In all the endlessly tiresome back-and-forth screeching about race relations in this country, never once have I heard anyone beyond an anonymous tweeter here or there suggest the main problem is that we’ve been far too nice to black people.
Despite the fact that black-on-white violence far outstrips the inverse, and despite the fact that American culture has performed nonstop analingus on blacks and nonstop defamation of whites for a couple generations now, and despite the fact that it’s ludicrous to assert that modern blacks are being economically exploited in any possible way since blacks in the aggregate take far more from the “government” (i.e., white taxpayers) in assistance than they contribute in taxes, the establishment left and right both seem to agree that anti-black “racism” is a real problem.
Multiple speakers at the COVID Skype show that was the Republican National Convention last week bent over and grabbed their ankles wishing warm feelings for Jacob Blake, the black male from Kenosha with a felony warrant for rape who was filmed on camera fighting with white cops before they wound up shooting him after screaming at him to put down his knife. But there wasn’t a word of sympathy for Kyle Rittenhouse, the white Trump supporter who shot three non-blacks in Kenosha last week as they were attacking him with fists, a skateboard, and a handgun.
Republicans get called Nazis no matter how far they bend over, and still they try to appease the same malicious actors who call them Nazis. You know what they say about those who don’t learn from history.
If the establishment left and right disagree on anything, it’s whether or not anti-white rhetoric and anti-white violence are problems. But both groups openly pander to blacks as a racial group, while neither dares to openly appeal to whites. The Republicans simply never say anything about whites, while the Democrats openly demean whites.
Despite what the narrative-sculptors would have you believe, I’ve never had a problem being nice to black people. And in most cases, black people don’t have a problem being nice to me. Having gotten that out of the way, what I’m about to say will be scorned by people on both ends of this imaginary political spectrum for different reasons, and I suppose it won’t help to explain that I’m saying this not to win good-guy points with anyone—because, you blinkered idiot, your misguided moral approval means nothing to me—but because it’s been my genuine experience: On an individual basis, I really, really like black people. Ever since I first started encountering them at around age eight, they’ve been some of the funniest and most charming people I’ve ever known.
There have, of course, been exceptions—I’ve been robbed and punched by black people, although I’ve never robbed or punched one myself. And I know multiple white people who’ve suffered violence, rape, and murder at the hands of blacks, whereas I’ve never personally known a white person who’s done the inverse.
But that’s not what the narrative-sculptors would have you believe, is it?
Despite all of the evidence, they keep peddling this antiquated notion that America is such a cesspit of anti-black hatred and violence that blacks are scared of even walking outside these days. Even basketball superstar LeBron James and his net worth of nearly a half-billion dollars recently asserted as much.
Coulda fooled me! Blacks don’t seem to have the slightest problem appearing in public and bullying and hitting and demeaning every white person within spitting distance.
No, it’s whites who are afraid. Deathly afraid.
Back when whites actually had a positive collective identity, they weren’t nearly as afraid. In fact, it was the blacks who were afraid. And that was a bad thing—if you were black. If you were white, one of the perks that you didn’t have to live in constant fear of being physically attacked for saying the wrong thing.
But as modern whites, we’re lectured that it’s a good thing to live in constant fear. We’re told it’s what we deserve for all that we’ve done to blacks.
Sorry, but what have I ever done to blacks except being nice to them?
So I have to ask ye white Americans: How has being nice to black people been workin’ out for ya?
Have you noticed that the nicer we are to blacks, the angrier they act toward us? Have you noticed that this phenomenon acts with almost mathematical precision? Have you pondered that perhaps they don’t interpret our kindness as kindness, but rather as weakness?
I read a long time ago that Southerners hate the idea of blacks as a group but are nice to them individually, whereas Northerners love the idea of blacks as an abstract concept but treat them rottenly on an individual basis. While that’s a gross overgeneralization and impossible to quantify, it’s appearing more and more that in this equation, I would qualify as a honorary Southerner.
Back when you could get your ass kicked by white people for saying nice things about black people, I was that guy.
Now, when you can get your life destroyed for saying nice things about white people, I’m still that guy.
I haven’t changed at all. All that “progress” really means is that society has shifted its poles and redefined the good guys and the bad guys.
Except for the times when I was punched and robbed by individual blacks, my experiences with them have been overwhelmingly positive. So, yes, it can be said that I have very high regard for most of them as individuals.
But holy shit, they are a complete mess as a group. Where on Earth does a large presence of blacks actually improve the per-capita income and life expectancy? Where is there a majority-black country on Earth where blacks enjoy a higher standard of living and live longer than they do in this allegedly white-supremacist hellhole called the USA? I’ve been asking that last question for a quarter-century and have never received an answer. I’ve been called plenty of names for asking the question, but after about the hundredth time, that only seems like a dishonest way of avoiding the question altogether.
It’s stupid to be nice to someone who has no intention of being nice to you.
Even though White Fragility is one of the best-selling books of recent years, what we’re actually dealing with is black fragility, because if you dare to even utter one negative thing about them, the entire nation might burn.
It’s not a healthy world where you’re constantly afraid of speaking the truth.
It’s as if all of white America is a battered wife desperately scrambling not to make her husband angry again. Sounds like we’re in an abusive relationship with blacks—so deeply abusive, we’re being gaslit as the abusers and most of us seem to believe it. It’s like, wow, honey, you just made your abusive husband breakfast in bed, but he slapped you harder than ever. The nicer we get, the more racist they say we are, and the meaner they get. And no one sees a connection to any of this?
If people refrain from ever thinking or saying anything negative about black people again, do you think this current situation will resolve itself, or will it get a lot worse? I recently conducted a poll on this very question, and 93.8% of the 499 respondents said things will only get worse.
When you concede to an infant’s tantrums, does their behavior improve?
Mind you, I don’t like white people any more than I like black people. In a lot of ways, I respect modern whites far less than I respect modern blacks. I’ll respect anyone who acts in self-interest far more than I’ll respect any masochist.
But we currently occupy a culture where being perceived as a “racist” justifies your murder. So would you rather be dead, or would you rather be called a racist and stay alive to fight back? Sooner than you think, you will be forced to answer that question.
I choose to continue being nice to blacks as individuals, but when it comes to blacks as a group, I am now highly suspicious of both their capabilities and their intentions toward me and other whites.
Let’s put it this way: I love my dog, and he has a great personality, but I wouldn’t let him drive my truck. Despite how likeable he is, I’d only be inviting disaster.
The Week’s Most Porcine, Unclean, and Obscene Headlines
WHY WE SHOULD ALL KEEP MISPRONOUNCING “KAMALA”
Joe Biden promised the nation that he would pick a colored woman as his running mate, and now that he has fulfilled his promise, people are acting as if it’s racist to notice that his running mate is colored.
How these people hold so many contradictions in their heads without their skulls exploding is a true marvel of nature.
The lady’s name is Kamala Harris, and she’s not even really black. Her dad was a light-skinned Jamaican and her mom was a dothead, and their spawn is so light-skinned that she fails the brown paper bag test, which is the commonly accepted scientific method of determining someone’s blackness.
If your first instinct was to pronounce her name like that of Kamala the pro wrestler—who, as fate would decree it, was really named James Harris—this is only evidence that you are a racially tolerant fan of pro wrestling. Pronouncing it as “Kuh-MAH-luh” merely shows that you are neither sexually nor racially threatened to see big fat smelly black dudes with floppy man-boobs thrashing around the ring with big fat smelly white dudes with floppy man-boobs.
But according to the Democrats, mispronouncing her name—which she insists is enunciated as “comma-luh,” you are only announcing before the world that you are a white supremacist racist who pours the blood of aborted black fetuses onto your breakfast flakes.
Forget about how only months ago, Miz Kamala was slamming her senile running mate as a racist and a rapist. Forget the fact that she probably has teeth in her vagina. Most importantly, forget that just like Barack Obama, she shares no ancestral lineage with the black American descendants of slaves who still consider themselves unfortunate for living in places such as Minneapolis and Kenosha rather than Mogadishu or Harare.
We’re supposed to respect the fact that her parents came to this country in order for her to one day attempt to destroy it.
Just like Harris, Fatima Goss Graves is another mulatto female who seems to have made a living pretending she’s as black as a lump o’ coal. And even though she’s visibly overweight, she sees it as a racist microaggression when people pronounce her name “FAT-ih-muh” rather than “Fuh-TEEM-uh,” which is how she insists people say it.
Mispronouncing “Kamala,” even if innocently done, “is an effort to diminish her,” Fatima says. “It’s designed to signal difference.”
Wait—wasn’t “difference” the main reason she was selected?
“When people are running for the highest levels of government, there’s an expectation they will be afforded with dignity and respect,” Fatima adds.
Right—she deserves every bit of respect and dignity your ilk have afforded Donald Trump for the past five years.
FAR-RIGHT GROUP DOES FAR-RIGHT THINGS AT PEACEFUL PROTEST IN PORTLAND
Yea, it is a topsy-turvy upside-down world when an official police department press release follows the laws of journalism with far more rigor than the hacks at a major newspaper do.
But that’s exactly what happened last week when you contrast the coverage of a political skirmish in Portland between Proud Boys and Antifa.
The Portland Police Department’s press release about the event was astoundingly unbiased, almost as if a dispassionate robot had written it. It doesn’t mention either group by name, only that they fought and eventually dispersed. It even relayed this bit of information without tittering:
Officers located a bucket containing condoms filled with an unknown liquid substance and a water bottle with what appeared to be urine along with several shields staged near the park at Southwest 4th Avenue and Salmon.
On the other hand, The Sun accused a Proud Boy of pointing a gun at Antifa while neglecting to mention it was a paintball gun. It noted that a white Proud Boy attempted to punch a black man, but it failed to mention that video shows more than one black man attempting to punch white Proud Boys. It cited an unsourced and easily discredited allegation from a black pastor in Kalamazoo that Proud Boys are founded on Jew-hatred, despite the fact that the group bends over backwards not to criticize Jews. And then it ends with a barrage of smears by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a reference to Charlottesville (which former Proud Boy leader Gavin McInnes openly disavowed prior to the event), and the usual lumping-in of the KKK to describe a group that’s actually led a black dude named Enrique. And like nearly every other mainstream media organization on the planet, it entirely misrepresented Donald Trump’s quote about there being “very fine people” on both sides at Charlottesville.
It gives us a queasy feeling to realize you can trust the police more than you can trust reporters these days.
RIOT OF THE WEEK
Don’t you just love all these riots that have been happening? It’s clear that justice will not occur until black people and their white enablers have burned down every building and then killed all the white people, including those that enable blacks. The white enablers will be the last to go, but they don’t even realize it. Or, hey—maybe they do realize and it seems like the best of all possible deals to them.
Last week’s Super Big Mega Riot happened in the town of Kenosha, WI, which is basically a restroom stop between Chicago and Milwaukee for black families traveling north to take advantage of the better welfare that Wisconsin provides.
Apparently some black guy named Jacob Blake, who was arrested in 2015 for pulling a gun at a bar and—surprise, surprise—resisting arrest, was wanted on felony warrants for domestic abuse and rape when police encountered him and—we know, sounds crazy—he started resisting arrest again. A viral clip shows him running away from two white policemen and leaning into his car, at which point he is shot in the back seven times. Blake was wounded and possibly paralyzed but survived the shooting. Audio from the event shows that police kept yelling at him to drop a knife. There is also a suggestion that he was reaching into his car to grab a gun. But the truth is, just as in all these cases, he wouldn’t have been shot if he didn’t actively resist arrest.
Predictably, the city of Kenosha started burning. Then a couple days into the riot, a 17-year-old white male shot three “protesters,” killing two of them. Initial reports stated that his victims were black. As luck would have it, all three of them were Jewish felons, and all three of them are on videotape attacking the gunman—one of them got his bicep blown clean off his arm while that arm was holding a handgun in violation of his felony status.
Interestingly, the next night was the first night since late May that there was no rioting in Portland. Should people have started shooting at rioters earlier?
TRAUMA PORN: SOCIAL-MEDIA USERS POSE AS AUSCHWITZ VICTIMS
As everyone knows, the Holocaust was the worst thing that has ever happened in human history, and if you try to deny the EXACT death toll of six million or make the slightest joke about this sacred fact, you deserve to be burned alive in a Papa John’s pizza oven.
To make things even worse on our long-suffering Jewish friends, some real sickos on the social-media app TikTok are role-playing as deceased Holocaust victims in a trend known as “trauma porn”:
TIKTOK users are pretending to be dead Holocaust victims in a disturbing new trend that has been dubbed “trauma porn” because it sensationalizes horrific events….Footage on the video sharing app shows people wearing the Star of David, striped clothing, and make up mimicking bruises and cuts while talking to the camera as if they are dead….Some users explain how they ‘died’ in Nazi-run concentration camps while acting out scenarios from the Jewish genocide during the Second World War.
Naturally, Jewish people are upset, and since they still haven’t gotten over the Holocaust, ignoring their feelings or suggesting that the Holocaust obviously didn’t finish the job it set out to accomplish would be highly inappropriate.
FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, LET THE BLACKS HAVE THEIR FLAVORED TOBACCO
Is flavored tobacco a tool of white supremacy? Or is it simply a lifestyle preference for people of color that white supremacists seek to deny them?
Frankly, we don’t know, and at this point we don’t even want to know.
All we actually know is that the tobacco industry has issued an ad supporting Senate Bill 793, which would ban the sale of flavored tobacco in California arguing that since it is unhealthy and disproportionately harms people of color, it should be banned.
On the other side of this insipid debate are actual colored people who represent organizations with “Black” or “African” in their names who resent this capitalistic and white-supremacist intrusion on People of Color’s attempts to give themselves lung cancer with metholated cigarettes and watermelon cigars. There is the usual hyperbolic hysteria about blood money being made on the backs of dead African Americans, and you wind up wondering at what point these people will finally shut up and eat a sandwich.
They’re making it REALLY hard to like them these days.
FRENCH WOMEN PUT THEIR TOPS BACK ON
It’s a well-known fact across the globe that French people don’t wear deodorant and that French women don’t shave their armpits—which is so disgusting, it almost makes you wish they had lost both World Wars.
France has also persecuted the finest female specimens that moldy nation’s loins ever spurted forth, Miss Brigitte Bardot, for daring to speak the truth about how mean Muzzies are to animals.
And as recently as 1984, an estimated 43% of French females chose to sunbathe topless. Now that quotient has dipped to below 20%. And the usual suspects are blaming fascism and sexual repression and Saudi Arabia and the United States. But when they actually bothered to ask French women, their answer was that they were increasingly worried about sexual harassment and even rape in the new and supposedly enlightened France.
Apparently these Vichy collaborators didn’t get the memo that progress can only come when French women welcome being raped by refugees from former French colonies.
GSTAAD—The jokes about keeping a mistress are old and I’ve yet to hear a truly funny one: “The difference between a wife and a mistress is like day and night,” “She’s been kept so often she was recently declared a playground area,” and so on. Like many other very good things, mistresses have gone out of style, what with equality between the sexes where salaries are concerned being one of the main reasons for their demise. History tells us a lot about great men who had mistresses, which most great men did. Beauty and physical attributes aside, the most important quality for a kept woman was her discretion, with a capital D.
Which brings me to the downfall of ex–King Juan Carlos of Spain, whose wife Queen Sofia I count as a very good friend. I first met him before he had become head of state in waiting by Franco. He was a polite young man and we hung out together during the Monte Carlo tennis tournament with Manolo Santana and Nicola Pietrangeli. He very politely reprimanded me when I called him Juanito instead of your highness in front of Manolo and Nicola, and they seemed confused. When I next met him he was counting the days as Franco lay dying in Madrid. Princess Sofia and I had a quarrel of sorts when I defended the Greek colonels who had been condemned to death that morning—we were on a boat off Majorca—and she took umbrage. There were some beauties on board the Atlantis on that particular cruise—1975—and Juan Carlos had a very roving eye, but he was very sweet to Sofia. We all know the rest: Having learned from his brother-in-law, King Constantine of Greece, that a king does not compromise where the constitution is concerned, he resisted the Spanish military’s coup and became a hero overnight, uniting Spanish political factions in the process.
Then the roving eye took over. Please don’t get me wrong. It is as unlikely for me to condemn a womanizer as it is for The New York Times or The New Yorker to give an unfavorable review to anything written by a black transgender female. What Juan Carlos did that was unacceptable was to be unkind to his wife, a person who is the closest thing to a saint and who has never set a foot wrong, ever. After numerous mistresses, one whom I know well and find wonderful, he met his Waterloo (pardon the cliché) in Corinna Larsen, who married a much younger man who is not very shifty upstairs in order to legally call herself Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein.
So far so bad, and it gets worse. As I said before, discretion is what makes for a great mistress. M, who was Juan Carlos’ mistress for a long time, hardly acknowledges the fact that she knows him. She wears a modest diamond ring, and when I told her I would double it in size because he was a cheapskate, she played dumb and charmingly told me it was a gift from her father. La Corinna I met once, at Pepe Fanjul’s dinner for her in New York—he’s Juan Carlos’ best buddy—and I must admit she’s got what it takes. She looked at me when introduced and asked how long I was staying in the Bagel. “As long as it takes,” I answered, leering. She gave me one of those smiles Hollywood gals practice for hours to develop and never do.
She sure was alluring, and I’m certain she is more alluring when unencumbered by couture, but to give her one’s banking secrets one must have the mind of a kamikaze. The Spanish royal family, like the Greek one, is poor, and the ruling Saudis—who are as royal as my jockstrap—were eager to be associated with him as fellow royal cousins. They were the first to gift millions to Juan Carlos, and from then on the give-and-take got out of hand. Nobody ever wins when dealing with those desert savages, and Juan Carlos was no exception. He was compromised in his dealings with them, and worse, he opened up to Corinna about what he was doing.
Now, as I said before, the more indiscreet a mistress in bed, the more discretion is required once out of it. La Wittgenstein turned nasty once the ex-king refused to turn over all the cash. (He gave her 65 million big ones.) In the meantime he was hardly speaking to his wife, treating her as a nonperson. All these negatives piled up due to his arrogance. Did he really believe that Corinna loved him rather than the cash he provided? Or the cachet he provided by being king? I’ve always preferred sweet young things, but my two mistresses after I turned 60 both ended up multimillionaires. No, it wasn’t my cash—although I spent plenty on them—but through marriage to unsuspecting suitors. I even attended one of the weddings.
Juan Carlos is the perfect example of what not to do. You never open up to a mistress, but always to a wife. You pick a mistress for sex but also for discretion. Gianni Agnelli of Fiat fame had so many, yet not one of them ever spoke to a reporter. Preferably you pick a mistress whose family has taught her good manners along with morality. The most immoral thing a mistress can do is spill the beans and keep money that isn’t hers, and Corinna is now working for Albert of Monaco. I wonder which one of the two will sing first.
Is Joe Biden forfeiting the law-and-order issue to Donald Trump?
So it would seem.
“Republicans Use Law and Order As Rallying Cry” was the top headline on The New York Times‘ front-page story on Vice President Mike Pence’s acceptance speech at Fort McHenry Wednesday night.
The Wall Street Journal Page One headline echoed the Times: “Pence Accepts Nomination as GOP Puts Focus on Police.”
In his address, Pence charged Biden with sinning by silence in failing to denounce the rioters, looters and arsonists who have for months attacked police and pillaged Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Kenosha and other cities.
Said Pence: “Last week, Joe Biden did not say one word about the violence and chaos engulfing cities across this country.
“Joe Biden says that America is systemically racist, and that law enforcement in America has… ‘implicit bias against minorities.’ When asked whether he’d support cutting funding to law enforcement, Joe Biden replied, ‘Yes, absolutely.’
“Joe Biden would double down on the very policies that are leading to unsafe streets and violence in American cities. … You will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
Now, it is inexact to say Biden would “defund” the police. When the big agenda item of Black Lives Matter was first raised, Biden rushed to say he would reform the police and increase spending.
And, late Wednesday afternoon, probably after seeing an advance of Pence’s speech, Biden tweeted from Delaware about the chaos that has engulfed Kenosha since Sunday night’s police shooting of Jacob Blake:
“Needless violence won’t heal us. We need to end the violence.”
Biden’s belated and tepid condemnations of the riots and pillaging of America’s cities by “peaceful protesters” gone rogue night after night testifies to the dilemma in which he finds himself.
It is three months since George Floyd ceased to breathe under the knee of that Minneapolis cop. But it is also three months to the election. And the political tide is turning, visibly and hard, against the arsonists and anarchists conducting the nightly rampages against cops across America.
The weariness of the public with the riots is palpable. The claim that these are but the understandable excesses of “peaceful protests” is getting stale. And the reaction against the riots and ruin in the Black communities, for whom they are allegedly being conducted, is growing.
Black leaders in urban areas are saying we want good cops, but we also want more cops to protect our people from gun-toting gangbangers who are running up rising weekly kill rates.
Tuesday, video surfaced of a mob of radicals surrounding, berating, cursing and threatening a woman at a D.C. diner. Her crime? She had refused to submit to demands she raise her fist in a Black Power salute and proclaim, “Black Lives Matter!”
“White silence is violence!” screamed the mob.
It looked like a training exercise for aspiring Nazi Brown Shirts.
We are beginning to see how this all unfolds. And from here, it looks like the Democratic left is going to be the loser on all counts.
First, the big mandate — “Defund the police!” — has backfired.
The Biden media daily testify to its unpopularity by insisting Biden never endorsed it. Where police department budgets have been cut, shooting and homicide rates have soared. And Biden’s refusal to endorse the mandate tells you what Democrats’ polls are telling them.
The police bill passed by Nancy Pelosi’s House featuring restrictions on chokeholds has been ignored by the Senate, and Republicans do not appear to be suffering for having ignored it.
The smashing of statues, which has escalated from Columbus to Catholic missionaries and saints, to Confederate generals and statesmen like Lee, Jackson and Jefferson Davis, to the four presidents on Mount Rushmore — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, TR — is now seen even by liberal elites as excessive.
Eventually, the country is going to go with law and order, for, no matter how the liberals’ recoil from the phrase and its associations with Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, without law and order there is no justice and there is no peace. What Nixon said in ’68 remains true: “The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.”
The mega-demand of BLM and its collaborators — reparations for slavery and segregation — is not wildly popular. Yet, reparations, which ultimately involves trillions in wealth transfers, is an issue on which Biden will have to choose between the Bernie-BLM-AOC wing of his party and the Scranton Democrats among whom he was raised.
The decisive question:
Are the nation’s police forces shot through with systemic racism and overpopulated by white cops who relish using violence on Black folks? Or are our police the first of the first responders, the thin blue line standing between America and anarchy?
The Republicans have chosen. They stand with the cops.
And if and when Biden comes out of the basement again, he is going to have to take a stand. Declaring evenhanded neutrality won’t cut it.
Between a hollyhock and a lavender in my garden is suspended a spider’s web. There is a part in which the prey is caught, and another part, a funnel, in which the spider waits like a paparazzo awaiting the appearance of a celebrity emerging from a night spent with a person who is not his or her spouse—which, for some reason, is a matter of intense interest to thousands or millions of people who know neither the betrayer nor the betrayed.
But to return to the spider, Agelina labyrinthica to be precise. I watched it the other day when a very small insect (which I was unable to identify) got caught up in the web. Out rushed the spider, a female, and clasped the struggling creature and injected it with poison, retreating an inch or so afterward. The little insect struggled, kicked its tiny legs pitiably. Then the spider rushed forward again to give it a second dose, once again retiring a little way, as if to contemplate its handiwork. When the insect’s struggles were reduced to manageable proportions, as they soon were, the spider rushed forward, grabbed it, and reversed at high speed into the funnel part of its web, as if to enjoy an illicit pleasure unobserved.
It is curious how, in these circumstances, one anthropomorphizes even the arthropods. I saw in this little scene a poor, innocent, suffering victim and a vile, merciless, evil predator. I still have firmly in my mind’s eye the vision of the little insect’s kicking legs, in its futile efforts to save its life to which, insignificant as it was, it behaved as if it was attached. My sympathies were immediately engaged, and I even thought of trying to rescue it. It was, as it were, the underbug in the conflict.
I could not but feel outrage at the spider’s behavior. Though I like insects, at least in their adult forms and apart from cockroaches and wasps, I don’t like spiders. I am not sure how or why this difference in attitude arose: Why should the extra pair of legs cause me to shudder, as it does? As Pascal put it, the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.
Anyway, the scene confirmed my worst thoughts about spiders. They are sneaky creatures; I hoped that one day this particular example of its species would meet a fate fairly common to it, namely matriphagy, being eaten by its own offspring. Serve it jolly well right!
Of course, I knew that it was absurd to attribute moral qualities to such lowly creatures as an insect and a spider, but in fact I think it is something that we all do. No one fails to attribute malignity to a rattlesnake or crocodile, though they are no more moral agents than are the arthropods. Even firm evolutionists invest the natural world with moral meaning. In his foreword to Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, the brilliant evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers wrote that the behavior of the social insects proves that there is no biological basis for differing roles for men and women. Proverbs should be rewritten:
Go to the ant, thou male chauvinist pig, consider her ways and be wise…
Notwithstanding the vile conduct of the spider, it must be admitted by all open-minded observers that the contrivances by which it obtains its livelihood are admirable. How is it that a creature of such little formal intelligence and education, and so small a brain by comparison with our own, is able, for example, to construct the funnel web in which it lies in wait so patiently, to say nothing of its ability, according to naturalists, to detect its prey even before its entanglement in the other part of the web, being ultrasensitive to the effect of the vibrations in the air on that part of the web’s fibers as the prey approaches? Its eyesight, too, is remarkable; your shadow will cause it to retreat more deeply into its funnel.
The answer is clear: It was evolution, working through the principle of survival of the fittest, that did it. Let us just take the construction of the funnel among the spider’s abilities. Each successive generation of spider had a genetic mutation among some of its multifarious offspring that allowed those with this mutation to construct a slightly improved version of the tunnel, improved in the sense that it conduced to greater chances of survival. After thousands or millions of generations of Ur-spiders, Agelina labyrinthica finally emerged to construct its web between my hollyhock and my lavender. And this goes for all the other creatures in my garden.
I am not entirely convinced that some minor change in the way a labyrinthine web is constructed would be translated into a statistically discernible improvement in spider-survival; but let that pass. It might be so because of the many billions of individuals in the spider population, such that there is an immense population to experiment on. Or perhaps some mutation allowed a spider to go from building no funnel web at all straight to building a perfect funnel web such as exists now. But at any rate, we know that the funnel-web spider was fit to survive because it did survive, and we know that it survived because it was fit to survive. This seems to me to be dangerously circular, a pseudo-explanation.
But what is the alternative explanation? That some force, divine or otherwise, created the funnel spider from a blueprint? This seems to me absurd. Who would decide that what the universe really needed for its completion was a funnel spider, let alone any or all of the other millions of arthropod species on earth?
The puzzle is too great for my small brain. But I have observed a very strange change in the population of lizards on my terrace recently. Three years ago a melanotic variety suddenly appeared and now about a third of the lizards are jet black. I can see no evolutionary pressure that might have brought this about. Perhaps there is an unseen advantage for lizards in being black.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Embargo and Other Stories, Mirabeau Press.
Nowadays it is impossible to go out on the streets and not break the law in some way, often unconsciously. The increase in prohibition and regulation with the viral excuse brings many European democracies dangerously close to the dictatorships of the last century. Many laws transform us into criminals, and the sanitary mask is a perfect atrezzo for the vulgar modern bandit.
Perhaps that is why this summer more boats are seen than ever before sailing along the Spanish coast, especially in the Balearic Islands. With such legal chaos on land, the sea offers the promise of freedom, like in the times of the lame corsair Byron. Or, as the pirate song of the romantic poet Espronceda says:
My treasure is my gallant ship,
My god is liberty,
My law is might, the wind my mark,
My only country is the sea.
Fortunately, most of them are freshwater sailors, nautical tourists, and it’s easy to dodge the crowds. The nautical tourists (for whom money only means more length, not better manners) only anchor by crowded beaches with sandy bottoms, as close as possible to some aberrant electronic-music bar; they spy on each other to see whose is bigger (I mean the boat, naturally). They stampede out as soon as they catch a glimpse of a cloud in the distance; they like to shout at their patient sailors with the vegan aggressiveness of a Captain Bligh, and have changed the noble habit of a gin and tonic or a grog for disgusting isotonic drinks or beet juices.
It must be awful to sail on a teetotaling ship, but at sea everyone is free to kill themselves as they wish, or survive as they can.
There is only one species that is impossible to avoid unless you are on open sea. I’m talking about jet skis, pest flies that carry their roar to the loneliest corners. They impertinently come up to where you are anchored and spray your boat at forty knots of speed. They destroy harmony and splash a martini that will never be dry again. If you don’t have a Mauser at hand, the best thing to do is to throw some eggs their way so that they learn to respect a certain distance.
Nevertheless, I still understand the marine escape very well; there is more freedom and less contagious hysteria. As soon as you set foot on land, hostilities begin. It’s like being condemned to the maroon, when the old pirates abandoned some wayward comrade on a desert island, with a bottle of rum, some tobacco, a gun, and a bullet.
Now you step on land and risk your freedom. The last bureaucratic stupidity in Spain has been to ban tobacco in the streets or on the terraces of bars and restaurants. If we add to that the fact that it is obligatory to wear a mask as soon as you leave your house, even when you are walking through a rough mountain range, we understand that the situation is schizophrenic. The government of President Pedro Sánchez exhumed the bones of General Franco, yet he has taken on a most dictatorial style. It doesn’t matter that the results have been disastrous and the management of the pandemic considered the worst in Europe. The socialist-communist government cancels out rights and restricts liberties with the excuse of human health, but democratic health and the sweetness of life suffer dangerously. We live in dangerous times, socially marooned, with a dark reeducation.
The best way to avoid the growing paranoia and propaganda of fear is to go to sea. This is how it has been since time immemorial: Navigare necesse est. But choose your crew well, because if a bandit and a hermit live together for a while, the bandit becomes a hermit and the hermit, a bandit.
(The article in its original Spanish immediately follows.)
El Marooning Democrático
Hoy en día resulta imposible salir a la calle y no vulnerar la ley de alguna manera, a menudo de forma inconsciente. El aumento de prohibiciones y obligaciones con la excusa vírica, acerca peligrosamente a muchas democracias europeas con las dictaduras del pasado siglo. Tantas leyes nos transforman en criminales y la mascarilla sanitaria es el atrezzo perfecto para el vulgar bandolero moderno.
Tal vez por eso durante este verano se observan más barcos que nunca para navegar por la costa española, especialmente en las Islas Baleares. La mar sigue siendo la única patria de los hombres libres, que cantaba el corsario cojo Byron. O, tal y como dice la Canción del Pirata Espronceda:
Que es mi barco mi tesoro,
Que es mi dios la libertad,
Mi ley, la fuerza y el viento,
Mi única patria la mar.
Afortunadamente la mayoría son marineros de agua dulce, turistas de semana náutica, y resulta fácil esquivar los baños de multitudes. Los turistas náuticos (para quienes el dinero solo significa mayor eslora, no mejores modales) solo fondean en atestadas calas de fondos de arena, lo más cerca posible de algún chiringuito de aberrante música electrónica; se espían mutuamente para ver quién la tiene más grande (me refiero a la embarcación, naturalmente); salen en estampida en cuanto atisban algún nubarrón en la lontananza; gustan de chillar a sus pacientes marineros con la vegana agresividad vegana de un capitán Bligh y han cambiado el gin-tonic o el grog por cochinadas isotónicas o zumos de remolacha.
Debe de ser horrible navegar en un barco abstemio, pero en la mar cada uno es libre de suicidarse como quiera o sobrevivir como pueda.
Tan solo hay una especie a la que es imposible evitar a no ser que estés en alta mar. Me refiero a las motos acuáticas, auténticas moscas cojoneras que llevan su estruendo por los rincones más solitarios. Se acercan impertinentemente hasta donde estés fondeado y afeitan tu barco a cuarenta nudos de velocidad. Salpican un Martini que ya nunca estará dry y destrozan la armonía. Si no tienes un máuser a mano, lo mejor es arrojarles unos huevos para que al menos respeten la distancia.
Pero aún así comprendo muy bien la escapada marina, pues hay más libertad y menos histeria contagiosa. En cuanto pones un pie en tierra, empiezan las hostilidades. Es como estar condenado al maroon, cuando los antiguos piratas abandonaban a algún díscolo camarada en una isla desierta, con una botella de ron, algo de tabaco, una pistola y una bala.
Ahora pisas tierra y te juegas la libertad. La última estupidez burrocrática en España ha sido prohibir el tabaco en la calle o en las terrazas de bares y restaurantes. Si a eso le sumamos que es obligatorio llevar la mascarilla en cuanto sales de casa, incluso cuando estás paseando por una sierra agreste, comprenderemos que la situación es esquizofrénica. El gobierno del presidente Pedro Sánchez desenterró los huesos del general Franco, pero ha tomado una querencia a prohibir de lo más dictatorial. Da igual que sus resultados hayan sido desastrosos y la gestión de la pandemia sea considerada como la peor de Europa. El gobierno socialista-comunista anula derechos y restringe libertades con la excusa de la salud humana, pero la salud democrática y la dulzura de vivir se resienten peligrosamente. En este marooning social vivimos peligrosos tiempos de reeducación nada luminosa.
La mejor manera de de esquivar la paranoia creciente por la propaganda del miedo es hacerse a la mar. Así ha sido en todas las épocas: Navigare necesse est. ¡Pero escoge bien la tripulación!, pues si un bandido y un ermitaño conviven juntos por un tiempo, el bandido se torna ermitaño y el ermitaño, bandido.
Every day is a reenactment of my book, Resistance Is Futile. Trump does something stupid (or many things) and the media say, We can top that!
Trump fumbles the ball, followed by the media throwing an interception, then Trump commits a personal foul, but the media blows the field goal, then Trump throws the ball out of bounds.
Does anyone want to win this election?
As the country burns, Trump (the president) sits in his bed sending out gratuitously bad-ass tweets … followed by utter spinelessness. He talks like he’s Yosemite Sam, then does nothing. This is the worst of everything. How about saying sweet nothings — then stunning them with force!
Trump claims he’s the antidote to the mass riots in cities across the country, but what powers will he have after being reelected that he doesn’t have right now, while he’s already president?
Our only alternative is the party that “embraces Black Lives Matter,” as The Washington Post admitted, calling Democrats’ cuddling up to BLM a “remarkable development in American politics, as a major party sought to associate itself fully with an emerging protest movement.”
So your choice is: a president who denounces riots, looting and violence in the streets, but does nothing, or a president who actively supports the people doing the riots, looting and violence in the streets.
And what can the media say? They denied the riots were even happening, then blamed “white supremacists” for the violence they said didn’t exist. (Is it the Boogaloo Boys or QAnon?) Now the media are calling the riots “peaceful protests” again, so I guess they know it’s their side doing the arson and destruction.
Democrats could wallop Trump if the media would just stop lying constantly.
FIVE Trumps spoke at the Republican Convention. You got anything to say about that, media? No, they’re too busy claiming “ethics” violations because Trump’s secretary of state spoke at the convention. That may have violated a norm! A norm, I tell you!
And the media’s No. 1 standby for any occasion is to repeat the lie that Trump called neo-Nazis “fine people.”
That one, they won’t give up. The neo-Nazi lie is even crazier than the one about Trump, an incompetent buffoon, orchestrating a vast international conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 presidential election. The Russian collusion story was merely preposterous. The neo-Nazi lie is on tape.
But that lie is the centerpiece of Biden’s campaign. When he announced his candidacy, Biden said he was propelled into the race when he saw Trump call neo-Nazis “fine people.”
Why not, because Trump didn’t end the carried interest loophole giving billionaire hedge fund managers a minuscule tax rate? Or because Trump never produced an infrastructure bill? Or because he’s put his incompetent son-in-law in charge of everything?
Regular people had to post the true Trump quote, including this part: “… and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists …”
Can Joe withdraw now?
No, he doubled-down, repeating the lie in his taped convention speech. Then regular people produced the quote all over again.
The media regularly invoke the neo-Nazi lie in some sort of weird sacramental ritual. And regular people have to keep posting the truth over and over and over again.
If Trump could be locked in the basement like Biden, he’d probably be reelected just to spite the media.
There are plenty of things for the media to dunk Trump on, by which I mean things he’s actually done as opposed to things the media wish he’d done. But no, they have to tell huge stinking lies about him. Even a guilty person can be framed, and that’s what’s happening to Trump.
The media hysterically denounce Trump for opposing vote-by-mail, smugly announcing that vote-by-mail is exactly the same as absentee voting, as Chuck Todd emphatically stated on MSNBC this week.
Look up the absentee voting requirements in your state right now and see if it’s the same as having ballots dumped on your doorstep because you — or someone who once lived there — ever registered to vote.
In New York state, for example, to receive an absentee ballot, you have to fill out an official form stating:
1. Name and date of birth of the voter
2. The address where you are registered
3. An address where the ballot is to be sent
4. The reason for the request, and
5. The signature of the voter
By contrast, with vote-by-mail schemes, ballots are automatically mailed to every eligible voter without any request at all. Ballots will be piled up outside apartment buildings, college dormitories and homeless shelters.
Usually, it’s conservatives who instinctively lunge for the worst possible argument — nah, leave those AK-47s behind, I’ve got the water balloons! — but with Trump, liberals can’t help themselves. They’d be better off being fairer to him, but their hatred makes that impossible.
The media are forcing people to say, “I don’t like the guy, but if it will upset The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker and MSNBC, I have to vote for Trump.”
Egged on by Joe Biden and Wisconsin governor Tony Evers, a mob of Black Lives Matter rioters has been burning down Kenosha, Wis. They are angry over the latest police shooting of yet another black criminal who assumed he is racially entitled to resist arrest.
The new Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution reads “No Black man must submit to being arrested if He’s really not in the mood to be arrested.”
(The old Zeroth Amendment—“Everybody on Earth has the right to immigrate to America and Americans aren’t allowed to object”—was demoted to the Negative First Amendment about the time in June it was decided that blacks are now Blacks.)
As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported:
Police arrived and wanted to talk with [Jacob] Blake, but he wasn’t interested and started putting his kids in the car to leave, the neighbor said.
One of the matters the cops may have wished to speak to Blake about was his open warrant for felony sexual assault. But in 2020, if he’s not interested, a Black man doesn’t have to discuss his warrant with nobody.
So, Blake fell to brawling with the police. Eventually he was tased, but without apparent effect. When he got up, a policeman pointed his gun at the 29-year-old security guard to encourage him to desist. But instead of complying, he strode around to the driver’s side of his vehicle, as the police shouted to him to “Drop the knife!” He opened the door and reached in, at which point the cop grabbing his shirt shot him seven times. (Remarkably, he isn’t dead, so far.)
Whether Blake really had a knife in his hand (the video is fuzzy) or a gun inside his car, or was just trying to make his getaway, is not known at this time.
Five years earlier, Blake had been involved in a similar resisting-arrest incident in which, after pulling a gun in a bar dispute, he was pulled over and charged the police. Back then, it turned out that he did have a gun in his SUV.
Fortunately, the police in 2015 brought along Dozer, Racine’s most celebrated police dog, who sent Blake to the hospital with a bite wound.
Perhaps we will wind up delegating the policing of black men to other species, since they aren’t so susceptible to wokeness.
After Blake’s shooting, Democratic politicians immediately poured gasoline on the fire. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers tweeted:
While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.
The governor didn’t say one word against rioting.
Not surprisingly that night, bored young people invigorated by authority figures like the governor poured into Kenosha’s streets and burned much of the business district.
The next day, Joe Biden issued the following irresponsible statement, making no attempt to calm the situation and prevent additional rioting, not even in the interest of deterring the spread of COVID:
Yesterday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back as police attempted to restrain him from getting into his car. His children watched from inside the car and bystanders watched in disbelief. And this morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force. This calls for an immediate, full and transparent investigation and the officers must be held accountable.
These shots pierce the soul of our nation. Jill and I pray for Jacob’s recovery and for his children.
Equal justice has not been real for Black Americans and so many others. We are at an inflection point. We must dismantle systemic racism.
“Systemic” is now used to mean unseeable, unmeasurable, unfalsifiable: in other words, nonexistent anti-science.
It is the urgent task before us. We must fight to honor the ideals laid in the original American promise, which we are yet to attain: that all men and women are created equal, but more importantly that they must be treated equally.
In the Democratic/media bubble, the endemic rioting since Memorial Day is unmentionable. It’s all just Peaceful Protesting that occasionally “intensifies.”
Then Monday night, following Biden’s reinforcement, the mob was back torching buildings, this time with perhaps more of a white Antifa cast. From the Racine County Eye:
Rioters take over Kenosha after police shooting
For the second night in a row, rioters took over the city by burning buildings, vandalizing businesses, and looting stores.
by Denise Lockwood, August 25th, 2020
KENOSHA, WI—Following the police shooting of Jacob Blake Sunday, the rioting and looting continued. Rioters set numerous buildings on fire, including the probation office, a furniture store, an apartment building, car lots, and a Family Dollar. People looted a Walgreen’s store, stole an ATM, blocked traffic, and stole gasoline from a nearby gas station to start fires.
Is much of this destruction being shown on television? I seldom watch national news on TV, but instead search out information that I find significant on the Web, so I have been surprised by how oblivious many less curious people seem to be about the pillaging of our cities this summer. The media’s attitude at present is obviously: If it’s not good for the Biden campaign, it’s not news.
But does Biden himself even know what’s going on outside his basement?
Why do too many blacks seem to assume that rule of law does not apply to them, that they don’t have to be arrested if they don’t want to be arrested, or that they can start shooting wildly at a barbecue or funeral if they feel a grudge against one person somewhere in the crowd?
As I pointed out in my last column summarizing federal crime statistics, the simplest explanation for why blacks get in trouble with the police so much is because on average they commit such an extraordinary amount of crime, especially murder.
According to the FBI, blacks, who make up 13.4 percent of the general population, comprised 54.9 percent of known murder offenders in 2018, an astonishing 7.9 times the nonblack rate.
(Strikingly, although the best justification for a police shooting is to prevent a murder, blacks made up only 26.4 percent of those killed by the police over the past half decade. Our society is not much interested in asking: When nonblacks perpetrate only 45 percent of murders, why are nonblacks almost 74 percent of the victims of police killings? Why are cops killing nonblacks at a clip so much higher than their homicide rate? Do Nonblack Lives Matter?)
Clearly, in the heat of the moment, too many blacks make really awful decisions with dire long-term consequences. For example, too many black guys tend to come up with the following plan when cops try to arrest them: I’ll just resist, if necessary fight the cops, maybe shoot them, and then speed off. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? That strategy works in Grand Theft Auto, doesn’t it? If I just lie low, the cops will forget about it, right?
Why do blacks tend to be worse decision-makers than other races when it comes to crime and violence?
Genes likely play some role in the jaw-dropping difference in murder rates in the U.S. between blacks and nonblacks. For instance, nobody has yet come up with a plausible nonbiological explanation for some of the more spectacular racial gaps seen in sports. For example, NFL cornerbacks need to be able to react quickly and violently, and there hasn’t been a nonblack starting cornerback since 2004.
But it’s also probable that black bad decision-making is partly socially constructed as well.
Foucault had a decent point: A lot of the attitudes in people’s heads are the result of powerful people planting them there. Although we are constantly lectured on how blacks were discouraged in the distant past, our culture since the 1960s has encouraged too many blacks to believe that they are above the law and entitled to resist arrest.
We should deconstruct those assumptions.
The least we can do for our black fellow citizens is not to embolden their self-destructive stupidity, the way Democratic politicians are egging them on (and Republican politicians have been too cowardly to demur). Will anybody dare inform blacks that they are the architects of their own troubles, and that the most effective way to deal with negative stereotypes about them is to stop committing so many murders?
As Donald Trump is about to be nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered the orientation of his party is on display.
Under Trump, the GOP ceased to be a party of small government whose yardstick of success was how close it came to a balanced budget.
Trump signed on this spring to $3 trillion in deficit spending to rescue the economy from a depression into which the government had shoved it to control the spread of the coronavirus. He is prepared to spend a trillion dollars more.
By opening new lands and seas to exploration, building pipelines, permitting fracking and slashing regulations, Trump has brought the U.S. to an energy independence which other presidents only promised.
The Trump GOP has abandoned an ideological commitment to free trade that dates back to the Kennedy administration and reembraced the economic nationalism of the 19th-century Republicans who built the world’s greatest industrial and manufacturing power.
Globalism has been relegated to the ash heap of history as our populist president trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords, and began to impose tariffs on countries that have looted America’s manufacturing base.
While Trump has been prevented by the Russophobia of our Beltway elites from seeking a detente with Vladimir Putin, he has managed to avoid a military collision.
Trump has also ended the decades-long freeriding of NATO allies on the U.S. defense budget, convincing many of them to contribute more.
He has made the Republican Party the pro-Israel Party, recognizing Israel’s annexation of the occupied Golan Heights and East Jerusalem by moving the U.S. embassy there. He effected the recognition of Israel by the UAE in return for Bibi Netanyahu’s postponement of the annexation of the 30% of the West Bank envisioned in Trump’s own “Deal of the Century.”
While Trump has not extracted this country from the forever wars of the Middle East — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria — he routed ISIS and kept us out of Libya’s civil war.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump has tabled the issue of immigration, especially mass illegal migration across the Southern border, and made progress on the border wall he made a feature of his 2016 campaign.
A discredited NAFTA has been replaced by a new trade deal, and a leftist government in Mexico City is helping prevent migrants from entering southern Mexico on their way to the United States.
Trump has done as much as Reagan to deregulate the U.S. economy and reduce taxes on workers, producers, and investors. Before COVID-19 hit in force in March, stock markets were hitting all-time highs and unemployment rates all-time lows.
He has nominated and elevated two Supreme Court justices and hundreds of federal judges.
The horizon, however, does not appear to be without perils.
Bellicosity toward Beijing is being reciprocated, and China appears ready for confrontation to validate its claims in the South and East China seas and Taiwan Strait.
What Beijing is doing to America — espionage, intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers, running up $600 billion trade surpluses at our expense — is Trump’s concern, not what Beijing is doing to restrict democracy in Hong Kong.
While his outreach to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un failed to persuade Kim to surrender his nuclear arsenal in return for recognition, trade and aid, even some of Trump’s enemies applauded his effort.
If Trump loses in November, however, much of what he has done will be undone.
The U.S. will agree anew to abide by the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal of John Kerry and Barack Obama will be revived.
Joe Biden says that only those making above $400,000 will pay higher taxes. Yet, the Democrats’ economic plan envisions higher payroll and personal income tax rates, higher capital gains and corporate tax rates, and even higher death taxes on estates.
Trump has also changed the character and composition of the GOP, making it more of a working- and middle-class party.
Where George H.W. Bush sought to build a “New World Order” with America as global hegemon and George W. Bush peached a global crusade for democracy “to end tyranny in our world,” Trump is all-in on “America first.” Bush transnationalism belongs to yesterday.
Even in confronting Xi Jinping’s China, Trump’s primary concern is not on how Beijing treats its people but on how it treats us.
America has a history of such cold realism.
FDR recognized Stalin’s regime in the USSR in 1933, when Hitler rose to power in Germany. Ike invited Nikita Khrushchev to tour the U.S. after the “Butcher of Budapest” had drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. During the Cold War, we partnered with Somoza, the Shah, Gen. Pinochet and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Trump, too, sees himself not as a moral crusader for human rights but as a defender of American interests in the world.
Last week, a physician declared on network TV that black lives matter more than other lives, and nobody cared. Nobody batted an eye. After months of activists, entertainers, sports stars, and politicians prioritizing black lives over white ones, we’ve grown so used to it, no one even notices when that point of view is expressed by someone actually entrusted with human lives.
Welcome to the asylum, where we no longer care that the doctors are as crazy as the inmates.
Dr. Brian Richardson is a urologist and chief of robotic and minimally invasive surgery at Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, Ala. He took his residency at Tulane, and he’s a member of the American Urological Association. Along with colleague Dr. Jeff Nix (a Birmingham urologic oncologist), Richardson (who is white) hatched a brilliant idea: Doctors should start wearing black scrubs because apparently blacks are such tiny-minded creatures, the mere sight of a white person wearing a black piece of clothing makes them exclaim with joy, “That look like me! Him wear me color! Him friend, him cares. Me feel proud and happy.”
In normal times, such arrogant condescension would be considered racist. In 2020, it’s called “allyship.”
Dr. Richardson has called on all medical professionals in America to wear black scrubs in a “show of unity” on Aug. 28, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Because, if I’m not mistaken, King stressed the importance of judging people by the color of their clothing.
On Aug. 15, CBS News ran a breathlessly supportive piece on Dr. Richardson’s campaign, with beaming “reporter” Jessi Mitchell damn near gettin’ the vapors in her swooning endorsement of #BlackScrubsForBlackLives. Indeed, on her Instagram and Facebook pages, Mitchell straight-out bragged that she was not just a reporter but a collaborator on the campaign (but of course “reporters don’t take sides”).
Still, it’s all fun ’n’ games. Just a couple of doctors serving up their God complex with a side of white saviorism.
Well, it was fun ’n’ games…until Richardson used his CBS platform to proclaim that “black lives matter most.” Speaking of the “healthcare disparity” between black and white Americans, Dr. Richardson boldly declared, “Yes, black lives matter most right now” (emphasis his).
A medical doctor declared that “black lives matter most” and, as I said, nobody cared.
Well, I cared. So I wrote to the guy.
It was rather jarring to see you on CBS a few nights ago proclaiming “black lives matter most right now.” Shouldn’t a physician refrain from saying something like that? Even if speaking of a medical crisis that perhaps disproportionately affects one racial or ethnic group over another, or a crisis of access that hits one group harder than others, surely no doctor should ever say that one group’s lives “matter most.” Even in an ER, where decisions are made every moment to prioritize care, it’s never about one life “mattering” more than another. If the guy with the gunshot gets prioritized over the guy with the sprain, it doesn’t mean that the gunshot guy’s life “matters more,” even at that specific moment. It merely means that he requires more immediate care. But every life in that waiting room “matters” equally. Or maybe I’m wrong.
Turns out I was wrong! The good doctor responded with a virtual Johnstown Flood of prose. Nearly 1,000 words, all devoted to not walking back his comment, which was intended to “highlight this disparity and bring attention to it” and to “allow folks to recognize the problem and hopefully lead to discussions that can positively enact changes.” He stressed that in his practice he “treats every patient the same” and “in no circumstance would I ever select one patient over another as a treating physician based on anything other than the acuity of their need.” He wanted me to know that he’s “not affiliated with BLM,” but in this “political environment today that promotes division and hate,” people are “twisting his words” and “creating a false narrative.”
Again and again, Doc Richardson refused to acknowledge that he’d said not just that black lives matter, but that they matter most. I kept giving him chance after chance to address the “matter most” part, to either defend it or correct it, but all he did was question my motives. “It appears to me that you may want to use that line as a ‘gotcha’ line,” he scolded, to “attack, degrade, and smear me.”
I responded that all I was trying to do was allow him to explain the incendiary line (a line that might alienate people from his cause). He then quickly shifted gears and began blaming CBS, claiming the quote was “taken out of context and used as a sound bite” and “is not the entire story I told.”
“I did not have any type of editorial review. I never saw the story before it aired,” he whined.
I wasn’t having it: “As a physician, you have a unique responsibility regarding the manner in which you communicate. CBS chose that line as a sound bite for a reason; the producers knew how provocative it is. But in the end, it’s on you for saying it, not on them for highlighting it. Now, I’ve given you ample opportunity to ‘walk it back,’ and you’ve chosen not to.”
At that point, he rather oddly suggested that if I want to see what a great doctor he is, I should come to Montgomery and watch him firsthand.
Travel to the Deep South in August to watch a man catheterize dicks? I’ll pass.
At no time during our exchange did Richardson address his actual statement. He either deflected from it, attacked my motives for bringing it up, or attacked CBS for highlighting it. But at no point did he say, “I misspoke.” Because he didn’t. He’s a physician who believes what he said: Black lives matter most.
And CBS, and fawning fangirl Jessi Mitchell, believe that too. Which is why that’s the one line from Richardson’s interview they wanted America to hear. And the fact that the message was so passively received aptly demonstrates just how primed we are for the new apartheid.
It’s ironic that Richardson’s “wear black for blacks” event is on the MLK speech anniversary. Dr. King’s friend, civil rights activist Michael Aaron Robinson (a North Carolina rabbi), would always tell the story of how his father, an Asheville physician, incurred the wrath of his fellow doctors because he refused to prioritize white patients over black ones. That’s the way it was in the Old South—white lives mattered most. And here we are in the “New South,” where an Alabama doctor trying to appropriate King’s message goes on national TV to say “black lives matter most.”
Everything old is new again…just differently colored.
Now, I could close by citing the many, many, many studies that demonstrate how perceived physician racial bias can negatively influence the health of patients who sense favoritism. Regardless of how Dr. Richardson actually treats his patients, the perception created by his words—words he refused to retract—could adversely impact his white patients. I could also close by citing studies that show how blacks are less likely to donate organs because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that white lives “matter more” when it comes to receiving donor organs (again, perception of physician bias, perception of favoritism, influences patient actions).
But I won’t. Instead, I’ll end with more words from Dr. Richardson. Older words, from before he hatched his “black scrubs” campaign. Before he discovered that prioritizing black lives could land you a fawning puff piece on a national network. Before all that, he wrote a lengthy post on his Facebook page detailing the real reason for the healthcare disparities in his state.
Is it racism? Nope.
Have laws been created to select or allow an advantage for some, while putting others at disadvantage? Allow me to give an example in my profession of medicine…there is something called the “certificate of need.” Not all states have this law, but Alabama does. The essence of the law is that hospitals and other large medical entities are able to prevent competition from building and operating things like imaging centers, surgery centers, and other medical services. The reality is that this would create competition- just like Adam Smith envisioned when he described the economic theory of capitalism. By nature- fair competition is designed to provide the best service, quality, and at the price the market supports. However, with the certificate of need, a board decides if competition is allowed to come into a community. The process of attempting to compete is expensive and arduous. Every stakeholder in the community will object to the competition and spend lots of money to prevent a business person or company from being able to compete…. I could go on for days about unnecessary regulations, unfair practices, laws and rules selecting winners and enforcement of obstruction of opportunity for competition.
And there you have it, the cold, cynical truth. Dr. Richardson knows that the reason for the “disparity” isn’t racial, and it won’t—can’t—be solved by having dress-up day in the ER. But he also knows that talking about the “certificate of need” (aptly known as CON) problem won’t land him on network TV, and it won’t make him a beloved folk hero with groveling admirers in the press. And that’s why this story is about so much more than calling out a “gotcha” moment on an Alabama doctor. This story’s about how the media’s obsession, and the entire left’s obsession, with race corrupts honest debate about important issues. An MD talking about the healthcare crisis created by CON laws gets zero publicity. An MD screaming “black lives matter most” while advocating the kind of simpleminded solution a child might dream up gets a prime-time spot.
By the way, in Alabama, guess who supports that healthcare-stifling CON law: Democrats! Former governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat, was put in prison for using the CON law to peddle influence to the tune of $500,000. But just a few months ago, Alabama’s current Republican governor, Kay Ivey, ordered the CON law relaxed to help battle COVID. You know who opposed Ivey’s plan? State House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels…a black guy!
When you see everything as a color, when you exploit color for cheap publicity or personal aggrandizement, when you encourage others to think of color in the most juvenile terms (“Blacks must feel so proud to see me wearing black! I’m a hero!”), you miss life’s valuable nuances.
More important, you end up promoting cartoonish solutions to complex problems.
On Aug. 28, Dr. Brian Richardson will dress in black scrubs.
On Aug. 29, not a damn thing will have changed, nor will a single life be bettered.
Let’s hope the rest of the people in his field are more interested in realistically tackling healthcare disparities than they are in incendiary sound bites and childish publicity stunts.
