No use piling on where Prince Andrew is concerned. It’s not the end of the world, and he’s not among the brightest, either. Back in the summer of 2007, in Saint-Tropez, I had a boatload of guests and we all went to a party given by the Rubin family in their villa. It was a very gay night, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word “gay,” and soon we were joined by a slutty-looking beauty from the Far East and the prince with the highest IQ on the planet, Andrew. He was polite but distant, concentrating on the slutty beauty. That’s when I told my friend Debbie Bismarck that Andy had no chance. “Just watch me,” I said.
I inched myself close to the babe in question, signaling to her that I needed to tell her something, and when she excused herself from Andy’s monologue, I informed her that the prince would not marry her nor keep her, but I instead, as a producer of Chinese Westerns, could employ her forthwith. She dropped him like the proverbial hot you-know-what. My friends were laughing, although some thought I had been rude to the prince. “Not at all,” I told them. “I know women, and he does not.”
Mind you, it didn’t take a genius to guess that the slutty one was slutty. Things did not turn out as planned because of my friend Nick Scott, who caught on quickly and sat beside me talking shop—Chinese Westerns—and making me laugh so hard that even the slutty one realized there was something wrong. Especially when Nick told her I had Bruce Lee killed for refusing a role. She went home alone, probably for the first time in her young life. Yes, as previously stated, Andrew is not the brightest of the bright; he is, however, smarter and more articulate than Jabrill Peppers, a man who attended academically demanding Michigan University for four years and now plays for the New York Giants, a football team of intellectuals. After a loss last week he addressed the press corps and said, “I ain’t really care about how ya’ll feel or how nobody feel.” I hope Peppers did not major in English, but if he did, I’m not surprised. There are many dumb people around, and “270 million followers of Kylie Kardashian-Jenner buy her products, recently making her the second-youngest billionaire.” Here’s a rather plain to ugly-looking young woman who has 270 million idiotic followers and we go around calling Prince Andrew stupid.
Who was it that said one never goes broke underestimating the public’s taste? H.L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, that’s who, and the sage was no dummy. Epstein the child molester would never have gotten to him. Mencken was suspicious of “sudden” wealth, and Epstein’s sure was sudden. But are royals supposed to know the difference? When they stick to their own kind of people they’re called aloof and indifferent. When they mix with the recently arrived, they get into trouble sometimes. The “sweatless” one obviously fell for Epstein’s toys, but so did many others who should have known better and are now off the hook because two prison guards were surfing the internet for porn or bargains while persons unknown were applying instant sedation on the child molester. Maybe.
Yes, stupidity reigns supreme, especially when some female clown from London writes “Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?” Why? Because he fathered children with the young girls he lived with in Tahiti back in 1893. Back then young girls were betrothed and married at ages that now would land people in the pokey, like 13, and in France of all places. They still do it in Arab countries, but we’re not supposed to look at Gauguin paintings anymore. We genuflect in front of Gulf child molesters because they have lotsa moola, but we have no excuses for old Paul. It’s total and utter rubbish, as ridiculous as those in the West in the universities, the media, and the arts who are striving to dismantle our cultural and religious traditions. In the meantime, our European culture defenders are nowhere to be found, except in this publication. The intellectuals both here and in America are working to discredit our past, and while they’re at it, to demolish our future. Looking at a Gauguin will not turn one into Epstein, but reading The New York Times or looking at the BBC will turn one into a soulless moron.
Moral superiority is what the leftist, PC mob is looking for, hence all the crap about toxic masculinity, white privilege, Gauguin’s pictures, even Randy Andy’s stupidities. People are not all fools, and they should see through the bullshit and react to it. These cretins trying to rule our hearts and minds are in the majority, alas, especially in American universities, where the proportion of liberals to conservatives ranges from 8 to 1 to as much as 70 to 1. Oh yes, I almost forgot: Jeffrey Epstein was a big, big liberal, as were most of his friends like that lefty lawyer Dershowitz. Andrew should start hanging out with right wingers like myself, but in his case I’m not available. For some strange reason I prefer people with brains.
About 25 years ago, I had a patient whose marriage broke up after an hour. Her groom had answered “Yes” to the following question, put to him according to the rites of the Church of England: “Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor, and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?” Then he punched her in the face at the wedding reception and called her a slut.
When, therefore, I read the headline of one of my local newspapers—‘Wedding brawl sparks protest’—it seemed quite like old times. According to the report, the reception “descended into a punch-up,” after which three people were taken to hospital.
But some aspects of the happy occasion were thoroughly modern. The families of the bride and groom were united in their condemnation of the hotel where the reception took place. According to them, members of the hotel staff took videos of the brawl on their telephones and posted them on YouTube and social media. This, according to the families, constituted an invasion of their privacy and caused “ongoing trauma” to guests and attendees.
They complained also that the hotel was negligent because of its “poor crowd control.” They are now threatening to sue the hotel on both counts. The most likely result of any legal action is a settlement out of court without admission of liability. Our legal system has become something between a blackmailer’s charter and a protection racket.
The newspaper reported that the hotel “strongly refutes the claim.” It quoted a spokesman for the hotel as saying, “These claims are all fabricated. We refute them entirely.”
I activated my inner pedant at once. The claims were not refuted, they were denied, which is not the same thing at all. Whether the claims are true or not, and whether, if true, they give rise to any legal liability, has still to be established. But increasingly in Britain (and also, I have noticed, in France), people are unable to distinguish between the meaning of the words denial and refutation. And this confusion, it seems to me, is not either entirely insignificant or entirely innocuous.
In a world in which people claim to have their own truth, and that their opinions are as valid as anyone else’s because a cat may look at a king, it is not surprising that the meaning of the two words should be confused or amalgamated. Denial requires only that someone denies something; refutation means the establishment of the falsehood of a proposition because the empirical evidence contradicts it, or because the reasoning of which it is the conclusion is invalid. The first is entirely subjective, the latter is largely objective (which is not to say that it may not be mistaken). Where my criterion of truth of something is whether I believe it or not, denial and refutation are indeed the same. Thus the confusion of meanings is not without wider social significance: It is not a mere malapropism.
The brawl over, the two families involved have mounted demonstrations outside the hotel with banners complaining of the hotel’s “Absolute invasion of privacy” and its abdication of its “Duty of Care.” The families are united both by and in their hope of financial compensation; it is the first time I have heard of such a unifying effect of our system of tort law.
What is most interesting about their claims is the psychology or worldview behind them. In this worldview, if people behave badly, some authority (in this case the hotel) must be held responsible and liable for it, even if that authority did nothing to provoke it, did not want it, could not have anticipated it, and could not have stopped it. The hotel, which advertises itself as being in a quiet location, was supposed by the complainants to have staff trained in riot control. Rioting guests in hotels cannot be held responsible for the damage they do or the injury they cause. The fault lies with those who failed to prevent them from doing damage or injuring people.
Whether a riot at a wedding party, during which a substantial number of the guests are caught on camera committing serious crimes, has any kind of legal privilege, I leave it to lawyers to decide (our law having long since departed from common sense). But it is surely shameful (and shameless) that anybody present at such a riot should attempt to extract money for breach of his or her privacy. If any compensation were morally due to those who were present but not participatory in the riot, it is elementary natural justice that it would be due from those who actually rioted and thereby directly caused fright or injury. If one thing is certain, however, it is that they, those directly responsible, will not be sued, both because they have less money than the hotel and are probably not financially worth suing, and because they are friends or relations of the potential litigants.
By ascribing a “duty of care” to an organization such as the hotel, making it responsible for adult behavior it could not reasonably have anticipated (as against, for example having failed to take reasonable precautions against the risk of fire), the potential litigants were in fact infantilizing themselves and the people with whom they were associated. A hotel is a hotel, not a parent.
The tort law often has the effect of infantilizing people by encouraging them to deny their own responsibility, trading their status as adults for the hope, in most cases forlorn or delusory, of a large payout. This is not to deny that our tort law does sometimes result in justice for the maltreated, but at tremendous cost both financial and civilizational. The tort law encourages deception (including self-deception), fraud, exaggeration, false witness, and infantilization. It legalizes corruption, insofar as cases of no merit nevertheless often result in payouts for the plaintiffs because it is more expensive for defendants with right on their side to contest the case to the bitter end. It is often responsible for more injury to the plaintiff than the original injury that caused the plaintiff to resort to it in the first place.
“Can Protest Art Get Its Mojo Back?” asks Spencer Kornhaber in a July 2018 article in The Atlantic. For though it’s a shocking thing, given the characteristic courage and heroism of progressives, “[s]ince the 2016 election,” Kornhaber relates, “pop music and TV shows have emphasized liberal impotence more than anger.” Here, the “Brooklyn punk rocker” Jeff Rosenstock is a representative figure. “In the days after Donald Trump’s inauguration,” Kornhaber tells us,
Rosenstock retreated to the Catskill Mountains to do what liberals everywhere were doing—mourn—and what many artists were doing, create work about what had just happened. The resulting songs, released on New Year’s Day 2018, bore titles such as “Powerlessness,” “All This Useless Energy,” “Beating My Head Against a Wall,” and “Yr Throat” (as in, “What’s the point of having a voice / when it gets stuck inside your throat?”). In jittery, epic-scale shout-alongs, he described his neighbors taking shots and moaning, “There’s nothing left we can do right now.” He told of joining a demonstration that shut down an interstate, and then realizing that “after a couple of days / the fire that I thought would burn it down was gone.” He reported withdrawing from regular life to channel his discontent into action, but finding it impossible to do so.
Poor fellow! If only that interstate had burned down; then he and the other demonstrators might have been inspired—say, to burn down more interstates, or better yet, the White House.
Still, no good team member should feel that he is without hope. In Kornhaber’s words:
[T]he entertainment world is undergoing, as a recent piece in ‘New York’ magazine put it, “the Great Awokening.” Even public figures known for their detachment have become walking Daily Kos comments sections, and when hundreds of thousands of women and other voters marched in protest after Trump’s inauguration, celebrities added oomph with speeches and songs. “Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House,” Madonna confessed to the crowd in Washington, D.C.
As for the fitness of our celebrities to opine on politics, the best proof is their brilliantly transgressive works themselves. Kornhaber once more:
Netflix’s ‘Queer Eye,’ for example, performs gentle missionary work in one episode, sending a squad of urban gays to ever so respectfully make over a Trump-voting Georgia cop. Sarah Silverman’s new Hulu series, ‘I Love You, America,’ has the foulmouthed comedian venture into the heartland to listen, argue, and bond through potty humor. The rapper Joyner Lucas landed a viral hit with “I’m Not Racist,” an imagined—and cartoonish—conversation between a Trump supporter and a Black Lives Matter activist.
Or, if you don’t find all that convincing, there’s the unfailing narcissism of this intellectual victim class, a.k.a. “creatives” and “influencers.” Says Kornhaber:
On the blue states’ favorite TV satires, the immediate reaction to Trump focused even more explicitly on progressives’ anxiety—rather than on, say, the cause of that anxiety. The great HBO series ‘High Maintenance’ toured an effete Brooklyn whose inhabitants were so triggered by the news on their phone that they temporarily abandoned their spin classes. A major thread of the recent ‘American Horror Story’ season followed two liberal lesbians—one a Hillary Clinton voter and the other, in a twist, a Jill Stein voter—as they descended into violent self-recrimination. On Comedy Central’s ‘Broad City,’ a feminist stoner found herself unable to orgasm in the Trump era until a sex therapist guided her through a fantasy including Hillary Clinton. Each of these shows is squarely directed at the people most horrified by America’s new political reality….
Leave it to the incorrigibly dull, I’d have thought before being edified by Kornhaber, to never get tired of their very selves.
“Many of the country’s more distinctive and provocative artists,” Kornhaber writes,
have been especially hard on themselves. The Pulitzer Prize–winning rapper Kendrick Lamar is at the top of any list of modern protest musicians, and he intermittently sniped at Trump and Fox News on his 2017 masterpiece, ‘Damn.’ Yet he focused more on critiquing himself and his allies, fretting that the recent vogue for sign-waving could be fleeting.
At this point I must ask my readers to restrain themselves, lest, like feminists at a buffet, they positively faint in elation. For who can fail to be filled with admiration for our artists’ deep commitment to self-examination, even as they reveal that, as Lin-Manuel Miranda puts it, “great art is like bypass surgery”—in the sense of bypassing all possible diversions from your obsessive narcissism? And as for Mr. Lamar, he needn’t fear—the people waving those signs won’t be bothering to get jobs anytime soon.
Of course, I cannot omit consideration of the artistic right from this column on artists in the Trump era. I gained a lot, after all, from a recent Twitter exchange with A.M. Juster, the conservative poet, critic, and poetry editor of First Things magazine who served as commissioner of the Social Security Administration from 2007 to 2013, having been nominated by the great George W. Bush himself. An ignorant fellow, I’d always thought that a writer’s political views and nonliterary activities were utter non sequiturs in regard to his merit as a writer. Juster, however, protested Peter Handke receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, since the Austrian had once expressed support for Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Yugoslavia who was indicted for war crimes by a U.N. tribunal for his role in the Yugoslav Wars. What that support entailed concerning Handke’s literary eminence (or lack thereof) was unclear, I maintained. Literary merit, Juster implied amid much ardent moralizing, is indeed determined by moral character, and, as if channeling David Frum, David French, or some other hysterical hack, he added that the award going to Handke was especially unacceptable, what with “democracy and human rights being threatened around the world.” Thereupon I recalled the description of Juster by an acquaintance of mine, a distinguished poet, scholar, and critic who has observed Juster over the years: “Juster is a fake conservative. He poses as a traditionalist and a Republican, but in fact never deviates from left-liberal loyalties. You might consider him the Mitt Romney of formalist poetry.”
Yet before I could decide whether this description was accurate, the writer Emina Melonic, a Muslim from Bosnia, took a break from sucking up to Buckleyites and Zionists to claim that giving an award to someone who supported genocide entails “implicit participation in a denial of genocide.” As with Juster’s opinion, I couldn’t see how that followed, mine having been a logical point of view, so I disagreed with Melonic as well. But, being faced with a Christ-cuck on the one hand, and a virtue-signaling intellectual woman on the other, I eventually yielded—doubtless by an act of Divine Providence—to their superior wisdom, and in my gratitude, I later published a poem on Juster at my web journal The Agonist. (Somehow Juster, who has my email address, has yet to thank me for publishing “The Dickless Sonnet.”)
Lastly, I must say that I have been very pleased lately by all the coverage of Kanye the Christian rapper on Fox News. God is good and you go, boy! Kanye, who has perhaps been “born again,” wants to make America great again, and to get our black brothers and sisters off the Democrat slave plantation. Oh, how they’ve been brainwashed, how they’ve been deceived, the poor blacks!
And yet Kanye, who, I understand, is recruiting the worthy Lil Wayne to the MAGA cause, is leading the way forward for our duped equals. Let us hope the two gentlemen will be joined in the vital endeavor by Rakim Athelaston Mayers, better known as the distinguished rapper and—thank God!—now-freed political prisoner A$AP Rocky, who is surely indebted to our national leader Donald Trump. Over the summer, while A$AP Rocky and “his boys” were in Sweden, a wicked Afghan immigrant named Mustafa Jafari harassed the innocent group. They tried to walk away. They tried to be the bigger men. But Jafari, who was perhaps envious of their American exceptionalism, continued to pester them, so that they had no choice but to defend themselves, A$AP Rocky throwing Jafari to the ground and wounding the man by hitting him with a bottle.
Now, one would think that such principled self-defense would have been met with profound appreciation—but nooo. A$AP Rocky and the crew were charged with assault, while the mischievous Jafari was cleared of all charges. Meanwhile, with their usual racism, human rights organizations around the world ignored the terrible injustice. How fortunate it was, then, that President Trump, at the urging of Kanye West and that fat whore he’s married to, took care to call the Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven and ask him to “free Rocky,” explaining that he’d be happy to pay Rocky’s bail himself. Of course, with characteristic class and diplomacy, our president also saw fit to tweet:
Very disappointed in Prime Minister Stefan Löfven for being unable to act. Sweden has let our African American Community down in the United States. I watched the tapes of A$AP Rocky, and he was being followed and harassed by troublemakers. Treat Americans fairly! #FreeRocky
Thanks to Trump’s pressure, A$AP Rocky was eventually cleared of all charges. Although suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—for which he is self-medicating by smoking a dozen blunts a day—A$AP Rocky has returned to making his celebrated illiterate musical compositions and, as if to confirm the wisdom of Trump’s intervention, to his endearing habit of giving the middle finger to the world in public.
Seeing as Making America Great Again depends on successful outreach to blacks (among other marginalized peoples), it is to be hoped that some enterprising Jaffaite will commission these excellent rappers to write for one of the two Claremont Institute publications, those bastions of conservative leveling. Surely Kanye, a devoted Trumpian, has penetrating insights to offer on “America’s founding principles,” or on Abraham Lincoln, even. Why, he might even freestyle a little some night on Fox News, whereupon Michael Anton could provide a Straussian interpretation of what the hell the man said.
As every contemporary school child knows, the first Thanksgiving took place in 1621, when our Pilgrim forefathers took a break from slaughtering Indigenous Peoples to invite them to dinner and infect them with smallpox, before embarking on their mission to fry the planet so that the world would end on Jan. 22, 2031. (Copyright: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)
Consider this description of the Pilgrims’ treatment of the Indigenous Peoples:
“They were the worst of conquerors. Inordinate pride, the lust of blood and dominion, were the mainsprings of their warfare; and their victories were strained with every excess of savage passion.”
You’ve probably guessed — unless you are an American college student — that that’s not a description of the Pilgrims’ treatment of Indigenous Peoples at all. It is a description of some Indigenous Peoples’ treatment of other Indigenous Peoples, provided by Francis Parkman, the world’s foremost Indian scholar.
It was Indians, not Pilgrims, who let out the “Mohawk war-cry” that made the blood run cold.
This is why the Wampanoag had a lot to celebrate that first Thanksgiving. They were delighted to have such excellent (European) allies against the terroristic Iroquois and Narragansett.
The Pilgrims also had much to be thankful for. Of more than 100 passengers aboard the Mayflower, only 44 survived the first winter, felled by scurvy, malnutrition and the bitter cold. Even the ones who made it did so largely thanks to the friendly Wampanoag, who shared their food with the Europeans and taught them how to till the land.
The Puritans, who came soon thereafter, so loved their Indian compatriots that the great missionary John Eliot translated sermons for the Algonquians in their own language. Indeed, the very first Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere was Eliot’s Massachusett-language Bible, published in 1663, titled “Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God.”
(For those interested in Coulter arcana, Eliot was an assistant of Rev. Thomas Hooker, the same Puritan minister that my ancestors followed to the New World.)
The warm relations between Pilgrims and the (mostly) gentle Algonquins doesn’t fit the White Man Bad thesis that is the entire point of all history taught in America today. In fact, as any sane, reasonable person can probably surmise: Some white men were kind, and some were cruel. Some Indians were neighborly — and some were bloodthirsty killers.
Parkman describes a typical Iroquois celebration that would cap off a war raid on their fellow Indigenous Peoples:
“The village was alive with sudden commotion, and snatching sticks and stones, knives and hatchets, men, women and children, yelling like fiends let loose, swarmed out of the narrow portal, to visit upon the captives a foretaste of the deadlier torments in store for them …. [W]ith brandished torch and firebrand, the frenzied multitude closed around their victim. The pen shrinks to write, the heart sickens to conceive, the fierceness of [the captive’s] agony … The work was done, the blackened trunk was flung to the dogs, and, with clamorous shouts and hootings, the murderers sought to drive away the spirit of their victim.”
The Iroquois, he writes, “reckoned these barbarities among their most exquisite enjoyments.”
[ASIDE: Compare Parkman’s thrilling passage to droning cliches like, “While America’s indigenous population at large is underrepresented in politics and popular culture, Native women are even more marginalized” (a current Harvard offering), and you’ll understand why the kids don’t like to read anymore.]
And here’s an Iroquois practice that university professors might want to steal and ascribe to the White Man — don’t worry, your students aren’t bright enough to figure out that you’re lying to them.
After killing “a sufficient number of captives,” Parkman says, the Iroquois “spared the lives of the remainder, and adopted them as members of their confederated tribes, separating wives from husbands, and children from parents, and distributing them among different villages, in order that old ties and associations might be more completely broken up.” JUST LIKE TRUMP!!!
Here’s one for the Womyn’s Studies Department: Having completely conquered the Lenape, the Iroquois humiliated the survivors by making them take women’s names.
Before the first European stepped off Mayflower, the Iroquois’ genocidal wars against their fellow Indians had already depopulated large parts of New England. Their murderous raids had scattered the farming tribes in all directions, often to their demise. “Northern New Hampshire, the whole of Vermont and Western Massachusetts had no human tenants but the roving hunter or prowling warrior,” Parkman writes.
The irony of the moron’s version of Thanksgiving is that the brave and honorable attributes of the American Indian are drained from all the PC stories. In the made-up history, Indians are only pathetic.
By contrast, the true story told by Parkman shows both the savagery and superstition, but also the courage and honor. Thus, for example, the Hurons “held it disgraceful to turn from the face of an enemy when the fortunes of the fight were adverse.” As the Indian captive of the Iroquois was being tortured alive, Parkman reports, he raises his voice in “scorn and defiance.” How’s that for machismo?
That’s the reason we name our sports teams and military armaments after Indians. It’s a tribute to their honor, intelligence and bravery. It’s why Americans love to boast of having Indian blood — even when it’s not true (and not only in order to land a professorship at Harvard).
But that’s not the image the left wants for Indians. Oh, no. They want to re-brand Indians as loser victims, in need of liberals’ tender ministrations.
Real Americans honor Indians and also honor the courageous Pilgrim settlers who brought Christian civilization to a continent, a miraculous union that we celebrate on this wonderful holiday. Happy Thanksgiving!
AUSTIN—Pretty soon now, I’m counting on it, somebody is gonna fly to Fiji, rent a bamboo villa that sits on stilts over the lapping waves hitting the pristine seashore, order a fruity drink in a coconut shell, stretch out on a veranda that juts out into an inlet where porpoises frolic and play, wait till the setting sun starts to disappear over the horizon, admire the soft orange glow over the Southern Pacific, and then not take a picture of it!
I’m counting on that one person in the universe who either (a) doesn’t bring his phone everywhere he goes, or (b) doesn’t have a camera in his phone, or, best of all, (c) sees no need to photograph every fucking thing that happens to him.
Of course, option B is pretty much out of the question since, as previously reported in these pages, I tried to buy a phone at the T-Mobile store that had no camera in it, only to be told, “There’s no such thing as a phone with no camera in it.”
Want a phone? Then buy a camera. You have no other choice.
Because Life…is Instagram. If it’s not on Instagram, it didn’t happen. The alehouses of 18th-century London frequented by Samuel Johnson and his errand boy Boswell, the Paris bistros described by Hemingway, the gritty back alleys of Los Angeles memorialized by James M. Cain—none of those could possibly have existed because where’s the Instagram? When Stanley went searching for Livingstone, why didn’t he bring back selfies? The least he could have done is stand on his head next to Victoria Falls. The mouth of the Zambezi, my ass—there is no Zambezi prior to October 10, 2010. That’s the day that Instagram launched and the world was truly known.
Travel agents know this. Travel agents scour Instagram looking for new destinations they can package based on photo ops alone.
Let me repeat that. These are professionals who sell $10,000 long-distance journeys to places where the only attraction is the picture you’re gonna take when you get there.
The best-known example of this is Wedding Cake Rock. Wedding Cake Rock is a sandstone formation located in the Royal National Park in Australia. It suffers from three characteristics that will ensure its destruction:
(a) It’s ecologically fragile, being so unstable that it will probably collapse from erosion sometime in this century.
(b) It’s 18 miles from Sydney.
(c) It looks great on Instagram.
In fact, it looks so great on Instagram that people fly to Sydney to perform stunts on its precarious surface. Things got so bad in 2015, with more than 10,000 visitors per month crowding onto a platform that threatens to become landslide fodder at any moment, that the national park service erected a barrier and shut it down. Officials blamed Instagram.
The name for this—because, of course, every example of mass idiocy needs a vaguely academic moniker so that psychologists can pay off their student loans—the name for this is Aspirational Escapism.
Why is it aspirational? Because there’s a perception that you get several degrees of coolness added to your résumé if you make it to Wedding Cake Rock, jump the barrier, and dangle an appendage off the edge—and the proof of your dangled appendage is the perfectly filtered post on Instagram. Money is no object. The 18-hour flight is no object. The four-wheel-drive Jeep rental is no object. You’re getting that selfie.
Okay, it gets even weirder. Some parks have started promoting “responsible geotagging,” specifically to fight against hordes of tourists invading a natural area in search of selfies.
The way it works is that someone popular, usually a young hot white person, photographs himself or herself in a remote location, scores the perfect Instagram photo—Photoshopped, of course, perfected with filters and crops—and inspires thousands of other Instagram devotees to start running to Kayak and planning a trip not just to that country, not just to that park, not just to the same area of that park, but to the exact same location, thanks to the geotag that allows them to know the precise longitude and latitude.
Park rangers say this is wrong, a horrible invasion of national park privacy, because…uh…well…not sure why it’s wrong, but they don’t want thousands of people taking the same selfie in the same place. I don’t want that either, but for a different reason: You people are boring the crap out of me.
They say that these Aspirational Escapists have no respect for the ecology, the biological diversity of the area, the local culture, blah blah blah, but I don’t think any of that stuff is the real reason. I think the real reason is hatred of millennial hipsters.
Of course, because they are millennial hipsters, they have a politically correct solution. The Center for Responsible Travel (CREST, like the toothpaste, summoning up images of people who live in Brooklyn and own the $400 Sonicare electric toothbrush) is an organization dedicated to defeating Instagram at its own game, promoting “tourism that leads to the management of all resources in such a way that economic, social, and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity, and life-support systems.”
Let me read that again. Wait five minutes, I’m gonna read it slowly.
Okay, I’m back. Fuck you.
What they’re talking about here—I know this from other websites that are written with more direct language—is two things:
Numero Uno: “Sustainability.” Not sure exactly what it means but I think it means making sure a place doesn’t become filthy with tourists. I happen to live in a place that’s filthy with tourists—New York City. It’s not a big deal. We manage.
Numero Two-o: “A Diverse Travel Narrative.” Not sure exactly what this means, either, but I think it means more blacks, Latinos, women booking those 737 flights from Luton Airport.
For example, there are Instagram accounts called @blackgirlstraveltoo and @latinaswhohike because, according to an article in Refinery 29, “It’s no surprise that the focus on sustainability is driven by women, people of color, queer people, and other groups that have historically been excluded from tourism.”
Excluded from tourism! Because of all those decades when travel agents and airlines and hotels refused to take money from minorities due to the Tourism Blacklist.
The idea here is that, if we had more minorities traveling and fewer rich white people—and, by the way, it’s mostly rich white people who are telling us this—then there wouldn’t be so much Kardashian-style posing in the Louvre and instead we would have “meaningful conversations” with the populace, an interest in “the day-to-day lives of the people,” and “learning about the indigenous people”—all of these are goals frequently stated in all these “responsible travel” websites—followed by a new era in which “the narrative of travel” (yes, that’s a thing) would no longer be controlled by the white European patriarchy.
Or we could simply follow the Joe Bob Briggs Plan to Rid the Earth of Airhead Travel Bloggers and make it a question on your visa application:
“Are you entering the country primarily because of a photo you saw posted on Instagram?”
And if the tourist answers yes, they get sent to the Instagram Bus, which goes directly to the geotagged site, lines ’em up for selfies at 50 bucks a pop, then herds them back to the airport for their flights home to Osaka and Boise. Several dozen people have jobs, the hipsters are fenced off from the general populace, the foreigners get what they came for, Instagram is awash with selfies, and Earth continues to spin on its axis, geotagged and validated and recorded for posterity on BoreYouToDeath.com.
The following was recently but ecstatically pronounced by the malignant, anti-white, anti-Christian, and anti-male New York Times: “Perhaps for the first time since the United States was established, a majority of young adults here do not identify as Christian.”
Yes, you read this right, the Sulzberger gang who owns the paper and adheres to the Jewish faith celebrates this sorry state of affairs with a bold headline in its editorial pages. Nicholas Kristof, the writer, tries to underplay his joy by throwing a few crumbs, but one can sense his delight. Christianity is finally getting its just rewards. Yippee!
Another Times writer, an Irish Catholic female who looks like Madame Defarge (la tricoteuse in A Tale of Two Cities), Maureen Dowd, has gone one better. She’s called the Catholic Church “a rotten institution,” and never fails to flail the Church and insult Christian believers. Actually, the attacks against the sexual scandals of the Catholic Church would be justified if, say, the newspaper had covered the drug-running and the sexual abuse of the Hasidic order as well, but the Times has ignored it. No wonder the war against Christianity is being won by the secular left—we Christians are sitting on our fannies and doing nothing about it. As an essay on a Fox News website declared, “Christianity is mocked, belittled, smeared and attacked….”
What is to be done? That’s an easy one to answer. Act like Muslims do when the Prophet is attacked. As a Christian I won’t go as far as those Muslims in Paris who murdered the Charlie Hebdo journalists who had made fun of Muhammad, but I have to admit the French media has not featured any satire of the Prophet since. I wonder what would happen if Christians did react violently at times, especially when papers like the Times ignore the crimes other religious orders commit. Am I advocating violence? Well, violence in defense of my religion I do not see as a vice, and I do not expect seventy virgins and lots of rice in return, either. It is a matter of principle. Jews defend their religion to the extent that the slightest hint against a Jew is seen as anti-Semitism. Christians need to do the same. Muslims certainly do. But what about turning the other cheek, like a good Christian? Or as my wife says, Christianity is not violent. Well, all I can say, and I consider myself a devout Christian, is perhaps it’s time for a change because the deck is stacked against us by so-called newspapers and media of all news fit to print, especially anything that deprecates Christianity.
As I write, a hatchet job on a man called Ralph Drollinger is spread over tens of pages in the Sunday New York Times magazine. His crime: He teaches the Gospel and holds Bible meetings and is a devout Christian who is friends with Donald Trump. Pity the trees that were cut down to print such rubbish against someone even the hatchet-job writer could not pinpoint anything against except teaching the Bible and believing in it and supporting the 45th president.
Mind you, no one reads the Times any longer except oldies like myself, and I only do that in order to find outrageous material that I can write about. If faith is supposed to provide moral guidance, I cannot think of a better one than Christianity, because it is Christians who donate more to charity than other religions—by far—and much more than secular Americans. And churches across America provide a crucial safety net, organizing for food and shelter.
Yet because many church leaders—and rightly so—have resisted cheering for same-sex marriage and LGBTQ uni-bathrooms, but have shown support for The Donald, many bien-pensant elites associate Christianity with hate rather than love. The war against Christianity did not come about by happenstance. Christianity preaches morality, and morality stands in the way of profit where fashion, filmmaking, porn and its distribution, land speculation, even big business are concerned. Teen Vogue online illustrates homosexuality for infants; Anna Wintour, a Brit import, is a major force behind it.
Yep, it’s all about profit, after all, as America’s third-largest restaurant chain recently discovered. The family owners of the Chic-fil-A franchise run the business as a Christian one, paying workers twice the national average, remaining closed on Sundays, and contributing to Christian causes. Their mission, they say, is to glorify God. This has outraged those people who do not share their views. Like giving to the Salvation Army. In Britain, where the Church of England made sure God died long ago, Chick-fil-A has been refused a lease because the outfit “has bitterly divided the people.”
“The people” are the current woke, yelling, screaming types who shut down free speech unless they agree; the same people who sanctimoniously applaud doctors who accept unsupported claims of children who think they’re in the wrong body, and provide sex-changing hormones. The same people who pledged to boycott Equinox gyms because the owner, Stephen Ross, held a fundraiser for Donald Trump.
Have a very happy Christmas, defend our Christian faith, and give your business to Chick-fil-A if you like chicken.
French reactionary writer Michel Houellebecq became world-famous on Jan. 7, 2015, when a caricature of him appeared on the cover of Charlie Hebdo to promote his new novel Submission about the future Islamification of France just as Muslim terrorists slaughtered the magazine’s staff.
That attack marked the opening of the two-year stretch in which the end of history ended: Merkel’s Mistake, Brexit, and Trump.
Submission, in which a Houellebecqian antihero adapts to the new order in Europe by converting to Islam and taking three brides, turned out to be terrific, perhaps the most memorable novel of the now-ending decade, which will likely go down in history as the era when much of the top talent moved to the right (or, alternatively, most of the mediocrities moved to the left).
Not surprisingly, Houellebecq (pronounced simply WELL-beck) can’t top Submission in his new book Serotonin, a more conventional literary novel about a depressive middle-aged bachelor’s nostalgic reverie over the women who once loved him.
Serotonin’s narrator, Florent-Claude Labrouste, is another Houellebecqian protagonist drifting between mordant contempt, comic ineffectualness, anhedonia, and an Aspergery compulsion to list the name of every chain store at which he shops. Houellebecq, who worked as a computer administrator after studying agronomy in college, has helped introduce the nerdish tone of science fiction to prestige literature, as if Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert had been your tech support guy.
This time Houellebecq’s protagonist is a well-paid 46-year-old consultant for the French Ministry of Agriculture. Unusually within Houellebecq’s oeuvre, he is quite handsome and once, despite his anonymous career, drew beautiful women easily. (In real life, the dilapidated author looks like Iggy Pop’s homelier brother.)
At the beginning of Serotonin, the narrator quits his job, and moves out from the stylish apartment he shares with his cheating Japanese girlfriend (Houellebecq recently married a Japanese woman whom I hope can take a joke). He flees to the last hotel in Paris that allows smoking. (Houellebecq’s fundamental complaint is basically: What’s the world coming to when a Frenchman can’t smoke in a Parisian hotel?)
There, nothing much happens other than he reminisces over old girlfriends and, in a characteristically French touch, stops showering. When the stench gets too bad, he breaks down and obtains a prescription for a (fictional) state-of-the-art antidepressant. It relieves his aversion to bathing, but:
The most undesirable side effects frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido, and impotence.
I have never suffered from nausea.
So, nothing much happens either when he meets up with a now-alcoholic old girlfriend, a Hitchcock blonde who’d once been an actress in avant-garde plays she had loathed:
Her beauty, blonde, elegant and cold, seemed to predispose her toward texts read out in a blank voice in a subsidized theater…. She would never have suspected, she told me, that such crap existed, it was baffling she said for them to offer such nonsense up to the public.
Fortunately, two of Florent’s other girlfriends were more adorable. It’s surprising how much romantic power Houellebecq can suddenly generate in his prose. Houellebecq is a patriotic French writer and is proud that romance is France’s greatest gift to human culture.
The narrator wonders if seventeen years ago he should have asked his 19-year-old true love to give up her veterinary studies in Paris to move to Normandy to be his wife.
But I didn’t, and I probably couldn’t have done;… I was a modern man, and for me, like for all of my contemporaries, a woman’s professional career was something that had to be respected above all else….
Exactly why Houellebecq has become ensconced in the pantheon of literature can be unclear. Reading him in translation, he seems more of a deft stylist than a masterful one. Serotonin is a fine book, but its lack of the science-fiction framework of Submission makes it less of a must-read.
Houellebecq is more of a novelist of ideas, a little like Vonnegut, another depressive semi-sci-fi author. What’s striking about Houellebecq is that so many of his ideas seem rather obvious in 2019, but hadn’t been expressed much at all in literary circles over the previous quarter of a century.
Some of Houellebecq’s distinctiveness stems from his having missed out on the academic-cultural gravy train that employs many other successful fiction writers. He had to get a real job fixing computers.
Keep in mind, however, that he hated having a real job. Serotonin is in part a fictionalization of a career path Houellebecq might have wound up on as an agribusiness executive if he’d been handsomer and thus more appealing in job interviews. His narrator writes of college:
I had felt nothing but revulsion for business and all that it involves…. I didn’t give a damn about my career—I don’t think I thought about it for more than thirty seconds, it seemed so unlikely that anyone could seriously be interested in anything but girls—and the worst thing is that now, at forty-six, I realize that I was right at the time: girls are whores if you want to see them that way, but a career is a more considerable whore and one that doesn’t give you any pleasure.
One unusual thing at the time that Houellebecq did was opposing free market capitalism from the right. (In recent books, Houellebecq treats the left as washed-up and intellectually irrelevant.) To Houellebecq, deregulating the marketplace, whether economic or sexual, was not going to be as conducive to human happiness as its optimistic Anglo-American theorists promised.
In Serotonin, old-fashioned trade protectionism serves as a metaphor for life and love, while the ideology of free trade represents depression and death. The purpose of property, whether private or national, is to shelter you from relentless competition.
His protagonist’s job at the Ministry of Agriculture is to write position papers for trade negotiators who are supposed to represent the interests of French farmers. The farmers always, though, seem to lose in the end. France, it is assumed, simply has too many farmers.
When I subscribed to The Economist in the 1980s, the editors complained endlessly about the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy, which lavished subsidies upon small farmers by fixing prices high for consumers. The Economist whined about the “mountain of butter” that Europe’s huge number of coddled dairy farmers produced.
Back then, the French state was adamant about keeping its country folk happy. Just because foreigners could make butter cheaper, the postwar French government reasoned, didn’t mean that French dairymen shouldn’t carry on their time-honored trade in their picturesque countryside. Ever since Napoleon ratified that the peasantry could keep the lands expropriated during the French Revolution, to be a French peasant had been to be privileged among the world’s many farmers.
But over the decades since, even the French couldn’t stand up to the seductions of globalization. When a Normandy dairy farmer asks the narrator, “And do you think there will never be protectionist measures?”
“Absolutely impossible,” I cut in without hesitation. “The ideological pressure is too great.”… I had been confronted with people who were ready to die for free trade.
In the most exciting chapter of Serotonin, the dairy farmers block the highways and fight the police in a premonition of the Yellow Vests movement that began in rural France between the time Houellebecq submitted his manuscript and its publication.
So, while Houellebecq isn’t at his Submission-level peak in Serotonin, he remains the fiction writer most attuned to our age.
A week from now, the 29 member states of “the most successful alliance in history” will meet to celebrate its 70th anniversary. Yet all is not well within NATO.
Instead of a “summit,” the gathering, on the outskirts of London, has been cut to two days. Why the shortened agenda?
Among the reasons, apprehension that President Donald Trump might use the occasion to disrupt alliance comity by again berating the Europeans for freeloading on the U.S. defense budget.
French President Emanuel Macron, on the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice, described NATO as having suffered “brain death.” Macron now openly questions the U.S. commitment to fight for Europe and is talking about a “true European Army” with France’s nuclear deterrent able to “defend Europe alone.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose nation spends 1.4% of GDP on defense and has relied on the U.S. and NATO to keep Russia at bay since the Cold War began, is said to be enraged at the “disruptive politics” of the French president.
Also, early in December, Britain holds national elections. While the Labour Party remains committed to NATO, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is no Clement Attlee, who took Britain into NATO at its birth in 1949.
Corbyn has questioned NATO’s continued relevance in the post-Cold War era. A potential backer of a new Labour government, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party, is demanding the closing of Britain’s Trident submarine base in Scotland as a precondition of her party’s support for Labour in Parliament.
Also present in London will be NATO ally Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan.
Following the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has purged scores of thousands from his army and regime, jailed more journalists than any other authoritarian, purchased Vladimir Putin’s S-400 missile system as Turkey’s air defense, and ordered the U.S. forces out of his way as he invaded northern Syria, killing Kurdish fighters who did the bleeding and dying in the U.S.-led campaign to crush the ISIS caliphate.
During the Cold War, NATO enjoyed the widespread support of Americans and Europeans, and understandably so. The USSR had 20 divisions in Germany, surrounded West Berlin, and occupied the east bank of the Elbe, within striking distance of the Rhine.
But that Cold War is long over. Berlin is the united free capital of Germany. The Warsaw Pact has been dissolved. Its member states have all joined NATO. The Soviet Union split apart into 15 nations. Communist Yugoslavia splintered into seven nations.
As a fighting faith, communism is dead in Europe. Why then are we Americans still over there?
Since the Cold War, we have doubled the size of NATO. We have brought in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but not Finland or Sweden. We have committed ourselves to fight for Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro but not Serbia, Bosnia or North Macedonia.
Romania and Bulgaria are NATO allies but not Moldova or Belarus.
George W. Bush kept us out of the 2008 Russia-Georgia clash over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And Barack Obama refused to send lethal aid to help Ukraine retrieve Crimea, Luhansk or Donetsk, though Sen. John McCain wanted the United States to jump into both fights.
In the House Intel Committee’s impeachment hearings, foreign service officers spoke of “Russian aggression” against our Ukrainian “ally” and our “national security” being in peril in this fight.
But when did Ukraine become an ally of the United States whose territorial wars we must sustain with military aid if not military intervention?
When did Kyiv’s control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?
Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the Cold War.
And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.
Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons?
Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?
In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on Germany. Would Justin Trudeau’s Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin’s Russia — for Estonia or Latvia?
Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations even closer to Russia.
One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.
You know the difference between an album and a concert? With an album, the idea is to create something with staying power. The music is meticulously recorded, mixed, sweetened, and preserved for repeated play. An album is timeless. I have friends who still play old vinyl. And I know “zoomers” who still listen to those great old songs, but digitized and delivered wirelessly.
You make an album to last. You make an album in the hope that three generations hence, people will still be listening to it, in whatever newfangled format the future might provide.
But a concert is all about the moment. It’s about the physical sensation of being there in that big airy amphitheater or that cramped little club. It’s about getting high or drunk and totally losing yourself in the visceral rush. You wake up the next morning and all that remains is the memory. It was fun, but it’s over.
What a concert we’re experiencing right now. I mean us righties. Have we ever had more fun? Groypers vs. Kirk! Meme wars! Autists and trolls! And those riotous insult comedy Trump tweets!
Yep, it’s a hell of a show.
The problem is, while we’re having fun at a concert, the left’s cutting an album. Three generations from now, what will American kids be listening to? Trump’s tweets? Frog memes? Or the sound of Third Worlders jabbering on every Main Street in the U.S.?
Regarding immigration, what structurally has changed under Trump? We don’t have a wall…we don’t even have any new wall being constructed. Chain migration? Still chuggin’ along. Birthright citizenship? Unchallenged. Amnesty laws? Still lettin’ ’em in. It’s often said that leftists can’t meme. Guess what: They don’t have to. The current course of events favors them. In terms of numbers pouring into the country and birth rates exploding within, all the left needs to do is nothing, because they’ve already set the wheels in motion. Leftists cried and wailed that night in November 2016 because they thought Trump was going to build a dam to stop the raging river they’d loosed.
Where’s the dam?
Yeah, the groyper thing is fun. Watching Charlie Kirk stammer and sweat and say “Evropa” as he gets chased off stage is a rollicking good time. But what’s it accomplishing? Oh, I know what you’re saying: “We’re fighting Conservative Inc. We’re getting rid of those whose support for immigration control is half-hearted or based on the ‘wrong’ reasons.”
Joe Stalin shakes his head in hell. You don’t purge until you’re firmly in power. Trump should absolutely push for purity within his administration. But regarding activists, supporters, and, most of all, potential voters, we’re not nearly secure enough to start cleansing those ranks. Why start this civil-war business now? The immigration policies that Trump campaigned and won on can be and were supported by people with a variety of motivations and ideological underpinnings. Keep in mind, many of the commonsense immigration restrictions and reforms that Trump championed in 2016 are things Democrats used to support. And we haven’t enacted those restrictions and reforms yet.
And next year we’re going to have to go back to the general public for a vote all over again. So why start splitting the right over “proper levels” of immigration righteousness?
I’d respectfully suggest that the current excitement over the “groyper war” is an expression of frustration. Impotence, even. The God Emperor has not delivered (yet). The Democrats, the media, and the cheap-labor GOPs are unmovable in their opposition. It’s frustrating; we don’t have a wall but we feel like punching one. Oh look, here’s someone in our midst who’s weak of faith. Let’s kick the shit out of him, for surely he’s the cause of our woes!
Chasing Charlie Kirk off a stage is no victory. Yes, it feels good. It feels like an accomplishment. But it’s “concert” fun. Fun for the moment. The poor schmuck thought it would be swell to answer audience questions. And when the groypers began asking, he did answer. They didn’t like his answers (I don’t like them either), and he proved an easy and touchable target. But I don’t think Conservative Inc. is shaking in its boots. We’ve had three years of Trump without any of the major changes he promised. Blame him, blame the people he foolishly surrounded himself with, blame the Republicans of the Ryan House, blame the Democrats who took over.
You wanna punch someone in frustration, and poor old Charlie Kirk stuck out his fat face and invited people to take shots. Enjoy the dunking booth. But if there’s even the smallest chance of making something out of Trump’s final one or five years, we’re going to need those whose opposition to immigration stops short of perfection.
As I’ve pointed out many times, 2016 did not give Trump a Reagan-vs.-Mondale-level mandate. Hillary was an execrable candidate and Trump beat her by tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, of votes in swing states. It’s a risky strategy to attack or dismiss people who support some level of immigration restriction because they’re not “hardcore” enough (especially regarding matters of demography and race). Don’t kid yourself that all those blue-collar whites in the rust and dairy belts are ready to go full Wilmot Robertson. To be sure, anti-immigration is a winning issue among swing-state whites. But if those voters’ anti-immigration sentiments are based on the fear of being displaced by foreign workers as opposed to anxiety over the projected national mean IQ in 2050, do you want to tell them to piss off?
“Take your pro-Trump vote and shove it; you’re not anti-immigration for the ‘right’ reason. We don’t want you.”
“Big tent Republicanism” is a recipe for failure. But “big tent immigration restrictionism” isn’t such a bad thing. The voter who favors Trump’s immigration policies but not because of demographic replacement fears still has value.
To be absolutely clear, my sympathies lie squarely with VDARE and AmRen and the rightists who (to reference a past column that becomes more timely each day) “dare to say white.” But let’s not delude ourselves. One need only view Nick Fuentes’ Telegram to understand that the anti-Kirk aktion is not about discussion but disruption. I’d have preferred to see the groypers start their own campus network instead of burning down Kirk’s. Being an agent of destruction is way too popular an occupation on the far right these days.
Now, maybe this is the “OK boomer” in me talking, but these young self-described “autists” who get such a kick out of wreaking havoc make me nervous. I’m rarely surprised by anything in politics anymore, but last year, when an obese alt-right “edgelord” named Matt Forney tried to use Antifa to smash up an event I was hosting for Ann Coulter in West L.A., I was genuinely taken aback, because the guy did it just for the laughs. He had no ideological beef with Ann or with me. He just wanted to destroy something because it was fun.
Unlike Forney, the groypers do have a philosophy. But if Fuentes’ social media demonstrates anything, it’s that destroying Kirk and all who support him has become an end, not a means to an end.
Take the way they’ve gone after Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a guy who, unlike any of the groypers, actually has the power to legislate the things we want done. What exactly was the point of trying to embarrass him with questions about Israel and 9/11? And by the way, bringing 9/11 trutherism into the immigration debate is as brilliant as bringing in Holocaust jokes. If “9/11 was a Zionist plot” (or an “inside job”), the logical conclusion is that our immigration laws had nothing to do with 9/11. If evil Zionists carried out the attacks and framed innocent Arabs, then everything Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin have written about how Muslim terrorists used, abused, and exploited our undiscerning immigration system is therefore completely false. Trutherism robs immigration restrictionism of one of its strongest arguments, that our “America last” immigration policies allowed a bunch of foreign troglodytes to legally waltz right in and carry out one of the greatest slaughters in American history.
The core of trutherism is that the Muslims were either framed or their identities entirely fabricated by the conspirators. Either way, it means that immigration policies had nothing to do with the attacks, and those who’ve written otherwise are dupes, idiots, or liars.
This is not good strategy. Even stalwart immigration restrictionist Rep. Matt Gaetz was recently attacked by groypers for daring to suggest that TPUSA deserves to exist. So now Gaetz is the enemy? And while the groypers are obsessed with this kind of self-defeating Herostratus-level arson, leftists are thinking—and planning—generations ahead. One of the reasons the most extreme leftist strategists have been so successful is that they understand that at times the ideologically impure can nevertheless be useful. Do you recall that as leftists pushed for gay marriage, “mainstream” lefties swore that it would never lead to enforcement of tranny orthodoxy? “Oh no, we’ll never force little girls to undress in front of men in wigs!” And do you recall how, before that, leftists tolerated anti-gay-marriage sentiments from politicians like Obama and the Clintons?
Notice how leftists didn’t crash Obama Q&A’s in 2008 to make him squirm with gay marriage or tranny bathroom questions.
I get tired of always having to remind rightists about how the left has mastered the art of incremental change. They can purge those who are not ideologically pure on the tranny question now. But if they’d tried that purge in 2000 or 2008, they’d have queered their deal.
We need “safe” points of entry like TPUSA to serve kids who are, at present, more “anti-left” than “pro-right.” We need the middle-of-the-roaders in sanctuary cities who don’t care about demographics per se, but who are revulsed by catch-and-release and noncooperation with ICE. And we need people who prioritize building a wall over rehashing the USS Liberty or Googling “dancing Israelis.”
The groyper thing is going to burn out fairly soon (don’t believe me? Let’s talk again next fall). But I hope the core ideas that the groypers were supposedly pushing, mainly the discussion of why the immigration debate needs to be about more than just properly filled-out forms, and why Conservative Inc. has no real desire to tackle the issue, stick around.
A demographics-focused anti-immigration movement is a good thing, but it’s going to take more than ideological purists to dam up the left’s raging river. Put the urge to purge on the back burner for the time being. Yeah, watching Charlie “little face” Kirk squirm is funny. Yeah, humiliating a one-eyed war-hero congressman makes for good LULZ. But perhaps our focus should be on ensuring that in five years’ time, we have a little more to show for the victory of 2016 than memories of a kick-ass concert.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that people who have unprotected sex with others without informing them that they’re HIV-positive are downright rude.
Mind you, I’m not saying that Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is HIV-positive, but he is married to a dude and over his long and fruitful life of being an impenitent homo has likely spent hundreds of hours in dark and musty rooms in close proximity to the virus that causes AIDS. I have no idea whether he wore rubber body suits and took weeklong bleach showers after his homosexual trysts or whether he was like a randy pig wallowing in potentially fatal slop, and if you have any information about this, I don’t want to hear it.
What I do know is that Buttigieg recently declared that laws which criminalize nondisclosure of being HIV-poz are “not fair.” Based on his sympathies and self-professed proclivities, I’ll presume he thinks these laws are unfair to the person who knows they could be killing their sex partner but is too creepy and cowardly and sadistic to inform them, rather than the person who may be handed a death sentence because they didn’t realize their seemingly harmless Tinder/Grindr hookup was a psycho.
Beware of a world where the mere idea of possibly giving someone who is the sexual equivalent of a drunk driver a social stigma is considered more damaging than a drunk driver plowing through a crowd without caring who gets hurt. In fact, be wary of any person or society who considers potentially harmful ideas worse than demonstrably harmful actions.
Buttigieg, along with Elizabeth “Dry Gulch” Warren and Cory “Scary” Booker, say they agree that laws designed to punish HIV-positive sluts who willingly put others in harm’s way are “antiquated” and “archaic” and have no basis in real science. Buttigieg noted that someone who’s dosed his bloodstream with antiretroviral drugs may have such a low viral load that it is undetectable and therefore untransmissible.
That’s all fine and dandy, but these laws do not differentiate between people with low viral loads and those who are so chock-full of HIV they could infect all of Brazil with one sticky wad.
It can’t be said enough that Buttigieg’s surname begins with “Butt,” nor can it be overstressed that the California state senator who recently shoved a bill down the taxpayers’ throats that demoted the act of intentionally infecting someone with HIV from a felony to a misdemeanor is named Scott Weiner. Like Mayor Buttplug, Master Weiner wants society to wake up, awaken, and become woke to the fact that the recklessly negligent or proactively malevolent AIDS bandit is the real victim here rather than the person they may be sending to a cold and early grave.
A recent article at Vox claims that 26 states currently criminalize the act of knowingly exposing someone to HIV, down from a high of 33 states in 2011. The essay also has the moxie to insinuate that the very idea that any noble AIDS-carrier would ever intentionally infect anyone else emerged from a moral “panic” that “may have been fueled by longstanding social prejudices, including homophobia.”
No, you noodle-brained true believer, fear of AIDS is caused by germaphobia rather than homophobia, and it’s an entirely legitimate fear.
And when people get up on their little pink soapboxes and try to gaslight you, I also think it’s legitimate to kick that pink soapbox straight out from under their stiletto heels. For instance, Anna North at Vox had the gall to toss out this easily debunkable nugget:
There is no evidence that a significant number of people were ever intentionally trying to infect other people with HIV.
I wish the whole world could hear me sighing right now.
There are endless documented cases of people using HIV as a murder weapon, either intentionally or with reckless disregard for the life of the person they were jizzing all over.
Just last week, John Conner III—a professional dance coach and star of TV reality show Bring It—pled guilty to exposing a 16-year-old boy to HIV when Conner was 26 and they’d “had unprotected sex inside Conner’s vehicle multiple times.” Now 30, Conner was aware of his HIV-positive status in 2012 and is also being investigated for possibly exposing two other males to the virus.
Last year, a Scotsman named Darryl Rowe received a life sentence after he went on an eighteen-month campaign of vengeance to purposely infect as many other gay men with HIV as possible. Rowe claims he had unprotected sex with hundreds of men through the gay dating app Grindr; he is confirmed to have infected at least five of them. He would wait for days after exposing them to the virus so that they’d have no chance of nipping it in the bud with retroviral cocktails before he’d send them text messages such as:
Maybe you have the fever. I came inside you and I have HIV LOL. Oops!
You can’t get rid of me. You’re gonna burn. I ripped the condom. You’re stupid. I got you.
You’re a fucking revolting jackass. Ha Ha Ha Ha. I’d taken the condom off.
I hope you enjoyed four of my loads. I have HIV.
In 2015, 22-year-old Missouri resident Michael Johnson—who called himself “Tiger Mandino” in gay chat rooms—was found guilty of infecting one partner and attempting to expose at least four others. Police found 32 videos on Johnson’s laptop of him having unprotected sex with others.
In 2015, a California landscaper named Thomas Guerra was convicted of infecting others with HIV based on 11,000 text messages that saw him reveling in the fact that he was infecting others:
Yay lol. Someone getting poz that day. Poor Sucka.
Guerra’s punishment for potentially killing dozens of people? Six months in jail.
In 2014, an unnamed Seattle man who had been fully aware of his HIV-positive status since 2008 and knowingly infected eight sexual partners with HIV was only ordered by a judge to see a counselor and get medical treatment.
For ten years leading to his 2013 arrest, a Missourian named David Mangum estimates he had unprotected sex with at least 300 men while fully aware he was HIV-positive and without disclosing it to a single soul. He says he didn’t tell them about his condition due to a “fear of rejection.”
In 2008, an ostensibly heterosexual Australian father of five named Michael John Neal was convicted of fifteen charges including “attempting to infect another person with HIV, rape and procuring sexual penetration by fraud.” Neal estimated that he infected about 75 men and confessed that he “gets off” on the idea of transmitting the virus.
Also in 2008, a trio of HIV-positive Dutch men were handed sentences ranging from a trifling nine years to a measly 18 months for purposely injecting a drug cocktail that included their AIDS-tainted blood into a dozen men during a series of gay sex parties.
Then there are the pedophiles who purposely infect children with HIV. Mustn’t forget them…
Way back in the summer of 1992, a repressed gay Christian living amid the tall timbers of southern Oregon named Adam Lee Brown molested or raped at least nine children he’d lured to his home. Brown claimed that he went on a revenge rampage after learning of his positive HIV status: “They gave it to me. I’m going to give it back to them.” In the most sickening case of all, a five-year-old boy claims that “Uncle” Adam took “the white stuff that came from his weenie” and rubbed it into an open scratch on the boy’s arm. Brown was sentenced to 16 years in prison and later, while on parole, was rearrested for allegedly stabbing a 10-year-old boy in a Wendy’s bathroom.
At his own wedding reception in 1994, an AIDS-carrying crack addict named Frank Bridges raped his seven-year-old stepdaughter and infected her with HIV.
Last year a high-school track coach in Maryland received a 105-year sentence on federal child pornography charges as well as five counts of purposely attempting to infect children with HIV.
But it’s not simply the homos and pedos. Plenty of heteros are on record trying to purposely taint others with the killer virus.
According to Michigan mental-health officials, David Dean Smith was “sexually aroused by causing pain to females” and went on a three-year spree trying to infect as many women with HIV as possible. One victim described Smith as “very charming.”
In 1992, an HIV-positive parolee named Terry Boatwright kidnapped his former girlfriend, raped her, and used a syringe to inject her with his toxic blood. He told her that he wanted her to know what it felt like to live with an incurable illness. And then he shot himself.
After testing positive for HIV in January 1992 subsequent to being raped by a Detroit burglar named Dwayne Lamont Peterson, his victim lamented:
I think he should die now. He took my life away from me for no reason. I’ll probably die within a year, and I’ll never get married, and I’ll never be able to have children, and I’ll never be a doctor.
In 1997, a New Yorker named Nushawn Williams admitted he’d had unprotected sex with anywhere from 75 to 300 women after learning he was HIV-positive. He was confirmed to have infected at least 14 women—two of whom gave birth to HIV-positive babies.
In April 2009, the first person in history to be convicted of murder for purposely infecting someone with HIV was a Ugandan-born Canadian named Johnson Aziga, who infected at least seven women with the virus, killing two.
And just last month a white HIV-positive white South Carolina DJ named Jason Roger Pope was arrested for forcing four underage black girls to have sex with him at his home. Pope is suspected of luring up to 700 black girls into prostitution.
And although it’s much harder for women to transmit the virus to men, it’s not due to a lack of trying. In 2006, after learning that a black lover had given her the “gift” that doesn’t stop giving until you’re dead, a white British hairdresser named Sarah Jane Porter went on a five-year mission to infect as many black men as possible. One man she infected described her as “pure evil.”
In 2010 Nadja Benaissa, singer in a German girl band called No Angels, was convicted of having unprotected sex with three men without informing them of her HIV-positive status, infecting one of them. Her “punishment” was 300 hours of community service.
In 2014 an unnamed female teen in Kenya went on a Facebook group to declare that she became HIV-positive after having unprotected sex with a man at a party who lied and told her he’d used a condom. She says she then went on a revenge mission to infect at least 2,000 men but “only” had sex with 324 of them before pecking out the following online confession:
I buried the good girl in me and became the bad girl, my goal was to infect as many as possible so far since Dec up to now i have infected 324 men and i make sure to note down there list which i secretly keeps when ill be on my death bed i will release it….I know i have nothing left to do on earth but wait for my death but before i do, men will get it.
Sorry, fruitcakes—this is a situation where your legendarily fragile feelings must take a back seat to public safety. You can shoot at someone with a loaded gun and entirely miss your target, and it will still be charged as attempted murder. Having unprotected sex with someone and not telling them you’re HIV-positive should be treated the same way.
