As this week’s column will run on the final day of the year, I thought I’d break format and do something a little different. People often ask me, “Dave, where do you get your story ideas?” Why, from my Mossad handlers, of course. But every now and then I manage to scrounge something up on my own, and every other now and then I encounter a story idea that I just can’t flesh out to a full column. And every year those unused stories go right into the ol’ dustbin. But not this year. In the name of Thunberg the Righteous, I shall recycle my waste into one final column of the twenty-tens. Starting with…

The Curious Case of the Crawling Cripple

This was a white whale I just couldn’t land. My friend Scott Rosendall is an accomplished actor. He’s also wheelchair-bound. Scott does okay for himself in a business where “appropriation” is off-limits except when it comes to able-bodied actors pretending to be handicapped (“capface,” as I like to call it). In August, Scott auditioned for a UnitedHealthcare commercial. The spot specifically called for actual crips, no pretenders. A rare opportunity for a guy like Scott.

But here’s the punchline: The commercial was scheduled to be shot on the top floor of a building with no elevators! The cripples would have to crawl up several flights of stairs if they wanted the job.

This is, of course, a gross violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. You can’t offer work to the handicapped in a building they can’t access. Making it even funnier is the fact that the commercial was being shot by “social justice” advertising production company Tool of North America, best known for its “kiss cam” PSA featuring a Down syndrome gay couple kissing (can’t get more woke than that!).

Yet these “progressive” heroes literally told Scott and the other auditionees, “You want the job? Crawl, stumpy.”

Great story, huh? Major leftist production company caught breaking federal law. Except I could not get any of the involved parties (UnitedHealthcare, Tool, casting director Arlene Schuster-Goss, and ad agency Leo Burnett) to speak on record about the incident. All I had was Scott’s testimony, and that of his agent. So I handed off the story to a contact at Variety, who was similarly stonewalled. This is what happens when potential interviewees understand that their words might lead to a federal lawsuit. At least I can console myself that Variety was equally unsuccessful. Still, I hated to let this one go.

Even Mexican Child Murderers Need a Friend

In July 2002, Samantha Runnion, a beautiful 5-year-old girl, was playing in the front yard of her home in Stanton, Calif., when she was kidnapped in broad daylight by a stranger, Alejandro Avila, who repeatedly raped her before strangling her and dumping her naked body in a forest. Avila came from a family of Mexican immigrants. His father was a convicted murderer, his brother was killed by members of his own street gang, and Alejandro had previously been charged with child molestation.

And who says Mexico doesn’t “send its best”?

Because Samantha Runnion was white, the L.A. Times became the advocate for the noble brown man charged with her murder (I mean, c’mon, she obviously asked to be killed, and Avila was merely doing a job Americans wouldn’t). Times “justice reporter” Tina Dirmann mocked the police for not having any evidence against Avila (when in fact they had tons of it).

Back in 2002, I asked Dirmann to explain why she claimed the cops had presented no evidence when in reality they’d held several news conferences detailing the evidence they had.

Our 2002 correspondence went like this:

Me: “You wrote, ‘Investigators say they are confident they have the right man. But they have yet to present any evidence.’ In fact, investigators have released information to the press regarding blood, hair, skin, and other biological evidence against Avila. How do you explain your comment that they have yet to present evidence?”

Dirmann: “Evidence can only be presented in a court of law. Since preliminary hearing and trial proceedings have not yet begun, we have not yet seen any evidence formally presented. That’s why the story reads the way it does. Police gather evidence, which gives them probable cause for an arrest, then take what evidence they’ve gathered to the DA, who will press charges and later present it in court. That’s how the system works. Hope that helps.”

A most disingenuous and condescending response, but I let it go. For seventeen years.

Last August, I was working on a piece about mainstream journalists who cover for nonwhite killers, and I thought it might be fun to contact Dirmann again to ask her to clarify her 2002 remarks. Dirmann happily agreed to reopen the conversation, so I asked her the following question:

I’ve always been puzzled by your response. You appear to be saying that, by the definition of evidence that you were using, investigators don’t “present evidence” and can’t “present evidence.” If that’s so, then why say in your article that they had “yet to present any evidence”? If they can’t…if, by your definition of evidence, only the DA and prosecutors can “present” evidence, and only at trial, why make the claim that investigators had not done something that, by your definition, they can’t do?

Dirmann’s “ask away” attitude abruptly changed. “I don’t feel comfortable commenting further,” she replied, adding that she had no recollection “at all” of the Runnion case. And why should she? She did her part (playing word games to cheerlead for an accused child killer), and she lost (Avila was convicted and is currently on el corredor de la muerte).

My exchange with Dirmann was too cumbersome to fit in my August piece, but I want it to see the light of day anyway. It’s an important reminder that the media is filled with hacks who devote their time to finding creative ways to defend nonwhites who thin the “privileged” herd.

Speaking of Whites, Let’s Overcharge Them!

In July, Detroit music festival “Afrofuture Fest” heroically stood up to the man by charging white patrons double price for tickets (whites $40, all others $20). The New York Times thought this was a superb idea. So much so that the paper assigned former Essence editor Derrick Bryson Taylor the job of penning a piece explaining why antiwhite discrimination is not only amazing, but legal. Taylor, in turn, interviewed Detroit civil rights attorney Tiffany Ellis, who confirmed that because the festival is private, it can discriminate away!

Tiffany Ellis, a Detroit-based civil rights lawyer, said private organizations have some leeway to choose who they are going to do business with and how they do that business. “We have constitutional rights as an individual, and the 14th Amendment provides that we cannot be discriminated against because all people are created equal,” Ms. Ellis said Sunday. “When it’s a private actor, those protections are different.”

Except, no. Not at all. Michigan has a law banning discrimination in any type of “public accommodation” (as does Colorado—that’s why that Christian baker keeps getting harassed). Is it really possible that an actual civil rights attorney in Michigan is unfamiliar with her state’s antidiscrimination laws? Or did the Times manipulate her words?

I emailed Ms. Ellis, who confirmed, “The part that didn’t make it into the story was when I told him (Taylor) that the legal challenges the organizers would have faced would be based on public accommodation law.” She invited me to chat about her experience with the Times, and yep, Taylor and/or the editors removed the part of her interview where she warned that such discriminatory pricing would run afoul of the public accommodation law.

A “paper of record” misrepresented the views of an attorney in order to present a false case for the legality of antiwhite discrimination, in an effort to bolster those who engage in it. I couldn’t build an entire column around that, but it’s a nice reminder of that outhouse rag’s priorities.

An Infinite Monkey’s Inadvertent Wisdom

I knew in advance that my recent column excoriating that unique type of dimwit known as the Holocaust denier would attract a few trolls. But one troll in particular, though not worthy of a full column, nevertheless deserves a mention. A YouTube “redpiller” named Angelo John Gage decided it would be fun to troll me on Twitter. Curious about the identity of this minor nuisance, I checked out his channel and watched a video detailing why, in his opinion, denial is the only intelligent way to look at the Holocaust. Gage explains that if you haven’t seen and experienced something for yourself, you can never truly know it happened. Therefore, we must remain “agnostic” about all historical events that we did not personally witness. He provides Julius Caesar as an example. Since Gage “never met him,” maybe he existed, maybe not.

Hallelujah! I never thought I’d encounter a Holocaust denier oblivious enough to explain his craft so clearly. Yes, Holocaust denial is the outright rejection of the idea that humans can ever know anything about history. It’s a rejection of historiography as a field, and of evidence as a concept. This is how deniers are mentally able to dismiss the wealth of contemporaneous documents proving the 1941–1943 Jewish extermination program: “I wasn’t there, so therefore it’s unknowable.”

Of course, why limit that to the Holocaust? Don’t we have to be equally “agnostic” about Stalin’s mass murders? And Mao’s? Gage rants about the USS Liberty, but he wasn’t there for that. Where’s the agnosticism? And why stop at history? The criminal justice system is based upon judgment by twelve people who “weren’t there” for the event in question. Surely that must end. That white girl “murdered” by black teens in the park in NYC…I didn’t see it happen, did you? No? Then stop talking like it did.

Finally, a denier self-diagnosed his own pathology. No drivel about deniers being “investigators” trying to “find the truth.” Deniers dismiss not only the truth of the Holocaust, but the very concept of truth itself.

A few days ago, Gage pulled the video, so I can’t link to it. Redpiller redpilled himself, and then memory-holed himself.

Sheer poetry.

Late in Time Behold Him Come

Back in August, I railed against the right-wing morons who were attempting to cancel the conservative-friendly action film The Hunt. The morons won, and the film was shelved. I revisited the issue in my Dec. 24 column, and the next day—Christmas Day—Mike Cernovich tweeted: “One of the dumber things I did in 2019 was fall for the conservative outrage over The Hunt. What a stupid thing. My apologies to (producer) Jason Blum and others.”

Cerno must have been visited by four spirits on Christmas Eve, to have undergone such a dramatic change of heart.

Some folks read my column, others hear it secondhand from ghosts.

Regardless, a Happy New Year to you all.

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” Yogi Berra reminded us.

But on “The McLaughlin Group,” the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s.

Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump’s great domestic challenge would be to keep the economy firing on all cylinders. His great foreign policy challenge? Avoiding war.

When one looks at the numbers — unemployment at or below 4% for two years, an expansion in its 11th year, the stock market regularly hitting all-time highs — Trump enters his reelection year with a fistful of aces. One has to go back half a century to find numbers like these.

Moreover, the opposition shaping up to bring him down seems, to put it charitably, not up to the task.

Joe Biden, 77, with 45 years in electoral politics, has lost more than a step or two and his most memorable Senate vote was in support of George W. Bush’s decision to take us to war in Iraq, the greatest blunder in U.S. diplomatic history.

Biden’s challengers are a cantankerous 78-year-old democratic socialist who just had a heart attack and a 37-year-old mayor of a small town in Indiana who claims that his same-sex marriage is blessed by the Bible.

Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are white male billionaires who are dumping scores of millions into TV ads to buy the nomination of a party that professes to stand on principle against white male privilege, wealth inequality and the noxious effects of big money in politics.

While Trump is facing an impeachment trial, an acquittal by a Mitch McConnell-run Republican Senate seems a pretty good bet.

And the coming report of U.S. Attorney John Durham into the origins of the Russiagate probe is expected to find political bias, if not conspiracy, at its root. Trump could emerge from the Mueller Report, Horowitz Report and Durham Report as what his allies claim him to be — the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy to fix the election of 2016.

If there are IEDs on Trump’s road to reelection, they may be found in the Middle and Near East, land of the forever wars, and North Korea.

Not infrequently, foreign policy has proven decisive in presidential years.

The Korean War contributed to Harry Truman’s defeat in the New Hampshire primary and his 1952 decision not to run again. When General Eisenhower, architect of the Normandy invasion, declared, “I shall go to Korea,” his rival Adlai Stevenson was toast.

Lyndon Johnson saw his party shattered and chances vanish with the Tet Offensive of 1968, Eugene McCarthy’s moral victory in New Hampshire, and antiwar candidate Bobby Kennedy’s entry into the race.

Jimmy Carter’s feckless response to the seizure of U.S. hostages in Iran consumed the last year of his presidency and contributed to his rout by Ronald Reagan.

The critical foreign theaters where Trump could face problems with his presidential re-election include Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea.

As of Dec. 30, Kim Jong Un’s “Christmas gift” to Trump had not been delivered. Yet it is unlikely Kim will let many weeks pass without making good on his warnings and threats. And though difficult to believe he would start a war, it is also difficult to see how he continues to tolerate sanctions for another year without upgrading and rattling his nuclear arsenal.

Trump is eager to make good on his promises and remove many of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan before Election Day. Yet such a move is not without risks. Given the strength of the Taliban, the casualties they are able to inflict, the inability of the Afghan army to hold territory, and the constant atrocities in the capital city of Kabul, a Saigon ’75 end to the Afghan war is not outside the realm of the possible.

Nor is a shooting war with Iran that rivets the nation’s attention.

Yesterday, U.S. F-15s, in five attacks, hit munitions depots and a command center of the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia in Syria and Iraq, a retaliatory raid for a rocket attack on a U.S. training camp that killed an American contractor and wounded four U.S. soldiers.

“For those who ask about the response,” warns a Kataib Hezbollah spokesman, “it will be the size of our faith.” One has to expect Iran and its militia in Iraq to respond in kind.

They have a track record. During 2019, with its economy choked by U.S. sanctions, Iran and its allies sabotaged oil tankers in the Gulf, shot down a $130 million U.S. Predator drone, and shut down with missiles and drones half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production.

In former times, a confrontation or shooting war often benefitted the incumbent, as there was almost always a rallying to the flag. Those days are gone. This generation has had its fill of wars.

Another year, another 365 days of walking, talking human headaches. Sometimes I don’t know why I simply don’t look away from it all—and then, when I can’t come up with an answer, I begin getting annoyed with myself.

With the mysterious and highly suspicious exception of 2015, I’ve done these yearly rundowns ever since 2012. Here are the previous installments for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

It behooves me to stress the difference between “annoying” and “appalling.” These aren’t necessarily the worst people this year; they’re merely those whose sanctimony and muddle-headedness made we want to smack them in the face with a cold trout when no one else was looking.

If you’re looking for “appalling,” there was plenty of that to go around this year as well: the tacky showbiz impresario who trotted around a group of Down syndrome children in drag; the lesbian couple who drove their interracial adopted children off a cliff or the lesbian couple who castrated, murdered, and then dismembered their nine-year-old son—in that order; the Chinese girl who cheated on her boyfriend, felt guilty, accused the guy she cheated on him with of rape, and had the poor guy beaten; and the black rapper who made a music video showing white kids in cages and drinking toilet water.

For me, I suppose the difference between “annoying” and “appalling” is that the latter deserves a lot more than a few slaps with a cold trout.

These are rated in ascending order—from least annoying to so insufferable that I want everyone who ever had so much as a positive thought about them to suffer prolonged and painful deaths via perfectly natural causes. At the very least, they should be custom-fitted for dildos that are three sizes too large.

And for the bajillionth time for all you knuckleheads up in the peanut gallery—I’m talking about people who I, James Thaddeus Francis Goad, personally found annoying this year. I don’t care who you found annoying, and I ESPECIALLY don’t care to hear about how I got some of the answers wrong. This is a subjective matter. I understand that you don’t understand the difference, but at least try to understand that I understand that and you don’t. Understood?

There is no threshold for name recognition here, either, which is why you probably never heard of many of these people and might actually hate me for making you aware of their existence.

I went heavy on the guys this year—all but five of my villains are biological males.

More than anything, I suppose I’m annoyed by people who don’t know who they really are:

There’s a man who believes he’s a dog.

A man who believes he’s a woman who just happens to have hairy balls.

A white woman who is certain she’s going to squeeze out a black baby with her white lover.

A lying Native American drifter who can’t stop banging his war drum.

A woman who finds that she’s “bored” that her husband won’t cheat on her.

A woman who went from transgender to “transalien.”

A neocon writer who is just as bad as the French, which might be why he’s named after them.

A black presidential candidate who reminds you he’s black—in case you forget that he’s black.

An Irish presidential candidate who wants you to believe he’s Mexican.

A gay presidential candidate who thinks America is ready for a gay presidential candidate.

A black woman who accuses white people of stealing time.

A TV host who threatens to beat up people who say mean things about dumb Italians like him.

A gay man who falsely accused his partner of raping him because he needed the attention.

A biracial ex-NFL player who believes he’s Malcolm X.

A white man who says he’s an Asian trapped in a white body.

A Jewish comedian who wants to outlaw jokes about Jews.

A smelly Jewish man who blames his body odor on anti-Semitism.

A gay black Jewish actor who hired two burly African guys to pretend they were white Trump supporters who attempted to lynch him.

And finally, a woman who said she doesn’t believe men are women, then, to save face, lied and said she was a man who transformed into a woman, and then admitted she was just a woman after all when it became clear she was lying about being a man.

Shall we?…

19. BETO O’ROURKE
Although he’s impressively annoying, I wanted him to wind up last here—just like he did in the polls.

Whatever you call him—Beto, Beta, Bitch-Tits—he’s a white man who pretends he’s Spanish, but in order to protect the poor Spanish-speaking peoples of southern Texas, he’s coming to take the white man’s guns and hand them over to the peace-loving brown people, who in all likelihood will promptly shoot him.

Beto could smell the winds of change. He could smell them strongly. At some point the stench became so unbearable that someone needed to open a window.

18. FREDY KOSMAN WEE
No annual list of annoying people would be complete without some guy falsely accusing another guy of raping him, which if you really think about it is sadder than if he’d actually been raped.

This year’s annoying-homo standard-bearer is Fredy Kosman Wee, whose name manages to be both gay and annoying. He also looks gayer than a sprig of artificial pink mistletoe. The squealing Indonesian gaybird called police three times to falsely accuse his lover of force-feeding him a sleeping pill and then raping him after he fell unconscious—an abominable act which, if it had only been true, would have been rude by all known standards. After his story fell apart like a virgin sphincter under a rigorous gang-pummeling, Fredy broke down and admitted he made it all up because he was absolutely furious his boyfriend wasn’t providing enough solace for an undisclosed medical condition which has to be AIDS because no one is afraid of disclosing any other medical conditions.

17. ED CASE
Although he looks every bit as white as you’d expect a guy named “Ed Case” to be, this Democratic Congressman from Hawaii stood up at some clearly racist event to celebrate racial pride among Asians and said that he felt like an “Asian trapped in a white body.” If he had only followed that up by jesting that he would gladly swap out two inches for 20 extra IQ points, that wouldn’t have been annoying at all. But groveling before racial identity groups is never attractive, Ed. NEVER.

16. MARTINA BIG
As if it wasn’t disgusting enough to surgically enhance her breasts to a zeppelin-sized 32S, this German woman and her preposterously adipose lover Michael Eurwen have been taking injections of a synthetic hormone called Melanotan that is turning her formerly fair skin into roughly the color of coal tar. Michael’s skin, however, might be so truly German that it is fighting off the black invaders. In 2018, Martina flew to Africa to be baptized as a “true African woman.” Now, just as all the other racial-dysmorphia casualties who’ve convinced themselves that they’re black, Martina says that a doctor has convinced her that any babies the couple has will be as shiny-black as Slappy White.

There is a chance that if they do indeed breed, their children will be born perfectly white. Their children may grow to despise their racially delusional parents, especially their attempts to birth their children in a toxic petri dish of self-hatred. There’s even a chance that their children may feel compelled to kill their parents. That isn’t a wish—more like a fantasy. But it’s probably likelier than the fantastic notion that their children will be born black.

15. BRITTNEY COOPER
In a field that was packed to the gills this year with annoying fat black women, it was hard to pick only one. Cooper is, to our knowledge, the only black woman who has ever been named “Brittney.” She is “an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies” and recently gave a speech where she ululated that white people invented the concept of time as yet another lug wrench in their Evil Toolbox of Oppression:

…if time had a race, it would be white. White people own time.

She actually used this cockamamie accusation to excuse why there are pervasive stereotypes about black people always being late for everything.

Bitch, I ain’t got time for this.

14. YOSSI ADLER
Just as we enjoyed/suffered a surfeit of annoying fat black women this year, there was no shortage of Tribespeople who found a way to get on our last nerve: There was the Jewish couple who took money to live in Alabama and then complained about living in Alabama and the Canadian Jews who painted swastikas on their own restaurant.

But Yossi Adler takes the cake because there’s nothing worse than a smelly person who’s aggressively in denial of the fact that they’re smelly. According to a statement from American Airlines, “multiple passengers” complained on a flight from Miami about the father of nine’s almost predatory body odor. Faced with a flight full of people who said he emitted a very sharp and offensive smell, he denied the fact that anyone said that and instead suggested they were anti-Semitic.

One look at the guy and you can tell he stinks like a decaying eel. Accusations of anti-Semitism are the last refuge of smelly scoundrels.

13. KAZ JAMES
If you are familiar with “otherkin,” they are people who are so insane that they insist they are something other than people.

Kaz James is a 37-year-old store manager from Greater Manchester who, even though no dog in history has been able to articulate a cohesive sentence, says quite emphatically that he is a dog. He eats out of a dog bowl. He wears a fur suit that makes him look more doglike. He says he’s always acted like a dog: “I was known by my friends for saying hello to them by grabbing hold of the collar of their shirt in my teeth and biting or licking them, very canine-type behaviors.”

As far as I can tell, Kaz James is neither a mad dog nor a proper Englishman. Instead, he is a mad Englishman.

12. CLARE O’REILLY
Nothing makes a gal’s cooch dry up like the cacti of the Sonoran Desert quicker than a “nice” guy. Modern feminism teaches women that they want “nice” guys, but since ideology can, at best, only temporarily trump biology, these women inevitably wind up wishing that these men would ditch the niceness every so often and take them with the force of a barbarian army. Clare O’Reilly is just enough of a t-w-a-t that she went public actually complaining that she found the perfect feminist husband who is dutiful and loving and, I will assume, repulsively submissive both in and out of the boudoir.

Out loud and in front of the whole world, she proclaims that she wishes her nauseatingly nice-guy hubby would “lie, cheat, defame or slander just once.”

What’s his phone number? Let me have a talk with him. When I get done with him, he’ll insult you so thoroughly, you won’t be able to keep your hands off him.

11. JARETH NEBULA
I could simply say “Jareth Nebula” and walk away without needing to further justify this person/thing’s inclusion on this list.

Apparently it’s a girl who describes herself as “Trans/Agender, Demisexual/Graysexual, Blue Alien, MisfitGoth, Body Mods, Disabled, J-Fashion, Potato.”

She also wants you to know that she wishes to undergo nipple-removal surgery in order for her to feel more comfortable as her true self, which—duh!—is a “transalien.”

Girl, that’s transtarded. Go back to Mom and Dad and have them shove you in a dress and teach you how to play with dolls.

10. DAVID FRENCH
Again, as with the fat black women, readers this year suffered no famine of insufferable “conservative” scribes who have a deep cellular hatred for the very people whose interests they’re supposed to represent. David French is the pelican-faced creature who was suggested by Bill Kristol, without a hint of irony mind you, as a viable candidate to snatch the Republican nomination for president from Donald Trump.

Instead, French is taking a different approach—he wants to eliminate everyone who supported Donald Trump. “It’s time to declare war on white-nationalist terrorism,” he shrieked in National Review, which for years has been the go-to publication for white men with erectile-dysfunction issues. In TIME he warned of an “Alt-Right Virus Infecting America,” apparently unaware that a successful vaccine had been found long before he published the article.

David French, I don’t know if you’re actually French or if it’s more fake news, but I hate you as much as I hate them.

9. NATHAN PHILLIPS
What’s sadder than being a Native American?

Nothing, as far as I know.

Take a look at Nathan Phillips, the serial fabulist who nearly started yet another national race war early this year when the self-proclaimed Omaha Tribesman got up into the face of some white Catholic kids in Washington, DC and started beating his war drum. Nearly every last tidbit of Phillips’s account of that incident was proved to be false—every bit as false as the idea that Native Americans were peace-loving flower children when Paleface first arrived on their shores with the sole intention of harshing their mellow.

But Nathan Phillips, it is YOU who are the stone-cold bummer.

8. CORY BOOKER
I think he has AIDS. I have absolutely no proof of this, which is why I said “think.” But he’s supposedly a lifelong rump-wrangler, and this caramel-tinted failed presidential candidate has a terrified look in his eyes—the eyes of a man who has either stared the Grim Reaper in the eyes or stared at the word “POSITIVE” on HIV test results.

So my theory is that he’s terrified of the world knowing that he has AIDS. Combined with the fact that he’s not even a Harry Belafonte shade of black, this is why he focuses on black issues and white supremacy and how white supremacists are the number-one threat to black people and how black lives matter even though far more black people die of AIDS than from police shootings.

Plus, I’ve always hated the name “Cory.”

7. CARISSA PINKSTON
Talk about bending over backwards to kick yourself in the ass and being none the better for it!

Ms. Pinkston is a freckle-faced hi-yella Negress model who committed the mortal sin of saying on Facebook this past May that men who say they’re women really aren’t women.

Then, after being attacked with the wolverine intensity that only trannies can muster, she backpedaled and said that she was actually a male-to-female tranny and was merely lashing out due to the pain of a society that forces her to be in denial.

Then, when a friend said that she had always been a woman and is acting crazy, she laid on yet another layer of apologies, all while realizing she was only making things worse.

She is now forced to spend the rest of her life clumsily attempting to take her head out of her ass.

6. SACHA BARON COHEN
He used to be funny when he mocked Muslims. And homos. And Jew-haters.

But when he appeared recently in front of the hatemongers at the ADL to declare that Big Tech needs to shut down all anti-Semitic hate speech and, although he didn’t use exactly these words, beat all anti-Semites to death with hammers in the streets while raping their women and stealing their children’s lunch money, he ceased being funny to us.

He actually said, and he didn’t appear to be joking, that if Adolf Hitler were alive today, Facebook would be partnering with him. If Cohen had a funny bone left in his body, that would be his next movie—with him as Hitler.

5. JESSICA YANIV
Born Jonathan Yaniv to a Jewish immigrant mother who enables him to the point that she probably still breast-feeds him, Yaniv recently earned international headlines for filing human-rights complaints with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal because a series of estheticians howled “Ew! No!” when he asked them to wax his testicles.

As a man who claims he’s a woman even though he still has balls to be waxed, Yaniv was mostly targeting immigrant women—actual women—with his complaints. He also has a weird tampon fetish and a predilection for sending pornographic voicemail messages to underage girls.

He’s easily the year’s most repulsive tranny, and that deserves an award of its own.

4. CHRIS CUOMO
This steroid-addled Ginzo’s entire shtick consists of little more than pawing at his crotch and saying, “Yo, Vinny—our president is a doosh!,” and yet CNN pays him to do it.

Because both his father and brother became governor of New York while he does nothing more than paw at his crotch for TV cameras, Chris is the weak link in the Cuomo family dynasty, and he’s painfully aware of it. So great is his pain that when when some heckler referred to him as “Fredo”—the weak link in the Corleone family dynasty in the Godfather movies, Cuomo was filmed threatening to throw the heckler down a flight of stairs for smearing him with the Italian equivalent of the “N” word.

That makes no sense, though. Who needs an Italian equivalent of the “N” word when you can just say “Italian” and people will know what you mean?

3. JUSSIE SMOLLETT
His name rhymes with “hussy” and is a nickname for “Justin,” a name which I’ve always found annoying, but not nearly as annoying as “Jussie.” So we’re not doing very well right out of the gate here.

He’s a gay black and rumored-to-be-Jewish actor who perpetrated the most high-profile hate-crime hoax in a country where such incidents are becoming as common as the Junior Prom.

He wanted a nation that was already weary of hate-crime hoaxes to believe that in the middle of a frigid winter night in a posh gay/black neighborhood in downtown Chicago, two white MAGA-hat-wearing, bleach-toting, noose-clutchin’ yahoos were roaming around just lookin’ to put a gay Negro actor in his place. His story fell apart more times than Judy Garland’s marriages, though, and even though he was arrested for filing a false police report he was later released and has not faced any of the sort of punishment I would personally enjoy watching him suffer.

2. COLIN KAEPERNICK
Is it legal for me to say that the white couple who adopted him should have murdered him? I’m not sure, so that’s why I’m asking.

What is this weird complex that half-breeds have that make them among the most dedicated racial-identity fanatics of ‘em all? I’d suspect it’s precisely because they are half-breeds and their fierce public displays of racial purity are at once a sad and hilarious display of both agony and insecurity.

Nothing Kaepernick says is true, every “injustice” he screams about ceased occurring long ago—that is, if it ever happened at all—he’s obviously deflecting from the fact that his days as a top-tier quarterback are long gone, and if he had any sense at all in the pillar of confusion that is his body, he’d spend at least a sliver of his $20 million fortune to get a nose job and a haircut.

1. PETE BUTTIGIEG
Hey, it’s “Mayor Pete”! He’s the first millennial homosexual mayor ever to make a serious bid for a major party’s nomination. He has never had an original idea in his life, and the only reason he’s gained any traction is because he’s an anus-nuzzling bone-polisher. Blacks don’t like him, Hispanics don’t like him, and radical homos think he’s too boring. Whenever this smarmy little vole starts pontificating about some policy issue or another, all the entire world can think about is that later tonight, he’ll be batting around his husband’s testicles as if they were ping-pong balls and his tongue was a paddle.

The Week’s Crustiest, Rustiest, and Mustiest Headlines

ROBERT DE NIRO EXPRESSES WEIRD SCATOLOGICAL SEXUAL FANTASY ABOUT DONALD TRUMP
Robert De Niro is a formerly great actor who, alas, has gone paunchy and senile.

Along with everyone else in the entertainment industry, De Niro received the memo that if he ever wants to eat lunch in Hollywood again, he must flail about flapping his arms like one of those weird inflatable puppets you see on used-car lots about how Donald Trump is the most evil thing ever to happen to our galaxy and if we don’t neutralize him immediately, our planet will explode and Satan will win.

De Niro has formerly said that he would like to punch Trump in the face. All we’ll say about that is that he’ll have to aim high, seeing as Trump is four inches taller than the scrappy Sicilian half-pint.

He has also called Trump a “monster.” And a “pig.” And a “punk.” He also said Trump is “too stupid to even know he is evil.”

From all appearances, Robert De Niro is very upset with Trump—that is, unless he’s acting.

In a sit-down interview with that seeping tub of suet named Michael Moore, De Niro expressed a desire to see feces—whether human or animal, he didn’t specify—smeared across our one and only president’s face:

There has not been one thing about this person that has been redeeming, as far as I can see….I’d like to see a bag of shit right in his face. Hit him right in the face like that, and let the picture go all over the world. He needs to be humiliated. He needs to be confronted and humiliated by whoever his opponent is….They have to stand up to him, they don’t have to do it in an obvious physical way, but they have to have the formidability to confront him and to put him in his place, because the people have to see that, to see him be humiliated.

Neither Travis Bickle nor Rupert Pupkin ever sounded that crazy. Suddenly it becomes clear that Robert De Niro has never acted a day in his life—he’s simply a mental defective behaving naturally.

MAN SENTENCED TO 16 YEARS FOR SETTING RAINBOW FAG FLAG ON FIRE
Ignorance leads to fear, which leads to hate. Hate then leads to more ignorance, which is scary. Scary ignorance then leads to more hate, which always ends in violence. If there’s anything worth hating and fearing, it’s ignorance. And for all the ignorant people out there, don’t be hatin’ on what I just said. It just shows that you’re afraid.

Adolfo Martinez’s mother probably cursed him from birth by naming him after Hitler. Actually, we’re not certain that’s why she named him “Adolfo,” but c’mon, lady, your son was born a mere 30 years ago at a time when everyone knew that Hitler’s unforgivable sins had rendered both his name and his mustache off-limits for eternity.

Not to knock his mom too much, but either she didn’t tell him not to hate homos or Li’l Adolfo didn’t listen to her. The homophobic Hispanic from Iowa just received a 16-year sentence for stealing an LGBTQ flag that was hanging outside Ames United Church of Christ and burning it outside Dangerous Curves Gentleman’s Club on June 11.

Has anyone ever seen a gentleman at a “gentleman’s club”?

Martinez received his harsh sentence not completely because homosexuals’ feelings are so sacred that we must protect them no matter how insanely sadistic the punishment is, but because he’s a habitual offender. But make no mistake—the fact that he will spend 16 revolutions around the sun while trapped in a cage is intended to send a message to anyone foolhardy enough to set flame to something that is sacred to the flamers.

PEAK TRANS: TRANSGENDER WOMAN ACCUSED OF TRANSPHOBIC HATE SPEECH
What kind of world do we live in where a man can pretend to be a woman so long as he doesn’t break character and say, “OK, I’m only pretending”?

Debbie Hayton is a physics teacher in England’s dreary Midlands. Debbie’s parents probably named Debbie something like “Jack” or Nigel,” but we don’t want to “deadname” Debbie and get put on some hit list. At some point in recent years, Debbie legally changed Debbie’s name and received hormone treatment and sex-assignment therapy.

Whew. At least we were able to get through that entire paragraph without saying “her.”

At some event organized by a group of killjoys called Fair Play for Women, Debbie committed the self-hate crime of wearing a T-shirt that said:

Trans women are men. Get over it!

Debbie is facing expulsion from the LGBT committee of the Trades Union Congress for not only wearing the shirt, but for opining thusly in a published essay:

Trans women are biologically male — in fact, being male is the sole qualifying criterion to be a trans woman

Where’s the lie? In fact, the only lie we could spot is that this creatures calls itself “Debbie” and wants us to lie and say he’s a chick.

According to Maria Exall, who looks like she could be Tucker Carlson’s younger, underachieving brother, Debbie’s comments crossed that “line” we keep hearing about:

[Debbie has] gone beyond discourse, and the expression of alternative viewpoints, and is now propagating hate speech against the trans community.

But that’s simply not true. And neither is the fact that Debbie is really a “Debbie.”

This is all one eternally spiraling headache. Does anyone have any aspirin—like, five or six of them?

RUDY GIULIANI CHALLENGES GEORGE SOROS TO A JEW-OFF
We always considered ex-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to be a devout and likely Mob-connected Catholic, so it comes as a wee bit of a shock to hear him say that when it comes to Jewishness, he can out-Jew George Soros any day of the week.

Responding to the allegation that any criticism of George Soros is rooted in anti-Semitism, Giuliani dismissed such meshugga goy talk:

Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him….Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.

When a reporter later asked Giuliani how any Catholic could out-Jew any Jew, much less one as prominent as Soros, he said, “I’m more Jewish than half my friends.”

Yeah, but what if half of his friends aren’t Jewish? And how is he measuring Jewishness, anyway? We’ll believe him when we see notarized test results proving that he has a serum blood level of at least 2.3 Jewtrons or higher.

“SEX OFFENDER EXPERT” CHARGED WITH SEX OFFENSES
If you were writing a short story and wanted to make one of the characters a sex offender, it’s hard to go wrong with a name like “Kurt M. Bumby.” The guy just sounds like a deviant.

Bumby, 50, is a Missouri-based “forensic psychologist and national leader in the field of sex offender management.” For two decades he’s been advising governmental agencies across the country in the fine art of “sex offender management.” Just last month he was paid a staggering $280,000 merely for delivering a report to the Arizona Supreme Court about how to better manage sex offenders and, we dunno, make them less sexually offensive.

Now he is facing charges in both St. Louis County and Columbia County, MO for child sex crimes against two separate children. The St. Louis case involves molestation charges from 1988 to 1994 while Bumby was in college. The alleged victim was the member of a family Bumby had befriended and would visit on weekends. The Boone County charges allege that Bumby sodomized yet another child of a family friend between 2008 and 2015.

You always have to keep an eye on the do-gooders. Always. More often than not, they’re the worst.

NIGERIAN MALES RISE UP AGAINST THE MISANDRIST PLAGUE!
In a climate where it often feels like the entire Western media is trying to gaslight you, we find solace and comfort in the magical world of African journalism.

Olatunji Ololade is one of our favorite African journalists, and we only say that because we aren’t aware of many African journalists. But he has a very lyrical name that rolls off the tongue almost as if one were practicing cunnilingus. He recently penned a diatribe for Nigeria’s The Nation which hints that African males are dealing with the same problems that besiege Western males:

‘Toxic masculinity’ is the new rage. It connotes everything supposedly wrong with Nigeria’s male folk. Coined in Western feminist circuits, an obsession with it at the homefront highlights the workings of the misandrist mind. Yea, most of Nigerian feminists are misandrists or closet man-haters….
By chanting the sins of toxic maleness, they seek to force men on a defensive swerve. With delusional certitude, they aim to usurp the patriarchy and seize control of society. But like all things novel, they will enjoy their seasons of anomie and pretension to sentience. They will seem to ‘run things,’ until their sand castles come tumbling down….
The Nigerian man must, however, live to thwart the onset of feminist dystopia. Right now, he manifests as a lost cause. Having strayed in the maze of perverse feminist plots and literature, he navigates manhood, answering to name-plates forged by his nemesis….
By remoulding him into a demon, a doormat and social affliction, feral feminists or Feminazis, if you like, have gained an edge over him. The exploitative nature of rapists, murderers, looters, assassins, paedophiles, and tyrants among men further affirms misandrist claims against the Nigerian man….

Is there any way we can hire this man to write a weekly column?

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

I began my journalistic career under strict censorship. It was imposed on the press and media by the Greek colonels who had seized power in a bloodless coup in Athens on April 21, 1967. Censorship, however, suited me fine. That’s because I was an ardent backer of the coup, the democratic process having been torn to shreds by the socialists and extreme left-wingers in Parliament. Fifty-two years later I am once again writing under censorship, this time virulently unsuited to it, the inspectors now being the politically correct gestapo who hand down punishments for life. One wrong word and one’s career is kaput, no ifs or buts about it.

A society in which free speech or an ill-judged joke means losing one’s livelihood is not a laughing matter. And this is taking place right here, in the good old U.S. of A. Free speech and due process have become things of the past. Let me explain: The Orwellian vision of total conformity derives from an intrusive government that polices thought, the written and spoken word. Today’s demand for total conformity as far as free speech is concerned does not come from any government, but from the media, the film industry, and university campuses. When you think of it, it’s really quite unique. Governments have been suppressing free speech since time immemorial, but for the first time in man’s history the abolition of free speech has taken place through osmosis, by the very people who teach and make movies and write about freedom: the universities, Hollywood, and the media. The key words that are used for restricting speech are racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist, white supremacist, and other taboo words I cannot think of right this minute.

An 85-year-old sports announcer in Canada recently was fired for regretting on the air that new immigrants had abandoned the tradition of wearing a poppy in their lapels to commemorate the veterans who had lost their lives in World War I. Don Cherry’s crime was seen as such for mentioning immigrants, the diversity mob demanding his head even before he had finished the sentence.

Megyn Kelly’s television-superstar career has been on hold for years because she rhetorically asked on the air what was wrong with wearing black face paint à la Al Jolson at a costume party. She compounded her mistake by also saying that Santa Claus was white, not black. Both Cherry and Kelly were fired because aggrieved listeners were shocked to hear such talk. And it gets worse: Due process no longer exists when a female accuses a male of harassment.

The latest brouhaha with the perpetually offended—the sisterhood—comes to us from dear old England, where a woman threatened to divorce her husband because he gave her an exercise bike for Christmas. Fellow females were outraged because the present signified the recipient was fat. Enter that super-woke jerk Justin Trudeau, who wants to have the word mankind changed. Nothing, of course, can match The New York Times for waging unrelenting war against white people. The rag praises a junk movie as if it were Citizen Kane: “Queen and Slim are slow dancing in a Louisiana juke joint. The black couple has been on the run since shooting a white cop dead. The two sway tenderly, staring deeply into each other’s eyes….” Needless to say I haven’t seen this trash, but I bring it up because of the sympathetic manner in which the rag presents the black killers. Imagine what would happen if someone wrote in this manner about a white couple having murdered a black police officer.

Here’s the Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy sounding off on social media about respectability and a civil tone: “This idea of respectability, this idea of civility, this idea of unity, all of these words—decorum—who invented these words? These words were invented by white men for the benefit of other white men, in systems and institutions that were always designed to be for white men.” Did you get that, all you bad white men out there? The preening intolerance of militant feminists, militant gays, militant blacks, militant transsexuals, militant whatever has turned this country into a laughingstock. Did you know the term “convicted felon” is no longer tolerated in San Francisco? City government ignores the fact that the place is drowning in human feces, but is pushing through a law that calls convicted felons “justice-involved people.” Nurse, quick!

Black perpetrators are especially prominent in anti-LGBT crimes, comprising ten out of twelve arrested for those crimes in New York City, but only the New York Post had the courage to print this. But the Times did have the courage to report on how the coach of the Calgary Flames was forced to resign for saying something rude bordering on racial to a Nigerian-born player, Akim Aliu, more than ten years ago. The hockey league, of course, folded quicker than you can say “Aliuuuu,” the accuser being from Africa and all that.

Finally, good old Syracuse U. It recently gave in to student demands after rioting by black, Latino, Asian-American, Jewish, Muslim, and indigenous students after racist and anti-Semitic graffiti appeared in a freshman dorm. Nineteen demands by students were met, and everyone went home happy after rioting that lasted two weeks. Worst of all, the graffiti read “Little China Town.”

Arriving in Paris on one of the few trains still running in the middle of the strike by public sector workers who, as good socialists, were trying to preserve their privileged pension arrangements for all eternity irrespective of the finances of the country, we participated in a brief but Darwinian struggle for a taxi. No bourgeois wants to hang round the Gare du Nord longer than necessary.

The next day, I realized that I had forgotten to bring the charger with me for my laptop, and, although by no means a technophile, I feel strangely anxious and incomplete nowadays without a working laptop. It was a Sunday and the nearest computer store open was more that two miles away. There being no public transport, I walked.

It was an interesting walk. I passed, for example, the Centre d’Animation Ken Saro-Wiwa, a kind of youth club in a concrete-slab building run by the municipality. Ken Saro-Wiwa, whom I used to see regularly, was the only man I have ever known who was executed by hanging. He was a Nigerian writer, accused by the military dictatorship that was then in power of fomenting violence and plotting murder. He belonged to a small ethnic group, the Ogoni, whose ancestral lands and fishing grounds have been completely ruined by the extraction of oil in the region. Saro-Wiwa’s novel, Sozaboy, relates the Nigerian Civil War as seen through the eyes of a semiliterate village boy, and is a very fine work of anti-war literature; but Saro-Wiwa turned, against my fervent advice, to politics in an attempt to obtain for his people some recompense for the destruction of their traditional way of life. His military trial was a travesty, and he was in effect murdered.

There is no mention of who Saro-Wiwa was on the center’s website, perhaps because it does not want to confuse any young person by too-detailed mention of anything that happened before he was born, or by suggesting that not all the suffering of black people is caused by racism.

The center is “dedicated to urban cultures,” and invites you to come and participate in “new artistic practices and discover Hip-Hop culture in all its forms.” Among the worthy activities is that of learning graffiti:

Try out a subversive art in all legality? Through workshops in Street art, comprising spray painting, graffiti and other kinds of urban art, you are invited to start or perfect your murals as a source of social expression.

State- or publicly funded hip-hop and subversion? What on earth is going on, one might ask. I think the answer is obvious. Both hip-hop and the kind of subversion teachers of graffiti are likely to promote undermine the ability or willingness of people to practice the very virtues that are necessary for people to lead lives independent of the state. As for social expression, it is not any expression that is to be encouraged, but only that which reinforces or extends the power of the bureaucratic authorities to interfere in the life of its citizenry. By social expression is meant a perpetual propensity to grievance that requires the intervention of the government to ameliorate.

Walking a little farther, I heard the sound of a demonstration, seemingly angrier and angrier as I drew nearer. The demonstration was not by protesters against President Macron’s attempts to reform the pension system, but by people waving both the Algerian and the Berber flag outside the Algerian consulate, protesting against the pseudo-elections soon to be held in Algeria. The CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, the police auxiliary force mainly concerned with riot control, a growth industry in these times of economic uncertainty) were out in force, blocking off roads.

Was this not a historical irony, a little like that of the appearance of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize winner, before the International Court in the Hague, her government accused of genocide, after she was for so long idealized as an innocent and principled political prisoner? The French state was now protecting from the rage of citizens the diplomatic property of the very state whose establishment it had fought so long and bitterly to prevent. “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” says the Fool to Malvolio in Twelfth Night, perhaps not realizing that he was enunciating a fundamental political principle that has been illustrated in history over and over again, though no one heeds it.

As a group of young Englishmen in a pub now terrifies me, so the demonstration terrified me: Violence could have broken out at any moment. However just its cause, a chanting crowd has always the potential for a sudden passage from good humor to anger to rage to destruction of property and cruelty toward men, since rumors can run through it like wind through grass. Between a crowd and a mob there is seldom a great distance.

I passed the demonstration. A little later, there was a wall daubed with the following slogan:

SHE LEFT HIM
HE KILLED HER

I presume this was some kind of protest against the violence of men toward women; and certainly in my career as a witness in murder trials, I came across cases in which a woman was murdered either because she had left her erstwhile lover or told him she was about to do so. I had many women patients who had insanely jealous and violent boyfriends and who were thinking of leaving them. “On no account,” I said, “tell them what you are contemplating, when you will do it, or where you will go. If you tell him any of these things your life might be in danger.” Sometimes they took my advice.

The jealous are not ever jealous for the cause, Shakespeare wrote, but jealous for they’re jealous—and, as usual, he was right. A jealous man who loses a woman and finds another is very soon just as jealous of her as he was of the first. He does not so much love the object of his jealousy as fear the humiliation of losing it; and humiliation is a powerful spur to violence.

Yet I could not help but think that the slogan on the wall was intended as an angry ideological statement, of the “all men are bastards” variety: not that some men are violent, but that all are, and that therefore relations between men and women must be those of war, or intrinsically hostile.

We live in angry times.

“It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire.” —Russell Kirk

On Dec. 6, four Republican congressmen sent a letter to U.S. attorney general William Barr entreating the Department of Justice to enforce existing federal obscenity restrictions. On Monday, legal scholar Jesse Merriam, writing in National Review, made a solid case for regulating pornography. “[T]he federal government and the states,” Merriam writes,

are not restricted in any sense under the First Amendment in how they choose to regulate material found on today’s most popular porn sites, because in many, if not most, jurisdictions almost all of the porn that is available on these sites would be considered obscene under the Miller [v. California] test. While criminalizing mere possession of hardcore pornography could raise constitutional questions under the “right to privacy,” a federal or state ban on the production, distribution, and sale of hardcore pornography would not violate the First Amendment.

Merriam references Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s article “A Science-Based Case for Ending the Porn Epidemic,” published at American Greatness on Dec. 15. Unfortunately, the piece is marred by Gobry’s acceptance of the brain disease model of addiction, a false and, because it effectively negates the concept of moral agency, very mischievous conception. As I noted in my recent column “How Intellectuals and ‘Experts’ Undermine Moral Agency,” the brain disease model of addiction was very ably refuted by Heyman et al. in their trenchant and principled amicus brief in the important Commonwealth v. Eldred case. Nevertheless, Gobry’s article remains pretty useful, providing as it does a lot of evidence of just how very harmful pornography is.

Especially since, to say a rather remarkable fact, there is now a virtually endless amount of the stuff available all day every day to anyone with an internet connection—including children. What is more, there’s a lot of pornography that makes Playboy and Penthouse seem like Jack and Jill, the wholesome children’s magazine for which my late grandfather, the humor cartoonist Robert Lee DeGroot, was once an illustrator.

In the past few weeks, Merriam, Gobry, Matt Walsh, the phony gatekeeping conservative Sohrab Ahmari, and others have called for the government to regulate pornography. By contrast, some other right-wing writers, libertarians especially, have opposed what they think would be government overreach, their position well captured by Casey Given’s Dec. 9 article in the Washington Examiner, “The misguided war on pornography and the return of right-wing puritanism.” This debate is an instance of a more general phenomenon, one that is one of the most momentous political issues of our time—namely, the ongoing conflict between individual sovereignty and paternalism. And while this particular instance of a general conflict that divides social conservatives and libertarians indicates that William F. Buckley’s fusionism was never a good project except insofar as it served certain foreign policy interests during the Cold War, the general conflict is by no means specific to the right. Liberals and leftists, after all, have long had their own battles regarding individual sovereignty versus paternalism.

Since, then, the issue is so important, it would be worthwhile, I think, to imagine that there is not already a legal case to be made against pornography. Let us assume, instead, that this is a moral matter that the American public, with its characteristic rationality and good sense, must reason through, in order to decide whether or not a law or laws should be made to regulate pornography. For since normative debates often precede the making of new laws, this little thought experiment will mirror the process of how new laws often get made, in particular those that concern the quarrel between individual sovereignty and paternalism. It will serve, moreover, to illuminate how moral values function in societies in general.

Suppose there is a group of people who accept the view that pornography is harmful to themselves and others who view it, but who wish to continue viewing it nonetheless. Let’s suppose, too, that for the pro-pornography group, those who are against pornography simply need not view it. Now the question to ask is: Would a different group, paternalists opposed to pornography, be morally justified in keeping the pro-pornography group from viewing pornography, including by means of coercion, on the grounds that it’s harmful to the pro-pornography group?

Or does individual sovereignty trump such paternalism?

Whatever you think concerning pornography, it is necessary to recognize that, from a logical point of view, the harmfulness of pornography, in and of itself, doesn’t entail the right to exercise control over the pro-pornography group or to subject them to coercion to that end. (To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that I myself am against the regulation of pornography; what I am trying to do is convey the logical character and complexity of the debate.)

And yet, might the good (i.e., not viewing and engaging in pornography) be such that one must simply submit to it, as it were, if one is to be in the right morally? I think so.

But what, you may ask, if one does not want to be in the right morally? Here again we face the question: Do others have the right to make us be so?

And there is, in any case, a general difficulty: that moral goods are not knowable in the clear, incontestable way that two plus two equals four. We can arrive at them only by means of engagement, in many instances invariably controversial, with the opinions of our fellows. (Not to imply that there’s nothing to the good but mere opinion; i.e., relativism or subjectivism, both self-refuting positions, since the view that all values are merely relative or equal is itself relative or subjective.) And as we see from the history of philosophy, moral debates are endless affairs, even as our era’s great cracker barrel philosopher Steven Pinker affirms “enlightenment now.”

This much, at least, is certain: The paternalists have their work cut out for them. For so shot through with individualism is our culture that many if not most people basically take it for granted that they should be able to do whatever they want so long as they don’t harm others. “Mind your business!” they say to the poor paternalist Sohrab Ahmari, who, bless his righteous Christian heart, is as vexed by drag queen story hour as he is by bad team members like Peter Brimelow.

Many an individualist finds his touchstone in this enormously influential passage (“the harm principle”) from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty:

[T]he sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection…. [T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The main purpose of “the harm principle” was to oppose what Mill called “the tyranny of the majority.” Of the fitness for the majority to decide how people should live together, Mill did not think highly, to say the least. To be sure, there is much to be said for “the harm principle,” even though, as many philosophers have pointed out, “harm” and “evil” are ambiguous concepts, about which people will differ. “[T]he sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs,” said Emerson. John Derbyshire is also quite right that what he calls “magical thinking” is the default mode of nearly all mankind. In “magical thinking,” “truth” is determined by what you’ve picked up from other people and by what suits your interests, the overarching purpose being to advance what makes you feel good. The principled objectivity and detachment of the serious scholar, scientist, or philosopher is as rare as an honest politician. Meanwhile, most people are only too happy to use their shallow opinions to justify the control they wish to exert over others.

And yet, as the great English jurist James Fitzjames Stephen demonstrated in his brilliant book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the Millian approach is simply not workable. It cannot scale. Though the goals are fairness and liberty, and resistance to unthinking conformity, the result would be chaos. Everyone being free to go his own way so long as he doesn’t harm others makes for endless conflicts and question-begging. Such liberty is contrary to social order, which is the necessary condition for liberty itself. Accordingly, there has never been a society founded on or entirely guided by anything like “the harm principle.” And it’s hard to see how there ever could be, save for some small, essentially homogeneous one.

To understand all this, consider the case of those who advocate the legalization of all drugs, including hard drugs such as heroin. These persons, who are analogous to the pro-pornography group in our example above, reason as follows: “Heroin may well be harmful to me. It may indeed ruin my life. But even so, insofar as my use of it doesn’t harm others, it’s nobody’s business; so, the state is not justified in punishing me for using it.”

And certainly, one can find examples of people who do use heroin (or crack, or crystal meth, or whatever) but don’t harm others. Still, human behavior is a varied and unpredictable thing. There are, needless to say, many drug users who do harm others, and who cost taxpayers a great deal of money besides. Nor can it be known a priori that the user who is harmless today will remain so tomorrow. Similarly, a paternalist may fairly say, contra the pro-pornography group, that the problem with the view that people can simply ignore hardcore pornography if they think it’s bad is that children—who cannot always be supervised—will probably be exposed to this very harmful thing even so. The best we can do, then, is to try to reach a compromise between conflicting goods that comprehends the greater good.

It is well to know, too, that not all goods are arrived at by rational analysis or argument and debate. Many, indeed, come down to us via custom and tradition, products of trial and error, and of not a little hardship and suffering. Nor do these goods cease to be precisely that just because they’re not the fruits of the chattering classes. On the contrary, they constitute a precious inheritance, easily lost through the (unwittingly) rationalistic aims that characterize liberals and progressives generally.

Although, as a general rule, we should expect justification for things that hinder or preclude individual sovereignty, for anyone who would live among others, it is wrongheaded—and naive, even—to think that all human affairs can or should be matters of logical justification, or such that there will be no loss in the way of the good. Not everything is debatable. Trade-offs are inevitable. And the immense societal harm caused by greater accessibility to drugs such as heroin and crack, I would argue, would probably far outweigh the loss of sovereignty for those who would use the drugs without harming others.

Of course, I don’t think that whatever is harmful to ourselves and others should be illegal for that reason. Just as we can have too much individual sovereignty, so we can have too much paternalism. One has to consider the gravity of the harm, as well as it’s likely overall social consequences. In these respects, heroin and violent pornography are considerably different from, say, cigarettes and all-you-can-eat buffets.

Kwanzaa, celebrated exclusively by white liberals, is a fake holiday invented in 1966 by black radical/FBI stooge Ron Karenga — aka Dr. Maulana Karenga, founder of United Slaves, the violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural gibberish that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves.

In what was ultimately a foolish gambit, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better. (It’s the same function MSNBC serves today.)

By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. Although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers, they did not seek armed revolution.

Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. The United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (I will not be shooting any Black Panthers this week because I am Kwanzaa-reform, and we are not that observant.)

It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” — and clueless public schoolteachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.

In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the ’70s, Karenga was quick to criticize Nigerian newspapers that claimed that certain American black radicals were CIA operatives.

Now we know the truth: The FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police. Whether Karenga was a willing FBI dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear.

But the left has forgotten the FBI’s tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.

In one barbarous outburst, Karenga’s United Slaves shot two Black Panthers to death on the UCLA campus: Al “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins. Karenga himself served time — a useful stepping-stone for his current position as the chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University at Long Beach.

(Speaking of which, the cheap labor lobby certainly was right about how the GOP could easily win over “socially conservative” minorities. Look at how California has swung decisively to the right since whites became a minority there. Good luck winning California now, Democrats!)

Back to the esteemed Cal State professor: Karenga’s invented holiday is a nutty blend of schmaltzy ’60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. The seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another invention of The Worst Generation.

In 1974, Patty Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, famously posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snakehead stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani. These are the exact same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa, or “Kawaida,” as Karenga calls them. (And here’s something interesting: Kawaida, Kwanzaa and Kuumba are also the only three Kardashian sisters not to have their own shows on the E! network.)

Kwanzaa praises collectivism in every possible area of life. It takes a village to raise a police snitch.

When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from “classical Marxism,” he essentially said that, under Kawaida, we also hate whites.

While taking the “best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism” (is that the mass murder, the imprisonment of homosexuals or the forced labor?), Karenga said Kawaida practitioners believe one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding.”

There’s an inclusive philosophy for you!
Sing to “Jingle Bells”:
Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!

Kwanzaa emerged not from Africa, but from the FBI’s COINTELPRO. It is a holiday celebrated exclusively by idiot white liberals. Black people celebrate Christmas.

Merry Christmas, fellow Christians!

(The article in its original Spanish immediately follows.)

Tell me what you drink and I’ll tell you how you love. There is an undoubted relationship between love and alcohol. According to scientists at the University of Birmingham, the effects of the so-called love hormone (oxytocin) and a good cocktail have striking similarities. Both increase sociability, generosity, and empathy; they also stop anxiety, fear, and stress.

But Dorothy Parker already knew that:

I like to have a martini
But two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.

A hangover is treated with a pitcher of Bloody Marys; and a broken heart, with another love. In both cases, to get ahead, the quickest solution is always hanky-panky!

According to a French lady: Love is a je ne sais quoi, it starts you don’t know how, you get in bed you don’t know where, and it ends you don’t know when. And there is always an ideal cocktail for every encounter!

History shows that abstemious vegetarians fall in love less and are more cruel, calculating, and boring. It is not by chance that the vast majority of modern dictators hate hedonism and lack any sense of beauty. They are vulgar braggarts of sobriety who only get drunk, or fall in love, with power.

Stendhal wrote that in life we find four different types of love:

(1) Passion: like that of Tristan and Isolde.

(2) Pleasure: a gallant desire like that of “the sweet days before the French Revolution,” from which the lame Talleyrand, a great diplomat and seducer, capable of having sex with three generations of the same family, learned so much. For some reason he said that betrayal is a simple matter of the calendar.

(3) Physical: “While hunting, to find a fresh and glowing peasant running through the forest is more of an attraction than chasing a deer.”

(4) Vanity: One can summarize this by remembering that for the bourgeois a duchess is never older than 30.

As the malicious Somerset Maugham points out, for Stendhal the passions were quite cerebral, and possessing a woman was first and foremost a satisfaction of his ego (that little Argentinean we all have inside). As in dealing with girls he was clumsy and timid, the conquest filled him with security, and he helped himself with a striking wardrobe to camouflage his ugliness.

But in matters of love, Maugham’s tastes were very different. Also in alcohol. He liked to add a few drops of absinthe to his dry martini (so that the molecules would lie sensually on top of one another).

In my experience, love-delirium tremens (the alcoholic crystallization of the object of desire) combines all four categories. It is as exciting as it is dangerous, and one can end up like the poet Li Po, who drowned intoxicated while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in a river.

No doubt there is an art of love and an art of drinking.

Amoroso Delirium Tremens

Dime lo que bebes y te diré cómo amas. Existe una indudable relación entre amor y alcohol. Según científicos de la Universidad de Birmingham, los efectos de la llamada hormona del amor (la oxitocina) y una buena copa presentan sorprendentes similitudes. Ambos aumentan la sociabilidad, generosidad y empatía; también frenan la ansiedad, el miedo y el estrés.

Pero eso ya lo sabía Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a martini
But two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.

La resaca del alcohol se trata con un jarra de Bloody Mary; la del corazón roto, con otro amor. En ambos casos la solución es más madera o hanky panky.

Según la definición de una dama francesa cum laude en artes amatorias: El amor es un je ne sais quoi, que empieza no se sabe cómo, te encama no sabes dónde y termina no se sabe cuándo. Y siempre hay un cocktail idóneo para cada encuentro.

La Historia demuestra que abstemios y vegetarianos se enamoran menos y son más crueles, calculadores y aburridos. No por casualidad la mayoría de dictadores modernos odia el hedonismo y carece de sentido de belleza. Son vulgares fanfarrones de la sobriedad que solo se emborrachan, o enamoran, de poder.

Sthendal escribió que en la vida encontramos cuatro tipos de amor diferentes:

(1) El Amor Pasión: como el de Tristán e Isolda…

(2) El Amor Placer: un deseo-Kama galante y civilizado como el de “aquellos dulces días anteriores a la revolución francesa,” del que tanto aprendió el cojo Talleyrand, gran diplomático y seductor capaz de encamarse con tres generaciones de la misma familia. Por algo decía que la traición es una simple cuestión de fechas.

(3) El Amor Físico: “Estando de caza, encontrar una lozana y fresca campesina que huye por el bosque y nos llama mucho más la atención que cualquier venado”. Me parece que tal definición es del filósofo vitalista Ortega y Gasset.

(4) El Amor Vanidad: Una duquesa no tiene nunca más de treinta años para un burgués.

Según apunta el malicioso Somerset Maugham, para Stendhal las pasiones eran bastante cerebrales y el poseer a una mujer era ante todo una satisfacción de su ego (ese pequeño argentino que todos llevamos dentro). Como en el trato con ellas era tímido y apocado, la conquista le llenaba de seguridad y se ayudaba de un vestuario llamativo para camuflar su fealdad.

Pero en materia amorosa los gustos de Maugham eran bien diferentes. También en alcoholes: Le gustaba añadir unas gotas de absenta a su Dry Martini “para que las moléculas yazcan sensualmente una encima de otra”.

Gracias a mi experiencia puedo añadir el amor delirium tremens (la cristalización alcohólica del objeto de deseo), que combina los cuatro tipos de Stendhal y más allá. Es tan excitante como peligrosa, y uno puede acabar como el poeta Li Po, que se ahogó embriagado al intentar abrazar el reflejo de la luna en un río.

Sin duda hay un arte de amar y un arte de beber.

As that rail and subway strike continued to paralyze travel in Paris and across France into the third week, President Emmanuel Macron made a Christmas appeal to his dissatisfied countrymen:

“Strike action is justifiable and protected by the constitution, but I think there are moments in a nation’s life when it is good to observe a truce out of respect for families and family life.”

Macron’s appeal has gone largely unheeded.

“The public be damned!” seems to be the attitude of many of the workers who are tying up transit to protest Macron’s plan to reform a pension system that consumes 14% of GDP.

Macron wants to raise to 64 the age of eligibility for full retirement benefits. Not terribly high. And to set an example, he is surrendering his lifetime pension that is to begin when he becomes an ex-president.

Yet, it is worth looking more closely at France because she appears to be at a place where the rest of Europe and America are headed.

In France, the government collects 46% of the GDP in taxes and spends 56% of GDP, the highest figures in the Western world.

And Paris appears to be bumping up against the limits of what democratic voters will tolerate in higher taxes, or reductions in benefits, from the postwar welfare states the West has created.

A year ago, when Macron sought to raise fuel taxes to cut carbon emissions, the “yellow vests” came out in protests that degenerated into rioting, looting, arson, desecration of monuments and attacks on police.

Paris capitulated and canceled the tax.

How do we compare?

The U.S. national debt is now larger than the GDP. Only in 1946, the year after World War II, was U.S. debt a larger share of GDP than today.

In 2019, the U.S. ran a deficit just shy of $1 trillion, and the U.S. government projects trillion-dollar deficits through the decade, which begins next week. And we will be running these deficits not to stimulate an economy in recession, as President Obama did, but to pile them on top of an economy at full employment.

In short, we are beginning to run historic deficits in a time of prosperity. Whatever the economic theory behind this, it bears no resemblance to the limited government-balanced budget philosophy of the party of Ronald Reagan.

The questions the U.S. will inevitably face are the ones France faces: At what point does government consumption of the national wealth become too great a burden for the private sector to bear? At what point must cuts be made in government spending that will be seen by the people, as they are seen in France today, as intolerable?

While a Republican Congress ran surpluses in the 1990s, when defense spending fell following our Cold War victory, Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president to run surpluses.

Opposition to new or higher taxes appears to be the one piece of ground today on which Republicans will not yield. But if so, where are the cuts going to come from that will be virtually mandated if U.S. debt is not to grow beyond any sustainable level?

America’s long-term problem:

Deficits are projected to run regularly in the coming decade at nearly 5% of GDP while economic growth has fallen back to 2%.

With taxes off the table, where, when and how do we cut spending?

Or does each new administration kick the can down the road?

The five principal items in the federal budget are these:

Social Security, which consumes 25% of that budget. Yet, Social Security outlays will reach the point this year where payroll taxes no longer cover them. The “trust fund” will have to be raided. Translation: The feds will have to borrow money to cover the Social Security deficit.

Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare and other health programs account for another fourth of the budget. All will need more money to stay solvent.

Defense, which used to take 9% of GDP in JFK’s time and 6% in Ronald Reagan’s buildup, is now down to 3.2% of GDP.

Yet, while defense’s share of GDP is among the smallest since before World War II, U.S. commitments are as great as they were during the Cold War. We are now defending 28 NATO nations, containing Russia, and maintaining strategic parity. We have commitments in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and the global war on terror. We defend South Korea and Japan from a nuclear-armed North Korea and China.

Yet another major item in the budget is interest on the debt.

And as that U.S. debt surges with all the new deficits this decade, and interest rates inevitably begin to rise, interest on the debt will rise both in real terms and as a share of the budget.

Again, is France the future of the West?

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