A little while back, a friend of mine had a poem accepted by The Paris Review, a magazine that, though in steep decline since it became politically correct, remains a big deal in the world of letters. The poem was never published, though, because after googling the poet, the editor found that she’d published some pro-Trump articles at American Thinker. Of course, in regard to literary merit, one’s politics, like one’s race and sex, are a non sequitur. Still, in the largely left-wing literary world, to support Trump is to be persona non grata.
But Irony—look and see Him everywhere—is an unsparing god. He pardons nobody, being so just, and hence leftists are finding more and more that their groupthink and dogmatic notion of what they call “equality” is self-defeating. In his essay “The Enemies of Writing,” published in The Atlantic on Jan. 23, George Packer observes that writers today are crippled by a
fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.
In the context of The Atlantic, this is pretty rich, the weak man Jeffrey Goldberg having given Kevin Williamson the ax almost immediately after the publication of his first column, since the conservative writer doesn’t have the “correct” (that is, liberal) views on abortion.
At times, as he tries to explain what’s causing the “orthodoxy enforced by social pressure,” Packer fails utterly, descending into the stalest of progressive clichés:
The attraction of moral clarity is obvious, never more so than in the Trump years, when everything of value—honesty, kindness, tolerance, loyalty, courage—is daily trashed by the most powerful people in America. The Trump presidency is tremendously clarifying, and the duty of a citizen is also clear—to uphold those values in every way possible.
To his credit, Packer emphasizes that the facile appeal of “moral clarity” is deadly to serious writing, for it simplifies the complexity of hard problems, and disallows the fertile ambiguity that is essential to a writer’s restless and probing mind.
Himself a leftist, Packer doesn’t note (perhaps because he’s biased) that the conformity he describes is worse on the left than on the right. In order to understand this difference, we must grasp what the left has become in our narcissistic culture. In short, the identity-politics left is Christianity on the cheap. The left derives from a monotheistic, Christian worldview, but where the devoted believer strives to face his sins and self-deceptions in order to live a better life, the leftist insists that others compensate for his own inadequacies and failings.
In place of the Christian belief that all people have intrinsic dignity, the leftist—motivated by envy for the superior and, rather less often, pity for the weak—posits sheer status. Like a child throwing a tantrum, he demands equal outcomes, because in this way everyone, in our effectively post-Christian society, is supposed to equally matter in a kind of vague ultimate sense.
The left is embarked on a desperate and anxious project, because insofar as leftists lack traditional sources of value—family, community, religion, romantic love, intrinsically satisfying work—and insofar as they, in their “freedom,” are clueless regarding how to make these values meaningful parts of their lives, leftists become even more ardent about realizing what they call equality, and even more ferocious opponents of justice, excellence, and meritocracy.
For what the leftist project entails, among other things, is an erroneous commitment to social constructivism. Everybody is entirely a product of his environment, according to this doctrine. There are no innate or natural differences between the sexes and racial groups; we’re all just social constructs all the way down.
What’s more, judging by their reflexive aversion to “inequality,” leftists seem to think that interests, talent, ability, conscientiousness, and so forth are the same from person to person, and equally distributed across the sexes and across racial groups. As a result, unequal outcomes must be due to “privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “sexism,” for since everyone is “equal,” how else could they be explained?
And indeed, such “discrimination” must be “corrected.” In the current issue of City Journal, Steven Malanga writes:
Many Americans probably have never heard of a “chief equity officer,” but it may be the hottest new job in municipal government. The emergence of the position is part of a broader movement to get local governments to look beyond the fundamental American ideals of equal treatment and opportunity and instead demand equity, which generally means the achievement of similar outcomes for all groups. While certain programs pursued under the equity banner—minority contracting set-asides, say—have been around for years, others are newer and more radical.
Here we have just the sort of thing to which the alt-right has been reacting all along. There will probably be many more chief equity officers and other vulgar levelers in the future, because the last thing the diversity crowd wants is diversity itself.
If we want to understand why the world is such a diverse place, and why unequal outcomes are inevitable, we need to be willing to consider the differences in interests, behavior, skills, intelligence, ability, and conscientiousness between the sexes and racial groups. To this end, it would be quite helpful if people would realize that sex differences and racial group differences, qua differences, are value-neutral, and that, in general, the value of a thing is determined by its function in a particular context. Thus, men are higher in aggression than women, both on average and at the right tail end of the distribution of the characteristic (the most aggressive people in the world). As such, men account for most murders in the world. And yet, this same sex difference—or “toxic masculinity,” if you prefer—allows men to be of especial value as enforcers, protectors, and defenders. Law and order depend, of course, on force to uphold them, and this is an eminently male business.
Whether you’re male, female, black, white, or whatever, it goes without saying that you don’t have to define your value as a person by your social status. On this I think everyone would agree. But how quickly people, once their pride and status envy are aroused, lose their minds! Back in 2005, Harvard president Larry Summers was promptly defenestrated for expressing his opinion that the greater male variability in intelligence (GMVI) may partially account for the lack of “gender parity” in physics and mathematics departments at elite universities. Fifteen years later, academia is even more intolerant of free thought. It is a corollary of GMVI that there are both more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. If we consider GMVI, the differences in interests between the sexes, and the fact that men are higher (on average) in motivation than women (more willing and able, that is, to rise through dominance hierarchies), then the ongoing lack of “gender parity” in math, science, and elsewhere is only to be expected.
Still, we aren’t supposed to talk about these factors when it comes to explaining unequal outcomes between the sexes. For feminists are prone to reading their own anxieties and insecurities into empirical, value-neutral subjects. Their reactions and judgments imply that truth is determined by their feelings: If something upsets them, it can’t be true, or publishable. Hence feminists, in an amusing irony, live up to the most negative stereotypes about women: that they are too emotional, irrational, and illogical. It’s as if feminists wanted to confirm stereotype accuracy.
With respect to understanding the varieties of human behavior and achievement, the most formidable obstacle is nothing less than the human mind itself. There are very few people who are capable of objectivity and detachment concerning “sensitive” subjects, and this is to say nothing about the education and intelligence one needs in order to try to understand them. “We see what we perceive,” said F.H. Bradley, “and the object of our perceptions is qualified by the premises of our knowledge, by our previous experiences.” By “qualified,” Bradley means that “the premises of our knowledge” and “our previous experiences” constitute a certain epistemic perspective. Moral values serve the same function. So it is that, quite unconsciously, people frequently perceive in external phenomena what they internally (as willing, moral agents) want to be the case, or do not want to be the case. For while very few people can think well, everyone has a stock of prejudices at the ready, and it’s quite natural for people to treat events as occasions for affirming what they already value and believe.
Notice, for instance, how victimist leftists, in article after article, in newspapers and “scholarly” journals, declare that poverty is “linked to” some social evil whose origin they want us to think has been explained. Thus, in trying to account for racial differences in crime rates, they smuggle in some vague idea of causation, since they can’t establish what they want to be true. Logically, all they’re actually saying is: A and B; ergo, A causes B. And, of course, this is not a valid argument.
That leftists are motivated by sheer bias in such endeavors is clear from simple group-by-group comparisons. Why is it, for instance, that we are never told that poverty is “linked to” crime rates among Asians in New York City? The answer is that although Asians are the poorest racial group in New York City, they are nevertheless highly underrepresented in crime rates there (especially in violent-crime rates, where blacks are massively overrepresented). By contrast, every year many articles are published in which innumerate journalists and “scholars” declare that poverty is “linked to” the high crime rates among blacks in New York City and elsewhere. What’s the reason for the difference? That in the case of blacks, many people simply want to believe that poverty causes crime—after all, there’s a lot of the latter to “explain”—and so they do. You may think this is quite mad, but why assume people understand themselves or want to?
The bias and the cognitive limitations I’ve described are by no means specific to the left. Last July, at the National Conservatism Conference, Amy Wax made a case for “cultural distance nationalism,” and in response, Joshua Tait and Cathy Young—two middling, virtue-signaling writers—accused her of “racism.” Having, out of perverse curiosity, read a fair amount of Tait and of Young, I believe they’re simply incapable of understanding Wax’s rather complex and nuanced argument. Certainly, anyway, they misrepresented it. Nor is that a wonder, the two having been quite out of their depth in regard to Wax. And yet, Tait and Young undoubtedly have higher-than-average IQs and, as people go these days, are surely better educated than most. If they are too dull and too touchy to consider the implications of cultural differences for immigration policy; if they, though right of center, are nevertheless moved to respond to Wax with a lefty-like moralism, what is to be expected from people in general on this difficult and important subject? In William Butler Yeats’ words, “What if the Church and the State/Are the mob that howls at the door!”
But the main problem for the right is its characteristic weakness of character. Up against an insidious and uncompromising left, the right often refuses to fight a principled fight. Where moral courage and intellectual integrity are needed, many conservative intellectuals choose conformity and cowardice, careerism and lucre. Nor are the rare and brave individuals such as Amy Wax sufficient. Winning the culture war requires collective action, so the right will be doomed if it doesn’t get some guts. Will it ever? It is this vital subject that I will write about in next week’s column.
Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It’s hard to believe but not impossible.
As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls have him running first or second in the first three contests: Iowa on Monday, and then New Hampshire and Nevada.
If Bernie can best main rival Joe Biden in Iowa, he will likely thump Joe in New Hampshire. Biden’s campaign, built around “electability,” could suffer a credibility collapse before he reaches South Carolina, where Joe is banking on his African American base to rescue him if necessary and give him a send-off victory straight into Super Tuesday.
If Sanders can beat Biden two or three times in the first four primaries in February, the last remaining roadblock on Sanders’ path to the nomination could be Mike Bloomberg’s billions.
Hillary Clinton may sneer, “Nobody likes him,” but Bernie has a large, dedicated, loyal following, especially among millennials, and tens of thousands more small-dollar donors than any other Democratic candidate.
He is flush with cash. He has a radical agenda that appeals to the ideological left and the idealistic young. The rising star of the party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is campaigning alongside him.
And, say what you will, Sanders is no trimmer or time-server. He has consistently voted his values and views. He voted no to Bush 41’s Gulf War, no to Bush 43’s Iraq War, no to NAFTA, no to GATT. In the ’80s, when President Reagan battled the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Sanders was on the other side.
But what makes Sanders an appealing candidate for the Democratic nomination may prove poisonous to him as a party nominee in the fall.
For what does Bernie promise?
Free tuition at public colleges and forgiveness of all student debt. “Medicare for All,” a single-payer government-run health care system that would require a huge hike in middle-class taxes and abolish private health insurance for the 160 million Americans currently enrolled.
He would break up the big banks, go after Wall Street, add $60 trillion of federal spending in the next decade, and raise income, corporate, capital gains, estate and inheritance taxes.
He would expand the government’s share of the U.S. economy to levels rivaling that of France, the highest in the free world.
Bernie was first to back the Green New Deal and pledges to reach carbon neutrality in 10 years in energy and transportation. As for our oil, gas and coal producers, says Sanders, they “have evaded taxes, desecrated tribal lands, exploited workers and poisoned communities.”
How would Sanders deal with the millions of illegal migrants now within the country? He’d welcome them all in.
Bernie has proposed the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection and wants to provide a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million to 22 million illegal migrants already here. He would decriminalize border-jumping and give health and welfare benefits to the invaders.
He would decriminalize the breaching of America’s borders.
“My first executive orders,” tweeted Bernie last week, “will be to reverse every single thing President Trump has done to demonize and harm immigrants, including his racist and disgusting Muslim ban.”
Leaders of the center-left think tank Third Way warn that a Sanders nomination risks a Democratic rout of the magnitude of the 49-state losses of George McGovern in 1972 and of Walter Mondale in 1984.
Vulnerable Democrats in moderate and swing districts would have to jump ship, abandoning the ticket to survive the slaughter.
Fearful of such an outcome to a Sanders-Trump race, super PACs run by moderate Democrats have begun to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads to blunt his momentum in Iowa.
What Socialist Jeremy Corbyn did to Britain’s Labour party — leading it to the worst defeat since the 1930s — Sanders could do to the Democratic Party, write Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler of Third Way.
In 2016, Sanders ran a surprisingly strong race for the nomination, and it was later learned that a supposedly neutral DNC had been in the tank for Hillary Clinton. The Democratic establishment, the party elite, had collaborated to put the fix in against Bernie.
Yet Sanders supported Clinton that fall. If, however, Bernie’s last chance at the nomination is aborted by an establishment piling on, party super PACs running attack ads against him, and major media taking time out from trashing Trump to break Sanders, the Democratic Party will have the devil’s time of it bringing Bernie’s backers home in the fall.
Bernie’s believers might just conclude that the real obstacle to their dream of remaking America is neither the radical right nor Donald Trump, but the elites within their own party.
The tedium of the impeachment trial has at least allowed me to catch up on my reading. Apparently, there was a peaceful gun rights rally in Virginia last week that had the media in a panic.
Today, I will explain how their hysteria about the gun rally is directly related to their hysteria about the Russians throwing the 2016 election with Facebook ads — or, as MSNBC’s Brian Williams put it, using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter “to turn Americans against one another, psychological and information warfare, that didn’t stop with the election.”
First, the moral panic on guns:
“Virginia’s capital braces for gun-rights rally” — The Associated Press
“New fears tied to a pro-gun rally that’s scheduled in Virginia” — NBC News
“A gun rights rally in Richmond on MLK Day has people fearing a repeat of Charlottesville” — Richmond Times Dispatch
As we have come to expect, the “newspaper of record,” The New York Times, bested them all:
“Virginia Capital on Edge as F.B.I. Arrests Suspected Neo-Nazis Before Gun Rally”
Wow — neo-Nazis! Wait, what did the arrest of “neo-Nazis” have to do with the Virginia gun rally?
Not a thing, it turns out.
The FBI had arrested three white guys with guns in another state the week before the rally. One of the men was an illegal alien from Canada. Three of the four charges against the men had to do with his immigration status.
What does the arrest of an illegal alien and his accomplices in Maryland have to do with a gun rally in Virginia? As the Times explained, “Although the charges were not directly linked to the Richmond rally, law enforcement officials said the three men had discussed attending it.”
Here’s an idea for you, New York Times. Every time an African American is arrested for some infamous crime, cite that arrest in a headline claiming that people are “on edge” about a coming NAACP convention — or maybe a meeting of black scientists.
“Virginia Capital on Edge as F.B.I. Arrests R. Kelly Before NAACP Convention” (Just say Kelly had “discussed attending it”!)
The media are liars, and they know they’re liars. We’ve been having gun rights rallies forever, and they’ve never turned into murderous bacchanals. How about some flood-the-zone coverage of Big Foot sightings?
If journalists were serious about alerting the public to events that are likely to result in violence, they should check out the West Indian Carnival parade in New York.
The Wikipedia entry on the parade has a special listing for “incidents,” which I have fact-checked and edited for brevity:
— In 2003, a man was fatally shot and another was stabbed in the neck.
— In 2005, one man was shot and killed along the parade route.
— In 2006, one man was shot and another was stabbed.
— At the 2007 parade, a man was shot twice in the leg.
— In 2011, there was one murder, three stabbings and numerous shootings, including of a policeman.
— In 2012, two people were fatally stabbed; two others were shot.
— In 2013, several shootings killed two and wounded three.
— In 2015, at a pre-parade celebration, there was one fatal stabbing and one fatal shooting, when an aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Carey Gabay, was shot in the head. He died eight days later.
— In 2016, during pre-parade celebrations, four people were shot, two fatally, and two more were stabbed.
Under the bloodcurdling headline, “Playing and Swaying to Caribbean Rhythms,” the Times mentioned a few other incidents. In 2004, a man was stabbed and a woman was run over by a float. In 1999, two young children were killed by floats, and one man was killed by a sound truck.
The 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which left one person dead, would have been a banner year for safety at the Caribbean day parade.
Despite the annual bloodshed, you will never see the headlines: “Crown Heights Braces for West Indian Labor Day Parade” or “City on Edge Before Caribbean Carnival.” (And why not: “Playing and Swaying to Stirring Second Amendment Rhetoric”?)
Our media simply will not report crimes by non-whites. Journalists think to themselves: What’s the point of reporting a crime if it was committed by a black person?
At least this makes it easy to figure out the race of the perp. If any white person commits a crime, you know — oh my gosh, do you know! But if there’s no mention of the perp’s race … it’s a minority!
Journalists have convinced themselves that it’s not dishonorable to mislead the public — in fact, it’s actually the honorable thing to do. If we tell the truth, it will just feed the racists!
This is why the media are constantly demanding censorship of the internet. The ability of the public to escape the media’s sleazy, dishonest ecosystem and get the truth elsewhere is a mortal threat, as it is to all totalitarian regimes.
Oh, how they long for the days of three TV stations, a handful of national newspapers and magazines — and nothing else! Every night on MSNBC, you can see them warmly reminiscing about the good old days when they could remove a president from office without breaking a sweat.
The next time you read a denunciation of Mark Zuckerberg for his maddening refusal to censor Trump ads on Facebook, remember: The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was safer than the average Caribbean Day parade. The media want to make sure you have no way of knowing that.
There is an Austrian legend that deals with a man who, according to his daily custom, goes to the Neugröschl restaurant in Vienna and has a goulash lunch. As soon as he returns home he goes to bed twice with his wife and thrice with his sister-in-law, rapes the maid, and is arrested just before attempting against his daughter. The case is so interesting from the clinical point of view that a council chaired by an eminent, world-famous professor is called. The family doctor reports that the man has not done anything extraordinary; he just went to the Neugröschl to eat goulash. “What do you suggest we do, Herr professor?” they ask the great scholar. “I don’t know what you’re going to do,” says the great professor. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to the Neugröschl to eat goulash.”
This lubric Viennese story is found in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, by Gregor von Rezzori, and can be extended to different geographical locations and their typical dishes.
But is there really such a thing as aphrodisiacal food? In the novels of the sybarite Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, oysters, eggs cooked in multiple ways, snails, caviar, crabs, Bolognese spaghetti with a lot of garlic, good red wine, and a lot of Taittinger champagne come out often. The Vesper Martini also works.
It is a matter of vital joy. A good entourage also helps to achieve erotic sensations. The Kentucky Fucked Chicken or those multinational fast-food franchises are not inspiring, because they kill every sense of taste. They are like electronic music with a sieg-heil-like rhythm that makes man dumb from the rhythm of such low taste. Something, but not sensual.
I remember one summer near Cala Salada in Ibiza where a chartered boat for swinging couples allowed itself to be seen moored just a few meters from the coast. The show would have delighted Caligula, as the orgy was rampant and, in the absence of a horse on board, a Great Dane was walking on the deck.
But the really rude thing is that the panda of exhibitionists stirred at the abominable rhythm of an electronic bakalao at a deafening volume. They destroyed the harmony of the afternoon and any erotic delight with that music only suitable for nanotechnologists or pill zombies attached to a bottle of water. (They also fucked like robots—you could tell they didn’t know the bolero’s cadence, the taste of calypso, the sweetness of the samba, the braid of the rumba, the gallop of the mambo…)
The contortions were typical of abstemious sex, which is not so funny. I know because after a forced exile detox at a fat farm in Merano, the maintenance of an oligarch temporarily accepted me to cope with the hard and sad diet. The spark really took light when the sweetheart pulled out a bottle of vodka hidden under her pillow…
(The article in its original Spanish immediately follows.)
La Chispa Afrodisiaca
Hay una leyenda Austríaca que trata de un hombre que, de acuerdo con su costumbre diaria, va al restaurante Neugröschl de Viena y almuerza un goulash. En cuanto regresa a su casa se acuesta dos veces con su mujer, tres con su cuñada, viola a la sirvienta y es detenido justo antes de atentar contra su hija. El caso es tan interesante desde el punto de vista clínico que se convoca un consejo presidido por un eminente profesor de fama mundial. El médico de la familia informa que el hombre no ha hecho nada extraordinario: se limitó a ir al Neugröschl a comer goulash. “¿Qué sugiere usted que hagamos, herr professor?”, le preguntan al gran erudito. “No sé qué es lo que ustedes van a hacer—dice el gran profesor—, en lo que a mí respecta, voy a ir al Neugröschl a comer goulash.”
Esta lúbrica historia Vienesa se encuentra en Memorias de un antisemita, de Gregor von Rezzori, y puede extenderse a diferentes geografías y platos típicos.
Pero ¿existe realmente la comida afrodisiaca? En las novelas del sibarita Ian Fleming, creador de James Bond, salen a menudo las ostras, huevos cocinados de múltiples maneras, caracoles, caviar, cangrejos, espaguetis boloñesa con mucho ajo, buen vino tinto y mucho champagne Taittinger. El Vesper Martini también funciona.
Es una cuestión de alegría vital. Un buen entourage también ayuda a lograr sensaciones erotizantes. El Kentucky Fucked Chicken o esas franquicias de fast food multinacional no son nada inspiradoras, pues matan todo sentido del gusto. Son como la música electrónica con su ritmo sieg hail y embrutecen al hombre en la igualdad rítmica del más bajo gusto común. Algo nada sensual.
Recuerdo un verano, cerca de la ibicenca cala Salada, cómo un barco fletado para el intercambio de parejas se dejaba ver a pocos metros de la costa. El espectáculo hubiera hecho las delicias de Calígula, pues la orgía era desenfrenada y, a falta de caballo a bordo, paseaba por la cubierta un gran danés.
Pero lo verdaderamente grosero es que la panda de exhibicionistas se agitaba al ritmo abominable de un bakalao electrónico a un volumen ensordecedor. Destrozaban la armonía de la tarde y cualquier delicia erótica con esa música solo apta para nanotecnólogos o zombis de pastillita pegados a una botella de agua (también follaban como robots, se notaba que no conocían la cadencia del bolero, el sabor del calypso, la dulzura de la samba, el trenzado de la rumba, el galope del mambo…)
Sus contorsiones eran propias del sexo abstemio, lo cual no es tan divertido. Lo sé porque tras un forzoso exilio detox en una fat-farm de Merano, la mantenida de un oligarca me aceptó temporalmente para sobrellevar la dura y triste dieta. La chispa realmente prendió cuando la tierna tártara sacó una botella de vodka escondida bajo su almohada…
Social scientists tend to be leftists, but the bulk of their findings have long tended to support rightists.
Charles Murray, a rare man of the right in the social sciences, has been pointing out this paradox since his 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980.
Now 77, Murray began planning to write his new book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class four years ago.
The title Human Diversity is impertinent because we are supposed to simultaneously worship diversity and pretend it doesn’t exist. Humanity is proclaimed to be both a rainbow of diverse delights and a beige putty that is wholly molded by arbitrary social injustices.
But would writing an honest book entitled Human Diversity be worth the abuse? Murray’s wife was skeptical. He explains in its Acknowledgments:
My wife and editor, Catherine…initially tried to talk me out of writing ‘Human Diversity.’ When I began work in the fall of 2016, the nastiness associated with the reaction to The Bell Curve was a distant memory. Did I really want to go through that again?
A kind and sensitive man, Murray had found the ignorant and malignant backlash against his 1994 magnum opus coauthored with the late Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, to be a depressing experience. The hate campaign against Murray contributed to virtually nobody paying attention to his fascinating 2003 book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950.
But Murray finally got out of the media’s doghouse with 2012’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by the expedient of applying his superb analytic skills solely to white Americans.
Still, in early 2017 a leftist goon squad at expensive Middlebury College assaulted Murray and a professor, Alison Stanger, who was attempting to interview him:
Then came the radicalization of the campuses, when we learned that the bad old days were back no matter what. “Confound it!” said Catherine, or two syllables to that effect, on the day I returned from the riot at Middlebury. “If they’re going to do this kind of thing anyway, go ahead and write it.”
On the other hand, Human Diversity is not intended to be a sharp stick in the eye for Murray’s abusers. It is aimed instead at intelligent readers who want to learn about the state of the human sciences a fifth of the way through the 21st century. Human Diversity is something of a meta-review of recent meta-analyses that have been published in dozens of subdisciplines to summarize countless individual studies.
We’re lucky to have Murray to guide us through so much. Although Murray has made his career largely at think tanks rather than in academia, he is by nature less argumentative than professorial. He works hard at making his vast amount of material comprehensible. His prose style is pleasingly informal.
And Murray’s books have always been appealing physical objects, with elegant fonts, uncluttered graphs, and a little extra leading between the lines to make the text look less daunting.
Still, Human Diversity is, by its nature, an imposingly highbrow book. Murray’s aim is to assist social scientists in finally beginning to implement naturalist Edward O. Wilson’s ambitions expressed in Sociobiology and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge to integrate the softer social sciences with the harder sciences that underlie them:
The sciences form a hierarchy. “Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology,” wrote evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. If so, this century should be an exhilarating time to be a social scientist. Until now, we social scientists—for I am a member of that tribe—have been second-class citizens of the scientific world, limited to data and methods that cast doubt on our claim to be truly part of the scientific project. Now, new possibilities are opening up.
While Murray’s intent is ambitious, his chosen means in Human Diversity is cautious. He largely sticks to “findings that have broad acceptance within their respective disciplines.” There isn’t a lot of new raw data being analyzed, as there was in The Bell Curve and Human Accomplishment, just Murray applying his talents to making sense of dozens of 21st-century research questions.
Although Murray says his intended audience are people who enjoy reading the fine Science section in The New York Times, that could be optimistic. It’s more realistic to suggest that Human Diversity will likely have its biggest impact on grad students.
Science notoriously progresses one old scientist’s funeral at a time, and Murray’s book is aimed at providing a one-volume education for young social scientists who suspect that their future careers will depend upon learning about biology, especially the recent revolution in polygenic scores.
Despite all the cancellations and violence, Murray is upbeat:
The background level of animosity and paranoia in today’s academia is much worse than it was in 1994. But here is the reality: We are in the midst of a uniquely exciting period of discoveries in genetics and neuroscience—that’s good news, not bad.
Murray defines the current conventional wisdom as being that gender/sex, race, and class are all social constructs.
Of course, we are also supposed to believe that any jock who declares himself transgender is in touch with his innate biological inner womanhood.
In reality, society shifted very rapidly on women working during the feminist 1970s; but nothing much has happened since then except a lot of sound and fury:
A look back at what has happened to educational and job choices over the last 50 years suggests that vocational doors really did open up for women during the 1970s, that women took advantage of those new opportunities to the extent that they wanted to, and that we fairly quickly reached a new equilibrium.
Murray sums up one aspect of today’s race dogma:
Race is a social construct. The concept of race has arisen from cosmetic differences in appearance that are not accompanied by inborn differences in personality, abilities, or social behavior.
The other facet, of course, is the simultaneous belief that “whiteness” is inherently vile. Those ideas might seem contradictory, but the people who expound them seem to enjoy saying both and don’t care about your logical quibbles.
Murray goes on:
Class is a function of privilege. People have historically been sorted into classes by political, economic, and cultural institutions that privilege heterosexual white males and oppress everyone else, with genes and human nature playing a trivial role if any. People can be re-sorted in a socially just way by changing those institutions.
Unless the people at the bottom vote for Trump, then they’re just inbred losers.
As a social scientist, Murray is particularly excited by the development over the past decade of polygenic scores, which ought to be able to help answer in the coming years many old questions about nature versus nurture:
By the end of the 2020s, it will be widely accepted that quantitative studies of social behavior that don’t use polygenic scores usually aren’t worth reading.
For example, Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology who went back and got a second doctorate in biology, has been trying to test Herrnstein’s famous 1972 supposition that there has been increasing assortative mating on IQ due to the rise of standardized college admissions testing throwing together young people of similar mental abilities.
Conley’s first crack at evaluating Herrnstein’s Hypothesis using early PGS for educational attainment didn’t back it up, but we’ll see what he finds with the improved PGS published by James J. Lee et al. in 2018.
It takes a huge sample size to generate a polygenic score (Lee’s was more than one million people), but you can then apply a PGS to a smaller sample. For example, you can get DNA samples from very old folks, such as those in the Framingham Heart Study that began in 1948, and thus look well back into the past.
On the other hand, PGS scores so far haven’t worked all that reliably when applied to other races:
For example, a polygenic score based on a test population of English and Italians usually generalizes accurately for French and Germans, not so accurately for Chinese and Indians, and least accurately for the genetically most distant populations from sub-Saharan Africa.
Ironically, while this has slowed the resolution of the race-IQ question, it suggests that genetic differences between continental-scale races are fairly significant.
In any case, large databases for nonwhite races will arrive within a few years. Then what?
For highly charged topics such as IQ, many people will continue to urge that studying population differences does more harm than good. But what happens if findings from European samples about cognitive-related traits such as depression, autism, or schizophrenia lead to more effective treatments for Europeans but not for other populations?
Murray sums up on race optimistically:
…ethnic differences in cognitive repertoires are neither to be doubted nor feared. They exist, and everyone who has seen anything of the world knows it. The mix of nature and nurture? That’s not the issue. The differences themselves are facts. People around the world are similar in the basics and different in the details. We connect through the basics. We live with and often enjoy the differences.
But we now have huge numbers of people employed in the Diversity Inclusion Equity apparatus who owe their pay and power to the only allowable explanation for the patterns that ensue from those differences in cognitive repertoire being the Evil of Whiteness.
Indeed, Christopher Caldwell’s new book The Age of Entitlement argues that there is no obvious way out of this corner Americans have painted themselves into.
Well, we shall see whether Murray’s optimism or Caldwell’s pessimism is more justified.
To make his 319 pages of main text less digressive, Murray has exiled a huge amount of material to the 190 pages of fine print at the back.
I was particularly interested in his update to The Bell Curve in the endnotes from page 416 to 423. What’s happened over the past quarter of a century?
Obviously, Herrnstein and Murray’s main forecast—that the cognitive elite would continue to do better than the noncognitive elite—has come true. So has their most notorious prediction—that group differences in intelligence, such as the white-black gap, would remain largely intractable.
But what about the inside-baseball stats on IQ and income? In Human Diversity’s endnotes, Murray reports on both the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth cohort of over 10,000 late baby boomers and the 1997 NLSY study of a similar number of kids born in the early 1980s.
When the incomes of the 1979 NLSY cohort were evaluated in 1993 when they were 30 to 35 years old, blacks and whites with the same IQs earned the same amount of money. Hispanics, however, earned 6 percent less. Asians were so few they weren’t broken out separately back then.
When the subsequent 1997 NLSY cohort was evaluated in 2014, however, immigrant groups were doing better than whites and blacks. Latinos outearned whites with similar IQs by 2 percent, and Asians outearned equally smart whites by a stunning 57 percent.
Between these two cohorts a couple of decades apart, white incomes at a 120 IQ fell by 4 percent and black incomes by a shocking 19 percent. Blacks with 120 IQs in 2014 made only 84 percent as much as whites with similar intellects, and merely 54 percent as much as equally high-IQ Asians.
These are curious findings, and Murray doesn’t comment much upon them. I’d point out that the sample sizes, especially of blacks at 120 IQ, are not large and the methodological challenges of comparing two separate (but similar) studies are likely complex.
Still, if this trend is real, it could help explain worsening black-white relationships during the current Great Awokening. Perhaps between 1993 and 2014, the earnings of both blacks and whites got squeezed hard by immigrants, and the two old American groups are taking out their financial resentments upon each other rather than upon the newcomers.
I’ll begin this week’s sermon, I mean column, with the Parable of the Hemorrhaging Mexican Whore. I used to have this friend—I won’t say his name because he’s an actor and you’d know him—who loved driving down to Tijuana to avail himself of the brothels. Man oh man, did this guy love the TJ hookers. Bargain-basement prices, and relative anonymity for the johns.
Sometime in 2005, I was supposed to have a meeting with the guy to map out a TV pilot I was producing for him. It was a Monday following one of his south-of-the-border weekend excursions. He showed up for our lunch in a panic. The working girl he’d procured on his most recent visit had apparently been, how should I phrase it…unwell. In the middle of executing their contract, the scarlet senorita started bleeding, rather heavily, from her you-know-what. And now here was my friend, nerve-racked over the possibility that he might’ve caught the STD version of Montezuma’s revenge. He wouldn’t stop ranting and raving about how frightened he was, how frustrated, how angry. But I stopped him mid-kvetch. “Dude, you made the choice to go down to the armpit of the peninsula to have sex with serape-clad petri dishes. You should have known the risks; you have no right to complain.”
Here lieth the lesson: Nobody wants to hear you bitch when the shit you do that you should know better than to do comes back to bite you in the ass.
At this exact moment, two powerhouse Hollywood entities are being bit in the ass by the consequences of things they shoulda known better than to do. To be more specific, Hollywood’s identity-politics chickens have come home to roost, in two separate lawsuits, both of which saw major developments last week. And since I’m a sucker for symmetry, I thought I’d examine them side by side.
Lawsuit No. 1 deals with the lamentably successful Jennifer Lopez film Hustlers. For those of you fortunate enough not to have seen it, I’ll provide a quick rundown: Hustlers is the true story of four strippers who became wealthy (by stripper standards) by drugging men and maxing out their credit cards. A sordid tale of a quartet of sleazy, common criminals. They lured dudes to a private room where they essentially “date rape drugged” them with a mélange of MDMA and ketamine. Then the strippers would rob them of every cent they had.
As I said, sleazy common criminals. But they were women. And some of them were women of color. And most of the victims were white. So Hollywood was like, “Let’s glorify these courageous role models!”
Jennifer Lopez and her production company Nuyorican partnered with STX Entertainment to produce Hustlers, and boy, did it resonate with every low-IQ social justice mouthbreather in the biz. The Hollywood Reporter’s Kristen Lopez (a.k.a. “two affirmative-action quotas for the price of one”) described the valiant strippers as only a truly stellar dimwit could: “Their actions became the rallying cry of the oppressed everywhere.”
Yes, drugging and robbing people is exactly what “the oppressed everywhere” long to do. Christ, if I’d said that, I woulda been banned from Twitter.
The film became an industry cause célèbre because of its “anti-Trumpian” message of empowerment: women of color taking control of their lives by drugging and robbing white men. The real-life stripper felons went on press junkets to promote the movie. Hell, J. Lo herself partied with the roofying robbers, even walking the red carpet with one of them at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Because those drugging, thieving strippers are heroes!
And now J. Lo and STX are being sued by one of those “heroes” because the film didn’t portray her heroically enough! Ex-stripper Samantha Barbash, a mixed-race plastic-surgery nightmare who looks like a cheap Mexican knockoff of an inflatable sex doll, claims that the movie does not make her look as “ethical” and “loyal to her colleagues” as she is in real life. In her legal complaint, filed last week, she doesn’t contest the fact that she drugged and robbed the guys. She’s fine with that part. And she’s fine with how positively her actions were depicted in the film. She’s only pissed about the fact that she was portrayed as possessing a few personal flaws. So she’s suing Lopez & Co. for $40,000,000.
Lopez and STX are contesting the suit. They shouldn’t. They brought this on themselves by lionizing pure, 100% human garbage. They took four common criminals, thugs, worthless bottom-feeders, and told them, “You’re the greatest, most noble role models since Florence Nightingale” (that Barbash is the only one of the strippers who’s suing is due to the fact that J. Lo and STX made deals with the others before production started).
This is typical “woke” behavior, patronizingly telling the lowest among us that they’re the greatest. And now Lopez et al. are paying the price. Barbash is acting logically based on what she was told by the filmmakers. If she’s so purehearted, so valorous, so beneficent, then by logical extension the negative aspects of her onscreen representation must be lies. Actionable defamation.
A deluded moron is suing the Dr. Frankensteins who brought her to celluloid life. I hope she bankrupts every damn one of the jackasses who thought they could feed the beast’s ego and emerge unscathed.
Which brings us to lawsuit No. 2. Obese black actress and “comedian” Mo’Nique is suing Netflix because the company “only” offered her $500,000 to tell some “white people be walkin’ funny ’n’ shit” jokes for a concert film. Mo’Nique’s argument is simple: Other comedians—Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer, Ricky Gervais, and Chris Rock—got more than $500,000 for their Netflix specials. Therefore, Mo’Nique deserves exactly as much as they got, because whenever a black female gets less money than someone else, it’s because of racism and sexism (or as I like to say, raxism!).
Netflix is fighting the suit. But why? Netflix routinely does everything it can to trumpet how “woke” it is. In the content it produces and distributes, in the political stands it takes as a company, in the partnerships it forms, even in its tweets, Netflix is a veritable sewer main piping “gender and racial justice” fecal matter into the popular culture. Mo’Nique is merely reciting Netflix’s “truth”: Equal pay is an absolute; there is no context allowed. If Netflix tries to argue that Mo’Nique is worth less as a comic than, say, Murphy or Seinfeld, such a defense would mean that a black woman can be in the same line of work as a white person or a black male and yet deserve less pay for reasons other than racism and sexism.
Netflix is simply being held to what it preaches, which is that if there isn’t exact, to-the-penny pay equity between whites and nonwhites, men and women, raxism is to blame. This is Netflix’s gospel, so why is the company acting with such hypocrisy? Apologize for the discriminatory conduct and give Mo’Nique $100,000,000.
Netflix’s execs should have known what they were getting into before they approached Moby’Dique in the first place. This flightless Macy’s float has a well-deserved reputation as a prima donna. When she was nominated for an Oscar for the movie Precious, she famously refused to do any press junkets to campaign for the award (which even the best actors in the biz are expected to do). She demanded extra cash just to promote the film, because she be Mo’Nique and Mo’Nique get all da money.
When her refusal to help publicize Precious upset the movie’s producers—Lee Daniels, Tyler Perry, and Oprah (a.k.a. the biggest names in “black Hollywood”)—Mo’Nique told them to get bent. When Steve Harvey told her she shouldn’t feud with such powerful former benefactors, she told him to get bent.
And Netflix wanted to form a business relationship with this woman?
After Mo’Nique was offered the $500,000, by way of response she publicly called for a boycott of Netflix to punish the company for “lowballing” her. And now she’s suing Netflix for “retaliation,” because the streaming service didn’t up its offer following her boycott announcement. Pretend you’re a retarded ox for a moment, and that argument might make sense:
Netflix: “We’ll pay you $500,000.”
Mo’Nique: “That not enuff. BOYCOTT NETFLIX!”
Netflix: [Says nothing]
Mo’Nique: “Dat retaliation! You retaliatin’ against me by doin’ nothin’.”
Last week, Netflix’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss Mo’Nique’s suit, and it’s sidesplitting. Don’t get me wrong—every word of the motion makes sense. What’s funny is watching Netflix attempt to use reason against the very irrationality it promotes and encourages. As the motion states,
Netflix’s singular act of making a “low-ball offer” cannot serve as both evidence of discrimination and evidence of retaliation for criticizing the alleged discrimination. Plaintiff’s retaliation theory is, indeed, nonsensical. Plaintiff appears to claim that after she made a public call for a boycott based upon an opening offer that Netflix believed was fair, Netflix had an affirmative obligation to increase its offer.
Yep, that’s what she’s arguing, and that’s the woke logic that Netflix’s philosophy engenders. A black woman was unhappy, so therefore the very act of not giving in to her demands constitutes retaliation. Mo’Nique didn’t even make a counterproposal. She was offered $500,000, and her response was to call for a boycott. And when Netflix didn’t come running with reparations, she labeled their lack of action “retaliatory.” Because how dare anyone not capitulate when a black woman is angry.
Even “black Twitter” responded to Mo’Nique’s suit with derision. “Bitch u not even funny,” tweeted one prominent black Twitterer. “I didn’t even know you still around.”
Netflix’s attorneys are doing their best to contest the suit, but they’re trying to use common sense against an aggrieved product of entitlement culture. It won’t work against her, and it won’t impress a jury made up of black women. Netflix is getting a taste of what average Americans have to deal with on a daily basis. In any other context, had a black woman been offered a job, had she rejected the proposed pay, had she called for a boycott of the company that sought to employ her, and had she sued the prospective employer for not upping the offer in response to the boycott, Netflix would have been the first to release a documentary immortalizing the woman as the new Rosa Parks and condemning the employer as KKK scum.
I hope Netflix loses its shirt.
J. Lo deifies street trash, then she gets sued for not treating street trash like a deity. Netflix execs lecture the world on the inviolability of equal pay for women of color, so now equal pay is being demanded of them by a woman of color.
Much like my pathetic actor friend, J. Lo and Netflix made the choice to do business with unclean whores. And just like my actor friend, they are behind every misfortune that befalls them.
In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do.
In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy made Edmund Ross one of the Senate’s “Profiles in Courage” for his decisive and heroic vote not to convict and remove Johnson.
Repealed in 1887, the Tenure of Office Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
But while the act was the lethal instrument to be used in the political assassination of a president whom the Radical Republicans meant to terminate, Stanton’s ouster was not the primary cause of their fury.
What truly enraged the Radical Republicans was Johnson’s resolve to be more magnanimous toward the defeated South than they meant to be. Johnson had in mind an earlier end to the military occupation of the South and a more rapid return of the seceded states to the Union.
The story is told in the 1942 Hollywood film “Tennessee Johnson,” starring Van Heflin, which has since gone down the memory hole along with Woodrow Wilson’s White House favorite, “Birth of a Nation.”
As historians concede, the impeachment of Johnson was about Reconstruction and who would remake the South. Would it be the Southern majority that fought and lost the war, or the victorious Yankees and the “scalawags” and “carpetbaggers” laboring alongside them?
The triumphant Radical Republicans were not about conciliation. So severe were aspects of the occupation that Gen. Robert E. Lee reportedly said if he had known what was coming, he might not have quit fighting.
So, too, the impeachment of Donald Trump is not really about his 10-week delay in shipping arms to Ukraine or his postponing of a visit by Ukraine’s president until he announced an investigation of Burisma Holdings and Joe and Hunter Biden.
Even before the 2016 election, Democrats, collaborating with a like-minded media, were using the instruments of power they possess, to first prevent and then to overturn the election results of 2016.
Russiagate, the James Comey FBI investigation, the Mueller probe — aborting a Trump presidency has always been the goal.
Saturday, White House counsel Pat Cipollone succinctly described to the Senate the bottom line:
“They’re asking you to remove President Trump from the ballot in an election that’s occurring in approximately nine months. … They’re asking you to tear up all of the ballots across this country on your own initiative, take that decision away from the American people.”
To save “our democracy,” to which they pay tireless tribute, the impeachers want to ensure that the people, in a supposedly free election in 2020, are not allowed to make the same mistake they made in 2016.
To save our democracy, the House and half the Senate want to deny the American electorate one of the most important roles the people play in this republic — the exercise of their right to choose the head of state and commander in chief of the United States.
Disqualifying presidential candidates whom populists favor but elites abhor is a quite common practice — in Third World countries.
Over the weekend, we learned that John Bolton, who has offered to testify in the Senate trial, claims in his coming book that Trump made a direct link between sending military aid to Ukraine and Ukraine’s opening an investigation of the Bidens.
This has caused some Republican senators to reconsider calling witnesses, particularly Bolton, in the impeachment trial.
If four Republicans vote for witnesses, they will be doing the work Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi’s House failed to do in their haste to get Trump impeached by Christmas. They will be prolonging a trial set up to burn and bury their president.
The Senate should let Trump’s defenders complete their case, as the House managers and impeachers have already done. Then allow 16 hours of questioning. Then call for the verdict.
There is no treason, no bribery and no high crime in what the House managers allege. There is nothing in the articles of impeachment voted that rises to a level to justify removing a president.
Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on defenseless cities and sent 2 million POWs back to the tender mercies of Stalin in Operation Keelhaul after World War II.
JFK greenlighted the overthrow of an ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, in a coup that ended in the murder of Diem.
LBJ ordered the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, and his White House shared the fruits of that FBI surveillance with a friendly press.
No one was impeached.
Why? Because Truman, JFK and LBJ were establishment favorites.
For Trump, a phone call with a Ukrainian president saying, “Send us your Biden file and we will have a meeting,” is a political capital crime justifying democracy’s version of a death penalty.
I write this from the once-upon-a-time small alpine village of Gstaad, Switzerland, now a mecca of the nouveaux riches and vulgar, snow and manners having gone with the wind. Global warming is still a maybe, as far as I’m concerned, but the visual evidence right here in the Alps is undeniable. The glacier I used to ski on almost year-round has disappeared, and man-made snow is pumped out daily in its place. The reason I’m reluctant to believe the climate Cassandras is because their prophetic gifts have been very wrong in the past—Prince Charles predicted the end of the world some time ago, but he’s still flying private around the globe twenty years on—and that Swedish teenager who accuses us of killing her future is a publicity freak of Meghan Markle proportions.
In my own little way I do what I can against global warming: I drive a tiny mini, use a sailboat rather than those polluting stinkers favored by Arabs, and occasionally charter only propeller planes when flying around Europe. Never mind. More depressing than the disappearing white stuff are the manners of the people who warn us nonstop about global warming. Never have I met a ruder kind: young, usually bearded where both sexes are concerned, and, like all annoying types, holier-than-thou.
Mind you, some of us oldies think that the hot air emanating from the climate warriors, the LGBTQ crowd, and their allies who encourage them to protest at the drop of a hat is the real cause of the snow’s disappearance. My son, who as a teenager used to lean left, has finally seen the light and annoys the ritzy-glitzy youngsters he runs into these days by asking them what pronoun they go under. What’s undeniable is that we have produced a generation of young people who pride themselves on being eternal pessimists. Life will deliver less, is their message. A wry smile is my reaction when I hear this stuff. I grew up during the last world war—something these darlings see on TV and in the movies, and it traumatizes them at times.
Like many others of my age group, memory serves where the almost daily bombing during the war is concerned. My family’s house north of Athens was near a small airport used by the Greek royal family that the occupying Germans had taken over to park their fighters. Although my German nanny and my parents had forbidden it, our favorite game was running out during an air raid in order to catch the silver foil Allied bombardiers would dump in order to confuse the primitive radars of German antiaircraft guns. It sounds more dangerous than it was. Three years of bombings and not a single casualty. Today’s youth have no such luck. They’re being bombed daily with exaggeration, intolerance, untruths, and outright falsehoods by Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, with millions of casualties.
No wonder they’re all so angry. Had I lived my life in the grip of social media, I’d probably be an inmate in an insane asylum by now, or convicted of having raped that pachyderm Lena Dunham. Abused, trolled, bullied, incapable of having a relationship, today’s youth have rap stars as heroes, and that includes the ghastly Kardashians and Hiltons. Social media is now the echo chamber where one hears nothing but one’s own prejudices fed back to them. Their inner voice tells them that it’s all the fault of the oldies, people like myself who don’t care about the future. Bad, bad Taki.
Yet when communism collapsed thirty years ago, the world rejoiced for the values communism had denied the people under it: free speech, respect, and tolerance. The irony is that three decades later, newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, TV networks, and movements like #MeToo want to revert to the kind of control practiced by communist dictators. The Donald promised to drain the swamp, but the swamp seems to be winning with help from the above-mentioned unmentionables, and from the zombielike people attached to their machines who shout at others on the internet. You know the type: those with a not-my-president, hands-over-the-ears reaction to democratically elected officials.
Back in 1969, President Richard Nixon went over the heads of the so-called elite and the Eastern establishment and told the American people that America would not be humiliated by North Vietnam. He called on the silent majority of Americans to back him, and they sure did. The polls went through the roof. One of my most pleasant memories was watching New York construction hard hats attack and beat the crap out of effete Harvard types for burning the American flag on Fifth Avenue. Irish cops looked on with smiles on their faces. Well, we all know how that ended. The swamp brought down a great president who had won 49 states.
We’re in the same situation now, except Trump is no Nixon. He’s listening to lying Saudis and Likudists and picking a fight with Iran, which should be our closest ally in the region. He’s on the right path where immigration is concerned, and when and if that is finally restricted, we can start rebuilding harmony among our communities, particularly in the inner cities. But I’m not holding my breath.
Woke Culture is the haunting fear that white people somewhere may be happy.
The Super Bowl is coming up next week, and the predominantly white hordes of anti-white propagandists who won’t rest until every last white person is as miserable as they are have already found a way to spoil the fun.
The event—the quintessential yearly national American communal ritual—pits the Kansas City Chiefs against the San Francisco 49ers, and the “wokelings” won’t seem to rest until they make white people (instead of Injuns) feel ashamed about their past.
As they argue it, both the Chiefs and 49ers are named after situations in American history in which white people unfairly and hatefully vanquished peoples who have been here for about 15,000 years—which, if you want to be frank, seems like more than enough time to have gotten their whole “defending your territory” thing together.
Why is it more shameful to be the winner than the loser?
“OK,” you might say, “I can understand why people might find the Chiefs’ name offensive, but what’s wrong with the 49ers?
Surprisingly, using current sensitivities as a guideline, a case can be made that the 49ers’ name is far more offensive than the Chiefs’.
But I’ll start with the Chiefs.
Their logo features an arrowhead, they play in Arrowhead Stadium, their fans sometimes wear headdresses and do the “Arrowhead Chop,” and each home game starts with a ceremonial banging of the war drum.
Offended yet? Me, neither. I grew up watching afternoon kiddie shows in the Philly area hosted by Chief Halftown, a real-life Seneca Injun in a garish headdress who started every show with a greeting of ees da da sussaway, which is Seneca for “Let’s get it started!” Although he was authentically Seneca, he was also doing a bit of a minstrel show.
Did it make me hate him or, by extension, all Injuns? No, I loved Chief Halftown. If anything, he led me to be more kindly disposed toward Injuns. I also loved Sally Starr, who was a kids’ host on the same TV station and played a stereotypical rope-‘em-doggies cowgirl. I suppose I should have been personally offended by this gross caricature of the white pioneers who settled the American West, but no—as with Chief Halftown, I found Sally Starr’s form of minstrelsy endearing.
Apparently these “racist stereotypes” backfired and made me love both cowgirls AND Indians.
The Kansas City Chiefs, as well as other professional Injun-themed sports teams such as the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves, and the Cleveland Indians, pay homage to the Injun warrior spirit. As far as I can suss it out, the intent behind naming your team after some Native American folklore doesn’t seem to be defaming Native Americans as much as striking fear in your opponents. It makes zero sense to name your team after something you hate. Who’s going to put their bodies through the rigors of training and risk being crippled for life carrying the banner of a team whose name they find pathetic rather than noble?
Never mind that when Injuns were polled about the Washington Redskins’ name in 2016, nine out of ten say they were “not bothered” by it. I’d reckon that 9 out of ten who actually get bothered are palefaces.
But writer Vincent Schilling is one of those Injuns who says he’s bothered by the Kansas City Chiefs’ name. He claims ancestry in the Mohawk tribe, who are mainly famous for inventing a haircut. He recently wrote an article detailing the history of the Kansas City Chiefs’ name.
Harold Roe Bartle was a white man who allegedly smoked 25 cigars a day, which causes big trouble to white man’s lung. He eventually served two terms as KC’s mayor. He claimed that he was an honorary member of the Arapaho tribe and given the name Chief Lone Bear by a tribal chieftain. In 1925 he founded a Live Action Role-Playing Indian tribe called the “Mic-O-Say.” Working in tandem with the Boy Scouts, the Mic-O-Say were not Native American by blood. They merely incorporated Indian folklore and traditions.
Again, maybe I need glasses, but to me this looks more like a respectful homage than hate speech.
In the early 1960s when Lamar Hunt was seeking to relocate his Houston Texans to Kansas City, Bartle convinced Hunt to rename the team the Chiefs.
If you were really looking to find a name that might offend and put the fear in the Injuns, I’d suggest the Dallas Cowboys. Wasn’t the only genuine full-scale, play-for-keeps bloody race war fought in American history the war between cowboys and Indians?
The San Francisco 49ers’ name refers to a very specific strain of American Injun-exterminators. According to history.com, the team’s namesake engineered an anti-native genocide:
But though gold spelled prosperity and power for the white settlers who arrived in California in 1849 and after, it meant disaster for the state’s peaceful indigenous population.
In just 20 years, 80 percent of California’s Native Americans were wiped out….An estimated 100,000 Native Americans died during the first two years of the Gold Rush alone; by 1873, only 30,000 indigenous people remained of around 150,000….And though some died because of the seizure of their land or diseases caught from new settlers, between 9,000 and 16,000 were murdered in cold blood—the victims of a policy of genocide sponsored by the state of California and gleefully assisted by its newest citizens.
An 1849 editorial in the Daily Alta California opined that for white mine laborers to feel that they can work securely without the fear of constant Indian raids, “Whites are becoming impressed with the belief that it will be absolutely necessary to exterminate the savages….”
In 1851, the first Governor of California, Peter Hardenman Burnett, said the following in his state address:
That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.
Harsh!
Last summer—have you noticed that they tend to wait at least a century until it’s absolutely impossible to make amends to the original victims in any meaningful way?—California Governor Gavin Newsom offered a meaningless apology:
It’s called a genocide. That’s what it was. A genocide. [There’s] no other way to describe it, and that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books. And so I’m here to say the following: I’m sorry on behalf of the state of California.
I believe I have established beyond all doubt that the San Francisco 49ers’ name is far more racist than that of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Based on my findings, pick your team and let’s play ball!
The Week’s Most Degraded, Debated, and Denigrated Headlines
BIDEN ’N’ BLOOMBERG GO BLACK
Joseph Biden is 77 years old, which is exactly how much time it would take to spend all of Michael Bloomberg’s money.
Both are running for president, and neither one of them has an Italian water ice’s chance in hell.
Both of them, since they’re Democrats, are making direct appeals to black voters by reminding them of how horrible white people have been to black people. Subtly, they also conveyed the message that we now live in a world where all serious politicians are forbidden from making direct racial appeals to white people no matter how many times they directly address black people.
Biden appeared at a black church, told them that black laughter and group hugging is “contagious,” and insinuated that Donald Trump was in cahoots with the KKK and that their entire agenda consisted of “hate”:
This president and his — the Ku Klux Klans and the rest of them, they think they’ve beaten us again. But they have no idea — we’re just coming back….I thought you could defeat hate. But hate only hides. It never fully goes away….Dr. King didn’t give up on the dream, and I’m asking you all, don’t give up on it. We can defeat this moment of hate.
Campaigning in Tulsa, OK, Bloomberg recalled not only the race riot that occurred there a century ago but other white mob attacks in other states which, as we’ve already noted, occurred long before any of us was alive, so it’s a little weird for him to be bringing this up now unless he’s trying to rekindle some kind of race war or something:
In just that short period, from 1917 to 1923, more than 1,000 black Americans were killed by white mobs in cities and towns all across the country. But the truth is: What happened during that period was part of a continuum of violence that black Americans faced even after the end of slavery — violence that denied them their lives, their liberty and their pursuit of happiness.
Bloomberg further stuck his proboscis up the black community’s posterior by admitting that his “story might have turned out very differently if I had been black.”
Hmm…how might that have gone?
He was born Quantrelle Bloomberg to an unwed mother in East Harlem…During an infamous 1951 incident, young Quantrelle Bloomberg was bicycling when he was injured by a member of Chabad who’d lost control of his vehicle. When a private ambulance agency showed up and took the Chabad driver to the hospital first, riots erupted for days….
A TRUMP-RELATED STABBING MURDER?
Mason Trever Toney is a scruffy, chubby construction worker whose parents clearly didn’t know how to spell “Trevor” or “Tony.”
Toney, 28, is described as a man with anti-government beliefs. He has been charged in Orlando, FL, with murdering his boss William Knight, also 28, by stabbing him with a trowel on a construction site, draping an American flag over his corpse, and escaping in a vehicle while shouting that onlookers were “terrorists.”
Knight has been described as a supporter of Donald Trump.
As we go to press, that’s the only “evidence” that the stabbing had anything to do with Donald Trump, but aye, the press be one bloodthirsty beast.
TRANNY DOLL FOR KIDS DEBUTS IN RUSSIA (MAYBE)
If you were to describe Russia as a fag-friendly country, you’d be incorrect.
That’s why the appearance of what is thought to be the world’s first transgender doll in a Siberian toy shop has led to outrage, consternation, befuddlement, and the torrential unleashing of repressed desire in this resolutely homo-hostile nation.
The doll looks sort of like the ugly young blonde girl in Family Ties, yet jutting out from under her dress like a sore thumb is a penis.
Some have suggested this is merely a manufacturing blunder, but for those weirdlings who think what the world really needs is female children’s dolls that have dicks, this is a milestone.
HILLARY POOPS ON BERNIE: “NOBODY LIKES HIM”
Hillary Clinton is an almost assuredly lesbian sociopath who failed to win the presidency not because Americans don’t like women, but because nobody likes Hillary Clinton.
In a four-hour biographical documentary on Hillary with the clever and catchy title Hillary, Clinton decides to open up her moldy womb once more and fire vaginal flame-darts at Bernie Sanders:
He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.
She also seriously said this:
We do have some well-off people who support Democratic candidates, there’s no doubt about that, but they’ve never bought a TV station. They’ve never gobbled up radio stations. They’ve never created newspapers in local communities to put out propaganda.
Did you ever get the sense that half of the world sees a completely different world than you do?
UNDERAGE MEXICAN MIGRANTS GET STRANDED IN TIJUANA, AND NOBODY SEEMS TO CARE
The sleepy Mexican border town of Tijuana, home of cheap sombreros and even cheaper donkey shows, currently boasts the world’s highest homicide rate.
Experts—apparently somebody employs bean-counters to tally mini-beaners as they cross from Mexico into America—say that recent years have seen an upsurge in underage Mexican minors attempting to find employment at a Hardee’s restaurant somewhere in Los Estados Unidos.
However, many of these aspirant service-industry workers only get bounced back to Tijuana, where they are subject to the predatory wiles of pimps and pushers.
Nicole Ramos is a migrants’ advocate who claims that American and Mexican authorities are doing nothing to improve the situation:
Under the Trafficking Victim Protection Act and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an unaccompanied minor has the right to present themselves directly to U.S. immigration authorities. The idea that Mexican and U.S. officials are collaborating to prevent human trafficking is not credible in the slightest. If that were actually true, U.S. immigration officials would not turn unaccompanied minors away from the port of entry in violation of U.S. and international law and back to the streets of Tijuana, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and the site for epic levels of human trafficking, particularly the sexual exploitation of children.
All we can say about these kids is that it must suck to be them.
MICHAEL MOORE: WHITE PEOPLE “ARE NOT GOOD PEOPLE”
Michael Moore is a stupid white man who wrote a book called Stupid White Men. Like so many people, he seems to find some virtue in finding no virtue in his people.
He recently did a podcast for the music-journalism dinosaur Rolling Stone where he pulled a reverse Jesse Jackson and says he actually gets scared rather than relieved when he sees white people walking down the street:
[Whites] are not good people….I refuse to participate in post-racial America. I refuse to say because we elected Obama that suddenly that means everything is okay, white people have changed. White people have not changed….Two-thirds of all white guys voted for Trump. That means anytime you see three white guys walking at you, down the street toward you, two of them voted for Trump. You need to move over to the other sidewalk because these are not good people that are walking toward you. You should be afraid of them.
If that’s the case, why did he until very recently live in a lake house in a small Michigan village that’s 95% white and 0% black?
Something smells here, and we think it’s Michael Moore’s gunt.
MEN DON’T GET PERIODS—PERIOD!
Kenny Jones is a “male model” despite the fact that he menstruates, which strongly suggests that he is not a male at all.
He is now the star of a film called Pandora’s Box: Lifting the Lid on Menstruation, which seeks to uplift and not disgust us by peddling the idea that males are able to menstruate. The film is directed by a certain Rebecca Snow, who did some sort of movie about Hitler and the Holocaust that sounds like really groundbreaking work.
Riddle me this, though, Twatman: If gender is only a social construct and males can menstruate, how come it’s only females who menstruate throughout the rest of the animal kingdom?
Every Monday, Jim Goad reads the previous day’s “Week That Perished” on his podcast.
