policy toward the countries of their forefathers.
We also need a constitutional amendment directed at 10th-generation Americans who fancy themselves foreign policy experts. Foreign policy is the idiot’s shortcut to imagined erudition, the last refuge of the insufferable.
Sen. Lindsey Graham was on TV last week, bragging about how he’d been to Syria — Afghanistan? Iraq? Who cares! — 75 times.
Not one person who voted for Graham has the peace and contentment of Syrians on his Top Ten Concerns list. Like everyone else, South Carolinians care about their jobs, their safety, their neighborhoods, their country.
But Sen. Graham wouldn’t sound like a deep intellectual if he went on TV and started talking about water treatment plants, despite the fact that clean drinking water is of far greater interest to his constituents.
It’s very romantic to think of yourself as a geopolitical chess player, jetting around the globe and staying in five-star hotels in Riyadh and Paris, chatting with dictators and reporting back your impressions as a Master of the Universe — I’m very concerned about the leadership of the Kurds … Richard Haas wrote a fascinating treatise about how our policy has been deficient in the following nine ways … I’ll be sure to bring that up next week when I’m meeting with the E.U.
These are the kinds of people who would join Mensa.
It would be annoying enough if government officials, whose salaries we pay, spent all their time working on the betterment of other nations, but at least everything turned out GREAT. In fact, however, they’re never right, they always make things worse, and they never pay a price because, again, no one cares.
Proposed Constitutional Amendment No. 2: Elected officials may take one government-funded boondoggle abroad for every three (3) trips they make to our southern border.
The Carolina Panthers’ speedy running back Christian McCaffrey, who is second in the NFL with 105 yards rushing per game, is bidding to become the first white player to lead the NFL in rushing since Jim Taylor of the legendary 1962 Green Bay Packers 57 years ago.
McCaffrey’s 2019 performance shouldn’t be surprising. He was third in the NFL last year in combined yards from scrimmage with 1,098 rushing and 867 receiving, while at Stanford he was runner-up for the 2015 Heisman Trophy.
Despite McCaffrey’s fame, this year’s Madden videogame depicted him as black. After all, game-breaking NFL backs (McCaffrey has scored ten touchdowns in his first seven games) are virtually never white.
His witty mom, Lisa, tweeted in response to her son:
Sorry you had to find out this way. @87ed may not be your real dad.
@87ed is Christian’s real dad, Ed McCaffrey, an All-American wide receiver at Stanford, whose superior speed helped extinguish the football career of a more plodding Stanford recruit, presidential candidate Cory Booker. Ed then played thirteen years in the NFL, making the Pro Bowl and winning three Super Bowl rings.
As his father Ed had done to Booker, Christian relegated a more famous name to the bench at Stanford, starting in front of Barry Sanders Jr. Christian broke the NCAA record for most all-purpose yards in a season held by his backup’s dad, the great Barry Sanders.
Christian’s speed wasn’t inherited just through his father’s bloodline. His mother was a star soccer player at Stanford.
And her father, the late ophthalmological surgeon Dr. Dave Sime, was the last white American to medal in the Olympic 100-meter dash, the race to determine the world’s fastest man. In 1960, Sime won silver, missing out on gold to a West German in a photo finish.
So Christian’s speed shouldn’t come as a surprise. As his mother joked to Sports Illustrated in 1998:
“That’s why Ed and I got together. So we could breed fast white guys.”
They succeeded: Christian’s older brother has played briefly in the NFL as a wide receiver, while one younger brother is a quarterback at Michigan and the other is a quarterback at Nebraska.
There’s nothing terribly controversial about suggesting that hereditary genetics play a role in Christian McCaffrey’s football success. (Of course, nurture as well as nature helps: His clan has been an expert and diligent follower of sports-science advice for three generations.)
Or consider another fast family, the Dibaba sisters of Ethiopia: Tirunesh has won three gold medals, Ejegayehu two golds, and Genzebe a silver, while their aunt Derartu Tulu won two golds.
But, in the Current Year, many people suffer the kind of brain shutdown that Orwell called “crimestop” when it is suggested that some of the same hereditary reasons the McCaffreys and Dibabas are fast might also help explain why, on average, blacks tend to run quicker than whites.
Similarly, the abundant data suggesting that individuals of sub-Saharan ancestry enjoy genetic advantages at other professions requiring running speed, such as playing NFL cornerback or Olympic sprinting, can lead to Orwell’s “protective stupidity” among those claiming the authority of Science.
For example, it’s considered fine to suggest that the reason that each new Dibaba is fast is due to their shared genetics. But to say that one major reason Ethiopians keep winning Olympic running medals (now up to 54, but none at any distance shorter than the 1,500-meter metric mile because Ethiopians lack sprinting ability) is due to their shared genetics is thought unthinkable.
For example, last week four academics of middling repute issued a set of talking points in the popular Race Is Not a Biological Category genre entitled “Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer.” Citing no data other than their own authority, they asserted:
Research in the 20th century found that the crude categorizations used colloquially (black, white, East Asian etc.) were not reflected in actual patterns of genetic variation, meaning that differences and similarities in DNA between people did not perfectly match the traditional racial terms.
In our sublunary world, few things “perfectly match” our terms. But a less intentionally misleading statement would be:
Research in the 21st century found that the crude categorizations used colloquially (black, white, East Asian etc.) WERE reflected in actual patterns of genetic variation, meaning that differences and similarities in DNA between people did more or less match the traditional racial terms, although not perfectly.
If the authors had possessed the courage to challenge superstar geneticist David Reich of Harvard, who has emerged in this decade as the most productive researcher into race, ancient and modern, the Middling Four could at least have made their essay less boring.
Reich wrote in The New York Times last year:
But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.” Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago—before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
Granted, tangling with David Reich, as overconfident science denialist Angela Saini tried to do (with amusing results), is not a prudent strategy. So, the four authors, Ewan Birney, Jennifer Raff, Adam Rutherford, and Aylwyn Scally, have instead aimed their “explainer” at debunking unnamed but clearly evil wreckers:
Amidst this ongoing surge of new information, there are darker currents. A small number of researchers, mostly well outside of the scientific mainstream, have seized upon some of the new findings and methods in human genetics, and are part of a social-media cottage-industry that disseminates and amplifies low-quality or distorted science, sometimes in the form of scientific papers, sometimes as internet memes—under the guise of euphemisms such as “race realism” or “human biodiversity.”
Their essay is representative of most conventional wisdom on the topic of human biodiversity in that it’s boring and uninformative. No names are named, no citations included, and virtually no examples given. It mostly consists of assertions that you are supposed to take on their (middling) authority.
In contrast, I tend toward the exact opposite writing style. I may not convince you of my ideas, but I’m going to provide you with a lot of data and examples. The human world is an interesting place, although you wouldn’t know that from reading “Pseudoscience.”
I pointed out on Twitter that it’s hard to reconcile the current dogma about race not being a biological reality with what we see in sports, such as each of the last 72 finalists in the Olympic 100-meter dash going all the way back to 1984 nine Olympics ago being at least half sub-Saharan in ancestry.
The Middling Four were not amused. Scally tweeted dismissively:
Olympic medals are second only to nobel prizes as a really bad starting point for thinking about human genetics.
When numerous people pointed out data inconvenient to his theory, he complained:
Lol, my timeline is now just a hosepipe of shite about black people winning the 100m sprint.
Birney assumed I was arguing that genes for dark skin color make you a faster runner:
It would be speculation about the links to skin pigmentation loci to 100m running ability – it’s not obvious that they *should* be linked, but biology is weird, and we don’t have data. I wouldn’t take the 100m Olympic final as way to answer this question though.
If you’ve actually thought about the subject, you’d know that there are also lots of dark-skinned people in South Asia, but South Asians are perhaps the least athletic people on earth. The last person born in India to win an Olympic running medal appears to have been Englishman Norman Pritchard in the 1900 Games.
No, sub-Saharan ancestry correlates with running efficiency: sprinting velocity in West Africa, distance endurance in the East African highlands.
Birney was offended by the idea that we could learn anything about genetics from the Olympic 100-meter dash. Think of the tiny sample size!
Actually, the sample size is fairly close to every man on earth. By age 12, 99 percent of boys know some other boy who is a faster runner than them. The 1 percent who don’t keep competing at running until they meet somebody they can’t ever beat. This process goes on and on until, finally, there are eight black guys lined up in the Olympic 100-meter dash final. The gun goes off, and a little under ten seconds later Usain Bolt wins and goes on to make $100 million in endorsements.
Birney was even more offended when I pointed out that if you don’t think running speed correlates with sub-Saharan ancestry, just look at photos of top sprinters like Bolt and Carl Lewis and distance runners like Eliud Kipchoge, who just ran 26.2 miles in under two hours. They are almost all quite black. Birney responded:
For (b) using skin colour to genotype people is about 30-50 odd loci around the genome, out of a notional need for about 300,000. Looking at people is just plain madness as a genotyping strategy.
In reality, I look at people all the time to get some sense of their ancestry. You do too.
For example, in 2016, The New York Times declared Sen. Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, to be “not white.”
“Is that true?” I wondered. So, I scanned hundreds of photos of Rubio online. Judging from his looks, there was a sizable chance he was 100 percent white, but there was also a good chance he was very slightly Amerindian and/or black. So then I dug up pictures of his parents and siblings. On average, they looked a little less white than Marco does, so I concluded he probably wasn’t 100 percent white.
In 2019, Rubio went on Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots TV program and had his DNA scanned. He came out:
92.4 percent European
4.6 percent Native American
1.2 percent Sub-Saharan African
0.2 percent North African
1.2 percent Unmatched
Likewise, if you don’t believe that looking at a photo of Carl Lewis, the greatest American sprinter, can tell you much about his ancestry, you can also look at pictures of his relatives. Both of his parents were respected athletes and coaches, as was his sister Carol Lewis, a three-time Olympian. They all look quite black.
Sub-Saharan blacks are, like all racial groups, a large extended family.
They are a race because they tend to be more related to each other than to people of other races. A racial group is just an extended family that has more endurance and cohesion than a simple extended family because it has some degree of inbreeding.
The term “inbreeding” tends to freak out Americans, but it’s simply a mathematical inevitability for every long-enough-lasting extended family. Icelanders, for example, have largely been marrying other Icelanders for the past 1,000 years, or roughly thirty generations. Back thirty generations there would be over one billion open slots to fill in an Icelander’s family tree, but there have never been even a million people in Iceland. So, lots of ancestors of present-day Icelanders did double duty.
As Reich points out, sub-Saharans have largely been reproductively isolated for 70,000 years, or more than 2,000 generations.
This fundamental relationship between family and race is often overlooked. As Charles Darwin explained to T.H. Huxley in 1857, surface features such as color aren’t the essence of species or race, they are simply clues to what is more essential: genealogy. Contra Birney, Darwin explained:
Generally, we may safely presume, that the resemblance of races & their pedigrees would go together.
Strikingly, in horse racing, where the pedigrees of each thoroughbred are fully documented for at least a dozen generations, nobody much cares about color in forecasting which horse will prove fastest. That’s because bettors know everything about horses’ genealogy.
Essays like this one reflect the common assumption that the reality of racial differences must be covered up from the public to prevent mass violence.
In reality, however, most everybody who watches sports on television has already noticed the obviousness of racial diversity in genetic propensities and, rather than going out and waging genocide, has instead gone to the fridge and gotten another beer.
Every year Halloween seems to get more popular. Between the free candy and the dress-up parties, the month of October also provides an excuse to ruminate on the themes of horror, the occult, and the strange. Given the left’s depiction of Republicans and conservatives as a blandly wholesome people, it’s fun to think of the right’s spiritual underbelly. Some of our most popular right-leaning politicians and intellectuals have held beliefs that are mystical, weird, and “New Agey.” I would even allow the word…spooky.
Let’s start with the president. Our tweeting White House alpha male was brought up in a unique church. Trump’s pastor was Norman Vincent Peale. Peale blended Christianity with the doctrine of New Thought or “the power of positive thinking.” This was decades before Oprah promoted “The Secret.” It was before Joel Osteen preached his own brand of sunshine-and-lollipops Christianity. The concept that unites this group is their teaching of the omnipotence of the human will. The idea that you can think, talk, and will your way to self-improvement has been the heart of American romanticism since at least the 19th century.
New Thought and positive thinking teaches that one should cultivate one’s own will and desires religiously. You see this in practice when people talk of “speaking things into existence,” deploy visualization techniques, or make vision boards. Some have argued these mystical ideas go back further to Idealist and Hermetic traditions, that they begin in the mystery religions of the ancient world. In many ways these ideas are the opposite of Christianity in the Bible, which teaches that one submit their will to God’s will.
Put another way, Trump was raised under Peale’s Christianized version of the “Do what thou wilt” ethos made famous by occultist Aleister Crowley (and championed later by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page). This sounds ominous. However, Trump is not the first Republican to get inspiration from the occult.
The superhero of the Republican Party is still Ronald Reagan. Since he was a nondenominational Christian, it’s presumed he was a straightforward evangelical. However, this was not the case. For Reagan, the importance of religious belief was simply in the believing. His attitude toward religion resembled that of another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower:
“[The American] form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”
Reagan’s wife, Nancy, famously took advice from astrologers. It was on astrological advice that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as governor of California on Jan. 2 at exactly 12:10 a.m. Reagan’s superstitious mindset continued in his presidency with his reliance on astrologer Joan Quigley.
An astrologer had set the time for summit meetings, presidential debates, Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, State of the Union addresses and much more. Without an O.K. from the astrologer, he said, Air Force One did not take off.
What drove Reagan’s strange beliefs? Some point to his friendship with the Los Angeles occultist Manly P. Hall. In the 1930s, Hall became a spiritual guru and was a prodigious scholar of ancient religions. Reagan borrowed a number of stories and phrases from Hall’s writing for his own speeches. Decades later the future Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson would teach classes at Hall’s school, the Philosophical Research Society. There she would cover the New Age book A Course in Miracles. It goes to show, it is not just liberal Democrats who go into the mystic.
Then there is the case of Russell Kirk. Kirk was one of the most famous mid-20th-century conservative intellectuals. His 1953 book The Conservative Mind arguably launched the modern conservative movement. He was there for the founding of National Review. He was even well-liked by liberals. The film critic Roger Ebert once called him his “favorite conservative.” Kirk eventually became a Catholic (practically a legal obligation if one wants to write for National Review), but he had an occult background. As Kirk wrote in a letter: “Henry James was a man with Swedenborgian forebears who didn’t believe in ghosts; I am one with Swedenborgian forebears who does believe in ghosts.”
Kirk would hold séances and practiced the tarot until the 1970s. He used his spiritualist background for fuel in his literary career and was considered one of the premier writers of ghost stories, winning praise from the likes of Ray Bradbury, Stephen King (with whom he shared an agent), and Jerry Pournelle.
General Patton was the very image of American masculinity in World War II. He also believed in reincarnation. When a British general said to Patton, “George, you would have made a great marshal for Napoleon if you had lived in the 19th century.” Patton remarked, “But I did.”
Samuel Hayakawa was the Republican senator representing California from 1977 until 1983. He was a proponent of Alfred Korzybski’s discipline called General Semantics. In its founding text, Science and Sanity, General Semantics is presented as “both a theoretical and a practical system whose adoption can reliably alter human behavior in the direction of greater sanity.” Imagine grammar Nazis believing they could save the world and you get the idea. General Semantics would fall out of favor in the 1950s, with many of its followers abandoning it for L. Ron Hubbard’s similar but more exciting system called Dianetics. At least Scientology offered them the opportunity to become a movie star’s slave.
And one of the greatest conservative writers of any era, G.K. Chesterton, got caught up in the spiritualist craze of the 1870s. He described himself as a brief dabbler in spiritualism without having formally become a spiritualist. Chesterton said of his experience with the Ouija board:
I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will…. The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies…. [They] are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.
Just how many other famous Republicans and conservatives had a penchant for the mystical and spooky? To find out we’d perhaps have to consult the owl at Bohemian Grove, or join the mysterious Skull and Bones.
Sunday morning, President Trump announced that the world’s worst terrorist, the head of the ISIS caliphate who had raped an American woman, had received justice.
About to be captured and carried off in a helicopter by U.S. special forces, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself up with an explosive vest in a compound in northwest Syria. The long search for the sadist and fanatic had ended in triumph. No U.S. troops were lost.
That evening, Trump went out to the fifth game of the World Series between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros. As his face was flashed on the big screen, the stadium erupted with people booing and chanting, “Impeach Trump!” and “Lock him up!”
That Trump is not cheered at a D.C. baseball game is not odd, for the spectators are not working-class Trumpians. Series tickets cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, and the spectators are drawn from a town that gave Donald Trump 4% of its votes in 2016.
The mutual distrust in this city was on display when Trump told the press yesterday morning that he had not alerted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the impending U.S. raid, because he was afraid of leaks.
“I wanted to make sure this kept secret,” said Trump. “I don’t want to have people lost. … We were going to notify them last night, but we decided not to do that because Washington leaks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. … A leak could have cost the death of all of them.”
The Russians, however, were alerted we were coming, as they control the airspace over the compound we were targeting. And Trump thanked the Russians for their cooperation.
Also left out of the loop was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, one of the “Gang of Eight” that is almost always given a heads-up about major military operations. Schiff is conducting secret hearings to drum up support for Trump’s impeachment and removal for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
It is imprecise to say this city is divided over Trump. It is rather almost solidly united behind what millions of Middle Americans believe to be a deep state-media conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election and effect a coup d’etat against a president whom this city detests but fears it cannot defeat in 2020.
A week ago, this writer noted the astonishing number of foreign capitals that were on fire with protests that go beyond marching and demonstrating — to riot, rebellion and even revolution. As with the “yellow vest” protests that shut down Paris on many weekends this past year, and the disorders in Hong Kong, the epidemic had spread to Beirut, Barcelona and Santiago, Chile.
In Iraq, over 200 have been killed and thousands injured in protests this month against the Baghdad regime. In Algeria, now six months after President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to step down, rioters still battle the army.
The thread common to these uncivil, often-violent disruptions?
A conviction that the cause the protesters are advancing is so critical, noble and necessary that democratic rules may be dispensed with and law and order suspended in pursuit of the cause.
Saturday’s Washington Post describes the mindset that is taking hold in D.C. among militants, using as an example the Extinction Rebellion group’s dragging of a boat into the street at 16th & K to block traffic for hours to call attention to rising sea levels.
“Blocking traffic may only be the beginning,” wrote Marissa Lang. “As protests in the District continue at a rate of about two a day, activists looking to stand out from crowds that march near the White House or the Mall have resorted to more disruptive measures in recent weeks — a tactic that experts said will probably escalate.”
She cites sociology professor Dana Fisher: “There has been a lot of discussion among people on the left who use protests as a tactic that peaceful, traditional protests may not be enough. … That could mean … more people blocking traffic. … I think we’re going to see a lot more people coming into D.C. to get arrested.”
Fisher continues: “When activists don’t feel like their grievances are being heard or responded to … the natural progression is to get more confrontational and, sometimes, to get more violent. … I’m … surprised it’s taken so long.”
Who wins when leftists go lawless — in liberal citadels like D.C.?
This thinking echoes the famous “bodies upon the gears” speech of Mario Savio at the famous 1964 University of California, Berkeley campus riot: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that … you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”
After Berkeley came civil disobedience; the burning of ROTC buildings; and urban riots marked by looting, shooting and arson. Out of that came Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide, Ronald Reagan, and Republican triumphs in five of six presidential elections starting in 1968.
Bring it on.
I’m starting this week’s column on a self-indulgent note. Bear with me; I have a larger point to make. But first, let’s talk about my bloated, misshapen physique. I used to be rail-thin, but about four years ago, age and my unhealthy lifestyle finally caught up with me. My hair grayed, my stomach swelled, and my chin vanished like Atlantis in a sea of cellulite.
Whenever I’d appear on a vodcast, I’d get YouTube comments asking, “Are you really David Cole? David Cole is young and svelte. You sure you’re him?”
See, a portion of my fan base knows me only from my Holocaust work—the documentaries and TV shows I did in the early 1990s. When I was a kid. Those old videos, and my appearances on programs like 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Donahue, Morton Downey, and Montel Williams, centered around what I was infamous for back in those days: exposing fakes in the evidentiary record of the Holocaust. Fake film footage, fraudulent testimony, and, most notoriously, physical evidence that was inaccurately or deceitfully presented. It was a fun life full of international travel, speaking gigs, and the occasional assault and death warrant.
But being a gadfly is not being a historian. Far more important is the content I produced detailing my overall thesis regarding the Holocaust. Not just what didn’t happen, but what did. The what, who, when, and how of it. And while my thesis has been praised by both revisionists and anti-revisionists alike, to the fan base stuck in the ’90s, it’s a completely irrelevant detail of my work. Ninety percent of the online messages I receive reference my “debunking” activities. “Talk about when you exposed that fake gas chamber! Remember when you busted that staged ‘Nazi’ footage? Hey—do another video where you walk through a gas chamber showing the windows and doors that lock from the inside!”
I’ve written more about the Holocaust since my “outing” in 2013 than I wrote in the entire decade of the ’90s. I wrote a book on the topic. But everyone wants to talk about “fake gas chambers” and “fake footage.” It pisses me off.
Well, it used to. I recently had an epiphany, courtesy of leftists, neocons, and Syria…a revelation that made me realize that the Holocaust content I produced back in the early ’90s probably does matter more than what I’ve done since. Who the hell cares about my vaunted historical thesis? Who gives a rat’s ass about Aktion Reinhard or Wilhelm Kube or the Korherr Report or Heinz Höppner’s influence on Himmler’s 1940 anti-Bolshevist mindset? Yawn! Even Jews don’t care about such minutiae.
My thesis might be 100% accurate. It might be 100% bullshit. It might be 50% of each. None of that matters compared with the fact that it’s completely irrelevant to what’s happening in the world today. But wartime propaganda fakes? That topic has relevance, because those who push for war continue to use fake footage, fake testimony, and faked physical evidence to move the gullible and stupid toward an acceptance of one new conflict, one new intervention, after another.
See, all this time I had my fans figured wrong. I pretentiously thought they were ignoring the most vital part of my oeuvre. But no, just the opposite. They were quite rightly responding to the aspect of my work that transcends one particular war and one particular atrocity.
If you want to learn about the Holocaust, great. As Emil Faber famously said, “Knowledge is good.” But if you choose not to immerse yourself in such details, it really won’t make a damn bit of difference to your life or your community.
But the manufacturing of fraudulent evidence in the service of a pro-war agenda matters. You don’t have to be a soldier, or a soldier’s family member, for wars to matter. The destabilization caused by a shitstorm like the Syrian regime-change fiasco never stays regional. So when the war-drivers use fakes and deceptions to garner popular support for their latest adventure, that’s something that should be of interest to you, no matter who you are or where you live.
Everyone should have at least some working knowledge, some awareness, of the history of wartime fakery. So as much as I hate to admit it, I was wrong to deride people for concentrating on what I considered the least important aspect of my work. And I’ll tell you the exact moment I had that epiphany: It was when ABC “News” misrepresented video of a Kentucky gun range as front-line battle footage showing innocent Kurds being obliterated in the wake of Trump’s “abandonment.” The fraud was quickly exposed (not by mainstream “media critics,” but by the gadflies who do today exactly what I was doing thirty years ago), and ABC apologized. With even Snopes acknowledging the deceit, the aforementioned critics had no choice but to act like they cared all along, as they puffed their cheeks and bellowed, “ABC owes us an explanation!” Having shown what good, conscientious media critics they are, they felt no need to actually push for an explanation. Hey—they asked. Isn’t that enough? Of course, ABC provided no explanation, and the critics happily let the unfortunate incident slide.
As an AIDS-riddled Aussie once so sagely observed, everything old is new again. In 1989, the U.S. National Archives heralded an amazing find: actual footage of a gas chamber in a Western Front Nazi concentration camp. That’ll silence those damn revisionists! The “discovery” was announced in a National Archives book titled The Holocaust, Israel, and the Jews. The footage was described as showing the “interior of a gas chamber, including handprints dug into the cement wall by the victims.” When the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993, the footage was featured as evidence of the Nazis’ extermination program.
Three days in the National Archives is all it took for me to uncover the source Signal Corps film from which the “gas chamber” footage had been extracted. In fact, the footage was actually of…ready for this?…a gun range. A Parisian firing range that had been used by the Nazis during the war to execute resistance fighters. No Jews, no gas. The “handprints dug into the cement wall” were actually bullet holes in the wall behind the posts where the condemned partisans were tied.
Two gun ranges, 75 years apart. Different culprits, different objectives, but the same con, the same fraudulent misuse of firing-range footage, and the same refusal to provide an explanation for the “error.” The war propagandists have a limited bag of tricks, so by necessity locations and themes are reused. Ah, themes. Dead kids is a huge theme. Like the footage of that “dead” Kurdish girl being cradled by her grieving mom. The footage that half of Hollywood and damn near every Democrat and neocon tweeted a few weeks ago. The footage where the dead girl blinks and moves her head—that dead Kurdish girl.
Soon enough, the war cheerleaders were forced to admit that the young girl was actually just “sick,” but same difference, right? After all, by refusing to escalate in Syria, Trump empowered the germs that felled her.
From Kuwaiti babies tossed from incubators to phony Assad poison-gas attacks, war fakes are as predictable as Magicicadas and far more destructive. So it stands to reason that anything that encourages people to be more skeptical of wartime propaganda is positive. And while most so-called professional skeptics prefer to question things like Bigfoot, UFOs, and fortune-tellers, I’d humbly point out that the death toll from wars has been a bit greater than the death toll from Bigfoots, so if there’s anything worthy of a skeptical eye, it’s propaganda crafted with the intent of inflaming pro-war passions.
To be clear, the existence of fakes in the fabric of Holocaust historiography doesn’t mean the Holocaust didn’t happen, any more than Syrian war fakes mean that Turkey’s objectives in the region are noble. It should also be pointed out that Holocaust fakes weren’t used to initiate a war. Rather, in the West, they served as an ex post facto reason for fighting once Stalin voided any possibility of Polish independence. When Eisenhower visited the newly liberated Ohrdruf camp in April ’45, he took every opportunity to exploit the images of dead and dying inmates. That Ohrdruf had opened only a little over four months prior to liberation, that it was not a “Jewish” camp, and that it had nothing to do with the Holocaust mattered not; we needed dead bodies, stat. In one of my favorite forgotten episodes of the war, Churchill personally complained to Eisenhower that the British “atrocity team” he’d dispatched to Ohrdruf to obtain dead-body photos for British use had been “hustled” out of the camp by the Americans.
Two towering Allied figures fighting over access to emaciated stiffs. That’s how important atrocity images, context be damned, were to the Western Allies, the Soviets, and the Jews. And for the latter, the fakes retained their value long after the war ended (hence the appearance of new fabrications, like the Parisian gun-range footage, well into the 1990s).
There had been wartime propaganda long before World War II, but the Holocaust fakes, some of which were intentional and others the result of wartime chaos and confusion, helped forge a template that continues to be used to this day, especially when the goal is to motivate Americans to support intervention in the name of saving persecuted minorities. I have several leftist friends who’ve forgotten all about their fanatical anti-Bushism as they bitch and moan about how Trump “abandoned” the poor waifish Kurds. These friends were so “anti-war” in 2001, they didn’t even consider 9/11 a valid reason to put boots on the ground or bombers in the air. But all of a sudden the Kurds are the new Jews, and Trump is leaving them to be gassed. All of a sudden Tulsi Gabbard is a one-woman Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, equal parts Russian asset and genocidal Nazi.
Because look at that twitching totally not-dead dead Kurdish girl.
Watching suckers fall for such vulgar propaganda, and watching skeptics debunk it, has prompted me to make peace with the “fans” who continue to obsess over the more sensationalistic accomplishments of my youth. If I played even a small role in making people a tad less susceptible to manufactured atrocity propaganda, I’m cool with it. Every fake from long ago that’s debunked can give people a little more immunity to the fakes being employed today. Which probably explains why YouTube is pulling all of my 1990s videos and TV appearances. Up until now, YouTube pretty much left my old stuff alone. I never uploaded those ancient vids myself, but others did, and I’d occasionally note with amusement how many views they had (cumulatively, a couple million).
I’d assumed that YouTube ignored them because they regarded them as irrelevant.
It appears YouTube and I shared an epiphany. What are the odds?
I’ve never needed a tampon, and I’m 100% certain it’s directly related to the fact that I’m a man.
Tampons are for people who get periods. Women get periods and men don’t. These were simple facts that we, as a former society, used to embrace unquestioningly, because to do otherwise would be…insane?
The problem is, people who have an adversarial relationship with reality can’t seem to rest until they’ve made everyone as crazy as they are.
My preemptive apologies to those of you who’ve been bludgeoned and/or brainwashed into submitting to a very obvious lie, but our hysteria-prone friends in the “transgender” community have a fundamentally adversarial relationship with reality. Just like the fact that I don’t have a carburetor and four tires means that I’m not a Volkswagen, the fact that you don’t have natural breasts and a natural vagina means you aren’t a woman.
But don’t try telling them that, though. They’ll do everything they can to ruin your life and make you almost as miserable as they are. Under threat of extreme and unending pain, we are required to pretend they aren’t the ones who are pretending.
Would anyone—and I mean anyone, even many trannies who simply want to live out their fantasy in peace—have supported this trans-rights thing if they knew it would immediately blossom into this annoyingly relentless, reality-impaired, destroy-all-enemies grievance-monster? I mean, due to the fact that you never stop complaining, I’m starting to think that many of you guys actually are women.
But my mission here today isn’t to address the raging majority or so of trannies who, despite the fact that gender is absolutely fluid, decide to escape the stigma of toxic masculinity and switch to Team Female. Instead, my focus is on the tiny minority of trannies who make the opposite trek across the Red Sea—those butch broads who merely can’t accept that they’re masculine females and that nature made a little mistake; no, they insist we say it was the physician who correctly identified their genitals at birth who made the mistake.
These are the ones who want us to look reality square in the eye and lie to it—they want us to say that despite the fact that they still menstruate, they are men.
After all, you can’t say “menstruate” without saying “men,” can you? There must be a reason they don’t call it womenstruation, n’est-ce pas?
When people are accustomed to hearing crazy talk, normal talk sounds crazy to them.
If you’re “woke,” you won’t understand what I’m about to say, but if you’re even remotely awake, you will—the most problematic thing about this whole male-feminine-product thing is a purely strategic one—where do they put them? Up their ass? Where else is a “man” going to put a tampon? If they’re putting them up a bleeding vagina, then “they” are not a man and “you” are either delusional or a liar.
“Kenny” Jones is a black woman who pretends she’s a man and writes articles about it. Kenny recently bared it all for an article on self.com called “Getting My Period Made Me Feel Like Less of a Man—Even Though I Knew I Was,” a clumsily phrased headline that implies Kenny always knew he was less than a man—and further implies that Kenny would be well-suited to spend less time on hormone replacement therapy and more time hiring a good copyeditor. Like so many misfits, Kenny blames society for Kenny’s unhappiness:
Society in general still views menstruation as strictly a thing that cisgender women experience—which is simply not the case. Not everyone who gets a period is a woman, and not every woman gets a period….I knew I was meant to be a boy since I was 14. At 15 years old, I started menstruating….Getting a period made me feel like less of a man, even though my teenage self already identified as male. I, too, used to associate periods solely with cisgender women. In my eyes, a period was the opposite of masculine, and so my ego and internalized expectations of male dominance were enough to convince me to bottle it up and speak about it with no one.
Maybe you should have heeded your internalized expectations there, Kenny.
Kenny also speaks of his mind and body “battling each other.” So does a certain Cass Clemmer, a gingery “menstrual health activist” who resembles a gay young Ron Howard and thought it would be a good idea to take pictures of herself with a blood-stained crotch as some kind of creepy cri de coeur to the world about the pain attendant to telling your body that you’re a man while your body barks back, “No, you’re still a chick, you daffy broad.” Cass writes about how she feels her “body had betrayed me” and that menstruation is a reminder that there’s a “war raging deep inside” of her.”
Sounds like you girls have some problems. We’ve been saying that for years.
A poetic soul, Cass writes of the unique mental pain that accompanies menstruating while pretending you’re a man:
See my body had betrayed me,
That red dot, the wax seal,
On a contract left there broken,
A gender identity that wasn’t real.
Most people deal with blood and tissue,
And yet my body forces me to surrender,
Cause every time I get my cycle,
Is another day I shed my gender….
The blood drips from an open wound,
Of a war waging deep inside my corpse,
The battle between mind and body,
Immovable object; unstoppable force.
Sounds like it really sucks to be you, Cass. I think we can both agree on that.
Over the summer, a certain Ben Saunders—a mannish woman who insists that we play along with her delusion and pretend she’s a man—contacted Procter & Gamble, who produce the Always line of feminine-hygiene products, asking them why on Earth they would put the universal logo for “female” on a product that everyone knows is also used by trans men? Did neither Procter, nor for that matter Gamble, realize that men can have periods? Are they entirely unaware—or, far worse, so abjectly unfeeling—that they fail to realize by including a female logo on a product that women who insist they’re men (but are hampered by the fact that they’re actually still women, which is why they still menstruate—DUH!) may feel dysphoric and even catch a hint of the vapors? Were they willing to stake their entire corporate future on the outside chance that they’d be able to withstand the scorched-earth negative-PR blizzard of fire and brimstone that befalls anyone foolhardy enough to step on the immensely delicate baby toes of the Sacred Transgender Community?
(The Always brand produces pads and liners rather than tampons, but the point stands—if you strap a lady-diaper between your legs to sop up the blood that’s leaking from your vagina every month, I’m going to rule out any possibility that you’re a man, kill me if you must.)
Wisely—because hell hath no fury like a tranny ignored—Procter & Gamble capitulated and removed the offending logo from their feminine sanitary napkins—sorry, their gender-neutral menstrual products that in no way are intended to suggest that women, as well as the women who pretend that they’re men, are unclean, even if blood and mucus are dripping from them in gobs.
A woman—I think—named Sheryl from the Always marketing division decided to inform “Ben” that she had successfully bent them to her will. It was delivered as an open letter, because why inform someone privately when you can virtue-signal to the world that you are playing along with the Big Lie for fear of being hurt? It read:
Dear Ben, I wanted to come back to you regarding your message about the Always wrappers’ design with the female symbol on it you sent 18/06/2019.
We listened to you and our marketing team worked a solution!
We are glad to inform you that as of December we will use a new wrapper design without the feminine symbol.
Please just be aware that you might find products with the old wrapper design in the stores for some weeks after December, as the distribution of the new packages might take some time – the new designs should be in store Jan/Feb 2020.
We are absolutely grateful for having people like you voicing their opinions. Thank you for contacting us, your comments help us improve every day!
Dear Sheryl: You stink.
You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I long for the day when we can return to a more rugged, natural, and frontierlike existence—a world where the men are men, and only women wear tampons.
The Week’s Cloudiest, Dowdiest, and Rowdiest Headlines
POPE FRANCIS FAT-SHAMES THE WORLD
Since you never see him wearing yoga pants, it’s impossible to tell whether or not Pope Francis is in good shape. Not only do the official church vestments make a man look holy—they cover over a possible lifetime of dietary sins.
But it is not our role to judge. Whether or not he’s being hypocritical, Pope Francis recently agreed—in spirit, at least—with a recent Taki’s Magazine editorial which plainly stated that “Fat People Are Killing Us.”
While addressing some guy with an unpronounceable Asian name who works on food policy for the UN, the pope noted that nearly as many humans are obese worldwide as are chronically hungry—there are 700 million Mr. Fatty Fatpants globally compared to 820 million belly-bloated stick bugs—and said that food “is ceasing to be a means of subsistence and turning into an avenue of personal destruction.”
(On a side note, Avenue of Personal Destruction will always be our favorite Guns N’ Roses album.)
But instead of doing the sensible thing—i.e., telling all the obese people to hand over their sandwiches to the malnourished—the pope had to immediately go full-blown Chapo Trap House hipster communist again:
The battle against hunger and malnutrition will not end as long as the logic of the market prevails and profit is sought at any cost, with the result that food is relegated to a mere commercial product subject to financial speculation and with little regard for its cultural, social and indeed symbolic importance….It is a cruel, unjust and paradoxical reality that, today, there is food for everyone and yet not everyone has access to it, and that in some areas of the world food is wasted, discarded and consumed in excess. To escape from this spiral, we need to promote economic institutions and social initiatives which can give the poor regular access to basic resources.
Or maybe we could start taxing the churches. You can’t have “social initiatives” without taxes, right?
HUNGARY THREATENS TO “USE FORCE” AGAINST UNWANTED REFUGEES
Speaking of hunger—oh, sorry, Hungary—Prime Minister Viktor Orban recently got into a penile staring contest with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and only history will tell whose penis blinked first.
In what was basically a promise to wage race war, Erdogan threatened to “open the gates” and flood Europe with 3.6 million refugees if Europeans persisted in criticizing his recent decision to stick his toes into Syria:
Hey EU, wake up. I say it again: if you try to frame our operation there as an invasion, our task is simple: we will open the doors and send 3.6 million migrants to you.
Flexing his pecs and puffing up his lats, Orban told Erdogan to kick rocks:
If Turkey sets off further hundreds of thousands (on top of those it has already), then we will need to use force to protect the Hungarian border and the Serbian-Hungarian frontier and I do not wish for anyone that we should need to resort to that.
Erdogan is headed to Budapest next month for a powwow with Orban. We’d take Orban in a traditional wrestling match—and Erdogan if they were to compete in oil wrestling.
ENGLISH POLICE LET MALE RAPISTS DESIGNATE THEMSELVES AS FEMALES
Despite the fact that by now, everyone—including and maybe even especially the trannies—realizes that this whole “tranny” thing is merely a government psyops program to break us psychologically and force us to admit that apples are oranges so long as you please shut up about it, they are never going to shut up about it no matter how pathetically and abjectly we capitulate.
Six different English police forces are now allowing male rapists—and in English law, a penis is necessary to commit rape, so “male rapist” would sound redundant if we weren’t living in an insane asylum—to register their gender as female.
For Nicola Williams, the director of a group called Fair Play for Women who has that perma-trauma look on her face that suggests she might have actually been raped at least once and perhaps serially, this is yet another slap in the face. If you’re gonna be raped, she argues, for heaven’s sake at least let it be by a man with a traditional male organ:
You can’t get much more of a male crime than rape. It would be highly offensive to a woman who was raped to have it written down that her attacker was a female when clearly that was a male with a penis.
It’s also counterfactual and counterintuitive to allege that woman can rape women. As everyone knows, if you get a couple drinks in them and they start making out, they’ll hop in the sack faster than you can say, “Billie Jean King.”
THE EPIDEMIC OF RACISM IN NORTH AMERICAN PARKING LOTS
Parking lots should be a place where all groups, creeds, races, genders, gender identities, sexual preferences, disabilities, accents, and heights can come together to park their cars.
Too often, however, they resemble Klan meetings or beer halls in Nazi Germany.
In Canada—it’s this country to the north of the United States that no one ever thinks about—a simple parking dispute has turned into a mini race war. In British Columbia last August, a Chinese lady named Amy Xu began filming a parking dispute with a woman who appeared to be white and who had obviously not only committed a violation by occupying part of the China lady’s parking space, she also slammed her own door into another car while trying to avoid Chinese street justice.
In the film, which of course went viral because it’s hilarious, a woman subsequently identified as Carla Waldman blows raspberries at the Chinese woman and begins chanting “Chinky Chinky China Lady,” which we must admit is the dadgum catchiest racial slur we’ve heard in a coon’s age. She also tells her, “Go back to China where you belong, ya fuckin’ asshole….You give the people a bad name here. We hate you people.”
It turns out that Waldman is Jewish and an active campaigner against anti-Semitism.
Jewy, Jewy—oh, forget it.
In Connecticut, two college students who are described as “white” but appear swarthy and whose surnames are Albanian and Turkish have been arrested…
…that’s right—arrested and charged with a crime…
…after a surreptitious video revealed them walking in a campus parking lot and gigglingly saying the word “nigger.”
Campus police arrested U. of Connecticut students Jarred Karal and Ryan Mucaj last Monday and charged them with violating a new state law that makes it a crime to ridicule “any person or class of people on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality, or race.”
During a campus protest Monday afternoon, hundreds of students allegedly marched in horror at the thought of the “N-word” being uttered at their school, chanting, “It’s more than just a word.”
No, it’s not. It’s just a word. When you think it’s more than just a word? That’s when you start screwing up everything.
A third person seen in the video was not charged, and we’ll assume it’s because he was an N-word.
FESTIVE SEASONAL BLACK-O’-LANTERNS LEAD TO OUTRAGE, DISGUST
Due to public outrage and the looming threat of yet another global race war, a Bed, Bath & Beyond store in Nyack, NY was forced to pull its “controversial” black jack-o’-lanterns after an extremely fat and unpleasant-looking black man named Wilbur Aldridge, director of the regional NAACP, threatened to shame them and shame them and keep shaming them.
The black-o’-lanterns initially caused a stir after a local law firm proudly displayed them outside their offices. In the ensuing hurricane of invective, a spokes-lawyer issued a statement insisting they had no idea that people would be offended by the black pumpkins and that they actually hate racism as much as the next guy—and the next guy hates racism a lot.
These people aren’t going to stop until something bad happens, are they?
HIV-POSITIVE WHITE DJ ACCUSED OF PIMPING OUT NEARLY 700 BLACK GIRLS, NO JOKE
It’s not often that you hear of a white pimp who traffics in black girls—it’s usually the other way around, and to be frank, it’s truly one of the rare entrepreneurial endeavors in which black males excel.
However, a white DJ in South Carolina named Jason Roger Pope—a blank-faced wigger who appears incapable of expressing any emotion on his mug whatsoever—was arrested in August and charged with sex crimes and human trafficking. Arrest warrants state that between July 2017 and July 2019, Pope forced four underage black girls to have sex with him at his home. The youngest was 13.
Oh—Pope is HIV-positive, too. Figured it was time to throw that golden McNugget into the stew.
He is suspected of luring nearly 700 black girls into a life of prostitution. He has a Facebook photo gallery called “DJ Kid (Parties & Girls)” that shows him cavorting—again, each time with absolutely no expression on his face—with more than 100 ladies of Negroidal ancestry.
Jason, if what they say about you is true, what you’ve done is not cool at all—at ALL. But we’d be lying if we said it wasn’t impressive.
GOOGLE BANS FAGGOTS FROM ITS ADS
Like everybody else, we figured that Google was a “woke” and tolerant corporation. We also assumed that everyone who runs it is gay, just like they are at all the other tech titans.
Boy, were we wrong!
An English restaurant called Fanny’s Rest Stop Café—for you Americans, that translates as “Vagina’s Rest Stop Café”—recently had an ad pulled for its faggots and peas dish because Google’s homophobic algorithmic wizards classified it as “inappropriate and offensive content.”
Wait a minute—what’s wrong with peas?
You don’t have to love the gays, Google. But we thought you accepted them. To hear that you banned them, though, makes us feel like we’re living in Germany in the early 1930s.
Every Monday, Jim Goad reads the previous day’s “Week That Perished” on his podcast.
I remember well a burglar who was angry at his imprisonment. I was examining him medically shortly after his arrival in what locals called “the big house.”
“I don’t need prison,” he said. “Prison’s no good to me.”
“But it is to me,” I said mildly.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “I’m a householder and you’re a repeat offender. While you’re in prison, you’re not burgling my house.”
He stifled a laugh, and repeated that prison was not what he needed.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“I need ’elp.”
So this is what the idea of therapy has descended to: the psychoanalysis of burglars to prevent them from breaking into houses and selling stolen goods. In the absence of the required therapy (a human right), he could continue to break into houses and sell stolen goods secure in the knowledge that it was not his fault but that of those who failed to give him the therapy that he needed.
But we in Britain are notorious for imprisoning a larger proportion of our population than any other country in Western Europe, Spain coming a fairly close second. Every good liberal knows that we have far too many people in prison.
The thoughtless, inhuman severity of the British criminal justice system can be best gauged by the case of Peter Duncan, a 52-year-old lawyer who was stabbed in the heart with a screwdriver by a 17-year-old youth called Ewan Ireland. Mr. Duncan and Ireland crossed paths at the entrance to a shopping center, going in opposite directions. Mr. Duncan raised his arm to let Ireland past, but for some reason Ireland took exception to this gesture of politeness and attacked Mr. Duncan, eventually stabbing him in the heart. The incident was caught on CCTV camera, as was the young murderer’s initial escape through the city.
Ireland had stolen the screwdriver, and was taking it to confront another youth over a dispute about some cigarettes (I have given evidence in two trials for murder committed in disputes between alcoholics over debts of £10 and £20). If he had not first killed Mr. Duncan, Ireland might have killed, and almost certainly would have wounded, the youth whom he was going to confront.
In the two years before he killed Mr. Duncan, Ireland had been convicted seventeen times for a total of 31 offenses. Furthermore, he was on bail at the time for affray, which is defined in English law as follows:
A person is guilty of affray if he uses or threatens unlawful violence towards another and his conduct is such as would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for his personal safety.
Among his other offenses were those of chasing his mother out of the house with a knife and threatening a bus driver with a knife when the bus driver told him that drinking alcohol on the bus was forbidden.
But this is far from all. If he were an averagely competent or lucky English lawbreaker (and from the pictures of him, he looks more than usually intelligent for such a type), he would have committed between five and twenty times as many crimes as those for which he had been caught and convicted, in other words between 150 and 600, at any rate very considerably more than a mere 31.
The fact, then, that he was still at liberty suggests just how thoughtlessly severe the English criminal justice system has become. Of course, the hundreds of thousands of victims created by this terrible and unthinking severity (there is nothing in principle unusual about this case) are mainly poor and therefore unimportant; for them, the chance of becoming victims of crime is regarded by liberals as a benefit received rather than a serious impediment to their lives. But Mr. Duncan was middle-class, a lawyer, and that is why his case was widely noticed and regarded as shocking. A similar dynamic, by the way, is observable in the relative weights given to the votes for and against Brexit: Some votes are more equal than others.
Oddly enough, one of the victims of the supposed unthinking severity of the criminal justice system is the perpetrator himself. Had he not been denied punishment, and had he been incarcerated properly for a sufficient length of time, not only would his victims not have been victimized, but he might, paradoxically, have had to spend less of his life incarcerated.
Another interesting lesson of this case is the uselessness of video surveillance in a society that has lost the will or confidence to punish wrongdoers. Next to China, Britain is the most heavily videoed society in the world, far more so than any other Western country, but also the one with by far the highest rate of violent crime in Western Europe. In Britain, then, Big Brother is watching you, but only as a kind of voyeur. The only people who fear him are the innocent. If Big Brother espies you waving a knife at your mother or at a bus driver, he will, in effect, look the other way.
The question not unnaturally arises as to why British society should have become so enfeebled, so lacking in moral confidence. In this, it is probably only the worst case of a general malaise in the Western world. My provisional answer would be the expansion of tertiary education, especially in nontechnical subjects. Huge numbers of people have now been educated in injustice and grievance studies of one kind or another, which have had for their effect the dissolution of a sense of human beings as agents rather than mere victimized vectors of forces. If people such as Ewan Ireland, and many like him, behave in the way that they do, it must be (as sociology, psychology, and criminology teaches) because of social forces beyond their control, and hence it is unjust to inflict punishment upon them. Punishment can only be justified where a man is a free agent and could have done otherwise than he did; but since he is never a free agent and could never have done otherwise than he did, it follows that punishment is never justified. Millions now believe this, thanks to tertiary education.
ENVOI
In case anyone should think that the case of Mr. Duncan was an isolated example, I may mention that on the day following that on which I wrote the article, I read of two young men in Manchester, Jamie Lee Hannon and Daniel Arthur White, who were interrupted by the owner of a vehicle as they were peacefully stealing it. They knocked him to the ground and then deliberately ran over him, fracturing his skull and causing a cerebral hemorrhage with lasting brain damage. Between them, Hannon and White had 23 convictions, which means that they had probably committed between 105 and 460 crimes. The thoughtlessly ferociously punitive, thoughtlessly cruel and heartless court sentenced them to spend 20 and 21 months in prison, respectively—though, of course, they may be eligible for early release.
Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the work goes back in time, before the grotesqueries of the present? Back, back, I say, but that’s to be expected. I’m such a fan of the past that if I could have one wish granted by Takimag, it would be for a review by William Dalrymple of the most uplifting movie ever, Ladies in Black, directed by the great Australian Bruce Beresford.
My, my, what memories of Australians and Oz it brought back: the great Lew Hoad, Mervyn Rose, Roy Emerson, Neale Fraser, Ken Fletcher, all great tennis players and good friends, and Sydney circa 1959, like a picture postcard from back then, not a single detail missing—large yellow cars, pith-helmeted traffic cops, two-tone shoes, vests, and hats included. Yes, I admit the nostalgic glow got to me like never before, but Beresford’s film is such a visual triumph, coupled with a story of coming of age both beautifully and tastefully told, that I remained seated in my bedroom after the end for fifteen minutes, in awe. That night I couldn’t sleep trying to figure out what happened, and why the world is so dreadfully different today.
There is nothing in it that’s dark, warped, or contemporary, nothing sick, which will probably turn it into a money loser in the U.K. and the U.S. of A. The degradation deposited on us by the film industry reflects today’s world of drugs and freak sexual mores and lifestyles. Oh yes, and we are not allowed to say things anymore that might offend anyone, including mass murderers who kill in the name of Allah. Militant secularists make sure we never say anything nice about Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, and God forbid we portray on film or on the printed page anyone of virtue and moral discipline. No wonder I was thunderstruck by Ladies in Black.
These ladies are shop assistants in a grand Sydney department store, the fictional Goode’s, and they include the most delightful and wholesome Angourie Rice and the beautiful Rachael Taylor. The movie was made this year, I think, and it makes Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life seem a downer by comparison. The teenage Miss Rice has a mother who adores her and a gruff father who works as a printer for the Sydney Morning Herald paper and doesn’t understand the modern world. Remember it’s 1959, pre–everything that’s horrible like the internet, Facebook, Twitter, computers, mobiles, selfies, the f-word, promiscuity, rap, leggings, porn, and the E.U. The teenager is divine and a top student. Her smile is to die for. She also works at Goode’s, and comes under the watchful eye of a Hungarian lady—once grand—looking out for her. She gets her to be prettier and prettier by showing her how to dress better and how to manage her hair. Overnight she becomes a rare beauty, always smiling, always happy and divine. Her mother is over the moon. The father is not so sure.
The Hungarian lady is married to a Hungarian gent who has a friend who is looking for female action. The friend is smooth but not a smoothie. Introduced to another lady in black, Rachael Taylor, he flirts like the charming Mittel-European he is, complimenting, dancing, charming her, exclaiming his love for the open spaces of Australia. He asks the beautiful Rachael if she prefers Liszt to Bach. She hesitates, not ever having heard of either, and he proceeds to teach her. They fall in love and she confesses to having had an affair. He laughs and tells her it’s okay.
The Aussies at first look upon the Hungarians as strange creatures. They have wonderful formal manners and talk about the grand old days, not with bitterness but with happiness. They charm and civilize the Aussies. They drink wine and even teach the gruff father of the teenager how to drink it instead of beer. Now, I have yet to meet a Hungarian I didn’t like—I’ve never met the ghastly George Soros—and in the movie the foreigners come up aces. Their sophistication coupled with their love of life seduces the Aussies. There is a very happy ending: The teenager wins a scholarship to university, Rachael gets engaged, the gruff father loves wine and other Hungarian delicacies, and the movie ends with me stunned and wishing it was 1959 all over again.
If movies educate the masses, no wonder we’re in such a mess. Nowadays the f-word is ubiquitous in every cool person’s conversation, and things have gotten so out of hand, there were cretins who recently expressed sympathy with some Manson murderers simply because they were women. Movies today thrive on violence, swear words, and loathing of traditional bourgeois values. It is a world of misogyny, toxic masculinity, and white male privilege. No wonder ethnic minorities feel aggrieved. All they have to do to feel like that is watch today’s movies. When I watched Ladies in Black, it reminded me of my own family. All my grandchildren and children do is make fun of (a) me and (b) each other. We laugh and laugh and love each other, and now that I have given what I got from my father to them—and beg them at times for cigarette money, always refused, then money for a mistress or two, refused with insults—I am reminded of the closing scene of Ladies in Black, and the happiness that wins out. More films like it, please.
